Misreporting The Holocaust,Marvin Kalb

During the 1940's my father would read his Yiddish newspaper and often share with me the awful news from Europe. To paraphrase the Watergate questions: What did we know? And when did we know it?

We knew enough, and we knew enough in timely fashion.

Week after week, month after month, we read about the roundup of Jews, the wholesale deportations, the killings. In July 1941, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency disclosed that hundreds of Jews had been massacred in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov, and other East European cities, as the Nazis cut a bloody path through the Soviet Union. By mid-March 1942, a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee returned to New York from Budapest to tell of 240,000 Jews killed just in the Ukraine.

On May 18, 1942, The New York Times reported from Lisbon that the Germans had machine-gunned more than 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, another 100,000 in Poland, twice that many in western Russia. The news appeared on an inside page - several inches of neutral copy.

On June 30, 1942, and again on July 2, The New York Times ran reports, first published by the Daily Telegraph in London, that more than one million Jews had already been killed by the Germans. The reports were mind blowing, but The Times again placed them on an inside page.

In July, Gerhard Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, reported to London and Washington for the first time that Hitler had in fact ordered the extermination of European Jewry. In London, the Foreign Office said that any official British response 'might annoy the Germans' and besides, officials added, they had no confirmation. In Washington, the State Department was suspicious of what scholar Walter Laqueur described as the 'unsubstantiated nature of the information.'

In October 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published the whole Riegner cable without attribution. A month later, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles confirmed to Rabbi Stephen Wise that the cable was accurate in every depressing detail. Worse, he said, two million of the four million Jews had already been killed. The United States then pushed for an Allied condemnation of the Nazi program of extermination which was announced in mid-December, 1942.<

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At this point there could be no doubt about the authenticity of the reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. And yet, amazingly, the coverage was marginalized. Why? How could such a story as the Holocaust not overwhelm the front page of every newspaper? How could it not be the lead story in The New York Times - if not every week, then every month? How could President Franklin Roosevelt, who knew about the Holocaust, not lead the Allied charge against it? How could the United States of America not open its doors to those Jews who could escape the Nazi onslaught?

Focus On War

To these questions there are, it seems, five answers or reasons. First and foremost, the Allies were determined to win the war and did not have their focus on saving Jews. The Allies had settled, as firm policy, on the 'unconditional surrender' of the Nazis, and 'no other thought,' even one as humanitarian as saving a people, was allowed to interfere with the prosecution of the war. Roosevelt did not want to alienate neutral nations, divert vital shipping, arouse false expectations, or antagonize Muslim states, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

To speak to the Nazis about the Holocaust, or anything other than their 'unconditional surrender,' was unacceptable to Roosevelt. As he told an aide, "We will have no truck with fascism in any way, in any shape." Every now and then, however, Roosevelt acknowledged that he was mindful of the 'Jewish problem.' He told visitors that he was considering a plan to establish a Jewish homeland in the Cameroons, or in Paraguay, or in Angola, or, if necessary, in Palestine - but later, he seemed to be cautioning, after the war.

Once, in 1942, after hearing that two million Jews had already been killed, he urged Rabbi Wise to stop pressuring him for immediate action. "The mills of the gods," Roosevelt said, "grind slowly."

Clearly Roosevelt squirmed, but just as clearly he dissembled, even to his closest aides. For example, in early 1942, he told Felix Frankfurter not to worry ? that the Jews were being dispatched to Eastern Europe not to be killed, but to build fortifications against a Soviet counter-attack. Roosevelt knew better.

On August 22, 1942, Roosevelt told reporters that the Nazi atrocities 'give rise to the fear that ... the barbaric and unrelenting character of the occupational regime will become more marked and may even lead to the extermination of certain populations.'

Was Roosevelt using code language? 'Certain populations?' Who was kidding whom?

The bottom line was that Allied leaders persuaded themselves that any humanitarian digression, such as bombing the railroad lines into Auschwitz, could only delay and possibly jeopardize the achievement of their ultimate goal of defeating the Nazis.

To which many of us may respond, 'nonsense,' but the Allied judgment contained the core elements of my second reason: anti-Semitism.

Just Below Boiling Point

Roosevelt, the politician who presided over the war and who read the polls, was aware that, in the late 1930's, as the U.S. was struggling to emerge from the depression, a xenophobic anti-Semitism flourished among many Americans.

His 'New Deal' was often described as a 'Jew Deal.' A poll by Elmo Roper asked in 1938: "What kinds of people do you object to?" Thirty-eight percent answered, "Jews." Another 27 percent answered, "noisy, cheap, boisterous, loud people." Another Roper poll, same year: 70-85 percent opposed raising quotas to help Jewish refugees. In 1939, 53 percent of the American people told Roper that the Jews were 'different' and for this reason 'deserved . . . social and economic restrictions.'

The war did not change American attitudes. In the spring of 1942, sociologist David Riesman described anti-Semitism in the U.S. as 'slightly below the boiling point.'

David Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, concluded that 15 percent of the American people would actually have 'supported' an anti-Jewish pogrom of some sort, and another 20-25 percent would have been 'sympathetic' to such a pogrom. In the scholar?s own words, 'As much as 35-40 percent of the population was prepared to approve an anti-Jewish campaign, some 30 percent would have stood up against it, and the rest would have remained indifferent.'

We are talking here about the American people in the closing months of a war against the Nazis, in which many Americans were killed.

Widespread Disbelief

The third reason is directly related both to this astounding anti-Semitism and to the enormity of the Nazi crimes. Many people simply could not believe that the German people, so highly educated, so sophisticated, so cultured, were engaged in the systematic extermination of the Jews. Many others, either because they were basically anti-Semitic or totally absorbed with the war effort, were indifferent to the Holocaust.

In late 1944, John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, turned to A. Leon Kubowitzki, a senior official of the World Jewish Congress, and said, "We are alone. Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?" Kubowitzki later wrote: "His sources of information were better than mine. But he could not grasp the terrible destruction."

There were also those Allied officials and ordinary citizens, already predisposed to look with supreme indifference upon Jewish suffering, who found the 'Jewish problem' to be a most annoying distraction from a day's work. And, such a waste of time. A British diplomat in the Foreign Office explained in September 1944, why he did not want to be bothered. It would compel other busy diplomats, in his words, "to waste a disproportionate amount of their time in dealing with wailing Jews."

The Nazis, of course, were skillful at hiding the facts. They used the tools of modern totalitarianism to control the flow of information, to confuse the enemy, and to stimulate a rush of pride and patriotism among their own people. They not only dominated the German press, all of which was filled with propaganda, lies and distortion; they also controlled and intimidated the small number of sympathetic, Berlin-based foreign correspondents, who came to understand that they had to play ball with the Nazi authorities or they'd be expelled or imprisoned. There was no real reporting from Germany. German and foreign reporters were intermediaries of Nazi propaganda.

Cheerleaders In The Press

My fourth reason concerns the very nature of journalism as practiced in the United States. During the war, American journalists, never an adventurous lot, performed, with very few exceptions, like obedient servants of the U.S. Government.

Reporters were cautious patriots, comfortable with their role as cheerleaders in a cause against fascism. The story was the prosecution of the war, the pursuit of an Allied victory, unconditional surrender. Like most other Americans, journalists covering the war had no other objective. Their editors wanted stories about the home front and the war front. Neither the editors, nor the reporters, were geared to do stories - quite fantastic stories, it seemed - about millions of Jews being gassed and burned to death as part of a systematic German campaign to exterminate a people.

Across the desks of the Associated Press and the United Press came stories from Europe about the systematic killing of Jews, but few were put on the news agency wires for mass distribution. Few newspapers published such stories. Aside from a paragraph here and there, the national news magazines maintained a steady silence on the subject. One exception to the rule occurred in late 1944, when Collier's and American Mercury published vivid accounts of the slaughter of Polish Jews written by Jan Karski, a leader of the Polish underground who had been an eyewitness to a Nazi killing camp.

There was little radio coverage of the Holocaust. Hollywood, though populated by many Jewish producers and writers, did many films on Nazi atrocities, but not one on the Holocaust. Not one. The very popular newsreel "The March of Time" never touched on the killing of the Jews.

Sulzberger's Times

My final reason focuses on the culture and personalities of the people who ran The New York Times, which also failed in its journalistic responsibility during the war. Not that it didn't cover the war - it did, with an exceptional and costly burst of energy and professionalism; it simply did not cover the Holocaust, and to this day the people who run (or have run) this great newspaper are baffled and embarrassed by this extraordinary omission.

The slogan of The New York Times was and is "All The News That's Fit To Print," but during the war the Times knew much more than it printed about the Holocaust; and what it did print, it printed, as a rule, inside, cut, often trivialized. What was the reason?

Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher during the war. Sulzberger considered himself to be a member of the establishment, an American who just happened to be Jewish. Sulzberger helped found the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; the Times gave this splinter group as much coverage as it gave to all the other Jewish groups combined - and much, much more than it gave to the Holocaust.

In the Times, the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor-league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time. Other editors, other reporters, other news organizations, all took their cues from the Times. Everyone knew that its foreign coverage set the standard. A perception then spread that if the Jewish-owned Times covered the Holocaust in this skimpy manner, then so could they, with impunity.

The Times's foreign editor during the war was Ted Bernstein, described by a colleague as 'a brilliant Jew running away from his roots.' Is it then any surprise that Jewish news, other than the Holocaust, was also shortchanged in the Times; that bylines such as A.H. Raskin and A.M. Rosenthal appeared rather than Abraham Raskin and Abraham Rosenthal?

Cyrus Sulzberger, a columnist covering the war, used his clout as a member of the family to discourage the hiring of too many Jewish reporters.

Changing Times

Of course the times and the Times have changed, and the journalism of today is significantly different from the journalism of the 1940's. Now journalists are obsessed with sex and scandal, fires and sports, weather and murders, tilting toward sensationalism whenever the competitive opportunity beckons. Negative and cynical, they distrust the government and disparage politicians.

Back then, journalists operated in a narrower environment, with simpler rules. They marched to the government's beat; they hated Hitler and Tojo; they supported the boys at the front.

It should be clear that the Holocaust was unique, the reporting of the Holocaust was unique, and neither can be duplicated. So long as there is a strong Israel and an articulate, influential Jewish community in the United States, I feel confident in saying that another Holocaust - another foreign, state-run program of extermination of the Jews - would be impossible. But other mass killings? These are not only possible, but likely.

If a story were to break today about another Holocaust, there is no doubt that it would be front-page news. Such horrible secrets can no longer be kept for months and years. Responsible officials are constantly reminded that what was tolerated during the Holocaust is unacceptable behavior today.

During a mid-1990's visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Strobe Talbott, at the time a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, read John McCloy's 50-year-old negative response to a demand by the World Jewish Congress that the Allies bomb the rail lines leading into Auschwitz. The response and the demand were on a museum wall flanking a huge blow-up of the death camps.

"Remember, Strobe," said his companion, the museum's then-director, Walter Reich, "any letter you write may end up on a museum wall."

Marvin Kalb's distinguished career in journalism encompasses 30 years of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News, as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and host of "Meet the Press." He is currently a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (an institution of which he was founding director) as well as Faculty Chair for the Kennedy School of Government's Washington programs.

This essay was adapted from a lecture delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Misreporting The Holocaust , Marvin Kalb