Sins of Omission

Leff chronicles how, from the start of the war in Europe in 1939 to its conclusion six years later, the Times published 1,186 stories about the Jews of Europe, but the unfolding genocide failed to “receive the continuous attention or prominent play that a story about the unprecedented attempt to wipe out an entire people deserved.” She notes that the unfolding events that culminated in the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times, but in only six of those stories were Jews identified on the front page as the primary victims. Leff reports that on the rare occasions when the Holocaust made the front page, the Times obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews, referring to them as refugees or persecuted minorities. This remained the case even after December 17, 1942, when the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a public statement that “the German authorities . . . are now carrying out into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe”–thus eliminating the possibility for a skeptical press (including the Times) that atrocity reports reaching the West were either exaggerations or propaganda.

Many journalists were apprehensive about wartime atrocity reports emanating from Poland because of the memory of similar stories of German excesses in Belgium during World War I. Given their suspicions about the news they received, editors buried stories about Nazi outrages against Jews in the middle sections of their newspapers, and the Times was no exception. Even after the 1942 Allied statement, the Times continued to put stories about the Holocaust inside the paper, long after their authenticity had been confirmed.

Leff, a journalist who teaches at Northeastern University, attempts to explain why the Times failed, for the most part, to feature the unfolding genocide on the front page, or address it in editorials. She charges that the manner in which the Times–and the rest of the press, which often followed the lead of America’s most important newspaper–underplayed the Nazi war against the Jews prevented any chance of arousing public opinion. And in documenting how the Times contributed to a political environment that led to inaction, Leff also reveals much about the insecurity of American Jews at that time, including such prominent and assimilated personalities as the Times‘s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Sulzberger defined himself as a Jew by religion and an American by ethnicity, and strongly opposed all talk of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. At the height of reports that Jews were being murdered by the Nazis, Sulzberger became embroiled in a fight with the Zionist movement. In January 1942 a Times editorial opposed a British plan to create a Jewish military force to fight the Nazis, which the paper argued would lead to the formation of a “separate Zionist army” and make the establishment of a Zionist state one of the Allied “official war aims.” The editorial further warned that the effort would raise the specter of American Jews having dual loyalties, and lead to “much misunderstanding among people who would believe that Jews wanted something different from what other Americans wanted.”

The Times‘s reporting on the Holocaust can best be understood from the perspective of Sulzberger’s view that singling out the Jews as special victims of the Nazis would be a concession to Hitler’s racial views, and a contravention of his convictions that Jews were not a race or a people. Leff maintains that for “Sulzberger to retreat from this belief would mean to acknowledge that his place in America and his identity as an American were not as secure as he resolutely asserted.” Throughout the war Sulzberger repeatedly stated that America came first, and that the only hope for European Jews was linked to that of other groups. As Leff notes, “His newspaper . . . ran front-page stories describing refugees seeking shelter, Frenchmen facing confiscation, or civilians dying in German camps, without making clear the refugees, Frenchmen, and civilians were mostly Jews.” Sulzberger may also have hesitated to lead his fellow Americans to recognize the suffering of European Jewry lest the Times be accused of special pleading. Sulzberger was aware that, as the Jewish owner of the country’s most important newspaper, he was vulnerable to the canard that the Jews had dragged America into a European war.

Would the manner in which the press in general, and the Times in particular, reported on the Holocaust have made a difference? Given the prevalence of anti-Semitism in America at the time, it is hard to imagine that full disclosure of the Nazi genocide would have altered public opinion to the extent that it would have forced more decisive action from the Roosevelt administration on behalf of the Jews. But this obscures the point that the press in general, and the Times in particular, shirked their responsibility; and, as historian Deborah Lipstadt has written, the “press bears a great measure of responsibility for the public’s skepticism and ignorance of the scope of the wartime tragedy.”

Leff concludes that the New York Times contributed to the public’s ignorance “because the Times and other publications did not feature what was happening to Jews as Jews on its front page, or write about their fate repeatedly in hard-hitting editorials, or highlight their plight in magazines or in retrospectives. The Times‘s tendency to not identify the victims as Jews and to link their fate with that of other suffering peoples made it even harder to recognize the extent to which the Jews were special targets of Hitler’s wrath. . . . Thus the full story of European Jewry’s destruction remained below the surface, only now and then in a diluted and fractured form. . . . In the process, the Times helped to drown out the last cry from the abyss.”

Jack Fischel is emeritus professor of history at Millersville University.