Beyond Belief (46 page)

The War Refugee Board's release of this information should not be interpreted as a sign of a changing government policy. Two incidents demonstrate that Pehle was really acting on his own. Even after he sent the text of the full report on Auschwitz to the general press for release on November 26, 1944, some Administration officials tried to stop its publication. Pehle received a call from Office of War Information Director Elmer Davis, who was, according to Pehle, an “able journalist and a recognized liberal.” Davis, who was angry about the publicity, pressured Pehle
“to call back the press release” because, he claimed, Americans would think it was propaganda.

The public would not believe that such things were happening and as a result would be inclined to question the government's credibility on other information released concerning the war effort.
⁸⁸

But Pehle did not do so, and, contrary to Davis's expectations, the information was not dismissed as propaganda. It was, in fact, the government's imprimatur which made this story credible in the eyes of the press.

Equally as striking as Davis's attempt to suppress this news was the successful attempt by high-ranking army officers to prevent it from reaching the armed forces. On October 30
Yank
magazine, published by the armed forces for their members, contacted the War Refugee Board and asked if it “dealt in German atrocity stories.” A reporter for the magazine, Sgt. Richard Paul, had been assigned to prepare an article about German atrocities in order to “show our soldiers the nature of their enemy.” Paul arranged to meet with Pehle to gather information for the story. At their meeting Pehle gave Paul a copy of the report for use by
Yank
.

A few days later Paul informed the War Refugee Board that the report would appear in the next issue of the magazine. But Paul's superiors intervened, told him that the story was “too Semitic,” and instructed him to get a “less Jewish story” from the Board. Pehle's assistant at the War Refugee Board refused to give him one, and in her explanation she explicitly stated something neither the Allied governments nor the Allied press ever really made clear: most of the victims in the German death camps were Jews.
*

Paul continued to try to win permission to publish his article, but he found that War Department and army officials had a “very negative attitude” toward what they described as a “hell of a hot story.” Paul's superiors in the army and at
Yank
claimed that because of “latent antisemitism in the Army” they did not want to use the story. They argued, as did the Russians who had censored Lawrence's story and Samuel Rosenman, who censored
Roosevelt's, that to speak of atrocities against Jews would serve to increase world antipathy toward the Jews. Paul lost his fight and
Yank
never published the story.
⁸⁹

This was not a unique incident at
Yank
. Generally when the magazine discussed atrocities, it simply ignored those committed against Jews. On only a few occasions did it even mention Jews as
among
those killed. Its report on Lublin and Maidanek, for example, contained no reference to Jews. This may explain why as late as September 1944 there were army officers fighting in Europe who professed not to have heard anything about the concentration or death camps. What they did hear they dismissed as rumor.
⁹⁰

The release of the Auschwitz story erased many, though certainly not all, of the press's doubts. As would become clear at the end of the war, many publishers, editors, and seasoned reporters managed to ignore or repress this news. Others continued to hope that somehow it was an exaggeration. Only a face-toface encounter with the evidence would convince them otherwise. At that point the struggle with this news would be transformed from one between belief and disbelief to one between knowledge and understanding.

One of the most revealing aspects of the press reaction to the opening of the camps was the newspeople's almost uniform admission that only now were they convinced that the atrocity reports had not been exaggerated. Almost all reporters, publishers, and editors acknowledged that they had not believed the news that had been dispatched over the past years and had come to Europe “in a suspicious frame of mind.” Their reaction sheds some light on the perplexing question of why they suppressed or ignored so much of this news. They had convinced themselves—in the face of much evidence to the contrary—that it was not true.

Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher and editor of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, anticipated that he would find that many of the reports which had reached the United States—including the descriptions of the horrors found in the camps—were “exaggerations, and largely propaganda,” just like the accounts of the previous war.
⁹¹
After visiting Buchenwald, he recognized that the reports that had appeared in the American press had been “understatements,” not exaggerations. The
Los Angeles Times's
Norman Chandler admitted that now that he had seen the camps, he knew that the reports which had appeared in the American press had not been exaggerations. “Exaggeration, in fact, would be difficult.”
⁹²
In a similar vein, Walker Stone, associate editor of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, said that only when he saw the camps did he know that nothing he had “read has been an overstatement.”
⁹³
Harold Denny, war correspondent for the
New York Times
, writing in the
New York Times Magazine
, acknowledged that his fellow reporters had the same reaction as did the publishers and editors. “Before our invasion of Germany, most of us had deprecated stories of these atrocities as touched up by propaganda.”
⁹⁴
Ben McKelway, editor of the
Washington Star
, summed up the editors' conclusions by quoting a G.I. they had encountered. “I always thought they were exaggerating to make us hate the Krauts. Now I know these things are true.” Richard C. Hottelet noted forty years later that he, along with many of his journalistic colleagues, “knew the Nazis had to be defeated and we did not need these kind of stories to convince us of that.” He, along with many of his colleagues, therefore assumed they must be at least partially untrue.
⁹⁵

Why these doubts? Given the abundance of information that had passed through these individuals' hands—whether they chose to print it or not—and given the information that had appeared in their own papers, how can one explain such skepticism? In the preceding pages we have explored some of the reasons the press itself offered to justify its failure to believe: its experience with World War I atrocity stories, the American fear of falling prey to propaganda, an Allied policy which hid rather than publicized information regarding Jewish atrocities, the absence of eyewitnesses, and the distrust of information that came from the Russians.

In addition, among the editors and reporters of the nation's newspapers and magazines were many Americans who had studied in Germany, were of German ancestry, had toured Germany, or had been prisoners of the Germans during the previous war. To them these tales of horror seemed implausible. After visiting Buchenwald, M. E. Walter, managing editor of the
Houston Chronicle
,
recalled his experience as a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War I.

By and large [I] had been treated well. The food was poor but so also was the food of the native population. Hence I was somewhat dubious of the [current] horror stories . . . wondering how much exaggeration was in them.
⁹⁶

Then also, America had been at war, and Americans, beset by many personal problems, worried about the fate of their friends and family in the armed forces. Convinced that war was the “ultimate atrocity” and any concomitant of war a related atrocity, they were not disposed to focus on the travail of one specific group. This was particularly so when the group in question, Jews, seemed always to be lamenting its fate despite the fact that millions of others were suffering. As Vernon McKenzie observed even before the worst of the news was released,

Is there room in bewildered minds, obsessed by personal problems, to ponder about the fate of remote individuals?
⁹⁷

For many bystanders, including reporters, editors, and publishers, it may have been psychologically easier to deny the truth than to admit that one was not really moved to act at all.

There was also something peculiarly American in this reaction. Americans prided themselves on their skepticism. The
Baltimore Sun
tried to explain how, despite so much evidence, Americans had been able to reject the reports as untrue. “Atrocities? Americans, a sophisticated people, smiled at this idea . . . . When it came to atrocities, seeing, and seeing alone, would be believing, with most Americans.” Kenneth McCaleb also believed the root of the problem was the American persona. “We are from Missouri. We have to be shown.”
⁹⁸

But the press had been shown. It had been shown by reporters who had been stationed in Germany until 1942 and who had heard numerous reports including those of participants in the persecution of Jews. Sigrid Schultz, for example, sat in the train station listening to returning soldiers describe the massacres on the eastern front. In 1942 UP's Glen Stadler, who had just returned from Germany, described what was being done to the Jews as an “open hunt.” By 1944 captured soldiers were confessing to atrocities that Harold Denny, the
New York Times
reporter
assigned to the American First Army, called “so wantonly cruel that, without such confirmation, they might have been discounted as propagandist inventions.”
⁹⁹
Reporters had seen places such as Babi Yar, where the soil contained human remains, and Maidanek, where mass graves were visible. The American government had released a documented report on Auschwitz. Yet these editors, publishers, and reporters claimed not to believe what they heard.

The truth is that much of the press had not rejected as propaganda all that it heard, but it had erected barriers which enabled it to dismiss parts of it. It accepted a portion, often quite grudgingly, and rejected the rest as exaggeration. It adhered to a pattern which I have chosen to call “Yes but.” At first it argued,
Yes
, bad things may be happening
but
not as bad as reported. Subsequently it was willing to acknowledge that
Yes
, many Jews may be victims
but
not as many as claimed.
Yes
many may have died,
but
most probably died as a result of war-related privations and not as a result of having been murdered.
Yes
, many may have been killed
but
not in gas chambers.
Yes
, some Jews may have died in death camps,
but
so did many other people.

As this sequence of events progressed, the press seemed willing to believe a bit more, but rarely was it willing to accept the full magnitude of the atrocities. This was as characteristic of the press's behavior in 1945 as it was in 1933. In 1933 it could not believe that Jews were being indiscriminately beaten up in the streets, and in 1945 it could not believe that they had been singled out to be murdered. When it came to atrocity reports, particularly those concerning the annihilation of the Jewish people, skepticism always tempered belief. By responding in such a fashion, the press obscured the true picture for itself and its readers.

What Raul Hilberg calls “functional blindness” also protected the press from the full impact of the news. Each time a report confirming some aspect of the Final Solution was released, the press treated it as if it were the
first
official confirmation. Previous reports and news stories were ignored. In December 1944
Newsweek
claimed that the War Refugee Board's description of Auschwitz constituted the “first time” an American governmental agency had “officially backed up” charges made by Europeans of mass murder. But the United States government had backed up the charges two years earlier, in December 1942. A
Chicago Herald American
editorial in May 1945 claimed that only “recently”
had America become aware of what was going on in Germany.
Life
made similar claims when the camps were opened.

For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, Americans have heard charges of German brutality. Made skeptical by World War I “atrocity propaganda,” many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners. Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty.
For the first time there was irrefutable evidence
as the advancing Allied armies captured camps filled with political prisoners and slave laborers, living and dead.
¹⁰⁰

Newsweek, Life
, the
Chicago Herald American
, and a variety of other papers and magazines ignored the fact that over the past twelve years there had been a tremendous amount of “irrefutable evidence,” evidence which they had dismissed as implausible and had placed in obscure corners of the paper or magazine so that readers either missed it or dismissed it. Almost without exception American journalists who visited the camps at the end of the war ignored that fact too.

But the reporters were, once again, emulating government behavior. In May 1945 U.S. Office of Strategic Services officials in Italy received the Auschwitz report, which nearly a year earlier had been released to the press and which had gotten tremendous press attention six months earlier when the War Refugee Board had released it in its entirety. Despite the publicity and attention it had already received Office of Strategic Services officials treated it as if it were a new revelation.
¹⁰¹