Beyond Belief (47 page)

A far more honest and accurate appraisal of the situation was offered by the Swiss paper
Basler Deutscheszeitung
. Despite the American and British “spontaneous wave of almost paralyzing disgust” at the atrocities “discovered” by the advancing Allied troops, in reality

the world had known before of the atrocities in German concentration camps . . . . However,
the human mind did not wish to see these ugly and disturbing facts
although for 12 long years fellow men were systematically tortured and killed in cold cruelty.
¹⁰²

Had the American press been willing to build on the information which had been steadily emerging over the past twelve years, there would have been little reason for “surprise.” But the press
was never able to see the full picture, even when it had many, if not all, of the details in hand. It could not admit to itself or to its readers that these stories were the truth. Often, instead of explicitly rejecting the news as exaggerated, it simply put a critically important story on the comic page or next to the weather report. It put on blinders and erected all sorts of barriers which made it more rational for readers to disbelieve than to believe.

We have seen how the reporters, editors, and publishers who visited the camps generally claimed that until that moment they had simply not believed that the stories were true. After their visits any vestiges of doubt had been eradicated. Now they knew such things could happen, but they could not fathom how. Their amazement had, in fact, only increased. In a front-page story in the
Baltimore Sun
Lee McCardell, the Sunpapers' war correspondent, voiced his confusion and disorientation after touring a camp.

You had heard of such things in Nazi Germany. You had heard creditable witnesses describe just such scenes. But now that you were actually confronted with the horror of mass murder, you stared at the bodies and almost doubted your own eyes.

“Good God!” you said aloud, “Good God!”

Then you walked down around the corner of two barren, weatherbeaten, wooden barrack buildings. And there in a wooden shed, piled up like so much cordwood, were the naked bodies of more dead men than you cared to count.

“Good God!” you repeated, “Good God!”

McCardell's reaction to what he found at this camp, Ohrdruf, which was far from the worst scene of German atrocities, was similar to that of the American major who first entered the camp:

“I couldn't believe it even when I saw it,” Major Scotti said, “I couldn't believe that I was there looking at such things.”
¹⁰³
*

A similar sense of overwhelming incredulity was expressed by Malcolm Bingay, who in addition to serving as editor of the
Detroit Free Press
was representing the Knight chain of papers on
the press delegation that visited camps in April 1945. He related the terrible consternation that beset hardened and seasoned journalists who no longer doubted that the implausible had been committed:

I have talked, . . . with endless numbers of war correspondents who have lived at the front throughout the war. Their stories do not differ and always there is a vast wonderment: How creatures, shaped like human beings, can do such things.

Last night I talked with one of our correspondents, Jack Bell, one of the most worldly wise and experienced reporters I have ever known . . . . “Bing,” he exploded with sudden vehemence, “it is the damndest, craziest, most insane thing that has ever happened to the world. You think you are awakening from a nightmare and then realize that you have not been sleeping. That what you see has actually happened—and is happening.”

Though Bingay and his colleagues talked “far into the night” in their quest for some explanation, they ultimately concluded there was none, for this was the “maze of madness.”
¹⁰⁵

Now that there was no longer room for doubt, various papers sought to explain to themselves as well as to their readers why they had been so filled with doubts. One theme was repeated in editorial after editorial. It was the same answer Bingay and his colleagues offered one another: this was a “maze of madness.” The
New York Times
described the news of “the cold-blooded extermination of an unarmed people” as “facts that pass belief.” Even before the camps were opened and the full horror known, the
Atlanta Constitution
argued that the “horror [was] too fantastic for belief.”

We know, logically, the stories of Nazi death camps, of wholesale slaughter of helpless captives are true, [but] . . . we cannot realize in our hearts they actually happened.
¹⁰⁶

This, the
Atlanta Constitution
claimed, was why “decent Americans”—its staff and editors included—had not believed. The
Washington Evening Star
wondered how could “the enormity of the thing be made to seem more than some wild nighmarish imagining?”
¹⁰⁷

The most outspoken skeptics were quick to use this line of reasoning to excuse their behavior. When the camps were opened,
The Christian Century
, which had so often in the past deprecated both the reports of atrocities and those who reported them, sought to excuse—in words laden with pious contrition—its behavior by claiming that the fantastic nature of the news had compelled it to disbelieve.

We have found it hard to believe that the reports from the Nazi concentration camps could be true. Almost desperately we have tried to think they must be widely exaggerated. Perhaps they were products of the fevered brains of prisoners who were out for revenge. Or perhaps they were just more atrocity-mongering, like the cadaver factory story of the last war. But such puny barricades cannot stand up against the terrible facts.
¹⁰⁸

This explanation, even when offered by
The Christian Century
, cannot be totally discounted. The magnitude of the horror
was
unfathomable. The tales of horror beggared the imagination. They were just “too inconceivably terrible.”
¹⁰⁹
This was certainly a critical factor in allowing the press to suspend belief. There were many failures in America's behavior during this period, and a failure of the imagination was one of them.

But there is a problem with explaining or excusing the press treatment of this news by relying on the fact that this was a story which was “beyond belief.” While the unprecedented nature of this news made it easier, particularly at the outset, to discount the news, by the time of the Bermuda conference in 1943 and certainly by the time of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in 1944 even the most dubious had good reason to know that terrible things were underway. Numerous eyewitness accounts which corroborated one another had been provided by independent sources. Towns, villages, and ghettos which had once housed millions now stood empty. The underground had transmitted documentation regarding the freight trains loaded with human cargo which rolled into the death camps on one day and rolled out shortly thereafter, only to be followed by other trains bearing a similar cargo. Where could these people be going? Where were the inhabitants of the towns and villages? Had they simply disappeared? There was only one possible answer to these questions. And most members of the press—when they stopped to consider the matter—knew it.

Given the amount of information which reached them, no responsible member of the press should have dismissed this news
of the annihilation of a people as propaganda, and the fact is that few did. In the preceding pages we have seen numerous examples of papers and journals acknowledging that millions were being killed. By the latter stages of the war virtually every major American daily had acknowledged that many people, Jews in particular, were being murdered. They lamented what was happening, condemned the perpetrators, and then returned to their practice of burying the information.

There was, therefore, something disingenuous about the claims of reporters and editors at the end of the war not to have known until the camps were open. They may not have known just
how
bad things were, but they knew they were quite bad.
*
It seems as if these publishers, editors, and reporters protested a bit too much. Why their claims to have doubted? Why their protestations of ignorance? They may have instinctively known that in a situation such as this, doubts are far more easily explained than apathy; disbelief is more readily understood than dispassion. They could rationalize and justify their doubts, but they could not justify the equanimity with which they responded to the news of the tragedy. The American press may not have believed everything that was reported, but it certainly believed a great deal. And therein lies the real question regarding the press reaction to the persecution of European Jewry. Why, given what it did believe, did most of the press react so dispassionately?

The dispassion, if not indifference, of most of the press becomes all the more noteworthy when it is compared to the behavior of publications such as the
New York Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Commonweal
, and
PM
and journalists such as Dorothy Thompson, William Shirer, Arthur Koestler, Sigrid Schultz, Freda Kirchwey, I. F. Stone, Alexander Uhl, Max Lerner, Henry Shapiro, W. Randolph Hearst, and a few others. They were able to surmount the obstacles posed by World War I atrocity stories, absence of impartial eyewitnesses, German obfuscation, and the unprecedented nature of the tragedy. They had no more information than the rest of their colleagues. In fact, some of them depended on reports in other major dailies for their information. One cannot ignore the fact that many publications and a disproportionately
high number of the reporters were associated with politically liberal philosophy.
*
But this alone cannot explain their behavior. The real difference between these publications and journalists and the vast majority of the rest of the press is not between belief and disbelief, but between action and inaction, passion and equanimity. They not only believed what was being reported but refused to accept it as inevitable. They were convinced that the Allies could do something if they would stop behaving as if “the Jews were expendable.”
¹¹²
They did not accept the position that nothing could be done and therefore there was no point in even talking about it.

There are those who are inclined to suggest that little was done because of contempt the Allies harbored for these particular victims because they were Jews. One is loath to accept that as true, but it must be acknowledged that many government officials, members of the press, and leaders of other religions behaved as if Jewish lives were a cheap commodity.
¹¹³
The government and the press reacted much more forcefully when non-Jewish lives were threatened. The Allies allowed food to be shipped through enemy lines to Axis-occupied Greece because the population was starving. They rejected requests from Jewish groups that the same be done for Jews in Eastern Europe. The Americans claimed that they had no means to transport Jews to safety at the same time that cargo ships were returning from Europe with empty holds.
The press was far more outraged over Lidice and the killing of European resistance fighters than it was over any similar action against Jews. When Jewish fighters in Warsaw managed to hold the Germans at bay, most of the press simply ignored the fact.

A real antipathy toward Jews certainly affected the Allied response. While no one among the Allies or in the press wanted to see Jews killed, virtually no one was willing to advocate that steps be taken to try to stop the carnage. Many Allied officials in positions of power in London and Washington were tired of hearing about Jews and even more tired of being asked to do something about them even though there were steps that could have been taken. In 1942 British officials described eyewitness accounts of massacres as “familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.” In 1944 another official complained that “a disproportionate amount of the time of the [Foreign] Office is wasted dealing with these wailing Jews.” In 1944 State Department officials warned Hull that the War Refugee Board should be restrained in its rescue efforts lest “Hitler take advantage of the offer to embarrass the United Nations at this time by proposing to deliver thousands of refugees.”
¹¹⁴
The most efficacious thing for the Allies to do was to try to ignore the tragedy and make sure that those whose responsibility it was to disseminate information did the same. And the press, having convinced itself that there was nothing that could be done and having inured itself to the moral considerations of what was happening, followed suit. It was a cumulative and collective failure. The press was ultimately as culpable as the government.

There is, of course, no way of knowing whether anything would have been different if the press had actively pursued this story. The press did not have the power to stop the carnage or to rescue the victims. The Allies might have remained just as committed to inaction, even if they had been pressured by the press. But in a certain respect that is not the question one must ask. The question to be asked is did the press behave in a responsible fashion? Did it fulfill its mandate to its readers?

Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel “insignificant and lost amid the crowd,” cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a “beacon” to bring together people who other
wise might ineffectively seek each other “in darkness.” Newspapers can bring them “together and . . . keep them united.” If there were no newspapers or if newspapers failed to do their task, he observed, “there would be no common activity.”
¹¹⁵
There is no way of knowing whether the American people would have ever been aroused enough to demand action to rescue Jews. But we can categorically state that most of the press refused to light its “beacon,” making it virtually certain that there would be no public outcry and no “common activity” to try to succor this suffering people.