Beyond Belief (29 page)

On June 2 the essence of the report was broadcast on the BBC. Toward the end of the month, after press conferences by members of the Polish government in exile's National Council, it was picked up by the British press. On June 29 the World Jewish Congress sponsored a news conference at which Sidney S. Silverman, a member of the British Parliament, and Ignacy
Schwarzbart, a member of the Polish National Council, told of the murder of Jews in Pinsk, Bialystok, Slonim, Rovno, Lvov, and dozens of other places. Schwarzbart spoke of the gassings at Chelmno and raised the estimated death toll to over 1 million.

These revelations constituted a watershed in the dissemination of information regarding the Final Solution. Here were the first public reports of gassing and the first reference to a systematic continent-wide program of murder. Moreover, the news now had the official imprimatur of the London-based Polish government in exile and of British officials, members of Parliament, and the BBC. This was the first step in the transformation of the news from rumor to officially confirmed fact. It was becoming more difficult, though certainly not impossible, to dismiss this story as having
no
basis in truth. Details continued to make their way out of Europe in the months and years that followed. Yet while the secret of the war against the Jews had begun to seep through the Nazi fog, it was difficult for it to break through barriers in the Allied world. The American press did not ease its path. It did not highlight this news and often omitted from its reports key pieces of information or burdened them with various disclaimers.

It is instructive to contrast the coverage of the American press with that of the British press. In Britain the story was treated in a direct and forceful style. The
Daily Telegraph and Morning Post
made the Bund report a main news item on the principal inside news page. The boldface headline read

GERMANS MURDER 700,000

JEWS IN POLAND

TRAVELLING GAS CHAMBERS

An even greater number of papers responded to the June 29 press conference. The
London Times:

MASSACRE OF JEWS—OVER 1,000,000 DEAD SINCE THE WAR BEGAN

Daily Mail:

GREATEST POGROM—ONE MILLION JEWS DIE

Manchester Guardian:

JEWISH WAR VICTIMS

More than a Million Dead

Daily Telegraph:

MORE THAN 1,000,000 JEWS KILLED IN EUROPE

Even some Canadian papers carried extensive accounts and explicit headlines. The
Montreal Daily Star:

“NAZI SLAUGHTERHOUSE”—GERMANS MASSACRE MILLION
JEWS IN EXTERMINATION DRIVE

Appalling Conditions Reported From
Hitler-Dominated Countries
¹⁰

The American reaction was far more muted. Behaving in a way that would become almost a hallmark of American press treatment of news of Nazi mass murders, papers placed the various stories on inner pages and allotted them but a few lines. Consequently, readers were left free to accept this news as valid or to dismiss it as unverified information in which the paper had little faith. The latter conclusion would have been easy to draw from the way the
New York Times
described the Polish escapee from Vilna, as mentioned above, or its decision to relegate the Polish government in exile's June announcement to seventeen lines at the bottom of page 5. The easily missed article noted that 700,000 had been slain through a variety of methods, but completely ignored the revelation that this was part of a program of systematic slaughter. The news of the June 29 conference was placed in the lower half of page 7 and failed to mention that Silverman or Schwarzbart, both of whom were members of official governmental bodies—one British and one Polish—had been present at the conference. Instead the announcement of the death of 1 million was attributed to nameless “spokesmen for the World Jewish Congress.”
¹¹
The
Los Angeles Times
used an AP report that omitted most of the details and 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.” The two-paragraph, thirteen-line article, printed on page 3, carried the following headline:

NAZIS KILL MILLION
JEWS, SAYS SURVEY

The
Atlanta Constitution
ran the same two-paragraph AP report under a headline indicating a little more faith in the story than the
Los Angeles Times:

1,000,000 JEWS KILLED
BY NAZI TREATMENT

The
Miami Herald
placed the story on page 2 but allotted it only twelve lines. The
New York World Telegram
ran a twenty-three-line story on page 4 which mentioned neither Schwarzbart's nor Silverman's participation in the news conference. But it did note that the death toll resulted from the Nazis' long-standing pronouncement that “physical extermination of the Jew must from now on be the aim of Germany and her allies.” According to this article the Poles had said that
probably
700,000 Jews had been killed in Poland and Lithuania, 125,000 in Rumania, 200,000 in Russia and 100,000 in the rest of Europe.
¹²
A similarly ambivalent attitude was demonstrated by the
Chicago Tribune
, which placed the story on page 6 and allocated a total of eleven lines to it. No mention was made of Silverman, and the deaths were attributed to “ill treatment.”
¹³

We might ask—and perhaps readers at the time wondered too—why the editors placed news of this magnitude on the inner pages and accorded it so little space. If they believed the news, then it should have been given more attention, and if they did not believe, then why were the stories printed at all? Part of the explanation may be found in the headline which the
New York Journal American
placed over its page 1 eight-line article which neither mentioned an extermination “policy” nor provided any death tolls for the various countries involved:

JEWS LIST
THEIR
DEAD AT MILLION
¹⁴

This was a
Jewish
story, worthy of reporting, but not worthy of complete trust because Jews were “interested parties.”
*

CBS radio, which had provided sparse coverage of the persecution of the Jews, included news of the press conference in its June 29 New York news broadcast. It was the first discussion of the Jews' situation on CBS radio since May 23, when John Daly reported on fear of forest fires in Norway, conscription of Poles by the Germans, Germany's conquest of Sweden, and then added that “the Nazi oppression has even been extended to Jews in Holland. And the Jews have been ordered to display the star of David on their clothing. And that's the world today.” On the 29th of June, Quincy Howe informed CBS listeners that

A horrifying reminder of what this war means to certain noncombatants comes from the World Jewish Congress in London today. It is now estimated that the Germans have massacred more than one million Jews in Europe since the war began. That's about one sixth of the Jewish population in the Old World. Moreover, those Jews who survive lead a subhuman existence on a fraction of the already short rations to which the rest of the population of Europe is reduced. The Jewish population of Germany has declined from 600,000 to 100,000 since Hitler took power. Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal are the only countries in continental Europe where Jews still possess human rights. In the Pacific war zones the Japanese suffered another defeat at American hands . . . .

Though this broadcast offered more information than most other reports, there was still no mention of a systematic extermination program.
¹⁶

There were some exceptions to this general pattern. The
New York Herald Tribune
devoted significant attention to this story, placing an eighty-two-line article on page 1 and running a headline which both accurately reflected the contents of the article and made it clear that things could still get worse:

NAZI SLAUGHTER OF MILLION JEWS SO FAR CHARGED;

World Congress Leaders Tell London of Systematic
Massacre over Europe
¹⁷

Though the story acknowledged that what was taking place was part of a systematic program, it failed to mention the gas chambers at Chelmno and reports of poisonous gas in use in other parts of Poland. These facts may still have been too fantastic for the editors to accept.

The
St. Louis Post Dispatch
placed the story of the Polish government in exile's June 26 announcement on the front page of its news section in the far-right column. This article, one of the more detailed to appear on the topic, was written by David M. Nichol, a reporter in London. He said estimates were that 700,000 Jews had already died: “disease and starvation are allowed to operate to the fullest extent. Where these methods are considered insufficient or slow, massacre tactics often are substituted, . . . sources say.” Both the headline and the story itself stressed something that many other papers simply ignored: poison gas was being used to kill Jews. Though the article spoke of ninety being killed “at a time,” the headline made it sound as if only ninety had been killed. Neither the article nor the headline mentioned that the report estimated that 1,000 people a day were dying in this fashion.

NAZIS REPORTED

KILLING POLISH

JEWS WITH GAS

90 Said to Have

Been Herded Into

Chamber for Mass

Execution.

Despite this lacuna the article treated the news in far greater detail than did most of the other major dailies. Nichol was unable to believe that this killing did not have some ulterior purpose, and he surmised that these gas chambers were being used “perhaps [for] testing lethal weapons which may sometime find more general use.” It is significant that Nichol noted that the charges of killing with gas “find grim confirmation” in the reports which had emerged from the Reich regarding the euthanasia program for people “incurably ill or mentally defective.”
¹⁸
By citing this precedent for murder by gas, the article may well have pierced readers' fog of disbelief and made the news more credible. At least it offered a historical precedent to those willing to accept it.

Over the next few days various stories appeared concerning the massacres. On July 2 a one-column article on page 6 of the
New York Times
discussed the Bund report's revelation that gas chambers were being used and that massacres were frequent. In addition to noting that 25,000 had been taken from Lublin and that “nothing has been heard of them since,” it listed other slaughter sites:

At Lwow 35,000 were slain, at Stanislawow, 15,000; at Tarnopol 5,000; at Zioctrow 2,000; at Brezanzany only 1,700 were left of 18,000. The massacre still continues in Lwow.

The article concluded by quoting what was probably the most ominous sentence in the report, “Whoever wins, all Jews will be murdered.” Even though the paper strengthened the credibility of the report by observing that the information in it was “supported by information received by other Jewish circles here and also by the Polish Government,” the
New York Times
felt obliged to include a disclaimer. Apparently not believing that 700,000 people could be massacred, it informed readers that this figure “probably includes many who died of maltreatment in concentration camps, of starvation in ghettos or of unbearable conditions of forced labor.” The value the
Times
placed on this news was also evident in its decision to run the story of Governor Lehman's donation of his tennis shoes to the scrap rubber drive on the top of page 1 and the Bund report on page 6. Furthermore, the headline highlighted a relatively minor aspect of the story, namely that the Polish underground had called for retribution, and made it appear that this was the main thrust of the article.

ALLIES ARE
URGED TO EXECUTE
NAZIS

Report On Slaughter Of Jews In Poland

Asks Li
ke Treatment for
Germans

Curb on Reich Sought

‘Only Way To Save Millions From Certain Destruction,'
Says the Appeal
¹⁹

One week later, on July 9, the paper reported that according to the Polish underground 3 million Poles and Jews had become victims of the Nazis. Over 500,000 had been sent to Germany
as forced labor, while 200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews were “murdered outright” by the Nazis. This excluded those who died of “starvation and disease.” The Vice Premier of the Polish government in exile “fully corroborated the information.” Approximately three-quarters of the way down the 125-line article, brief mention was made of the fact that Poles had refused to accept certain governmental and administrative posts offered them by the Germans. Though this was a relatively minor aspect of the story, it was the point the
New York Times
featured in the headline:

POLES SPURN
POSTS UNDER
NAZI REGIME

Cooperation Bid Falls Upon Deaf Ears,
Document
from Underground
Leaders Says

ARD
ENT PLEA TO A
LLIES

Report Read in London Puts Germany's Toll of Victims at
3,000,000 Mark

On July 23 the
New York Times
printed a small story regarding 120,000 Jews who had been sent to Poland, where 53,000 had been killed. Reference was also made to 17,000 Austrians who had been murdered since the war began. The headline ignored the 53,000.

Say
s Nazis Slew 17,0
00

Austrian-American League, Inc., Reports Toll Since Invasion

The
New York Times
may have placed the smaller more plausible number in the headline because it came from a non-Jewish source, while the 53,000 came from a Jewish source.
²⁰
This was not the only time the paper behaved in this fashion. Many times during this period, whenever the
New York Times
reported the deaths of non-Jewish civilians, it paid them more attention than it did the deaths of Jews, even though the number of non-Jewish victims was far smaller. On May 5 a page 1 story reported on the shooting of seventy-two Dutch anti-Nazis. In an editorial the paper strongly decried their deaths along with those of fifty-five at Lille, France, and eighteen in Oslo. Two days later a page 7 story told of forty killed in France in retaliation for the derailment of a German train. On May 24 a page 5 headline proclaimed