Holocaust Remembered: The News Went Nowhere

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, mourning the victims of that atrocity is a compelling act of memory. It would have been better, of course, if, half a century ago, while it was taking place, the Holocaust had been confronted with the focus and conviction that is now being devoted to its remembrance. But that didn’t happen. And in that sad fact lies a tale full of lessons and legacies for ourselves and our time.

By 1942, it was clear to Allied governments that Europe’s Jews were being murdered by Nazi Germany. Reports of mass killings by mobile killing squads in the Soviet Union, and then of the use of gas chambers, were transmitted to Allied capitals. And news of the annihilation of millions of Jews eventually appeared in American and British newspapers.

Yet in government circles and in the press, the information was marginalized and sometimes suppressed. Government officials often dismissed or ignored it, and newspapers relegated the news, when it was given at all, to brief reports. In the summer of 1942, for example, the New York Times reported on an inside page that more than 1 million Jews had been killed.

Even in the midst of a world war, this was major news. Why, then, was so little attention paid to it? Anti-Semitism no doubt played a role. So did the desire by Allied leaders to focus on military matters and to avoid giving the impression, as some had charged, that the war was being fought on behalf of Jewish interests.

Self-censorship on the part of newspapers was also significant. The publisher of the newspaper whose foreign reporting was a model for others--the New York Times--was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, whose family had come to America in the late 17th century, who was less than comfortable with his Jewish identity and who preferred not to focus on matters Jewish. Marvin Kalb has pointed out in a fine paper on the journalism of the Holocaust that, in the New York Times, “the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time.” In the summer of 1944, Kalb notes, the New York Times published “authoritative information” to the effect that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths, but this news appeared as only four inches of copy on Page 12.

But the main reason so little attention was paid in America and Britain to the ferociously focused and industrialized murder of the European Jews was probably the audacious and almost unbelievable nature of this immense genocidal project. How could so civilized and cultured a nation as Germany carry out so savage and inhuman an enterprise?

There’s much to learn from this sad tale of Western inattention to, and sometimes willful ignorance of, the murder of the Jews. But among its lessons is the ease with which governments, as well as institutions and populations, can become bystanders as true evil is carried out. Even if they have information about what is happening, they can find ways, if that information is uninteresting or inconvenient, of not absorbing it.

Some have argued that, in any case, the Allies could have done little more to save Jews than win the war, and that such acts as bombing the rail lines into Auschwitz, if they were possible at all, would have had a value that was more symbolic than practical. Even if this were true, they would have been acts that would have ennobled those who carried them out and given at least some hope to victims, who would have realized that the world was aware of their desperate plight.

One would imagine, in the wake of this history, that evidence of genocide would quickly mobilize nations to effective action. Yet such evidence became available as the genocide in Rwanda unfolded, and it failed to stir the action that could have stopped it. To be sure, the Holocaust was invoked by President Clinton to justify military intervention in Kosovo; but what was happening in Kosovo wasn’t genocide, and the invocation of the Holocaust was used in a circumstance for which it was convenient but to which it simply didn’t apply.

Does this mean that devoting one day a year to commemorating the Holocaust and developing educational institutions and programs to teach about it can have little effect on human responses to real genocide in our time? I don’t think so. Governments, the media and individuals can learn accurate lessons from the past. That they haven’t yet done so adequately doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. And, until they do, all we have is the past to teach us, and the fateful understanding that the stakes are too high to stop trying to learn from it.