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The annihilation of six million Jews would not for many years become
distinctively known as the Holocaust. But its essence became knowable fast
enough, from ominous Nazi threats and undisputed eyewitness reports collected by
American correspondents, agents and informants. Indeed, a large number of those
reports appeared in The Times. But they were mostly buried inside its gray and
stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.
Why, then, were the terrifying tales almost hidden in the back pages? Like
most -- though not all -- American media, and most of official Washington, The
Times drowned its reports about the fate of Jews in the flood of wartime news.
Its neglect was far from unique and its reach was not then fully national, but
as the premier American source of wartime news, it surely influenced the
judgment of other news purveyors.
While a few publications -- newspapers like The Post (then liberal) and PM in
New York and magazines like The Nation and The New Republic -- showed more
conspicuous concern, The Times's coverage generally took the view that the
atrocities inflicted upon Europe's Jews, while horrific, were not significantly
different from those visited upon tens of millions of other war victims, nor
more noteworthy. Only six times in nearly six years did The Times's front page mention Jews as
Hitler's unique target for total annihilation. Only once was their fate the
subject of a lead editorial. Only twice did their rescue inspire passionate
cries in the Sunday magazine.
Although The Times's news columns in those years did not offer as much
analysis or synthesis as they do today, the paper took great pride in ranking
the importance of events each morning and in carefully reviewing the major news
of every week and every year. How could it happen that the war on the Jews never
qualified for such highlighted attention?
There is no surviving record of how the paper's coverage of the subject was
discussed by Times editors during the war years of 1939-45. But within that
coverage is recurring evidence of a guiding principle: do not feature the plight
of Jews, and take care, when reporting it, to link their suffering to that of
many other Europeans.
This reticence has been a subject of extensive scholarly inquiry and also
much speculation and condemnation. Critics have blamed ''self-hating Jews'' and
''anti-Zionists'' among the paper's owners and staff. Defenders have cited the
sketchiness of much information about the death camps in Eastern Europe and also
the inability of prewar generations to fully comprehend the industrial gassing
of millions of innocents -- a machinery of death not yet exposed by those
chilling mounds of Jews' bones, hair, shoes, rings.
No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's
bitterest journalistic failure. The Times, like most media of that era,
fervently embraced the wartime policies of the American and British governments,
both of which strongly resisted proposals to rescue Jews or to offer them haven.
After a decade of economic depression, both governments had political reasons to
discourage immigration and diplomatic reasons to refuse Jewish settlements in
regions like Palestine.
Then, too, papers owned by Jewish families, like The Times, were plainly
afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread their
passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause. Even some leading
Jewish groups hedged their appeals for rescue lest they be accused of wanting to
divert wartime energies.
At The Times, the reluctance to highlight the systematic slaughter of Jews
was also undoubtedly influenced by the views of the publisher, Arthur Hays
Sulzberger. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a
race or nationality -- that Jews should be separate only in the way they
worshiped. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions
of their own. He went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a
''Jewish newspaper.'' He resented other publications for emphasizing the
Jewishness of people in the news.
And it was his policy, on most questions, to steer The Times toward the
centrist values of America's governmental and intellectual elites. Because his
editorial page, like the American government and other leading media, refused to
dwell on the Jews' singular victimization, it was cool to all measures that
might have singled them out for rescue or even special attention.
Only once did The Times devote its lead editorial to the subject. That was on
Dec. 2, 1942, after the State Department had unofficially confirmed to leading
rabbis that two million Jews had already been slain and that five million more
were indeed ''in danger of extermination.'' Even that editorial, however,
retreated quickly from any show of special concern. Insisting in its title that
Jews were merely ''The First to Suffer,'' it said the same fate awaited ''people
of other faiths and of many races,'' including ''our own 'mongrel' nation'' and
even Hitler's allies in Japan if he were to win the war.
In only one 48-hour period, in early March 1943, was the paper moved to
concede in multiple ways that Europe's Jews merited extraordinary attention. The
impetus apparently came from Anne O'Hare McCormick, the foreign affairs
columnist, a favorite of Sulzberger and a member of his editorial board, who
thought that a Madison Square Garden rally pleading for the rescue of Jews had
exposed ''the shame of the world.''
''There is not the slightest question,'' she wrote, ''that the persecution of
the Jews has reached its awful climax in a campaign to wipe them out of Europe.
If the Christian community does not support to the utmost the belated proposal
worked out to rescue the Jews remaining in Europe from the fate prepared for
them, we have accepted the Hitlerian thesis and forever compromised the
principles for which we are pouring out blood and wealth.''
Beside her column on March 3, the last of seven editorials allowed that
Hitler had condemned the Jews to death ''where others are sometimes let off with
slavery.'' Vaguely urging the United States to revise ''the chilly formalism of
its immigration regulations,'' it urged other free nations to let no ''secondary
considerations'' bar entry of those refugees who might yet escape from the
Nazis' control.
On the previous day, that same Garden rally was described in an exceptional
half-page article, beginning with three paragraphs on Page 1 under the smallest
of 11 front-page headlines:
SAVE DOOMED JEWS,
HUGE RALLY PLEADS
As never before or after, that day's coverage included long quotations from
speeches and even the text of the rally's ''resolution'' calling for urgent
measures to move Jews out of Hitler's grasp.
When more than a year later the editorial page returned to the subject and
supported the idea of temporarily housing refugees in isolated American camps,
it urged saving ''innocent people'' without ever using the word ''Jew.''
On its dense inside pages, however, The Times was much less hesitant about
offering persuasive and gruesome details of the systematic murders of Jews.
Hundreds of short items and scores of longer articles from different corners of
Europe bore out the prophetic dispatch from the Berlin bureau that had appeared
on Page 5 on Sept. 13, 1939, two weeks after Hitler invaded Poland:
NAZIS HINT PURGE
OF JEWS IN POLAND
''First intimations,'' it began, ''that a solution of the 'Jewish problem' in
Poland is on the German-Polish agenda are revealed in a 'special report' of the
official German News Bureau.'' Given the report's claim that Polish Jewry
''continually fortified and enlarged'' Western Jewry, the Times correspondent
added, it was hard to see how their ''removal'' would change things ''without
their extermination.''
On March 1, 1942, just seven weeks after the notorious Wannsee Conference
distributed orders about the mass-murder weapons to be used against Jews, an
article on Page 28 bore this headline:
EXTINCTION FEARED
BY JEWS IN POLAND
Polish intellectuals and officials cited underground sources for the warning
that 3.5 million Jews stood condemned ''to cruel death -- to complete
annihilation.''
By June 13, the threat became official: ''Nazis Blame Jews/For Big Bombings''
read a headline on Page 7. The accompanying article quoted Joseph Goebbels as
vowing that the Jews would pay for German suffering ''with the extermination of
their race in all Europe and perhaps even beyond Europe.''
Two weeks later, two paragraphs appended to the end of a related article
brought the news that ''probably the greatest mass slaughter in history'' had
already claimed the lives of 700,000 Jews in Poland -- a slaughter employing
''machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps,
whipping, torture instruments and starvation.'' By June 30, a brief item said
the World Jewish Congress put the death toll at one million.
Still greater detail followed, on Page 6 of the July 2 issue, in a London
report quoting the Polish government in exile. It cited the use of gas chambers
to kill 1,000 Jews a day in different cities and the staging of a blood bath in
the Warsaw ghetto. It said that ''the criminal German government is fulfilling
Hitler's threat that, whoever wins, all Jews will be murdered.'' Typically, the
headline, ''Allies Are Urged/To Execute Nazis,'' was no larger than that on a
neighboring article about a Polish diplomat who died in a plunge on Riverside
Drive. On Nov. 25, a lengthy London dispatch on Page 10 cited roundups, gassings,
cattle cars and the disappearance of 90 percent of Warsaw's ghetto population.
It said Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo head, had ordered the extermination of
half of Poland's Jews before the end of 1942.
That same month, the State Department finally conceded that it had confirmed
the extermination campaign but insisted that the Allies were helpless to prevent
it. By Dec. 9, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reported on Page 20 to
have promised Jewish petitioners eventual punishment of the Nazi murderers. He
was told that ''the scientific and low-cost extermination'' had claimed almost
two million lives. There followed a rare front-page notice, on Dec. 18, under
the smallest of a dozen headlines: ''11 Allies Condemn/Nazi War on Jews.'' A
brief editorial that day observed that this protest responded not just to the
outcry of victims but to ''officially established facts.''
For once, The Times Magazine now felt free to offer a passionate plea for
Europe's Jews. A brief essay by the novelist Sholem Asch on Feb. 7, 1943,
recounted ''the inhuman process of transportation in sealed, unventilated, limed
freight cars, which are death traps.''
''Those that survive,'' he wrote, ''become as human waste to be thrown into
mass-slaughter houses.''
The magazine's next and last article on the subject, by Arthur Koestler on
June 9, 1944, dealt mainly with the difficulty of comprehending ''the greatest
mass killing in recorded history.''
Yet comparable emotion appeared in The Times only in a half dozen large
advertisements pleading for ''ACTION -- NOT PITY!'' They were from groups urging
the rescue of Jews or the formation of an avenging Jewish army in Palestine.
Only passing notice recorded the mounting Jewish death toll: 3 million in August
1943, 4 million in July 1944, 5.5 million in November 1944. No article about the Jews' plight ever qualified as The Times's leading story
of the day, or as a major event of a week or year. The ordinary reader of its
pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the
Nazis' crime.
As Laurel Leff, an assistant professor at the Northeastern School of
Journalism, has concluded, it was a tragic demonstration of how ''the facts
didn't speak for themselves.'' She has been the most diligent independent
student of The Times's Holocaust coverage and deftly summarized her findings
last year in The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics.
''You could have read the front page of The New York Times in 1939 and
1940,'' she wrote, ''without knowing that millions of Jews were being sent to
Poland, imprisoned in ghettos, and dying of disease and starvation by the tens
of thousands. You could have read the front page in 1941 without knowing that
the Nazis were machine-gunning hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet
Union.
''You could have read the front page in 1942 and not have known, until the
last month, that the Germans were carrying out a plan to annihilate European
Jewry. In 1943, you would have been told once that Jews from France, Belgium and
the Netherlands were being sent to slaughterhouses in Poland and that more than
half of the Jews of Europe were dead, but only in the context of a single story
on a rally by Jewish groups that devoted more space to who had spoken than to
who had died.
''In 1944, you would have learned from the front page of the existence of
horrible places such as Maidanek and Auschwitz, but only inside the paper could
you find that the victims were Jews. In 1945, [liberated] Dachau and Buchenwald
were on the front page, but the Jews were buried inside.''
A story buried but not, over time, forgotten.
After the Nazis' slaughter of Jews was fully exposed at war's end, Iphigene
Ochs Sulzberger, the influential daughter, wife and mother of Times publishers,
changed her mind about the need for a Jewish state and helped her husband,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, accept the idea of Israel and befriend its leaders.
Later, led by their son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and their grandson Arthur
Sulzberger Jr., The Times shed its sensitivity about its Jewish roots, allowed
Jews to ascend to the editor's chair and warmly supported Israel in many
editorials.
And to this day the failure of America's media to fasten upon Hitler's mad
atrocities stirs the conscience of succeeding generations of reporters and
editors. It has made them acutely alert to ethnic barbarities in far-off places
like Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. It leaves them obviously resolved that
in the face of genocide, journalism shall not have failed in vain.
Yet what they printed made clear that the editors did not long mistrust
the ghastly reports. They presented them as true within months of Hitler's
secret resolve in 1941 to proceed to the ''final solution'' of his fantasized
''Jewish problem.''
Six Years, Six Page 1 Articles
Extermination Order on Page 10
Never the
Lead Article of the Day
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