There is a widely held belief that until Allied soldiers liberated the German concentration camps, the West had little idea of the enormity of the Holocaust. But an examination of US newspapers during the war years tells a very different story. The facts were there, but published in such a tentative way as to minimize the impact on US readers.
In the spring of 1942, US correspondents who had been stranded in Germany were exchanged for Axis nationals held in the United States. The reporters returned with details of the mass murder of Polish and Russian Jews. In the New York Times (5/18/42), UP‘s Glenn Stadler described what had happened to Jews in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania as an “open hunt.” Joseph Grigg, also of UP, wrote in the New York Journal American (6/1/42):
Thousands lie in…mass graves they were forced to dig before the firing squads as SS troops cut them down…. In Latvia…responsible Nazi sources admitted 56,000 men, women and children were killed…. The slaughter went on for days…. The entire Jewish population of many towns and villages was driven into the country, forced to dig graves and then machine-gunned…. The slaughter in Poland was horrible with 80,000 killed…. One German rifleman boasted…that he had killed thirty-seven in one night picking them off as a hunter does rabbits.
Grigg observed that correspondents who had lived in Germany had no doubt that Hitler “and his agents have done everything to make [Hitler’s] prophecy” of Jewish destruction “come true.”
This was not the first news of the Final Solution to reach the West. Deportations, massacres and mass graves had been reported since the Germans had invaded Russia in June 1941. An AP dispatch (8/8/41) spoke of “an orgy of murder and rape in Lvov.” The New York Journal American (11/13/41) reported “25,000 Jews killed in Odessa.” The New York Times (10/6/41) told of the machine gunning of “masses of Jews deported from Hungary to Galicia.” The New York Herald Tribune (12/5/41) described the Jews’ fate as “nothing less than systematic extermination.” The Hearst papers (12/1/41) accused Germany of the “extermination of an ancient and cultured race.”
June 1942 brought more ominous news. The Jewish Bund in Warsaw and the Polish government in exile confirmed that Germany had embarked on a systematic program to kill European Jewry. They listed the cities where the Jewish population had disappeared and reported on the use of “gas chamber” vehicles in which 90 people were killed at a time, a thousand people a day. The report documented Germany’s intention to “annihilate all the Jews in Europe.”
But the way the US press handled these reports left many people doubting their veracity. The Seattle Times (6/26/42) buried the news in a page-30 article which, though it spoke of “the systematic extermination of the Jewish population,” ran under the very small headline, “700,000 Jews Reported Slain.” The New York Times (6/27/42) ran an 18-line story at the end of a series of other articles, including one about the death of 800 in reprisal for the murder of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich; it mentioned gas chambers, but was silent about a systematic slaughter program.
A 13-line, page-3 article in the Los Angeles Times (6/30/42) simply stated that the British section of the World Jewish Congress estimated “that more than one million Jews have been killed or died as the result of ill treatment.” It carried the headline: “Nazis Kill Million Jews, Says Survey.”
The Chicago Tribune (6/30/42) buried its 11-line story on the bottom of page 6. Five days later, a summary of the Jewish Bund report appeared in the New York Times (7/2/42) on page 6; in addition to listing death tolls as high as 35,000, it noted that 25,000 had been taken from Lublin, and “nothing has been heard from them since.”
The press treatment of this news can be explained in part by a headline over the New York Journal American‘s front page, 8-line article (6/29/42): “Jews List Their Dead at Million.” This was a Jewish story, worthy of reporting, but not of complete trust, since Jews were interested parties. Throughout the war, news released by Nazi perpetrators was treated with greater credulity than that released by their victims.
Subsequent stories, including those authenticated by the Allies, were handled with remarkable restraint. Rarely on page one, they were usually buried deep inside the paper. In July 1942, a month after the Polish announcement that “deportation” meant death for Jews, the Chicago Tribune (7/26/42) reported that the Nazis would shortly begin deporting all Dutch Jews between the ages of 18 and 40; this story ran on page 9.
That same month the Poles detailed the execution of 200,000 Jews and a quarter million Poles. The New York World Telegram story (7/27/42), which omitted mention of Jews, was on page 22, next to an article about a doctor who hypnotized himself into making a parachute jump. In December 1942, after the Allies confirmed the news of a systematic killing program, the Chicago Tribune (12/20/42) ran a story with a headline saying that Poland had become a “Jewish abattoir” on page 18, next to a marriage announcement. In other leading dailies, stories about atrocities were to be found on weather, obituary and comic pages.
This pattern did not change even when the news became more detailed. The New York Times (2/18/44) devoted 32 lines on page 7 to a UP report that Holland’s 180,000 Jews had been “completely wiped out.” This article ran beneath a longer humorous story about how the King of England had awakened a sleeping American sergeant.
There were notable exceptions, including the New Republic, PM, The Nation, Commonweal, the New York Post and even the Hearst papers, which exhorted US citizens to “Remember… THIS IS NOT A JEWISH PROBLEM. It is a HUMAN PROBLEM” (9/4/43). Anne O’Hare McCormack, writing in the New York Times (3/3/43), called on Christians to do “the utmost to rescue Jews remaining in Europe,” for the “Jew was a symbol of what this war is all about.”
Given the treatment of this news, it is not surprising that many Americans were skeptical. In the final weeks of the war, a Washington Post correspondent (4/16/45) accompanying the Allied forces in Europe observed, “where atrocities are concerned, most American fighting men have to be shown to believe.” Even Americans who believed so underestimated the number of Jews killed that it was clear they had no conception of the magnitude of the tragedy, or that it was a systematic plan.
The US media no longer doubt that millions can be massacred systematically. During World War II it was beyond belief; today it is boring. We have become inured to human horror. This, too, is a legacy of the Holocaust.
