Beyond Belief (26 page)

By early 1940 the news had become grimmer. In March the
Chicago Tribune
reported that a news “leak” out of Poland indicated that Polish Jews would be forbidden to emigrate, that Jews in camps would not be allowed to leave for countries controlled by the Reich, and that “gradually all Jews are being massed in the Lublin area, the most desolate region in former Poland.” Also, American embassy officials in Berlin told the State Department of the progressively harsher regulations being imposed upon German Jews. They were particularly concerned when in early 1940 Jews from areas of the “old Reich” began to be deported. Embassy officials feared that this “presaged the general removal of Jews to Poland” from significant areas of the Reich. Assistant Secretary of State A. A. Berle, in a memorandum to the Secretary of State, described the deportations as “brutal in the extreme” and recommended that the Department register a protest either by sending a note to the Germans or issuing a press statement.
²¹

News of this sort prompted some unknowingly prophetic observations, including one by the
Buffalo Courier Express
which described the Nazis as waging two wars, a conventional one against Britain and France and “one of the basest, most brutal and vicious wars in human history . . . . the war of extermination against the Jewish people of Germany.” The
Newark Star Ledger
also offered a frighteningly accurate prediction: five and a half million Jews were in “distress,” and many were “doomed to perish.”
²²

These papers now understood that many Jews would die as a result of the conditions which they were being forced to endure. But even though they used the terms “extermination,” “annihilation,” and “doomed to perish,” they could not and did not know the full extent of the horror that would soon engulf European Jews. During the entire period of Nazi rule these terms were used
to mean different things. During the first years of Nazi rule, when Hitler and his followers threatened that the Jewish community would be “exterminated with fire and sword,” the press generally understood this to mean that the Jewish community as a functioning part of German society would be destroyed: synagogues would no longer exist, Jewish institutions would be disbanded, Jews would be unable to obtain decent jobs that provided a living wage, many Jews would leave the Reich because of the intolerable situation there, and those who remained would eventually die off as a result of extreme poverty and difficult conditions.

This was what Edgar Ansel Mowrer meant in 1933 when he described the aim of the Nazis' “barbarous campaign” against the Jews as the “extermination, permanent subjection or voluntary departure of the Jews from Germany.” He knew conditions would be terrible, but he was not predicting the Final Solution; for there was no way he—or any other reporter—could have been prescient enough to know that “extermination” would come to mean a systematic program of annihilation.
*
As the situation worsened, “extermination” was used in its literal sense: Many would die. But there was a difference in saying that many would die as a
result of extreme deprivation or even murder and acknowledging that millions, almost the entire Jewish population of Europe, would die in systematic massacres and in death factories established specifically to kill them.

A similar interpretation of the terms “annihilation” and “wiped out” was applied in an article entitled “The Annihilation of German Jewry” by the Berlin correspondent of the British journal
The Spectator
, who described how as a result of the “ruthless” deportations, the entire Reich and the annexed Polish provinces would be “completely ‘Jew-free' and Judaism will be completely wiped out.” In 1941, shortly after his return from Europe, H. R. Knickerbocker went a step further in his use of these terms. He predicted that while “perhaps five or six million Jews . . . will ultimately perish” at Nazi hands, they would not be murdered but condemned to a “slow death.” Hitler would not “kill them all at once” because he enjoyed watching them suffer, needed their labor power, and did not want to “outrage what there is left of world opinion.”
²⁴
During this period the press used such terms as “extermination” and “perish” to signify the “slow death” of a community, its institutions, and ultimately its people. No one could imagine even in 1941 that it would soon take on an even more diabolical meaning.

Between the fall of 1940 and the winter of 1941 antisemitic regulations were imposed in all Nazi controlled areas. In October 1940 Marshall Petain, chief of state of Vichy France, announced that Nuremberg-like decrees would also go into effect in unoccupied France. Foreign Jews could now be interned in special camps by local prefects, and Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. The decrees were widely reported in the press;
Time
typically described them as “so un-French, so very German in accent that the outside world found it hard to believe they came from the mouth of an old fighter for France . . . Petain.”
²⁵

By 1941 the press accepted Nazi persecution of the Jews as a “truism” and an “incontestable fact.” Reporters on the scene recognized that “despite the war,” Germany was intent on continuing to “press its persecutions of the Jews both in the Reich and in German dominated Europe.” An exclusive report in
PM
, the liberal New York daily, suggested that the “best policy for a Jew in Poland today is neither to be seen nor heard.” Reporters recognized that the treatment of the Jews had been standardized so that it followed a similar pattern in every city.
²⁶
In March 1941 an Associated Press story delineated the specific steps entailed
in that pattern: first Jews were “barred from professions and public office,” then they were prevented or “discouraged from mixing with other people,” finally they were driven from their businesses, “made to show distinguishing badges and . . . made to dwell in ghetto-like districts.” It could be expected that wherever German forces were in control, Jews would be “segregated” in “hermetically sealed ghettos.” Those Jews not yet deported from the Reich itself received, according to the
New York Herald Tribune
, “war work but little else.” They could not purchase clothing or fuel, were barred from parks and main streets and forbidden to have social contacts with “Aryan Germans.” A story in the February 15 issue of
Illustrated
magazine described the future for the “over a million Jews” who had been confined in Polish ghettos as a “gradual doom.” Ghettoization was “but a first step towards their annihilation,” which would result from “illness . . . lack of water and living conditions not adequate for cattle.” In March the
Christian Science Monitor
printed a map of the Warsaw ghetto and described the segregation of the Jews as reminiscent of “the Middle Ages.” The article carried a stark headline:

JEWS HAVE NO CHANCE in NAZIS' ‘NEW ORDER'
²⁷

In early April a reporter for
The Saturday Evening Post
visited Warsaw's ghetto, which he described as a “Forbidden City” cut off completely from “the teeming life around it.” The high-ranking Nazi leader who accompanied him claimed that the Jews preferred to live in the ghetto rather than be dispersed all over the city. This was “confirmed,” the author observed somewhat skeptically, by Jews who “lived before last November in comfortable surroundings . . . and had been free to circulate anywhere in Warsaw . . . [who] now live in a crowded room . . . and can leave only on those rare occasions when they obtain special permission.” Nonetheless, they insisted that they “like the new arrangement better” because of the “peace of mind” it afforded them. The editors, obviously fearful that readers might accept this at face value, appended a cautionary note to the beginning of the article. In a conquered country, they warned, “only the conquerors may speak freely to a reporter”; it was, therefore, necessary to “read between the lines.”
²⁸

In mid-June a reporter for
PM
returned from fifty-four days in the Reich to write that Jews in Germany were forced to work
for a pitiful wage which was insufficient to allow for even minimal subsistence. Those who somehow had enough funds to purchase food found that by the time they were allowed to shop—Jews could only enter stores after four in the afternoon—most of the shelves were empty. The reporter categorized life for Jews in the Warsaw ghetto as beyond “human endurance.” It was worse than bombing; “bombing at least gets it over with in a hurry.”
²⁹

But the imposition by Vichy in June 1941 of what the
New York Herald Tribune
described in its headline as a “final drastic decree” seemed to shock the press more than anything which preceded it. When such news had come from Poland, it was accepted somewhat matter-of-factly. When it came from France, this was not so at all, even though what was done in France was not as severe as in Poland. What had become normal behavior in Germany and Nazi-controlled lands seemed particularly out of place in France. Editorials in papers throughout the United States condemned France's “collaboration” in passing new laws which were a severe extension of those that had been issued the previous fall and essentially put Jews—foreign and French—“outside the law.” Now local prefects could send a Jew to a concentration camp for “any reason whatever,” and individuals could be interned on the “mere suspicion” of being Jews. When conditions in some of the French concentration camps were publicized in the American and British press, the French, sensitive to this criticism, ordered that they be improved. These improvements were more cosmetic than substantive, and the escalating French war against the Jews continued virtually unabated.
³⁰

As the commencement of the mass murder of European Jews neared, the press had enough information to indicate that many of them were doomed to die from disease, starvation, exposure torture and slave labor. Soon they would also have enough information to know that many were being massacred. But their own nagging doubts and those of their editors back home permeated the writing and publication of the news so that the American public would still have cause to disbelieve.
³¹

On June 22, 1941, German armored units rolled across the border into Russian territory, including that area of Poland previously
occupied by Russia. In the wake of the Wehrmacht's military advance there began another assault of a vastly different nature. The special units in charge of this attack, the
Einsatzgruppen
(Action Groups), conducted a series of “sweeps” against Jews between the summer of 1941 and late 1942. Together they left well over 1 million Jews dead. This, the first step in the actual murder of European Jewry, lacked any of the technological “advances” subsequently instituted in the death camps. The Nazis' dissatisfaction with the “inefficient”
modus operandi
of the
Einsatzgruppen
led them to seek a different mode of annihilation: death camps and gas chambers.

Although the Nazis tried to keep the news of these mobile killing units from the outside world, reports of their existence filtered through enemy lines fairly rapidly. The main sources of information were
Einsatzgruppen
members and soldiers who had participated in or witnessed the massacres. In addition, German civilian personnel who were present transmitted this information back to Germany.
³²
As early as August 1941 reports of massacres began to appear in the press. By the fall of 1941 news of the killing was widespread enough to have reached some foreign journalists. When they were brought by the Germans on a tour of German-occupied Russia, they told Nazi officials that they were fully aware of the massacres. But they remained cautious, and the reports they transmitted back to the states were often suffused with doubt and incredulity.

On August 8 AP described the massacre of hundreds of Lvov civilians as an “orgy of murder and rape . . . directed mainly at members of trade unions, workers in public services . . . [and] factory employees.” A note of skepticism was injected into the report with the comment that its source was “communiques based in part on
purported
stories of persons
said
to have escaped.” The doubts of the AP may have been exacerbated by the fact that the report of the “orgy” had been released by the Russians. The
New York Post
treated reports of mass deaths far more factually. In a lengthy and detailed article it told of a Polish White Paper on the “atrocities” committed by the Nazis during the first eighteen months of their rule. The story was, the
Post
observed, supported by over 200 items of source material, including “scores of affidavits from escaped eyewitnesses,” and told of over 70,000 civilian executions in Poland. Neither of these two reports specified Jews as being among the victims, but other reports soon did.
³³

On October 26 the
New York Times
carried news of the slaying of 15,000 Jews in Galicia. Details on the “massacres of thousands of Jews deported from Hungary to Galicia and the machine-gunning of more thousands of Galician Jews” by German and Ukrainian soldiers were based on letters reaching Hungary from Galicia and on eyewitness accounts of officers who had been present. According to this news report, those who had not been “massacred” were living in conditions of “widespread” poverty and hunger. On November 13 the
New York Journal American
published a page 1 (on page 2 in another edition) story on the massacre of Jews in Odessa, where the toll was reportedly 25,000. At the end of the month the same paper carried a report which had come from Moscow on the massacre of 52,000 men, women, and children in Kiev on page 2.
³⁴