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This month, Classroom Focus features two Holocaust-related lessons by Paul Wieser, on the U.S. Press and the Holocaust, and on Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1942. Also included are maps by George F. McCleary, Jr., Darin T. Grauberger, and Michael G. Noll, and a chronology of the Holocaust by Stephen Feinberg.

The American Press and the Holocaust Paul Wieser

The treatment accorded by the American press to the destruction of the Jews during World War II can be best described as a “sidebar,” the name given by journalists to a story that is ancillary to the main story. The press coverage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews paralleled U.S. government policy on refugee rescue, which was not treated as an issue of primary importance. The behavior of the press reflected the United States’ attitude of “rescue through victory.” It was relatively rare for more than the isolated paper to call for action to assist Jews. Information about the “Final Solution” and the systematic destruction of the Jews, was available from 1942, long before the end of the war. In spite of Nazi efforts to carry out mass murder in isolated areas and to swear participants to secrecy, executioners themselves talked, and occasional witnesses to mass shootings even more so. Underground organizations, particularly Jewish and Polish, made great efforts to let the world know what was happening and what would occur if the Nazis were not halted. The information was sometimes partial and even contradictory, but there were enough stories from enough sources that the outside world should have been able to discern a pattern by 1942. The Nazi regime was doing what Hitler had promised. Practically no aspect of the Holocaust remained unknown by 1945. Some of the information about specific killings, and about hundreds of thousands of deaths, was published in the Western press, although not in complete or dramatic form in most of the major American newspapers, with facts often understated or qualified by cautious editors. Significant information was often buried on the inside pages of newspapers. For instance, the June 1942 announcement that two million Jews had been killed as SE

a result of planned annihilation was placed at the bottom of page 6 of the Chicago Tribune and given thirteen lines. The story was treated similarly by other major papers. Many readers probably missed this story and similar ones published well inside the paper. Those readers who did see it had cause to assume that the editors did not really believe it; had they believed it, a reader might have assumed, they would have accorded it more prominent placement. From the beginning of the Nazi regime, the press in the U.S. generally failed to take Hitler’s prewar and, in certain cases, wartime threats against Jews seriously. Unfortunately, after the outbreak of World War II, all too many people compared reports of the Nazi treatment of Jews to stories about German atrocities in occupied Belgium and northern France during World War I, claims that turned out after the war to have been invented by Allied propagandists. As a result, there was much skepticism about reports of Nazi mass killings. Another factor was that a great many Europeans were suffering under brutal Nazi occupation, and it was not always easy to see that the Nazi had different policies for different peoples. When Jews pressed outsiders to recognize the growing tragedy for their people, unsympathetic observers could perceive this as a request for special favors from the Allies. The stakes of the military conflict were so high that many Allied government officials and citizens felt compelled to focus all efforts and concern on that task. They paid little attention to anything else that might complicate winning the war as quickly as possible. Finally and perhaps most importantly, there was the psychological barrier: what the Nazis were doing was not only logical and unprecedented, but literally inconceivable to many. As 1942 went on, the mass killings of

Jews received some attention in U.S. newspapers. Until the second half of 1942, the outside world knew little about the gas chambers and extermination camps. There were no satellites to provide aerial photographs, no portable TV cameras yet in existence. But there were a few people willing to risk their lives to unveil the Final Solution. One person willing to take a risk was Jan Karski, a courier from the Polish underground to the Polish government-inexile in London. Karski had been inside the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942 in the midst of the deportations, and in September inside Belzec, one of the six death camps in Poland. Karski’s vivid report to the Polish government-in-exile had some impact. On December 10, the Polish government-in-exile issued a note to the Allied governments describing in detail the process of destruction being utilized by the Germans and of their intent to exterminate all the Jews of Poland. On December 17, the United States, Great Britain, and ten Allied governments-in-exile issued a joint declaration denouncing Nazi implementation of “Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” This statement was the first time the United States government had made or participated in a declaration about Nazi mass killings of Jews. By the end of the year, the six extermination camps had streamlined and accelerated the Final Solution to the point where it had already claimed perhaps more than three million Jews. Scattered Jewish resistance inside and outside the ghettos had begun, but resistance organizers often had limited support from the Jewish community, very few arms, and limited or poor relations with nonJewish partisans. And the governments of the United States and Great Britain were barely ready to recognize what was happening, and not prepared to do much about it. Reprinted from the October 1995 issue of Social Education