The New York Times and the holocaust
Common Sense and Wonder
When Jews weren't news
(Nathan Guttman - Haaretz.com)
WASHINGTON - In 1944 the Nazi machine for slaughtering the Jews reached peaks of productivity and efficiency. At the death camps in Europe thousands of Jews were being murdered every day and testimonies about the horror were flowing from all directions, even to the media. But during that year the front page of The New York Times, the most prestigious and most important newspaper in the United States, mentioned the question of the Jews in Europe only 12 times on its front page. All the rest of the reports were relegated to the inside pages and got lost among the archival reports on what was happening on all the fronts of the war.
Even when the Jewish issue did get front page coverage in the times, it was swallowed up and concealed. The reports speak about "minorities," "refugees" and "murder victims." The word "Jews" hardly appeared on the front page of the newspaper.
The book "Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper," which was published this month in the United States by Cambridge University Press, documents in detail the campaign of sidestepping and downplaying the Holocaust by the publisher of the newspaper and the effects that his editorial decisions had on the American public's ability to understand what was happening in Europe during the war years. The author of the book, Prof. Laurel Leff, a former journalist and now a lecturer at the Northeastern University school of journalism, spent a year and a half of her life in the Times archive, closely reading every report published between the years of 1939 and 1945 and looking for reports on the Holocaust of European Jews. At the end of the process, she found that during those years The New York Times had published 1,200 items connected to the Jews and their fate in the war, but only 26 of them made the front page of the newspaper. Only six times were the Jews identified in the headline of the item on the front page of The Times as victims of the Nazis.
Reporters all over Europe
Is it possible that the newspaper that engraved on its masthead the slogan "All the news that's fit to print" simply did not know about the slaughter of European Jews? This supposition is refuted outright in the book. The Times was well-networked in Europe, even during the war, with reporters stationed in Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London, Moscow, Budapest, Bucharest and elsewhere, reporters who knew very well what was happening both at the battlefront and within the countries where they were posted. The Times itself also devoted editorials to the issue of the murder of European Jews, but even after these were published it took care to "bury" the reports on the subject in the inside pages and blur the Jewish identity of the victims.
Leff argues that this was an internal editorial policy that was dictated from above, and from the moment it was determined that the Jews were "not a story" in this war, the decision affected all levels. The reporters who were delegated to report on the story were of the second rank and the editors, who developed a reluctance to emphasize the place of the Jews in the European tragedy, pushed the reports about the slaughter far inside the paper.
The person behind the decision, says the book, is Arthur Hays-Sulzberger, the all-powerful publisher of the newspaper during those years. Although Sulzberger, a Jew of German origin, was not an official part of the editorial apparatus of the paper, everyone there knew that he was the address for any issue having to do with Jews and that he held unambiguous views on questions having to do with the slaughter of the Jews raging in Europe. "They knew he was very nervous about Jewish stories, so they always turned to him when these stories came up," says Leff of Sulzberger's status.
The decision to push the Jews' distress to the inside pages was not taken casually and was not taken without reason. The new book documents Sulzberger's correspondence and testimonies from people who spoke with him that explain the motives behind his decision not to give prominence to the distress of his people. Sulzberger was an assimilated Jew, but not of the usual sort. He believed in becoming part of American society, but he never concealed the fact that he was Jewish and was even a member of Jewish organizations. He believed that Judaism is only a religion and nothing more - not a community, not a shared fate, not an organizational issue. "For Sulzberger, it was just a question of if you go to church on Sunday or to synagogue on Saturday," says Leff.
But the rejection of the concept of the mutual responsibility of world Jewry explains only partially his approach to the coverage of the Holocaust in his newspaper. Sulzberger thought that it was not appropriate to relate to the problem of the Jews in Europe as an issue in its own right. In a letter to treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau he wrote that the American administration should not err in thinking that there is a single Jewish people. "Certainly there is no such common denominator between the poor unfortunate Jew, now being driven around what was recently Poland, and, let us say Mr. Hore-Belisha [Britain's Jewish secretary of state for war] or myself," he wrote.
Sulzberger was not speaking only out of arrogance - he took the trouble to explain to Morgenthau, the most senior Jew in the administration at the time, that separate attention to the Jews when dealing with the crisis in Europe would only play into the hands of Hitler, who was interested in isolating the Jews. Therefore the United States must not fall into this trap.
Practical consideration
Leff found testimony to the effect that behind the publisher's decision to keep the Holocaust out of the headlines there was also this practical consideration: "He believed that minorities cannot save themselves and that their only chance is if their fate is tied with that of others," she explains. Therefore Sulzberger argued that if there is anything that would stir America to action in Europe, it was not the plight of the Jews but rather the comprehensive aim of saving humanity from Nazi tyranny. It must be noted that Sulzberger had grown up and was living in America, and therefore he had a basis for his suspicion that the American public would find it hard to identify with the Jews' distress.
The publisher's policy quickly trickled down to all levels of the newspaper and theJews in Europe were covered accordingly: The slaughter of 15,000 Jews in Kharkov was put on page 19 next to advertisements for end-of-year sales, the destruction of the Krakow and Lodz ghettoes went on page 5, the deportation of the Jews of Holland on page 6 and on August 27, 1943, the report that "3 million Jews had been destroyed by planned starvation, forced labor, deportation, pogroms and methodical murders in German-run extermination centers" appeared on page 7 of the newspaper.
The Times' ignoring of the Holocaust was clear to many at the time. Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the leaders of American Jewry, said, "The Times seems to consider nothing as news that originated from and through Jews." Other readers sent letters and asked why reports that they had read in other places about the slaughter of the Jews were not appearing in The New York Times. Nearly all of these complaints were brought to the attention of the publisher, but the policy did not change.
The fact that The Times intentionally refrained from giving importance to the issue of the persecution and annihilation of the Jews of Europe during World War II does not involve only the world of journalism. In her book, Leff writes: "No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than The Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so."
During those years, the Times was the only newspaper in the United States that was committed to providing its readers full coverage of national and international news and the only one with correspondents spread throughout the world. Moreover - even then The Times was already considered the newspaper of the decision-makers and policy-makers in Washington. Leff discovered that in the archives of several heads of the administration at that time, which she examined, there were often newspaper clipping dealing with current events. These were always clippings from The Times.
Beyond the general power that the newspaper wielded, it enjoyed a special status with respect to its attitude toward Jews. "Because the owners of The Times were Jews," writes Leff, "there was a tendency to say that if this paper doesn't think it is an important story, why should we take interest in it?"
Sulzberger did not change his mind about the issue even after the war ended and the camps were liberated, and The New York Times continued to push the Jewish story to the margins. The reports from Europe on the victims and displaced persons systematically ignored the Holocaust of the Jews and did not relate to the Jews separately from the other victims of the war and those hurt by it. This was the case even when the numbers, which were known by then, proved that the Jews were not chance victims.
Important lesson
Even when American Jewry adopted Zionism, Sulzberger remained definitely anti-Zionist and had arguments and quarrels about this with heads of the Jewish community. In one case he even argued that one of the reasons so many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust was that the Zionists were putting so much stress on Palestine instead of saving European Jewry.
In 1996 the owners of The New York Times celebrated the 100th anniversary of their purchase of the newspaper. On that occasion they acknowledged that the story of the Holocaust of European Jewry had suffered from a lack of attention during the war years. Sulzberger himself never acknowledged this.
Nowadays, could a story of such magnitude be kept out the headlines? To Leff it is not clear that the answer is that it could not be. She notes that she found in her research that even though the Jewish organizations in the United States knew during the period of the Holocaust about the dimensions of the horror in Europe, they did not have the standing in the media or the administration to throw the spotlights on what was happening. "Even today, if a certain group doesn't have this clout, it won't be able to get it onto the front page," writes Leff. "It happens all the time," she adds. New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis has told Haaretz, "The Times' editors today believe that the newspaper's modern-day coverage of war and genocide would demonstrate that the newspaper has drawn an important lesson from that painful history."
Posted by Jerry Scharf
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