Beyond Belief (66 page)

Steel notes that the “crudeness” and the “cruelty” of Lippmann's attacks on his fellow Jews are in marked contrast to the sensitivity he displayed toward other minority groups and those suffering discrimination. It is “inconceivable,” according to Steel, that Lippmann would have written anything similar about the Irish, the Italians, or the blacks, despite the fact that none of these groups was without its own
nouveaux riches.
¹⁴

*
Birchall later became somewhat more critical about the Nazis.

*
Roehm and the leadership of the
Sturmabteilung
, or
SA
(the storm troops), were purged in June 1934 after Roehm had demanded of Hitler that the
SA
become a part of the German army and eventually be made its central force. Roehm's interpretation of Nazi ideology was rooted in his populist, antiaristocratic ideas. By this time Hitler was working hard to attract the support of the wealthy upper class and to ensure the loyalty of the
Reichswehr
(army) leadership, which was composed of Prussian aristocrats. Despite his long-standing relationship with Hitler, Roehm was no longer useful to the party, and on June 30, 1934, he and the
SA
commanders were murdered.

*
At least the
Post Dispatch
had abandoned its previous reluctance to criticize Hitler and Germany. In May 1935 it had hailed the German leader for his “virtues of peace.”
⁶⁹

*
These arguments about the benefit offered by immigrants could not, however, dispel a popular image of refugees pushing Americans out of work. During this period rumors were circulating in a number of cities, including New York, that certain department stores, some of which were owned by Jews, were firing their employees in order to hire refugees. Despite repeated denials by the stores, these rumors prevailed. They became so widespread that at one point several stores, including Bloomingdale's and Macy's, placed newspaper ads denying that they were hiring refugees.

**
This suggestion, although of little succor to the victims, was less frivolous than it might initially appear. Christian Scientists maintain that prayer can “decisively shape the course of events.”
¹⁰³

*
Existing laws, passed between 1935 and 1937, governed every aspect of American foreign relations with other states and were designed to prevent the United States from being lured into a conflict. In January 1938 an extraordinary presidential appeal had been needed to prevent the House from passing the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum before the country could go to war. The amendment was defeated by the slim margin of twenty-four votes.

*
In an interview Percy Knauth, who worked for the
Chicago Tribune
and then for the
New York Times
and also broadcast from Berlin for CBS when William Shirer was away, related how he watched Jews being rounded up on the streets of Berlin. The first time he came upon such a roundup, which was taking place near where he lived, he asked a policeman what was going on. The policeman matter-of-factly told him, “These are Jews. They are being sent away to be resettled.”
⁴

*
The Hearst papers' defense of Nazi Germany was not new. During the 1930s it had printed many pieces which tended to show fascism and Nazism in a positive light, including columns by Goering, the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, and Mussolini. One of the most persistent critics of Hearst's record was veteran journalist George Seldes, who in his publication
In Fact
repeatedly attacked

*
Scholars debate when Hitler decided on a program of annihilation of the Jews. Some, e.g., Lucy Dawidowicz, have argued that it was something he planned to do long before he came to power. Others, e.g., Yehuda Bauer, contend that annihilation was not decided on until all other options, such as forcing Jews to emigrate to other countries, were no longer feasible because of the Nazi conquest of most of the European continent, particularly European Russia. In this debate the question arises, What was the meaning of “extermination” when it was used by Hitler and his cohorts in the 1930s and early 1940s? The first group argues that as early as 1933 it meant the physical annihilation of the Jews. Others believe that it was initially used to mean a virtually
Judenrein
Reich in which those Jews who remained would be reduced to modern-day helots and would generally die premature deaths because of the terrible conditions in which they lived. From the perspective of this study what the Nazis meant prior to June 1941 when they used the term “extermination” is less important than how the term was understood and could have been understood by bystanders in general and the press in particular. None of the reporters, even those who were the most intensely hostile to Germany and Hitler, interpreted the term or themselves used the term prior to 1942 as meaning the systematic and planned physical annihilation of European Jews. It would, in fact have been surprising if they had interpreted it in this fashion. They could not have been expected to know what would follow. It was an unprecedented program that even the most vehement anti-Nazi could not have imagined possible. Those who today claim that the world should have recognized from the outset in 1933 that the Final Solution was in the offing are using historical hindsight, a tool that was obviously not available to contemporary observers.
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*
For additional discussion of
New York Times
policy on matters relating to Jews, see
Chapter 8
.

*
Even Jews could not quite bring themselves to believe this news.
The Jewish Frontier
, upon hearing of the news of a Final Solution, printed a portion of the report in small type in its back pages. This was an action which Marie Syrkin, who was a member of the editorial board, subsequently described as an “imbecility.” Within a few weeks the editorial board's doubts had vanished and it published a black-bordered special issue of the magazine devoted wholly to the massacre of the Jews of Europe. Syrkin cites this as revealing the change in comprehension between summer and fall 1942.
¹⁵

*
Though some of the correspondents who were stationed in Berlin believe that the
New York Times
was interested in news regarding the Jews, there is much evidence to support Talese, Halberstam, and Oswald Garrison Villard's (see
page 155
) argument. Certainly it did not want its editorial staff and management to appear “too Jewish.” Halberstam, who worked for the paper, relates in
The Powers That Be
that when Rollo Ogden, the editorial-page editor, died in 1937, Arthur Krock assumed that he would be given the job. It was given instead to John Finley. When Krock went to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, to complain, he explained that “it's a Jewish paper and we have a number of Jewish reporters working for us. But in all the years I've been here we have never put a Jew in the showcase.” When Krock explained that only his father had been Jewish and therefore, according to Jewish law, he was not a Jew, Sulzberger responded, “Arthur, how do you know all that if you aren't Jewish?”

When Krock became head of the paper's Washington bureau, he himself was known as someone who did not want Jewish reporters assigned to him. When one of his friends at the paper told him that given his record at the bureau some people thought he was an antisemite, Krock replied, “Maybe I am.” Sulzberger was part of a group of Jewish leaders who went to Roosevelt in 1939 to try to persuade him
not
to appoint Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court because it might generate antisemitism. Given Sulzberger's aversion to Jewish editors and executives and desire that the paper not sound “too Jewish”, it is quite logical to argue that the paper's treatment of this news was influenced, at least in part, by the fact that it concerned Jews.
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*
Jewish groups, particularly those which were Zionist in orientation wanted to establish a Jewish unit that would be under Allied command. The British strongly opposed the idea because they feared that the existence of such a force would be used to further the drive for a Jewish state.

*
Some of this information of Wise's, such as that corpses were being used for soap fats, was incorrect, as were his claims that the Nazis were killing their victims by injecting air bubbles into their veins. In this fashion one Nazi physician could supposedly “handle more than 100 men an hour.” Actually a far more efficient method was already in use: lethal gas. His figures on the number dead were also far too low. Wise's information came from the report which was sent from Geneva by the World Jewish Congress representative there, Gerhard Riegner.
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*
The reason why commanding religious and political personalities in the United Kingdom reacted in such a profound manner is something that remains to be analyzed. The British were aware of the “striking difference between the intensive propaganda campaign regarding Hitler's Jewish victims carried on here and the apparently negligible publicity in the United States.”
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*
One of the reasons the
New York Times
had a “better” record than other papers was that during the war, when newsprint was rationed, it chose to emphasize news, while some of its major competitors, the
New York Herald Tribune
most prominent among them, chose to emphasize advertising.
¹²

*
Not all of the Bergson activities were a success from the perspective of media coverage. In October 1943 the Bergson group organized a visit of 500 American rabbis to Washington. The visit was essentially a failure. Not only did the President rearrange his schedule so that he could leave the capital early and avoid meeting them, but most of the press, with the exception of the local papers, ignored the visit. Even when the visit was mentioned in the press, sometimes its main purpose was ignored. This was the case in
Time
magazine, which was the only magazine to mention the pilgrimage. It totally ignored the question of rescue and made it sound as if the rabbis had come to Washington just to discuss the opening of Palestine to Jewish settlement.
Time
did contrast the “diplomatically minimal” reception the rabbis received with the “full red carpet treatment” accorded that same week to Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
²⁶

*
The publisher of the
Washington Post
, Eugene Meyer, was adamantly opposed to any special demands for the rescue of Jews. In fact, in a private letter he wrote to U.S. Solicitor General Fowler Harper in response to the attacks in the
Post
on Bergson and his followers, he claimed that the calls for rescue of Jews constituted “harassment” of the President who was trying to win the war. Meyer concluded his letter by arguing that he did not feel “it is necessary for any pressure group, however well meaning, to devote its time and money to the business of ‘molding American opinion' on this subject.”

Meyer, a Jew, never identified with the Jewish community. His rejection of his Jewish heritage was so complete that once, when his daughter Kay Graham was asked by some classmates at Vassar what it was like to be a Jew, she could not respond because no one had ever told her she was one.
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*
The President's statement was general and lacked specific suggestions. His close personal adviser, Samuel Rosenman, was a Jew and was quite concerned about drawing too much attention to the Jews. He claimed that this could stir up antisemitism in America and convinced Roosevelt to eliminate some of his direct references to Jews and to avoid focusing on the Final Solution. The original draft, which Rosenman insisted Roosevelt change, had already been approved by Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy.
³⁹

*
Birkenau was a satellite of Auschwitz which Himmler ordered built in 1942 when it became apparent that the facilities at Auschwitz would not be sufficient for the task that lay ahead. For all intents and purposes the two were really one camp.

**
Auschwitz is the German name for Oswiecim.

*
Sometimes it was hard to discern whether a press reference to “Poles” included Jews or not. In January 1940 the
New York Times
had run two editorials on Nazi “horrors” in Poland. They decried the “bitter agony of the Poles” and the German attempt to “destroy the Polish spirit and disperse the Polish people,” which was really an attempt to “exterminate a whole people.” Did those threatened with extermination include Jews? The reader was left free to decide because Jews were not mentioned. Another editorial about the Poles observed that “no people in modern times has been subjected to such calculated brutality on such a large scale.” The Nazi “bloodthirsty treatment of the Poles is enough to damn them beyond defense.”
³⁹
Here too it was unclear if “Poles” included Jews.

*
One of the very few articles that made it quite clear who the victims at Maidanek were appeared in
Life:

LUBLIN FUNERAL

Russians honor Jews whom Nazis gassed and cremated in mass
⁴⁴

*
The death camps, i.e., those camps which contained gas chambers for the express purpose of killing victims, were in the east and were therefore liberated by the Russians. The camps liberated by the Americans and British were in Germany and Austria.

*
There were other Russian attempts to obscure the fact that Jews were the primary victims of the Nazis. In May 1944 a Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for investigation of German atrocities charged that over 102,000 people had been killed near Kovno, Poland, during the war. The commission quoted one witness: “I frequently saw how Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews—Soviet citizens—were killed.” The commission report, as described by AP, made it appear, once again, that Jews were simply one among many different groups of victims all of whom were united by one common characteristic, that they were Soviet citizens. A Soviet film on the Ukraine released in 1944 described Babi Yar as containing the bodies of Soviet “citizens” killed by the Nazis.
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