Beyond Belief (24 page)

German officials stationed in Washington recognized this and tried to alert Berlin to the fact that American fears of spies and sabotage would benefit the President's efforts to cultivate interventionist sentiment. Both the German Ambassador, Hans Dieckhoff, and the Chargé d'Affaires, Hans Thomsen, warned Berlin that Bund activities and German efforts to create a network of sympathizers in America were sure to bring America into action on the side of our enemies and of destroying the last vestiges of sympathy for Germany.”
⁵²
Thomsen was right. As a result of the American feeling that Hitler had designs on America and might invade this continent once he conquered Britain, public opinion favored aiding that beleaguered country. By 1941 polls showed that 85 to 90 percent of the American public was willing to aid England, though close to 80 percent still opposed American entry into the war.
⁵³

The panic which was spread regarding spies in America's midst solidified anti-Nazi sentiment, but it also strengthened the barriers that were placed in the path of refugees desperate to escape the lengthening Nazi grasp. It helped bar the way to those for whom a refuge meant the difference between life and death.

PART II

Newspapers are read at the breakfast and dinner tables. God's great gift to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it
.

W. R. Nelson, publisher of the
Kansas City Star

Confirmation of the news is a sacrament . . . . There's an old saying in Chicago journalism . . . “You say your mother loves you. Check it out.”

John Chancellor

7

One of the central questions in any discussion of the Allied reaction to the Holocaust is when those not directly involved in perpetrating the Final Solution became aware of the fact that Nazi antisemitism had progressed from brutal but haphazard persecution to a systematic program of murder.
¹
It is strange, in some respects, that this should be such a matter of debate, for during the war there were official Allied pronouncements confirming that an extermination program was underway. As shall be demonstrated in the following pages, a surprisingly large amount of information was known and publicized despite the fact that the death camps were beyond the view of the press. Various details were, of course, missing; sometimes the number of victims was exaggerated and sometimes it was underestimated, and the size and specific function of particular death camps were not publicly revealed until relatively late.
²
Nevertheless, considering that there were no reporters on the scene and that the Nazis wished to camouflage what was going on, a fairly accurate picture of the situation was available first to government officials and then to the public, long before the end of the war. Often it was not believed. In order
to understand how this was so, it is critical that we ask not
when
news was available but
how
it was made available.

In considering the issue of knowledge of the Final Solution, it is important to remember that the Nazis treated the mass murder program quite differently from their other antisemitic campaigns. Until the mass murder program began, relatively few attempts were made to hide what was being done to the Jews. Reporters were witness to the April 1933 boycott, the July 1935 riots, the Nuremberg Laws, the brutalities inflicted on Austrian Jews in March 1938, and
Kristallnacht
, a modern-day pogrom conducted in public view. They witnessed Jews being rounded up in various parts of the Reich.
³
Even the deportation of thousands of Jews from Berlin, which was carried out “swiftly, efficiently and with as much secrecy” as possible, in the words of United Press, was witnessed by reporters.
*

While the antisemitic actions which preceded the Final Solution were committed openly, the mass murder program was not. The Germans did more than try to keep things secret; they released all sorts of information designed to obfuscate. In trying to prevent the news of the murder program's existence from reaching the outside world, the Nazis used varied means of deception to convince the victims and those who witnessed the deportations that “resettlement” was the German objective. Victims were told they were being relocated, sent to work camps, “resettled.” Though these explanations may not have always been believed in their entirety, they did inject a note of confusion into the situation. When the deportations from Germany were at their height, official German sources assured American reporters that they were military measures dictated by “economic requirements of the war” and denied that Jews in Berlin were being dispossessed of their dwellings or taken to concentration camps.

It is interesting to consider how such a denial was handled by two different papers. The
New York Times
quoted the Nazi claims but immediately shed doubt on them by noting that the official Nazi Party newspaper carried numerous announcements of auctions of furniture, household goods, and other property confiscated from Jews. Similar sales were also scheduled to take place in Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Breslau. In contrast, the
Washington Star
simply reported the German denials and added that “because this is a war measure no details are available.”
⁵

There were other obstacles, some of which were so formidable that even when the news managed to escape the perpetrators' grip, it still did not reach the bystanders. Historical precedent lessened the credibility of this news. During World War I similar “atrocity stories” had been circulated and proven false. Americans were intent on not falling prey, once again, to such “propaganda.” Each side accused the other of atrocities, and within two and a half weeks after the beginning of the war,
Time
magazine was dubbing this or that report “the ‘atrocity' story of the week.” Atrocity charges were linked by much of the American press with each side's attempts to both sway neutral opinion in its favor and fire up the homefront. Typical of the attitude of some of the press toward Allied reports of atrocities was one paper's reaction to the March 1940 publication of the Polish emigré government's report that the Nazis had murdered numerous civilians, desecrated churches, and terrorized entire villages. One editorial reminded Americans that after World War I “a great many of the atrocity stories which were so well attested and so strenuously told, so indignantly believed and so commonly repeated, were found to be absolute fakes.”
⁶

The tendency to dismiss the reports of horrors was strengthened by America's desire to remain neutral. An isolationist American public, particularly one inclined to believe that Britain would stop at little to get us to join the Allied side, felt justified in dismissing these reports as British creations. The press was “distrustful” of both sides and unanimous, at least at the outset, in endorsing neutrality. Americans abhorred National Socialism, but as one contemporary commentator pointed out, “Tory England was an ideal for which Americans were hardly prepared to die.” Furthermore, England had for so long dismissed Nazi persecution and racial policies as “an internal matter” and treated them as irrelevant in the formulation of foreign policy that now it was
difficult to use these same policies as effective propaganda.
⁷
But the English did try to use them for propaganda purposes. At the end of October 1939 they released a White Paper on the tortures occurring in Nazi concentration camps. In a foreword to the report the British government explained why it had not released this information, some of which had been in its hands since
Kristallnacht
, earlier. It wanted to avoid doing “anything to embitter the relations between the two countries.”
⁸

If Tory England was an ideal not worth dying for, then the Soviet Union was an ideal which many Americans believed was not even worth preserving. Stalinist Russia was known for its brutality and for the “blood-purge.” When Russia began to release reports accusing Germany of atrocities after June 1941, they were greeted skeptically by many Americans. When Germany and Russia each accused the other of mass murder, it was a case, according to the
Dayton
(Ohio)
News
, of the “pot and the kettle.” While there were papers which believed that Hitler was “in a class by himself among modern dictators [for] not even Stalin practices racial persecution,” there were others which believed that both Hitler
and
Stalin had records “written in crimson.” The Germans attempted to make use of the American contempt for Stalin and took American reporters to the Russian front to show them corpses which were “allegedly” Ukrainians and Poles who had been murdered by Russian soldiers. They were not entirely successful in convincing American reporters, and, according to Fred Oeschner of the United Press, the correspondents refused to “leave out those little words ‘alleged,' ‘claimed,' or ‘asserted' or to make flat statements instead of attributing them to the German guides.” The Germans did have some success with some papers including the Hearst papers, which as late as November 1941 believed that the Russians were behaving worse than the Nazis and condemned the unprecedented “destruction wrought” by them. The Hearst papers declared that the “pillage and plunder conducted in Russian-occupied Poland has no counterpart among the many ravished lands of western and northern Europe, where ruthless carnage and savage despolitation [sic] are not novelties.”
⁹
*