Beyond Belief (43 page)

Even meetings with eyewitnesses who had seen the action and participated in the burning of the bodies did little, if anything,
to dispel Lawrence or Davis's skepticism. In fact, they seem to have reinforced it. Lawrence described the witnesses as men “who
said
they were Soviet soldiers who had been captured by the Germans and forced to take part in the disinterment and burning.” Davis also described the men as “persons who
say
they were eyewitnesses.”
¹⁸
In contrast, Shapiro described the same men as “three living witnesses of the German effort to exhume and burn every body in this charnel mass.” The fact that they were both Red Army lieutenants and “like most of the victims in Babi Yar—Jews” seemed to render them less credible witnesses for Lawrence and Davis but not for Downs, Shapiro, and Hindus.
¹⁹
The Reuters Moscow correspondent also sent a straightforward report devoid of any skepticism in which he described how he had seen “the relics of giant funeral pyres in which the Germans . . . burned the remains of thousands of men, women, and children whom they had murdered.”
²⁰
In his report to the BBC Winterton relayed witnesses' accounts of how the ground moved after the pit had been filled in because many of the victims were still alive when they were buried.
²¹

Lawrence's refusal to believe may explain why the
New York Times
, in contrast to a number of other papers, including the
St. Louis Post Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Examiner
, and
New York Journal American
, ran the story on page 3 and not on page 1.
²²
The
New York Journal American
not only ran Shapiro's story on page 1 but gave it a banner headline:

100,000 KIEV CIVILIANS KILLED BY NAZIS

Wholesale Massacre Revealed
²³

Despite subsequent reports further confirming the disappearance of the Jews from cities and towns throughout Europe, Lawrence maintained his “built in skepticism” for a long time. If someone such as Lawrence, a seasoned reporter for the most important and influential American newspaper and one who had the chance to visit the site and talk with witnesses, remained so riddled with doubt, it is not surprising that the American public, which depended on the press to bring it the news, tenaciously clung to its skepticism. As we shall see, Lawrence was far from alone. In fact many of those in the highest and most powerful echelons of his profession maintained their skepticism for another year and a half.
²⁴

It was not until ten months later, in August 1944, that Lawrence was willing to accept the validity of the charges against the Germans. It was his visit to Maidanek, one of the first death camps to be reached by the Russian forces, which finally erased his skepticism. Lawrence's report on this visit constituted more than just an extensive description of the camp and the horrors that took place there. It was also a
mea culpa
for what he now knew to be his unjustified doubts.

Never have I been confronted with such complete evidence clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating German crimes. After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.
²⁵

Though Lawrence was at last willing to acknowledge that these stories were true, the
New York Times
apparently was convinced that many of its readers were not, and it took the unprecedented step of declaring its faith in one of its reporters. An editorial which appeared on the same day as Lawrence's description of Maidanek assured readers that he was “employed by this newspaper because he is known to be a thorough and accurate correspondent” and that therefore they could believe what he wrote. Lawrence, who eventually became the
New York Times
White House correspondent, before joining ABC, wrote in his autobiography that never “before or since have I seen the
Times
so describe one of its reporters.”
²⁶

Other reporters who toured Maidanek with Lawrence had similar reactions. Associated Press staff member Daniel De Luce admitted that prior to the visit most of the other American and British correspondents in the group “could not even begin to imagine the proportions of its frightfulness.”
²⁷
Now they had no doubts.

Edgar Snow of the
Saturday Evening Post
, Richard Lauterbach of
Time
and
Life
, and Maurice Hindus of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
and the
New York Herald Tribune
all found the storehouse for the personal possessions of the victims more “terrifying” than even the gas chambers and the crematorium. In them they found rooms filled with shoes—one for men's shoes and one for women's—kitchenware, clothes, books, pocketknives, and other items that the unsuspecting victims had brought with them to facilitate their “relocation.”
²⁸
Maidanek “suddenly became real” to Lauterbach
when he stood on top of a “sea” of 820,000 pairs of shoes which had cascaded out of a warehouse. After viewing the camp
Newsweek's
Moscow correspondent described those killed upon arrival as “relatively lucky.”
²⁹
In the introduction to his detailed description of this camp, Snow explained why he broke with his magazine's norm and wrote about a subject which was fully reported by the daily press. Maidanek was evidence of the way Nazi ideology enabled people to commit “crimes almost too monstrous for the human mind to accept.”
³⁰

But even now not everyone was convinced. In what could by this time be described as an almost reflexive action,
The Christian Century
rejected the news and attacked those who relayed it. It chided American newspapers for giving the story the “big headline of the day,” and claimed that the “parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory' atrocity tale” of World War I was “too striking to be overlooked.” Neither the eyewitness journalist accounts nor the pictures of the gas chambers, the crematoria, the piles of bones and skeletons, the thousands of pairs of shoes, and the canisters of poison gas convinced this prominent journal that this report was not an atrocity story.
³¹

Christian Century
argued that its doubts were justified because the information came from the Russians, whom the journal did not trust. This lack of faith in the Russians had been exacerbated by Germany's announcement in April 1943 that it had discovered a mass grave containing the bodies of over 10,000 Poles, mainly officers, near Katyn forest, west of the Russian city of Smolensk. These officers, who had all been shot with their hands tied behind their backs, were believed to have been men who surrendered to the Russians in September 1939.
³²
Though the London based Polish government in exile charged the Russians with murder, most of the American press—with the exception of a few papers and journals including
The Christian Century
—dismissed the German claim as an attempt to divide the Allies and arouse anti-Russian sentiment.

Christian Century
further justified its dismissal of the Maidanek story by claiming that it was designed to divert attention from the Russian refusal to aid the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. The Russians, anxious to ensure that a communist government would rule postwar Poland, had purposely stalled their advance into Warsaw until the Germans had executed hundreds of thou
sands of Poles who had participated in the revolt. It was generally recognized in the west that the Russians wanted them killed because they believed that their loyalties were to the London based Polish government in exile and not to the Russian backed Polish Committee of National Liberation.
³³

Had the Russian released news of Maidanek been the only proof of German atrocities and had reporters not been brought to the site to inspect it and taken pictures of what they found,
Christian Century's
doubts might have been more understandable. But given the human remains the reporters found at Maidanek and the preponderance of evidence which preceded it, much of which had not come from the Russians, such skepticism and derision of those who did believe seemed highly misplaced and possibly motivated by other sentiments.

Even this news of Maidanek and the eyewitness accounts by reputable American correspondents did not significantly change the way the American press treated this story: momentarily attention was paid, but all too quickly the news was forgotten. Though no other paper or journal was as skeptical as
The Christian Century
, few seemed inclined to abandon what had by now become an established pattern of relegating such news to positions of little importance. After a brief wave of interest, reports once again appeared in short articles on inner pages. But this pattern of deprecating the importance of the news regarding the Final Solution did not originate with the press. In fact the press was faithfully duplicating an Allied policy of obfuscation and camouflage.

Part of the responsibility for both American skepticism and the press's ambiguous treatment of this news can be traced directly to Allied opposition to publicizing reports of atrocities against Jewish victims. On many occasions when atrocities against Jews were discussed, the identity of the victims was universalized. In other words, Jews became Poles or Russians or innocent civilians.
³⁴
American and British leaders had been intent on avoiding mention of Jews as the specific victims of Nazi hostility as early as 1938 at Evian, and their policy had not substantially changed since. The Allies argued that if they treated Jews as a separate entity, it would validate Nazi ideology. A truer explanation for this behavior
was American and British fear that singling out the unique fate of the Jews would strengthen the demands of those who wanted the Allies to undertake specific rescue action on their behalf. The Americans worried that they might be asked to admit more Jewish refugees, and the British were concerned that pressure would be put upon them to open Palestine to Jews.

It therefore became Allied policy to refer to “political refugees” and not Jews, even when these refugees were clearly Jews. Rarely did any reporters or editorial board take note of this policy. One notable exception was
PM
's Alexander Uhl, who angrily wrote during Bermuda that delegates were so anxious to avoid linking the rescue problem with Jews that it had been regarded as “almost improper to mention the word Jew' ” at Bermuda despite the fact that there were, according to Uhl, “at least 2,000,000 whose very existence is threatened.”
³⁵

Probably the most outrageous example of this explicit policy of ignoring the Jewish aspect of the tragedy occurred in Moscow in the fall of 1943. There Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met and affixed their signature to what is known as the Moscow Declaration, which warned that

Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of
Italian
officers or in the execution of
French, Dutch, Belgian
or
Norwegian
hostages or of
Cretan
peasants, or who have shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of
Poland
or in the territories of the
Soviet Union
 . . . will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.

Nowhere in the declaration were Jews even obliquely mentioned, a phenomenon the press simply ignored. While there were some exceptions to this Allied policy, e.g., the December 1942 statement confirming the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews, they were few. When declarations did contain references to Jews, as was the case in March 1944 when Roosevelt referred to the Hungarian situation, the President's advisers vigorously worked to ensure that they were not too prominently mentioned.
³⁶

This policy began to change somewhat when John Pehle and the War Refugee Board pushed for a different approach. But only quite late in the war did the Office of War Information officially take the “lead in getting out, and on official records, every pertinent fact regarding murder and mistreatment practiced by the Nazis.” Prior to that it had avoided too frequent mention of atrocities,
particularly those against Jews. The
War Information Guide
, a handbook prepared and distributed by the Office of War Information for government personnel and for “those outside groups which are cooperating with the government in giving the American people the full facts of war,” instructed that atrocity stories were to be used to illustrate the enemy's “planned strategy and principles,” and not just to incite hatred. Government officials determined that all information on atrocities which bore upon the “rulers and ruling parties in the countries with which we are at war should be publicized.” Reports that simply inspired Americans to hate “all members of the races guilty of such action (i.e. Japanese)” were to be avoided.

There was, however, an even more stringent policy in operation regarding atrocities against Jews. The Office of War Information, working in tandem with the Administration, tried to severely limit any public attention paid to this story. Despite the fact that the Final Solution was the prime illustration of the enemy's “strategy and principles,” the Office of War Information wanted it to be avoided by news agencies and not mentioned in war propaganda. Deputy Director of the Office of War Information Arthur Sweetser sent a memorandum to Leo Rosten, who was Deputy Director in charge of information on the enemy, on the “impending Nazi extermination of the Jews.” In it he argued that the story of atrocities would be “confused and misleading if it appears to be simply affecting the Jewish people,” and therefore news of the particular fate of the Jews should be contained and even suppressed. Consequently, when the news of German atrocities was publicized, the Jewish aspect was often eliminated.
³⁷