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.
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.
