On June 27, 1942, the New York Times ran a story that declared in its headline, “More Executed in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia & Poland—Jews’ Toll 700,000.”2 The headline was roughly accurate—historical records reveal that by that point, the Nazis had slaughtered not just 700,000 but almost 1,000,000 Jewish people from those countries. This first wave of massacre in the Nazi Final Solution program represents more than ten times more murders than all of those committed in the Bosnian genocide. Just an early, relatively small round in the killing of the Jews of Europe, it equals the total number of people killed in the entirety of the Rwandan genocide.
Furthermore, the deaths of the Jews did not happen overnight—they were the culmination of a lengthy process that began when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and citizenship and started to herd them to detention centers and early concentration camps. The Nazis had set the ball rolling toward genocide as early as 1935, when the Reich openly and unabashedly made Jews into second-class citizens with the Nuremberg Laws. It banned Jews from the 1936 Olympics and oversaw Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass,” when thousands of Jewish stores and homes were ransacked and burned in 1938. Then came the multiples rounds of deportations in which Jews were simply told to leave Germany and Austria, and then packed up and shipped off, also as early as 1938. All of these atrocities were known by newspapers around the world, which had reported on the Germans’ increasing crimes against the Jews. There was little reason to doubt that the Nazis were taking another step along their path toward racial extermination.
Still, the New York Times did not see it fit to dedicate an entire article to the revelation that 700,000 Jews had recently been murdered by the Nazis. Rather, the editors of the paper ran the information as a sub-story that was given about two inches of the famous gray paper—about the length of your little finger—amounting to a mere seventy-four words. The article was buried on page five.
Strangely, what little the editors at the Times did choose to run about the 700,000 murders accurately reflected the seriousness of the situa- tion. The blurb about the genocide quoted a BBC broadcast based on a ground-shattering report, the Bund report, on the situation regarding the Jews of Europe. The quotation remarked on the huge death toll: “To accomplish this, probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed—machine gun, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments, and starvation.”
The words “the greatest mass slaughter in history” stand out. The Times printed these words and acknowledged that the Nazis, who had provoked a world war and were ravaging Europe, had committed one of the greatest crimes in history. It also put its finger on the variety of devices used to kill the Jews, from new technologies like gas chambers to the simplest methods of brutality such as starvation and whipping. Yet the story ran as it did, with less space and attention in the paper than what is routinely given to an off-Broadway theater review.
The article is a disturbing symbol of the New York Times’s reporting on the Holocaust: the newspaper had detailed information about the slaughter, found the sources of the information reliable enough to print, and yet, relegated the story to a two-inch blurb on page five under a tiny headline. The source of the story’s information was a report written by the Jewish Labor Bund of Poland in May 1942, which tallied the number of deaths from known and confirmed Nazi massacres in and around Poland.3 Members of the Jewish Labor Bund succeeded in getting the report to the Polish government, which was exiled in London. The Bund report concluded that the Nazis were pursuing the “physical extermination of the Jewish people on Polish soil” and confirmed that Hitler was pursuing a policy that was expressed by the Nazi maxim that no matter how the war ends for Germany, the Jews will be wiped out.
The Times had actually quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s citation of this “no matter what, the Jews will perish” policy in an article that ran long before the June 1942 article on the Bund report. Already by late 1941, Nazi determination to wipe out the Jews and the implementation of the process, which came to be known as the Final Solution, was appearing in the New York Times’s own reporting. In a November 14, 1941 article entitled, “Goebbels Spurs Abuse for Jews,” the Times (in an article reprinted from United Press) reported, “Dr. Goebbels promulgated a new ten-point charter for the Nazi campaign against the Jews. He exhorted all Germans to harbor no sympathy for the Jews in connection with the government’s measures against them.”4 The article quotes Goebbels as saying that the emerging fate of the Jews “is indeed hard, but more than deserved.” It continues to quote the top-ranking Nazi, who said, “In this historical showdown every Jew is our enemy, regardless of whether he is vegetating in a Polish ghetto or delays his parasitic exis- tence in Berlin or Hamburg, or blows the war trumpets in Washington or New York.” The article concluded with Goebbels’s own conclusion—that it was Germany’s determination to “finally finish” the Jews.
Among the articles that graced the front page of the Times on that day, November 14, 1941, was a story about coal mining tests. Another article that made the hallowed front page was an article entitled, “Frankness Urged on Tokyo Leaders.” A further front-page story was about American police officers who had been demoted for infractions. There was also a report about one man from Iceland who had been killed. The article that quoted Goebbels’s use of Final Solution language did not make the cut. The report on the Nazi war against the world’s Jews was printed on page eleven.
The unfolding story of Nazi persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews was furthered by a March 1942 article that reported that a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Company named S.B. Jacobson had come back from the Balkans, where he had been working during the years preceding the Nazi declaration of war on America. Jacobson, accord- ing to the Times article, “gave an eyewitness account of the barbarities affecting the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in the Balkans.” Jacobson spoke about the situation of Balkan Jews.5 “They have had a taste of all the measures which the Nazis inflict on the Jews who fall within their grasp,” Jacobson said at a press conference, describing how 18,500 Jews (including women and children) were packed into cattle cars and shipped off and that the Gestapo killed at least fifty percent of them when they arrived at the destination. He also went on to say that “Internment camps and forced labor camps exist in Hungary for thousands of Jews. Those who are still at liberty suffer in other ways.”
Jacobson also made a point to note that Jews in other countries in Europe were suffering still harsher fates, if that was possible to believe. The story had all the trappings of front-page piece: it was of a global scale, told of unthinkable horrors committed by a wartime enemy of the United States, and came from a highly reliable source. As an eyewitness to the Nazi horrors, Jacobson stood to open the eyes of Americans who were mostly still ignorant about the situation in Europe. Despite all this, editors at the New York Times found it appropriate to give the massively important story nine short paragraphs relegated to page seven.
At that time, accounts like the one based on the Bund report and that of S.B. Jacobson were bubbling to the surface of the Jewish American press. Jewish readers in the United States began to pay more attention to the catastrophe unfolding in Europe, and it was not long before their collective anger and grief found an outlet in some form of action. In The Abandonment of the Jews, historian David Wyman explains that a few Jewish American groups, including the American Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith, and the Jewish Labor Committee joined forces to organize a New York demonstration in protest of the situation.6 The demonstration, which took place on July 21, 1942, turned out to be huge. At least 20,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden, and an estimated 10,000 more ringed the area around it. President Roosevelt sent a message to be read, and New York notables like Mayor La Guardia turned out to protest.
The rally represented one of the early—and one of the strikingly few—instances where a Holocaust story would make the front page of the New York Times. The article was 2,783 words long, but in all those words the Times report did not make a single mention of the fact that Jews were being mass slaughtered as part of a Nazi racial extermination campaign. In fact, the article took a tone of optimism and led with a quote from Roosevelt’s statement that “The American people will hold the Nazis to strict accountability,” and offered details on how the rally was organized.7 The article provided no background on the situation in Europe and did not reprint information from earlier reports, such as the statistic of the 700,000 murdered Jews, which the paper had only lightly touched on in its June article about the Bund report. Rather, the first paragraph spoke of Roosevelt’s statement; the second paragraph talked of the Jewish organizations involved in the rally; the third “revealed” the large number of Jews fighting for the Allies in Palestine, and the fourth laundry listed some of the rally’s notable attendees. The remainder of the article mostly comprised statements made by speakers and politicians at the event. But even the statements made by Roosevelt and Churchill (which accounted for a large part of the article) said nothing of what was happening in Europe—they spoke only of what would not be allowed to happen. In Roosevelt’s words: “The Nazis will not succeed in exterminating their victims any more than they will succeed in enslaving mankind.” Churchill’s message spoke mainly of Jewish fighters in Palestine.
No mention was made in 2,783 words that genocide was being carried out against the Jews in a campaign that was specifically being waged against them and was independent of the broader war. It was as if the editors and publisher of the New York Times had not actually read their earlier reports about the genocide-level massacre and mass deportation of Europe’s Jews. (Given that the vast majority of these reports were buried as afterthoughts in the final paragraphs of articles on page five, seven, and eleven, maybe they had not.)
Around the time that the Gray Lady was publishing its early, between- the-pages accounts of the Nazis’ war against the Jews, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the paper at that time, was going about life as a major newspaper publisher during wartime. In May 1941, Sulzberger gave a speech at the University of the South on the topic of government censorship during war. Sulzberger expressed his support for a certain amount of domestic censorship in war, saying:
I believe that we can have military censorship and still preserve a large measure of our freedom…I am not at all certain, however, that if we attempt to preserve our freedom by closing our eyes to our responsibilities—by turning away our heads from those who suffer because of that loss of freedom from which we would suffer were we in their place—I cannot believe that under such circumstances we could preserve and keep alive those spiritual values that must be alive when all this nightmare is over.
In light of how Sulzberger’s newspaper covered the Holocaust, sweeping stories of the deaths of 1,000,000 of his own people under the rug of mundane stories like tests on coal and the deaths of individual Icelanders, the statement is devastatingly hypocritical.
Less than two months later, Sulzberger was at another prominent function the New York Times found newsworthy: the marriage of his daughter. The nuptials were a full blown affair, and accordingly, the Times devoted 880 words to the event—more than eight times the amount of space that it gave to the findings of the Bund report, which reported the 700,000-per- son massacre. The wedding article celebrated the marriage of Sulzberger’s daughter Marian to Orvil Dryfoos, who would become publisher of the New York Times in 1961 after being fast-tracked through top positions at the paper.
The gown of the bride was of white taffeta, made with a fitted bodice and a full bouffant skirt, on which were taffeta bows scattered here and there. The bodice was fitted with short puffed sleeves and embellished with a little net yoke and revers of heirloom rose point lace that outlined the V-neck.9
The article continued on about the bride’s dress and then detailed the members of the bridal procession and what each of them wore, going into almost the same level of detailed that was used to describe the bridal gown, noting that “they all wore blue organdie frocks, with a panel of white organdie down the front of their bouffant skirts.”
The same day of the Sulzberger wedding, July 8, 1941, an event of a different type took place. One of the first waves of killings in what would come to be known as the Ponary executions or Ponary massacres was perpetrated by the Nazis in Poland, just outside of Vilnius.10 Polish Jews were brought to the Ponary train station outside of the resort town, where many of them had vacationed before the war. They were made to strip and give up any valuable possessions. They were then lined up in groups of ten around an open pit and shot with such efficiency that it was no stretch to murder a thousand Jews a day at the Ponary station. The Nazi executioners, some of them armed civilians, did not bother to see if the victims were actually dead before throwing a thin layer of dirt over them. The Nazis carried out the execution of more than 70,000 Jews, and 100,000 people in total, at and around Ponary station. The method used on that first day of execution would be the one adopted and then perfected for the remainder of the Ponary executions, which continued for another four years.
