Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 by Deborah E. Lipstadt

Author:Deborah E. Lipstadt [Lipstadt, Deborah E.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1993-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

9

Reluctant Rescuers

As 1943 unfolded, the German resolve to expedite the destruction of those Jews who remained alive seemed to grow stronger. Information emerged from all over Eastern Europe which served to confirm that the program to finally murder all the Jews was well underway. Ghettos which had once been full were now said to be mysteriously empty. Deportations were taking place in Western Europe, including Holland, Belgium, and France. There was even a report of a Nazi order to “starve” the Jews as a means of killing them. According to the New York Times mid-February had been set as the date for the “total liquidation of the Jewish problem” in France.1 AP reported that Polish Jews had been confined to fifty-five different ghettos where they were “awaiting extermination.”2 The February 27 edition of Collier’s printed a first-hand description of life in the Warsaw ghetto. Written by Tosha Bialer, who had been in the ghetto until the previous summer, the article was accompanied by pictures of those whom the magazine described as “starving people” and “homeless, hungry children.”

The Nazi leadership seemed remarkably more candid about its plans. According to a BBC broadcast, recorded in the United States by CBS, March 31 had been set as the day on which Berlin was to be completely Jew-free. Six thousand Jews would be deported daily in order to achieve that goal. Dr. Robert Ley, the Reich Labor Minister, reaffirmed Hitler’s policy of extermination, and in light of the revelations and confirmations of the previous months no longer could his words be understood figuratively.

No one in Germany is to speak any longer of the Jews as the chosen people. The Jew has been chosen but for destruction.3

Reports released by the Polish government in exile and the World Jewish Congress in mid-February painted an even bleaker picture of conditions in Europe. The World Jewish Congress charged on February 14 that the Germans had issued orders to “speed and intensify the extermination by massacre and starvation of the Jews remaining in occupied Europe.” The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times considered this news worthy of pages 2 and 3 respectively; the New York World Telegram carried it on page 13, the Atlanta Constitution on page 18, and the New York Times on page 37.4

Additional information released in March indicated that the situation was becoming more desperate. The American Jewish Congress estimated that “two out of every seven Jews [have been] liquidated by the Nazi ‘new order.’” In a lengthy article published on March 4 the Christian Science Monitor vigorously pointed out that Germany did not deny the estimate that 2 million Jews had been killed; in fact “Germany does not even deny that the extermination of the Jews is carried out according to a meticulously arranged plan.” The article analyzed what was known about the fate of the Jewish population in each of the seventeen countries which the Nazis had conquered. It ended with the concise observation that the “deportees either starve while under way in sealed

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