Beyond Belief (34 page)

Once the statement was released, State Department officials tried to downplay its significance. Two days after the declaration, a cable was sent by the Department to Costa Rica stating that “there had been no confirmation of the reported order from other sources (except from a Jewish leader in Geneva).” Despite a claim by the
Baltimore Sun
that Roosevelt and the State Department have tried to keep the American public fully informed regarding the atrocities, when it came to the Final Solution this was
not
American policy. As Walter Laqueur has observed, the Department wanted to “have nothing to do with the content of the [Allied] message.”
⁸⁹
In fact, it really wanted to have nothing at all to do with publicizing any information regarding the Final Solution.

Why were officials so opposed to confirming the news? Why
did they claim to be unconvinced as to its veracity? Once they acknowledged that the Nazis were engaged in the systematic annihilation of the Jews, they knew that they would have to contend with rescue demands and, if they did not heed these requests, with charges that they were being laggard in their efforts. Their fears were justified, for this was precisely what happened. Both Washington and London now had to stave off increasingly strident requests for action from various Jewish and non-Jewish groups.
⁹⁰
In July 1943 Foreign Office officials were still complaining about Polish and particularly Jewish groups' use of these stories to “stoke us up” and force the government to “waste a disproportionate amount of . . . time in dealing with wailing Jews.” State Department officials felt similarly.
⁹¹

Yet, though London and Washington, to a lesser degree, were beset with requests for rescue, they were ultimately able to dodge the issue—thanks, in part, to the press. The British government had a task here because of the pressure of the press and prominent personalities. Washington did not face this problem. By paying relatively little attention to what was happening to Europe's Jews and accepting the proposition that rescue would and could only come with victory, the American press as well as leading political and religious figures eased Washington's dilemma of having to do something, or at least appear to do something. On those occasions when British and American officials felt compelled to give the appearance of action—as they did in December 1942 and would again at Bermuda in April 1943—the press readily accepted their claims that they were genuinely trying to resolve the issue. Satisfied that all that could be done was being done, the press reported news of the Final Solution but did not pursue it with any urgency. In fact, it hardly pursued it at all. When it transmitted the information, it did so in a confused, skeptical, and obfuscated fashion. Mostly, there was an air of lassitude about the way it covered this story. On those few instances when the press focused on the issue, as the British press did in December 1942, public opinion and eventually the government responded.

9

As 1943 unfolded, the German resolve to expedite the destruction of those Jews who remained alive seemed to grow stronger. Information emerged from all over Eastern Europe which served to confirm that the program to finally murder all the Jews was well underway. Ghettos which had once been full were now said to be mysteriously empty. Deportations were taking place in Western Europe, including Holland, Belgium, and France. There was even a report of a Nazi order to “starve” the Jews as a means of killing them. According to the
New York Times
mid-February had been set as the date for the “total liquidation of the Jewish problem” in France.
¹
AP reported that Polish Jews had been confined to fifty-five different ghettos where they were “awaiting extermination.”
²
The February 27 edition of
Collier's
printed a first-hand description of life in the Warsaw ghetto. Written by Tosha Bialer, who had been in the ghetto until the previous summer, the article was accompanied by pictures of those whom the magazine described as “starving people” and “homeless, hungry children.”

The Nazi leadership seemed remarkably more candid about
its plans. According to a BBC broadcast, recorded in the United States by CBS, March 31 had been set as the day on which Berlin was to be completely Jew-free. Six thousand Jews would be deported daily in order to achieve that goal. Dr. Robert Ley, the Reich Labor Minister, reaffirmed Hitler's policy of extermination, and in light of the revelations and confirmations of the previous months no longer could his words be understood figuratively.

No one in Germany is to speak any longer of the Jews as the chosen people. The Jew has been chosen but for destruction.
³

Reports released by the Polish government in exile and the World Jewish Congress in mid-February painted an even bleaker picture of conditions in Europe. The World Jewish Congress charged on February 14 that the Germans had issued orders to “speed and intensify the extermination by massacre and starvation of the Jews remaining in occupied Europe.” The
Washington Post
and
Los Angeles Times
considered this news worthy of pages 2 and 3 respectively; the
New York World Telegram
carried it on page 13, the
Atlanta Constitution
on page 18, and the
New York Times
on page 37.
⁴

Additional information released in March indicated that the situation was becoming more desperate. The American Jewish Congress estimated that “two out of every seven Jews [have been] liquidated by the Nazi ‘new order.'” In a lengthy article published on March 4 the
Christian Science Monitor
vigorously pointed out that Germany did not deny the estimate that 2 million Jews had been killed; in fact “Germany does not even deny that the extermination of the Jews is carried out according to a meticulously arranged plan.” The article analyzed what was known about the fate of the Jewish population in each of the seventeen countries which the Nazis had conquered. It ended with the concise observation that the “deportees either starve while under way in sealed cattle cars or are killed after their arrival at one of the extermination centers that were established in Lithuania and Poland.”
⁵

That same day an Overseas News Agency dispatch from Stockholm reported that Himmler had issued a circular indicating that the Third Reich “seriously intends to annihilate all the Jews in Europe.” The circular announced that Poles were to be taken to “educative labor camps” and then transferred to other places of incarceration, while Jews “are to be transferred to the next state police station for further dealing.” The absence, the news
report observed, of “any supplementary instructions would indicate strongly that in most instances ‘further dealing' means execution.”
⁶
On March 20 the Polish government in exile released news that the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was “being speeded up.” This information was preceded by an AP dispatch saying that as a result of “fighting” which had occurred during the “forced removal” of Jews from the ghetto, fifty Germans had been killed. On March 21 a number of papers carried a brief AP report that the entire Jewish population of five Polish towns, approximately 35,000 Jews, had been killed.
⁷

Though this news painted a frightening picture, most of these stories were paid insignificant attention by the press. If they were to be found in a paper, they were usually relegated to a few small paragraphs tucked away somewhere unobtrusively. However, by the beginning of March the attitude of some of the American press had begun to change. This change was a response, in part, to activities sponsored by various segments of the American Jewish community. For a short period of time in 1943 American Jewry managed to focus the attention of the press on the situation of European Jewry and, of even greater importance, prompted some papers to ask whether rescue through victory was the only alternative.

On March 1st a massive rally was held at New York's Madison Square Garden. It was addressed by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, AFL President William Green, and many other prominent personalities. The rally's theme was “Stop Hitler's decimation of the Jews now.” Rescue could not wait until victory. Press estimates of the number of people who listened to the speeches over a public address system set up in the street because the 22,000-seat Garden was filled were as high as 50,000. The rally, which was sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, AFL, CIO, Church Peace Union, Free World Association, and a number of other Jewish and non-Jewish groups, received wide press attention. Newspapers from all over the country and magazines, including
Time
and
Newsweek
, commented on it and described it as the largest gathering of its kind ever held in the United States.
⁸
Stephen Wise, aware of the press's importance,
tried to capitalize on the attention the rally generated by writing to editors of various newspapers in order to get them to publicize its proposals. Similar rallies were held throughout the United States in a variety of different cities.
⁹

Even before the rally the question of rescue had been publicly raised by a small group of Palestinian Jews led by a man named Peter Bergson. Members of the Irgun, one of the secret Jewish armies in Palestine, they came to the United States to raise funds to support Irgun activities, including helping Jewish refugees break through the British blockade of Palestine. When news of the destruction of European Jewry began to be publicized, they turned their energies to that issue. From the outset they used the mass media effectively. Among their earliest activities was the publication on February 16, 1943, of a full-page ad in which they claimed that Roumania would not kill 70,000 Jews if it were paid 50 dollars a head. Though the principal demand of the ad, written by Ben Hecht, was the establishment of an Allied intergovernmental committee to “formulate ways and means of stopping this wholesale slaughter of human beings,” it was the idea of ransoming Roumanian Jewry which captured people's attention. This was due in no small measure to the headline above the ad:

FOR SALE to Humanity

70,000 Jews

Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece

No sooner had the ad appeared than the established Jewish organizations accused the group of activities that bordered on “fraud” for making it sound as if a 50-dollar contribution to them could save a Roumanian Jew. The Bergsonites ignored the criticism and less than a week later published another ad signed by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado demanding Allied action on the Roumanian proposal. Both these ads appeared in a number of different papers.
¹⁰

In addition to their effective use of these dramatic full-page ads, they sponsored a star-laden pageant entitled “We Will Never Die.” Produced by Billy Rose, written by Ben Hecht, starring Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, directed by Moss Hart, with the NBC orchestra playing music composed for the pageant by Kurt Weill, the March 9 premier in New York City drew over 40,000. A second showing was hastily scheduled when 50,000
people descended on the Garden for tickets that, in the words of the organizers, “weren't there.” Many people waited outside in the vain hope that a third performance would take place. The pageant was produced in five other American cities—Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and Hollywood. It generated press coverage wherever it was shown and was ultimately seen by over 100,000 Americans including Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, 300 congressmen and senators, diplomats, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her newspaper column, “My Day,” described it as