Beyond Belief (7 page)

Another explanation for this dichotomy may well have been the ever intensifying American conviction that the country must never be drawn into one of “Europe's eternal wars.” A number of reporters who returned to America after a sojourn in Germany attributed the skeptical and sometimes hostile reception their stories of terror received from the American public to the fact that Americans in “overwhelming” numbers were determined to stay out of Europe's affairs and therefore resented being made uncomfortable by these stories. Even when they accepted the reports as accurate, they often argued that this was “no business of ours.”
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Reporters also faced an obstacle in the stark contrast between their accounts and what Tolischus described as “the eulogistic
statements about conditions in Germany made by returning American tourists.”
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Germany was neat and clean. There were no slums, and people were well dressed. In contrast to America in the early 1930s, in Germany no jobless were visible on streetcorners selling apples or pencils, and no homeless were to be seen living in shantytowns or gathered in desolate corners of large cities. Visiting Americans, impressed by Germany's spectacular achievements, repeatedly complained to reporters about their pessimistic and critical news reports. It was acutely difficult to convince visitors who did not witness overt acts of persecution and discrimination that there was more to the new Reich than its economic renewal, rebuilt physical plant, substantial sports achievements, and gracious welcome accorded those from abroad. Edgar Ansel Mowrer's wife Lilian found it exasperating to hear people who paid a short visit to Germany fervently deny the fact that anything unusual was happening. “But you
must
be exaggerating, everything is so calm here, there is no disorder, and the Germans are such pleasant people . . . how could they allow such things to happen?” After his expulsion from Germany, Edgar Mowrer toured the United States and found many people unwilling to believe his description of life in Nazi Germany. In 1933
The Nation
complained that it was “difficult to restrain the silly people who after a week or two in Germany, during which they have seen no Jews beaten up in the streets, go back to their own countries and declare that the stories told in the papers about Germany are all untrue.” These visitors often said they knew things were not that bad because “the Nazis had told [them] so.” (One reporter developed a foolproof method for countering this impression. She would have any of her American or British visitors who “fell victim” to the Nazis' “charms” or propaganda accompany her to an interview with the Nazi leader Julius Streicher. Listening to him, particularly when he spoke about Jews, was enough to “cancel out all their good impressions.”)
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When Norman Chandler, the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
, visited Germany during the Olympic Games, he berated Ralph Barnes of the
New York Herald Tribune
and William Shirer of CBS for their critical and alarming stories on Germany. Other businessmen in his group told these two reporters that they had never seen a people so “happy, content, and united,” as one put it, and that the violence which had been reported was exaggerated or had not even occurred. When the reporters asked who had told them this, they responded that it was Hermann Goering.
Upon her return to this country Martha Dodd, the Ambassador's daughter, complained about the “naivete” of Americans who dismissed the reports from Germany as “gross exaggeration.”
⁶⁸
Throughout the 1930s American students continued to go to study in German universities, and many of them were deeply impressed by what they found there. They too served to counter the reporters' pessimism.
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But it was not only tourists and students who praised conditions in Germany. Americans with business there did so as well. Sometimes this resulted from what the American Consul General in Berlin described as “real pressure” placed on American businessmen and exchange professors by German officials to “send statements which would not give a really correct picture of the situation.”
⁷⁰
When these Americans returned home, they often told their local paper a very different and far more positive story than the one being carried by the news services. The praise by some came of their own volition and they had no ulterior motive; others had an economic motive for praising Germany. Sigrid Schultz claimed that many American businessmen were lured into snapping up “lucrative contracts” proffered by Nazi business interests and then threatened by Nazis that irregularities in these deals would be exposed if they failed to publicly extol Germany.
⁷¹

The American business community was impressed by the way in which Hitler was directing Germany's economic recovery.
⁷²
Business Week
believed that in terms of economic programs, “in many ways the Hitler administration is paralleling the Roosevelt administration.” By the end of 1934 there was a general consensus in much of the American business community that the recovery in Germany was healthier than in the United States. Germany managed to reduce the number of jobless from 6 million in 1933 to 1.17 million by the summer of 1936. The armament program, road-building projects, and forced sharing of work continued to whittle away at the number of unemployed, so that by 1937 joblessness was not a problem for Germany. The American business world envied the increasingly improving economic conditions enjoyed by the Reich. (By the mid-1930s, however, many business publications, while strongly isolationist, were critical of German economic affairs because of their highly controlled nature. The business press was also disturbed because of the demise of a free press in Germany.)
⁷³
There were numerous American firms with
extensive business interests in Germany. One American company was making more than half of all the passenger cars in Germany, another was building the ambulances for the Wehrmacht, still another had 20,000 filling stations, and many others had millions of dollars invested in all sorts of plants and equipment. According to Douglas Miller, American Commercial Attaché in Berlin, all these firms were “peculiarly subject to pressure and threats from Nazi quarters.”
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Thus, even as much of the press was telling one story, visitors, businessmen, and German propaganda mills were telling another. But they were not the only ones who related wondrous accounts of life in Germany. The
Christian Science Monitor
seemed particularly intent on describing life in Germany as “normal and serene.” Praise of Germany's natural beauty and social order was to be frequently found in its news and editorial columns. In August 1933 a two-part, unsigned series entitled “A Traveler Visits Germany” told of a satisfied, industrious, contented nation whose populace was fully devoted to the Nazis: “The train arrived punctually . . . . traffic was well regulated . . . . An occasional mounted policeman in smart blue uniform was to be seen . . . . street cafes are busy.” Even the infamous Brown Shirts emerged in a benevolent light. They behaved like they were “members of some student corps.” Little seemed amiss: “I have so far found quietness, order and civility.” This traveler found “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.” Doubts were also cast upon the tales of Jewish suffering. The “harrowing stories” of Jews “deprived of their occupations” applied, the reporter assured readers, “only to a small proportion of the members of this . . . community.” Most Jews were “not in any way molested.”
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Other papers and journals were reporting a strikingly different story. At the same time that the
Christian Science Monitor's
traveler was painting a portrait of a Germany peaceful, joyous, on the road to recovery, and above all united behind Hitler, who was bringing to a “dark land a clear light of hope,”
Newsweek
reported the arrest of 200 Jewish merchants in Nuremberg who were accused of “profiteering,” beatings inflicted on American Jews who were in Berlin, and the closing of Jewish Telegraphic Agency
offices in Germany.
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Hamilton Fish Armstrong described the red proclamation affixed to the door of the Jewish research institute, the Berlin Hochschule, and the doors of similar institutions throughout the Reich proclaiming the Jew as the enemy of German thought and culture. By this time the
Los Angeles Times
had reversed its stand, and now branded Hitler's denial of antisemitic persecution as “feeble and unconvincing.” The
Los Angeles Times
carried the harrowing description of how a young German woman was publicly humiliated for spending time with a Jewish man. Her head was shaved clean, and she was forced to march through a hostile crowd wearing a placard stating “I have offered myself to a Jew.” The incident was witnessed by a number of American correspondents including Quentin Reynolds, who was touring the area with Ambassador Dodd's children. In a series of front-page stories the
Los Angeles Times
described the “campaign of indignities” against German girls who kept company with Jewish boys. It featured “documentary evidence” of this campaign in the form of a card given to these girls threatening them with violence if they continued this practice.
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Some papers and journalists who acknowledged that persecution existed still maintained a benevolent attitude toward Nazi Germany. This was particularly the case when their support of Germany had an ideological basis. Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, visited Germany in August 1933 and wrote a series of three articles about what he saw. He found a reign of terror which placed “suspected Communists, members of former opposition parties and all Jews . . . in constant danger.” McCormick's comments are particularly important in light of the fact that the
Tribune
considered Hitler a force against communism and supported him as such.
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*
Even
The Christian
Century
, which had been and would continue to be skeptical about the accuracy of the reports of persecution, momentarily set aside its dubiousness when Paul Hutchinson, an editor of the journal, returned from visiting Germany to report that “the actual brutalities inflicted on Jews, socialists, communists and pacifists have been even more severe than the American press has published.”
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But these negative assessments of German life did not dispel the doubts of some of those who had not personally witnessed these developments. As late as 1935, when America's participation in the Olympics was being vigorously debated, some papers opposed the boycott because, they said, the news from Germany regarding the treatment of Jews was unsubstantiated “hearsay” on the basis of which it would be wrong to withdraw. A similar argument was made in the summer of 1935 by the
Minneapolis Tribune
after AFL President William Green recommended that Americans boycott Germany. Ignoring the numerous eyewitness accounts of events in Germany, it argued that a boycott would mean “involving this country in a dispute about which it has little accurate information.” Earlier that year, in January, an article in
Harper's
observed that when it came to press reports of Nazi persecution of Jews “what relation the news we get on the subject bears to the truth cannot be accurately calculated.”
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By this point in time extensive accounts of the riots and other violent outbreaks in Germany, many of which SS officials had verified, had appeared in the press. Various legal and quasi-legal
actions against Jews had been announced by German officials and reported by the German news agency. Nonetheless, there was a feeling in much of the press that America did not really have completely “accurate information” about the persecution of the Jews. There were papers, such as the
Philadelphia Record
and
New York Evening Post
, which dismissed German attempts to deny the persecution as “absurd statements.”
⁸²
More prevalent, however, was a state of skepticism and confusion about whether things were
as
bad as reported. Even while they condemned the Nazis' brutality, editorial boards expressed reservations about the accounts of brutality because they seemed beyond the pale of believability. Initial doubts regarding the veracity of the reports notwithstanding, the abundance of detail and eyewitness accounts constituted strong evidence of persecution. Most papers were never totally swayed by German denials and generally agreed that the accounts of what had been perpetrated upon a “defenseless Jewry” were too numerous and similar to believe “the
blanket
denial” offered by German officials. However, they also seemed never to fully accept the accuracy of the reports.
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Newspaper stories and editorials increasingly echoed the
St. Louis Post Dispatch's
assessment that while the reports of persecution, including looting and even murder, might be “somewhat exaggerated,” they nonetheless demanded attention because they were so “uniform in tenor.” The press did not doubt that terrible things were happening, but its belief was a grudging belief, sometimes bordering on disbelief. As one paper expressed it, “when there is so much smoke there must be some fire.”
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This persistent incredulity would not fade with the passage of time, but would instead come to characterize the American reaction to Nazi persecution. Often this skepticism persisted in the face of detailed information to the contrary. In February 1939, three months after
Kristallnacht
, Quentin Reynolds, writing in
Collier's
, noted that since that pogrom, which had been described in great detail in practically every American paper and magazine, the “plague of hate” against Jews had grown “in intensity every day.” Nonetheless “there are those,” he complained, “in England and in America who shrug complacent shoulders and who say: Oh things can't be as bad as we hear.'” The truth was, Reynolds observed, the Jews' plight was “actually much worse than we have heard.”
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