Beyond Belief Read online

  Refugees or Spies?

  The greatest and most immediate consequence of the focus by the press on spies lurking in America was its effect on attitudes toward refugees.34 Although Germany undoubtedly attempted to create a climate in America sympathetic to it and to implant spies, there is little evidence—and there was even less at the time—that refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, were involved. Nonetheless the conviction spread that a cadre of spies could be found within refugee circles. Feature stories about the role of the alien spy appeared in major American papers and magazines. Charges made in the daily and periodical press were repeated in Congress. Despite the efforts of liberal journals such as The Nation, the charges gained greater currency as 1940 progressed.35

  The fall of Europe was attributed to its having been betrayed by those to whom it had offered refuge. An article in the New York Herald Tribune claimed that forty-two Nazi agents had been recruited from among “‘half’ Jews” and ‘quarter’ Jews” from Germany who had been promised an “Aryan” passport for their work.36 Samuel Lubell, writing in The Saturday Evening Post, charged that Nazi agents disguised as refugees had permeated Europe and America as spies. He described a Gestapo school where spies were taught to “speak Yiddish, to read Hebrew, pray,” and even submitted to circumcision to make their disguise complete.37 According to these articles, America too was now in danger. In June 1940 Life published a pictorial record of Nazi activities in Asia and the Americas which, the magazine claimed, was proof that there were “signs of Nazi fifth columns everywhere.”38

  Westbrook Pegler claimed that Norway, a country which had been the object of great sympathy in America, had been stabbed in the back by the German refugees it had befriended.39 Edwin James, writing in the New York Times, reported that Norway had fallen as a result of a fifth column composed of Germans who had been brought to the country as orphans after World War I. Other papers warned of the “alien traitors” who like “termites” were “boring from within.” The Springfield (Illinois) Journal observed that America “may avoid going to war, but war’s backwash is surely coming to America.” When Germany suggested that it might be willing to release “racial and political refugees” from Europe, a number of papers immediately suggested that this was a way for the Germans to infiltrate the United States with spies.40

  Respected figures repeated the claims of the press. The American Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, argued in the summer of 1940 that France had been defeated as a result of its lax immigration policy.

  The French had been more hospitable than are even we Americans to refugees from Germany. More than one-half the spies captured doing actual military spy work against the French army were refugees from Germany. Do you believe that there are no Nazi and Communist agents of this sort in America?41

  The refugees bore the direct consequences of this hysteria about a fifth column. A “faulty immigration policy” was blamed by public and press for the threat facing America.42 Charges that spies had been found among the refugees were made by Democratic Senator Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, an archfoe of immigration liberalization. Reynolds warned that the United States was in danger of an “attack by the enemy from within.” In New York, District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey launched an investigation to “spotlight” fifth-column “treachery.” In Washington the House required the fingerprinting of all aliens over fourteen years old.43

  The most important step in this sequence of antirefugee measures was a June 1941 ruling by the State Department that refugees who had close relatives in Germany or German-occupied territories could not enter the United States. The ruling was issued after a hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1941 at which it had been claimed that no one could be released from a Nazi concentration camp without signing a “pledge that he would serve the gestapo.” The State Department announced that this decision was being taken in order to halt an already existing flood of spies disguised as refugees. It charged that there was such a flood despite the fact that a few months earlier only twelve out of a thousand people requesting visas had been found to be persons “whose presence would be prejudicial to the best interests of the United States.” In addition, the State Department’s announcement was ambiguous; it was not clear whether refugees had already committed acts of espionage or had merely been coerced into agreeing to act as agents in the United States.44

  Most papers declared that the decision was, in the words of the New York Herald Tribune, “readily understandable.” The Philadelphia Bulletin was somewhat more hesitant, both because of the lack of substantiating evidence for the State Department’s claim and because the vast majority of those who had fled countries occupied by Germany had “the genuineness of their status [as refugees] attested.” It too, however, declared the measure essential for “our national protection.”45 Another paper that was more tentative in its report of the ruling was the New York Journal American. It noted that the action had been taken because “alien refugees may be subject to pressure through threats against their kin.”46

  The Philadelphia Record chose a different approach. It stressed the severe repercussions of the ruling on the refugees:

  U.S. VISA CURB NEW TRAGEDY FOR AMERICANS’ FOREIGN KIN47

  The article described the measure as a “severe blow to hundreds of refugees.” It depicted the “tragic portion” and “desperate” situation of all refugees but particularly those who had already begun their “trek to safety” and now found themselves stranded. The Record’s coverage was unique. Most of the press ignored the human ramifications of the ruling and subscribed to the “refugee equals spy” attitude.48

  The liberal press argued that refugees made unlikely candidates for spies because their dress, language, and mannerisms attracted attention. It claimed that to identify refugees as Nazi agents was to yield to German designs. Part of the German objective was to “dump” Jews abroad in order to create confusion and consternation in enemy lands. The Nation and The New Republic emerged, predictably, as the staunchest defenders of the refugees. They took strong issue with the State Department’s story that refugees were serving as spies. The Nation challenged the State Department to “cite a single instance of the coerced espionage.”49No evidence substantiating the charges was ever provided. The New Republic believed the ruling to be simply a means of “persecuting the refugee.” It claimed, as had the liberal New York daily PM, that prominent Nazis found few obstacles in their way when they applied for admission to the United States, while “bars have now been raised making it almost impossible for political refugees to get out of Europe at all.” PM accurately blamed the policy on Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long.50

  The State Department ruling, coupled with other administrative obstacles, turned the flow of refugees who had entered in the wake of Kristallnacht into a mere trickle by the late fall of 1941. The fears of fifth columnists had been generated by the press, radio, newsreels, movies, books, churches, and patriotic groups. Had it not been for the often hysterical preoccupation of the press with spies in the nation’s midst, it is doubtful whether 71 percent of those polled in July 1940 by Roper would have answered in the affirmative when asked whether they believed a spy network posed a significant threat. But this campaign against the fifth column also fortified American support for the destroyer-bases arrangement and the Lend-Lease Act. It made it easier for Roosevelt to prepare the country for what increasingly appeared to be an inevitable conflict with Germany. The President was determined to strengthen the antagonism of Americans toward the Reich and their readiness to aid the Reich’s enemies.51

  German officials stationed in Washington recognized this and tried to alert Berlin to the fact that American fears of spies and sabotage would benefit the President’s efforts to cultivate interventionist sentiment. Both the German Ambassador, Hans Dieckhoff, and the Chargé d’Affaires, Hans Thomsen, warned Berlin that Bund activities and German efforts to create a network of sympathizers in America were sure to bring America i
nto action on the side of our enemies and of destroying the last vestiges of sympathy for Germany.”52 Thomsen was right. As a result of the American feeling that Hitler had designs on America and might invade this continent once he conquered Britain, public opinion favored aiding that beleaguered country. By 1941 polls showed that 85 to 90 percent of the American public was willing to aid England, though close to 80 percent still opposed American entry into the war.53

  The panic which was spread regarding spies in America’s midst solidified anti-Nazi sentiment, but it also strengthened the barriers that were placed in the path of refugees desperate to escape the lengthening Nazi grasp. It helped bar the way to those for whom a refuge meant the difference between life and death.

  PART II

  THE FINAL SOLUTION

  Newspapers are read at the breakfast and dinner tables. God’s great gift to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it.

  W. R. Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star

  Confirmation of the news is a sacrament . . . . There’s an old saying in Chicago journalism . . . “You say your mother loves you. Check it out.”

  John Chancellor

  7

  Deportation to Annihilation: The First Reports

  One of the central questions in any discussion of the Allied reaction to the Holocaust is when those not directly involved in perpetrating the Final Solution became aware of the fact that Nazi antisemitism had progressed from brutal but haphazard persecution to a systematic program of murder.1 It is strange, in some respects, that this should be such a matter of debate, for during the war there were official Allied pronouncements confirming that an extermination program was underway. As shall be demonstrated in the following pages, a surprisingly large amount of information was known and publicized despite the fact that the death camps were beyond the view of the press. Various details were, of course, missing; sometimes the number of victims was exaggerated and sometimes it was underestimated, and the size and specific function of particular death camps were not publicly revealed until relatively late.2 Nevertheless, considering that there were no reporters on the scene and that the Nazis wished to camouflage what was going on, a fairly accurate picture of the situation was available first to government officials and then to the public, long before the end of the war. Often it was not believed. In order to understand how this was so, it is critical that we ask not when news was available but how it was made available.

  Barriers to Belief

  In considering the issue of knowledge of the Final Solution, it is important to remember that the Nazis treated the mass murder program quite differently from their other antisemitic campaigns. Until the mass murder program began, relatively few attempts were made to hide what was being done to the Jews. Reporters were witness to the April 1933 boycott, the July 1935 riots, the Nuremberg Laws, the brutalities inflicted on Austrian Jews in March 1938, and Kristallnacht, a modern-day pogrom conducted in public view. They witnessed Jews being rounded up in various parts of the Reich.3 Even the deportation of thousands of Jews from Berlin, which was carried out “swiftly, efficiently and with as much secrecy” as possible, in the words of United Press, was witnessed by reporters.*

  While the antisemitic actions which preceded the Final Solution were committed openly, the mass murder program was not. The Germans did more than try to keep things secret; they released all sorts of information designed to obfuscate. In trying to prevent the news of the murder program’s existence from reaching the outside world, the Nazis used varied means of deception to convince the victims and those who witnessed the deportations that “resettlement” was the German objective. Victims were told they were being relocated, sent to work camps, “resettled.” Though these explanations may not have always been believed in their entirety, they did inject a note of confusion into the situation. When the deportations from Germany were at their height, official German sources assured American reporters that they were military measures dictated by “economic requirements of the war” and denied that Jews in Berlin were being dispossessed of their dwellings or taken to concentration camps.

  It is interesting to consider how such a denial was handled by two different papers. The New York Times quoted the Nazi claims but immediately shed doubt on them by noting that the official Nazi Party newspaper carried numerous announcements of auctions of furniture, household goods, and other property confiscated from Jews. Similar sales were also scheduled to take place in Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Breslau. In contrast, the Washington Star simply reported the German denials and added that “because this is a war measure no details are available.”5

  There were other obstacles, some of which were so formidable that even when the news managed to escape the perpetrators’ grip, it still did not reach the bystanders. Historical precedent lessened the credibility of this news. During World War I similar “atrocity stories” had been circulated and proven false. Americans were intent on not falling prey, once again, to such “propaganda.” Each side accused the other of atrocities, and within two and a half weeks after the beginning of the war, Time magazine was dubbing this or that report “the ‘atrocity’ story of the week.” Atrocity charges were linked by much of the American press with each side’s attempts to both sway neutral opinion in its favor and fire up the homefront. Typical of the attitude of some of the press toward Allied reports of atrocities was one paper’s reaction to the March 1940 publication of the Polish emigré government’s report that the Nazis had murdered numerous civilians, desecrated churches, and terrorized entire villages. One editorial reminded Americans that after World War I “a great many of the atrocity stories which were so well attested and so strenuously told, so indignantly believed and so commonly repeated, were found to be absolute fakes.”6

  The tendency to dismiss the reports of horrors was strengthened by America’s desire to remain neutral. An isolationist American public, particularly one inclined to believe that Britain would stop at little to get us to join the Allied side, felt justified in dismissing these reports as British creations. The press was “distrustful” of both sides and unanimous, at least at the outset, in endorsing neutrality. Americans abhorred National Socialism, but as one contemporary commentator pointed out, “Tory England was an ideal for which Americans were hardly prepared to die.” Furthermore, England had for so long dismissed Nazi persecution and racial policies as “an internal matter” and treated them as irrelevant in the formulation of foreign policy that now it was difficult to use these same policies as effective propaganda.7 But the English did try to use them for propaganda purposes. At the end of October 1939 they released a White Paper on the tortures occurring in Nazi concentration camps. In a foreword to the report the British government explained why it had not released this information, some of which had been in its hands since Kristallnacht, earlier. It wanted to avoid doing “anything to embitter the relations between the two countries.”8

  If Tory England was an ideal not worth dying for, then the Soviet Union was an ideal which many Americans believed was not even worth preserving. Stalinist Russia was known for its brutality and for the “blood-purge.” When Russia began to release reports accusing Germany of atrocities after June 1941, they were greeted skeptically by many Americans. When Germany and Russia each accused the other of mass murder, it was a case, according to the Dayton (Ohio) News, of the “pot and the kettle.” While there were papers which believed that Hitler was “in a class by himself among modern dictators [for] not even Stalin practices racial persecution,” there were others which believed that both Hitler and Stalin had records “written in crimson.” The Germans attempted to make use of the American contempt for Stalin and took American reporters to the Russian front to show them corpses which were “allegedly” Ukrainians and Poles who had been murdered by Russian soldiers. They were not entirely successful in convincing American reporters, and, according to Fred Oeschner of the United Press, the correspondents refused to “leave out those little words ‘alleged,�
� ‘claimed,’ or ‘asserted’ or to make flat statements instead of attributing them to the German guides.” The Germans did have some success with some papers including the Hearst papers, which as late as November 1941 believed that the Russians were behaving worse than the Nazis and condemned the unprecedented “destruction wrought” by them. The Hearst papers declared that the “pillage and plunder conducted in Russian-occupied Poland has no counterpart among the many ravished lands of western and northern Europe, where ruthless carnage and savage despolitation [sic] are not novelties.”9*

  These sentiments about Russians posed yet another obstacle to the news of the Final Solution. Anything that came from Moscow prior to Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war was considered tainted information, particularly by Americans who believed communism a greater threat to the United States than Nazism. Even after that date, when Russia became America’s ally, its accusations were still met with some skepticism.

  The fact that this news was coming from behind enemy lines further complicated its dissemination. Couriers were reluctant to allow themselves to be quoted by name because some who were in the underground intended to return to German-occupied Europe or feared for the lives of their relatives. Accounts attributed to known neutral sources were difficult to obtain. When reporters could cite a “reliable” source, they hastened to do so but often without actually using the source’s name. Such was the case in the November 10, 1941, edition of the New York Journal American. Alfred Tyrnauer, who for ten years had been head of Hearst’s International News Service (INS) bureau in Vienna, reported that the Nazis were planning “mass pogroms” and the “total expropriation of Jewish property” in all Nazi-controlled countries. He stressed that his information came from “absolutely reliable” unnamed “diplomatic quarters.”11