Beyond Belief Read online

  Mark Etheridge, an American journalist who spent time in Germany in 1933, wrote an impassioned defense of the reporters’ accuracy. He argued that because American journalists knew that “what they wrote was being watched and criticized, [they] have not only endeavored to verify the minutest particular of what they wrote, but have leaned backward in reporting the truth.”47This defense of the press corps was reiterated by Michael Williams of the Catholic periodical Commonweal, who upon his return from Germany exhorted Americans not to “be deceived by false denials concerning the persecution of the Jews under the Hitlerite regime; guard against its paid and voluntary propaganda.”48

  The New York Times also expressed its faith in the correspondents in an editorial in May 1933. The editorial countered public doubts about the trustworthiness of the reports from Germany by citing the findings of a “group of eminent American lawyers,” including “leaders of the American bar and two former Secretaries of State,” who had studied the situation in Germany. They confirmed, according to the Times, that judges had been “violently dragged from the bench and lawyers forced out of practice for no reason except hatred of their race or religion.”49 Despite these expressions of confidence in the reports of persecution, explicit and implicit expressions of doubt continued to be voiced in the American press.

  Sometimes reporters defended themselves by letting the Nazis condemn themselves. This was what New York Times reporter Otto Tolischus did in August 1935 when he quoted extensively from the official German news agency’s press releases describing the Nazi campaign against the Jews, which included picketing in front of stores, physical attacks on individuals, insults to customers who frequented Jewish firms, and an array of other incidents. Because it was unusual for a correspondent, Tolischus in particular, to rely so heavily on quotes from an official news source, Tolischus felt obligated to explain why he did so: “Next to the Jews the foreign correspondents in Berlin are now under fire from the National Socialist authorities.” Therefore, to avoid being accused by German authorities of telling falsehoods, he used the Nazis’ own words to describe the condition of the Jews.

  What Reporters Saw and Where They Stood

  Most of the reporters who were stationed in Germany were personally conversant with the Nazi modus operandi and understood Germany’s deep commitment to antisemitism. They also knew that “fanaticism was the essence of fascism.”50 Many of them had interviewed Hitler and had personally watched him at close range on numerous occasions. Foreign reporters often were placed adjacent to Hitler at mass meetings and public occasions. Every year at the Nuremberg rally the press cars were, by Hitler’s personal orders, “sandwiched” in between his own car and the car carrying his closest advisers—Goering, Goebbels, Hess, and Himmler.51Most of the foreign correspondents did not doubt that those at the very apex of power were either directly or indirectly responsible for the violence and were unequivocally committed to antisemitism. However, as we have seen, their observations were often discounted by those in the United States. Throughout the period of the Third Reich this pattern repeated itself: reliable sources told at least a portion of what was happening, and those far from the scene and unfamiliar with Nazism discounted the news as exaggerated or dismissed it as not quite possible.52

  A variation on this theme was the disagreement between Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief in Berlin, and her employer, Colonel Robert R. McCormick. A highly venerated journalist, she was fiercely anti-Nazi and as early as 1932 warned that there would be dire consequences for Germany and for Europe if Hitler came to power. McCormick and the Tribune had a very different view of Germany under Hitler: it was an obstacle to the “communist menace” and therefore deserving of strong American support. McCormick attributed antisemitism to the shortcomings of Versailles and the economic hardships created by the treaty’s inequities. He explained that antisemitism was a “national psychological reaction to being officially blamed for World War I.” Schultz absolutely disagreed with her boss on this point. “Our alleged unkindness at Versailles had nothing to do with Germany’s dedication to another war.” It also had nothing to do with Nazi antisemitism. Those who made this claim were, according to Schultz, in “quest of an alibi.” Neither the publisher nor the paper explicitly approved of German antisemitism, but they were willing to tolerate it because of Germany’s value as a bulwark against Russia. As late as 1938 the Tribune was still ignoring Germany’s internal persecution and calling for a “square deal for the Germans.” Incidentally, although her views were diametrically opposed to McCormick’s, Schultz’s articles generally appeared uncensored. And even George Seldes, the former Chicago Tribune correspondent who made a career of exposing the duplicity of the press and who on frequent occasions launched vitriolic attacks on McCormick, admitted that most of the foreign correspondents for the Chicago Tribune enjoyed “full freedom,” and were not given orders on what to write and how to treat the facts—or the falsehoods.”53

  Other reporters who understood the true nature of Nazism and its fanatical hatred of Jews included Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune; Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News until his forced departure in late August 1933; H. R. Knickerbocker of the New York Evening Post; Louis Lochner of Associated Press, the reporter who had been in Berlin longest and who also maintained social contacts with German leaders and seemed particularly careful to avoid antagonizing the Nazi authorities; William Shirer of CBS, who according to Martha Dodd was among the most fiercely anti-Nazi of the American correspondents; Pierre van Paassen of the New York World; Fred Oeschner of the United Press, and New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus.54 Norman Ebbutt, the senior London Times correspondent in Berlin, was also among the reporters who were most appalled by Nazi behavior. His intimate knowledge of Germany and his extensive contacts with different groups in the country gave him background for reports which, according to Franklin Gannon, who has studied the British Press and Germany, “undoubtedly riled the Nazi authorities.” But Ebbutt ran into a serious obstacle when his publisher, Geoffrey Dawson, refused to publish “anything that might hurt their [German] susceptibilities.” When Ebbutt discovered that his most exhaustive, comprehensive, and critical reports did not appear in the paper, he began to feed information to Shirer, who used it in his own reports.55

  Some reporters required only a short interaction with the Nazi system and with Hitler in order to understand them, others took longer. In certain cases initial impressions changed dramatically. Such was the case with Dorothy Thompson, whose popular syndicated column appeared in a variety of different newspapers, including the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. In 1932 Thompson visited Germany and was granted a personal interview with Hitler. She was unimpressed by the man and wrote that before she first “walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man.” (For many years Thompson’s journalist colleagues reminded her of this startlingly wrong evaluation.) In March 1933 she returned to Germany for a brief visit. In her reports on this visit she confirmed that the stories of persecution were not exaggerated. She returned once again in August 1934. Ten days later she was ordered out of the country. According to Ambassador Dodd the reason for her dismissal lay in her interview with Hitler in 1932 and her reports in 1933 condemning Hitler’s antisemitic campaign. Thompson explained her expulsion to readers as follows:

  My first offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man . . . . That is a crime against the reigning cult . . . which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people—an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American so I merely was sent to Paris.56

  While most of the reporters stationed in Germany had little, if any, en
thusiasm for the Nazi regime, they still maintained social ties with the German hierarchy. Some, such as Louis Lochner, whose wife was German and who spoke German in his home, held many famous elaborate parties attended by high-ranking Nazi leaders. He went to great lengths to maintain cordial contacts with German authorities. Sigrid Schultz’s Bier Abends (beer evenings) were renowned for the array of people—from the most powerful to the “just plain common folk”—who attended. Schultz, in an interview, acknowledged that entertaining politicians such as Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and other members of Hitler’s immediate circle was a most useful way to “collect news from them.” And the fact that she socialized with these people did not compromise her reputation as an anti-Nazi.*

  There were, of course, reporters such as Karl von Wiegand of the Hearst chain, who maintained close ties with Nazi and Prussian officials and was considered by some of his colleagues to be somewhat too sympathetic to German interests. Even Lochner, who certainly was no friend of the Nazis, was criticized by some of his colleagues for his strong identification with Germany. Shirer believes that Lochner occasionally “compromised” his journalistic integrity in order to ensure that he would get scoops from German authorities. In his autobiography Lochner described how, when he once discussed the “Jewish question” with Hitler during a visit to his famous mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden, the Reich leader became so agitated that Lochner “saw white, foamy saliva exude from the corners of his mouth.” This description does not seem to have been included in any of Lochner’s dispatches from Germany.

  As I have noted, other reporters, while not sympathetic, did choose at times to mute their criticism of Nazi Germany. First of all, they desired to avoid expulsion or arrest. Second, they feared that if they told too much, they might reveal their sources, who then might be arrested, sent to concentration camps, or even killed. This was particularly the case when inmates who had been released from the camps told reporters about life inside them. Their descriptions were especially valuable because reporters were not allowed to visit the camps except on rare and orchestrated occasions. Ironically, these descriptions were often not included in reports. Finally, reporters recognized that the more they were known to have an anti-Nazi attitude, the more they would be excluded from access to inner government circles. Fearful of being designated “uncooperative” by the Nazis, some reporters did not report all the information they obtained. Over the years of his stay in Germany, as his reputation of being unfriendly to Nazi interests grew, William Shirer found his access to news sources increasingly limited.58

  Support—and Disbelief

  Reporters who understood the deep and fervent Nazi commitment to antisemitism and knew that, despite occasional respites, persecution would persist had some astute backers in their field. There were editorial boards, such as the Philadelphia Record’s, and magazines such as The New Republic and The Nation which accepted the reporters’ analyses and accurately predicted that while “Jewish beatings may stop . . . . the ‘law’ will be used to deprive Jews of personal and political rights.”59 There were publishers such as Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News, who after his visit to Germany had no doubt about the veracity of the most extreme reports. There were commentators and authors such as John Gunther, whose immensely popular Inside Europe noted that the “basic depth and breadth of Hitler’s antisemitism” was clear to anyone who read Mein Kampf.60 Visitors such as these men understood, after a face-to-face encounter with Nazi Germany, that the country had undergone a fundamental transformation. A dispatch from the New York Times bureau in Berlin noted that though Nazi actions might “appear incomprehensible to observers in Western democracies,” it had to be remembered that “Nazism’s prestige rests on complete fulfillment of its antisemitic dogma in all its ramifications”; consequently Germany would “use all means at its disposal” to advance its antisemitic goals.61 Yet there was in general a dichotomy in the ranks of the press between reporters stationed in Germany, who because of where they were recognized the insidious nature of the National Socialist Party, and editors, publishers, and commentators witnessing Germany from afar, who tended to be more skeptical and optimistic.

  This split was mirrored in the diplomatic corps, though it was far less striking there.62 A number of the American diplomats stationed in Germany, including Ambassador Dodd, Consul General George Messersmith, Commercial Attaché Douglas Miller, and Consul Raymond Geist, understood the nature of this regime. Even before the Nuremberg Laws were issued, Dodd and some of his colleagues contended that any amelioration in the Jews’ situation, including the order against Einzelaktionen, or individual acts of terror, was simply a “camouflage for more drastic action based upon the plan of proceeding against the Jews by orderly, lawful means.”63 Many State Department officials at home were more optimistic about the future course of German affairs in general and the fate of the German Jews in particular. This split, which became even more striking as the situation grew more severe, may have resulted in part from the unprecedented nature of Germany’s behavior, which was particularly hard to fathom when one heard about it from a distance. Never before, even in states which were unquestionably antisemitic, e.g., Czarist Russia, had the demonization of the Jew been made the raison d’être of the regime. Antisemitism was a fundamental element of Nazism. While officially sanctioned antisemitism was not new, the fact that this was taking place in Germany, a country where Jews were fully integrated into the fabric of society, was difficult to comprehend. It was also hard to comprehend that this was occurring in a land which attached considerable importance to foreign opinion, especially in “those countries from which she hopes to gain political or financial advantage.”64

  Another explanation for this dichotomy may well have been the ever intensifying American conviction that the country must never be drawn into one of “Europe’s eternal wars.” A number of reporters who returned to America after a sojourn in Germany attributed the skeptical and sometimes hostile reception their stories of terror received from the American public to the fact that Americans in “overwhelming” numbers were determined to stay out of Europe’s affairs and therefore resented being made uncomfortable by these stories. Even when they accepted the reports as accurate, they often argued that this was “no business of ours.”65

  Voices of Praise: Tourists, Students, Businessmen

  Reporters also faced an obstacle in the stark contrast between their accounts and what Tolischus described as “the eulogistic statements about conditions in Germany made by returning American tourists.”66 Germany was neat and clean. There were no slums, and people were well dressed. In contrast to America in the early 1930s, in Germany no jobless were visible on streetcorners selling apples or pencils, and no homeless were to be seen living in shantytowns or gathered in desolate corners of large cities. Visiting Americans, impressed by Germany’s spectacular achievements, repeatedly complained to reporters about their pessimistic and critical news reports. It was acutely difficult to convince visitors who did not witness overt acts of persecution and discrimination that there was more to the new Reich than its economic renewal, rebuilt physical plant, substantial sports achievements, and gracious welcome accorded those from abroad. Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s wife Lilian found it exasperating to hear people who paid a short visit to Germany fervently deny the fact that anything unusual was happening. “But you must be exaggerating, everything is so calm here, there is no disorder, and the Germans are such pleasant people . . . how could they allow such things to happen?” After his expulsion from Germany, Edgar Mowrer toured the United States and found many people unwilling to believe his description of life in Nazi Germany. In 1933 The Nation complained that it was “difficult to restrain the silly people who after a week or two in Germany, during which they have seen no Jews beaten up in the streets, go back to their own countries and declare that the stories told in the papers about Germany are all untrue.” These visitors often said they knew things were not that bad because “the Nazis had told [them] so.”
(One reporter developed a foolproof method for countering this impression. She would have any of her American or British visitors who “fell victim” to the Nazis’ “charms” or propaganda accompany her to an interview with the Nazi leader Julius Streicher. Listening to him, particularly when he spoke about Jews, was enough to “cancel out all their good impressions.”)67

  When Norman Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, visited Germany during the Olympic Games, he berated Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune and William Shirer of CBS for their critical and alarming stories on Germany. Other businessmen in his group told these two reporters that they had never seen a people so “happy, content, and united,” as one put it, and that the violence which had been reported was exaggerated or had not even occurred. When the reporters asked who had told them this, they responded that it was Hermann Goering. Upon her return to this country Martha Dodd, the Ambassador’s daughter, complained about the “naivete” of Americans who dismissed the reports from Germany as “gross exaggeration.”68Throughout the 1930s American students continued to go to study in German universities, and many of them were deeply impressed by what they found there. They too served to counter the reporters’ pessimism.69