Beyond Belief (28 page)

By this time there were some news stories regarding the death of multitudes which were not skeptical in tone, but they were the minority. In December 1941, writing in the
New York Sun
, the columnist George Sokolsky singled out the Jews when he described the Nazis' “efficient process of murder.” He predicted that by the end of the war half of the 8 million Jews under Nazi control might well be dead.
⁵⁸
Even the
New York Herald Tribune
, which had demonstrated a lack of complete faith in the news of massacres, observed in an editorial at the beginning of December that the reports of mistreatment of Jews were no longer news—what was news was the “sheer mass” of those who had died. The fate reserved for the Jews was described by the
New York Herald Tribune
as “worse than a status of serfdom—it is nothing less than systematic extermination.”
⁵⁹
The Hearst papers described what the Nazis were doing as the “attempted extermination of an ancient and cultured race.”
⁶⁰
In a lengthy story which covered almost an entire page, the
Christian Science Monitor
noted that the “only purpose behind the ruthless treatment [of the Jews] appears to be the complete extermination of the race.” What was being spoken of was no longer just the destruction of institutions and organized communal life. “Extermination” now meant the death of multitudes as a result of living “destitute and helpless” in the ghettos of Poland and the wastelands of the Ukraine.
⁶¹
Jewish leaders also recognized the increased severity of the situation. Dr. Henry Shoskes, a prominent Polish Jew who had come to the United States at the beginning of the war, explained to reporters in 1942 that the Nazis created conditions in the ghettos which were so severe that Jews were “doomed to annihilation.”
⁶²
By early 1942 it was clear that Jews would die not only because of terrible conditions but also as a result of massacres. But what the press did not yet know—and could not yet know—was that annihilation would not be haphazard but that this killing would culminate in a systematic program using “modern” scientific methods and whose victims would include millions of Jews from every corner of the European continent.

While the ultimate meaning of “extermination” would not be fully divulged until the latter half of 1942, journalists, particularly
those in Germany, were increasingly cognizant of the changing nature of the situation. Information was available from too many sources to be easily denied. By early summer additional evidence would be available to prove that “extermination” had to be interpreted in its most terrible sense, that what was happening was even worse than had been previously imagined, and that the Nazis were no longer just persecuting the Jews or allowing them to die of starvation, but were murdering them. Despite the fact that these accounts of a systematic program of intentional and deliberate annihilation had been preceded by so much other information, they would find particularly formidable barriers in their path.

8

In late spring 1942, the American correspondents who had been in Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor were exchanged for Axis nationals stranded in the United States. These reporters returned to the United States with additional details on the mass murders which had occurred in Poland and Russia. Their descriptions of events were explicit and graphic. Glen Stadler, UP correspondent in Germany, described what had happened to Jews in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania as an “open hunt.” Some of the reporters estimated that more than 400,000 had already been killed by Hitler's “
new order
,” including “upward of 100,000 [Jews who] met death in Baltic states alone, and more than double that many [who] have been executed in Western Russia.”
¹
Joseph Grigg, also of UP, believed that the number of Jewish victims had reached 200,000.

Thousands lie in unmarked graves, many in mass graves they were forced to dig before the firing squads of S.S.
[Schützstaffel
or Defense Corps] troops cut them down . . . . One of the biggest known mass slaughters occurred in Latvia in the summer of 1941
when, responsible Nazi sources admitted, 56,000 men, women and children were killed by S.S. troops and Latvian irregulars. This slaughter went on for days. There was even an official German newsreel of squads shooting Jews in the streets of Riga . . . . In Lithuania about 30,000 Jews, according to most reliable estimates, were killed by special “cleanup” squads brought from Poland with the knowledge and approval of the German civil administration. The entire Jewish population of many towns and villages was driven into the country, forced to dig graves and then machine gunned. In one city alone, more than 8,000 were killed . . . . The slaughter in Poland was horrible, with 80,000 killed . . . a high percentage of [them were] Jews. The mass grave technique was used there too . . . . One German rifleman boasted to correspondents that he had killed thirty seven in one night, picking them off as a hunter does rabbits. Rumanians were even less reticent in boasting of their slaughters of Jews.

The repatriated reporters did not just describe how Jews had been killed, but some made it clear that they understood Hitler's plans for the Jews. Grigg noted that when the war broke out, Hitler had declared that it would result in the destruction of the Jews, and
“those of us who lived in Germany know that he and his agents have done everything to make the prophecy come true.”
²

In addition to these news reports many of the correspondents immediately published accounts of their experiences, discussing not only their experiences in Germany but also what the Germans were doing to the Jews. They worked on the books during the six months they were “imprisoned.” One of the most detailed accounts was published by United Press correspondent Frederick Oeschner, who believed that the full number of Jews “slaughtered by Nazi execution squads between the outbreak of war and spring, 1942” would never be precisely known but estimated that it was at least 200,000. Wallace Duel of the
Chicago Daily News
described the mass graves and the bonfires which were built in order to dispose of the bodies. Louis Lochner, whose account did not refer to the mass murder, did describe the deportations and said they constituted one of the “darkest blots on the Nazi escutcheon.”
³

As part of an extensive series on his experiences in Germany, this veteran AP reporter graphically told how “Hitler [was] still tightening screws on Jews in all lands where Nazis rule.” The treatment meted out was “more severe than even that specified
in [the] Nuremberg laws.” Those Jews who had not yet been deported to Poland in “the most primitive” conditions discovered that the “plain fact is that the Jew stands beyond the pale of any law.” According to Lochner, anything the Nazis wished to do to the Jews could be done. He made a point of noting that “decent” Germans were appalled by these reports and did whatever they could to ease the Jews' situation, including very seriously risking their own safety.
⁴
Though Lochner stressed the severity of the conditions facing Jews both when he was released and again in September, when he was interviewed by CBS radio, he did not make specific mention of an extermination or mass murder program.
⁵

An American citizen who had been caught in Poland when America entered the war was also released with the reporters. In a widely syndicated INS series he acknowledged that Polish suffering was great, but “whatever is suffered by the general population in Poland it is not as bad as the fate of those poor unfortunates who live in the Jewish ghettos.”
⁶

Meanwhile additional ominous signs appeared on the horizon. Several articles in the press indicated an increasingly frightening situation. On June 13 Goebbels's threat to carry out “mass extermination of Jews in reprisal for the Allied air bombings” was reported by the press.
⁷
A few days later the
Los Angeles Times
carried a report on the slaying of 25,000 Jews in Latvia. That same day the
New York Journal American
reprinted a story from the
London Evening Standard
which reported that escapees arriving from Vilna had said that the toll of Jews slain there had reached 60,000. The
New York Times
also reported this news but in a way that contrasted sharply with the
London Evening Standard's
report. According to the
Standard
, the source of the news was “a man who was in Vilna up to May 24 and himself saw much of the mass murder.” The
New York Times
described him as a man “who
said
he was in Vilna until May 24.” The
New York Times
then added the following paragraph. “The Polish refugee's story of the Vilna massacre, of which he
said
he was an eyewitness, is impossible to confirm now.”
⁸
Thus the
New York Times
established yet another barrier between itself and the news, shedding doubt on its authoritative nature. But this kind of treatment of the news was not unique to the
New York Times
, as would become abundantly clear during the next few months.

In June of 1942 the Polish authorities in London released a report they had received from Poland which confirmed that the Germans were murdering Jews throughout Poland. It described the “system” of killings which was “applied everywhere.” This information had been transmitted to London at the end of May by the Polish Jewish socialist organization, the Bund. The Bund report depicted how many of the massacres were conducted:

Men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to “an unknown destination” and killed in adjacent woods.

According to the report the Jewish death toll in Poland had reached 700,000. The number of dead in Rovno was said to be 15,000, in Vilna 50,000 and in Slonim 9,000. Sealed railway cars with 25,000 people in them had left Lublin and virtually “disappeared without a trace.” But this report contained two other even more important and startling revelations. It told of death by gassings at Chelmno and estimated that on the “average” 1,000 people a day had been killed between November 1941 and March 1942 in gas chambers which could accommodate ninety people at a time. Of greatest significance was its revelation that these murders were part of a coordinated plan to murder the Jewish people. The opening line of the report stressed this point: “From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical annihilation of the Jewish population on Polish soil.” The report then laid out the grim but accurate description of what had happened. (Though the plan only mentioned 700,000 victims, by this time the toll was in the vicinity of 2 million.)
⁹