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.
