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As soon as the Nazis came to power, they began to institute antisemitic measures. Although the first antisemitic laws were not promulgated until early April 1933, from the earliest moments of Hitler’s rule in January 1933 violence against Jews in the form of Einzelaktionen, or “individual” acts of terror and brutality, was an inherent facet of German life. Boycotts of Jewish shops were conducted by the Nazi storm troopers. Jews were beaten and arrested; some were killed and others committed suicide. When the Nazis strengthened and consolidated their rule in the March 5, 1933, elections, outbreaks against Jews increased in intensity. American Ambassador Frederic M. Sackett, who was then preparing to retire from his post, wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that democracy in Germany had been the recipient of a “blow from which it may never recover.”1
Though the press had not previously ignored Hitler’s antisemitism, most of the early reports stressed Nazi action against communists and socialists. It was only after the intensification of the attacks in March that the press began to focus explicit attention on the Jews’ situation. Typical of the vivid press reports sent by reporters on the scene was that by the Chicago Tribune’s Edmond Taylor, who provided readers with a stark description of the “unholy fear” prevailing among German Jews.
On the nights of March 9th and 10th, bands of Nazis throughout Germany carried out wholesale raids to intimidate the opposition, particularly the Jews . . . . Men and women were insulted, slapped [and] punched in the face, hit over the heads with blackjacks, dragged out of their homes in night clothes and otherwise molested. . . . Innocent Jews . . . ‘are taken off to jail and put to work in a concentration camp where you may stay a year without any charge being brought against you.’ Never have I seen law-abiding citizens living in such unholy fear.2
Taylor’s depictions of the systematic persecution faced by Jews and those deemed “opponents” of the regime eventually resulted in his expulsion from Germany. H. R. Knickerbocker, the Berlin correspondent of the New York Evening Post, who was also forced to leave Germany because of official opposition to his reports, provided a similar appraisal.
Not even in Czarist Russia, with its “pale,” have the Jews been subject to a more violent campaign of murderous agitation . . . . An indeterminate number of Jews . . . have been killed. Hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured. Thousands of Jews have fled.
Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood.
All of Germany’s 600,000 Jews are in terror.3
As the news of antisemitic activities reached this country, newspapers in cities large and small responded angrily. The Pittsburgh Sun decried the “acts of revolting cruelty . . . [which] have been committed.” The Poughkeepsie News saw a “tide of Nazi fury” engulfing German Jews and inflicting great “bodily violence” on them. The Toledo Times believed that conditions in Germany were characterized by an “abuse of power, . . . unrestrained cruelty, . . . suppression of individual rights, . . . violent racial and religious prejudices.”4 A midwestern paper was horrified by the reports of “beatings, torture, murder.” According to the Nashville Banner, sentiment in the United States was “solidified in condemnation of Hitler’s atrocious policy.” The New York Times simply wondered how a nation could “suddenly go mad.”5
But the persecution of the Jews constituted only one small segment of the story of Nazi Germany and was never the central theme of the reports about the new regime. News of political upheavals, Hitler’s jockeying for control, the Reichstag fire, the March elections, and the violence perpetrated by groups such as the storm troopers against communists and socialists took precedence. Rarely was news of the persecution of the Jews handled by journalists, particularly by those who viewed the situation from the safety of the United States, as an inherent expression of Nazism. This failure to see Nazi antisemitism as a reflection of the fundamental principles of Nazism was to have important consequences for the interpretation and comprehension of the news of the persecution of European Jewry.
When the first reports from Nazi Germany reached this country, Americans were incredulous. This was not the Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Schiller. The entire situation, not just that of the Jews, rang of chaos and confusion, revolution and upheaval. There were what the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times described as “wild rumors” that the Nazis planned to “massacre Jews and other political opponents.” The whole Jewish population in Germany was living, according to a London Daily Herald report which the Chicago Tribune reprinted, “under the shadow of a campaign of murder which may be initiated within a few hours and cannot at the most be postponed more than a few days.”6 In addition to these extreme reports, there were eyewitness descriptions by returning Americans of what the New York Times described as “atrocities” being inflicted on Jews. A number of Americans were among those who were terrorized and beaten. There was a striking difference between the United Press and New York Times versions of this story. The United Press described “three incidents alleged to have been perpetrated,” while the Times described “three more specific cases of molestation” about which American Consul General George Messersmith had complained to the German Foreign Office.7
Though the news that emerged from Germany during this initial period was not nearly as horrifying as that of subsequent years, a deep-seated American skepticism was already evident. In fact, some Americans were more skeptical about this news than they would be about news of far more terrible magnitude. Ignoring the fact that much of the news was based on eyewitness accounts, editorial boards lamented that the “stories which have trickled through cannot be checked and officially verified.”8
It was quite common to find papers and magazines which were convinced that the situation could not be as bad as the reporters contended. This, in fact, would become one of the recurring themes in the press coverage of the entire period: “Terrible things may be happening but not as terrible as the reports from Germany would have you believe.” The Los Angeles Times, which in mid-March carried exclusive reports of German persecution, a few weeks later told its readers that the “amazing tales of oppression” being brought from Germany by Americans who were visiting or living there were “exaggerated.” On March 26 the Los Angeles Times featured news of a Los Angeles physician who had visited Germany and claimed that the stories were incorrect.9 The New York Herald Tribune did the same on March 25. In a front-page story John Elliott of the Herald Tribune bureau in Berlin complained that while the situation of German Jews was “an unhappy one,” it was exacerbated by the “exaggerated and often unfounded reports of atrocities that have been disseminated abroad.” He dismissed ten cases of American Jews who had been “mishandled” as not an “accurate picture of the position of German Jewry under Hitler.” As proof he cited both the claims of German Jewish organizations that Jews were not being molested and the fact that he was personally “acquainted with members of old Jewish families in Berlin who were so undisturbed by the political change in Germany that they had never even heard of these deeds of violence against their co-religionists.”10 Another doubter, initially, proved to be Frederick Birchall, chief of the New York Times Berlin bureau, who in mid-March assured listeners in a nationwide radio talk broadcast on CBS that Germany was interested only in peace and had no plans to “slaughter” any of its enemies. He acknowledged that there had been persecution but believed that German violence was “spent” and predicted “prosperity and happiness” would prevail.11 (As the situation became worse, Birchall’s doubts would be totally erased.) On March 27, 1933, five days before all Jewish shops in Germany were subjected to a one-day nationwide boycott by the Nazis, the Los Angeles Times announced in a page 1 exclusive “German Violence Subsiding” and “Raids On Jews Declared Over.” The Christian Century, which would emerge as one of the more strident skeptics regarding the accuracy of the reports on Jewish persecution, called for a “tighter curb . . . [on] emotions until the facts are beyond dispute.”12
Other papers expressed their reservations less directly. One paper acknowledged with an almost reluctant air that there “seems to be evidence to support the charges [of brutality against Jews] in the main.” But it then reminded readers that “many of the cruelties charged against Germany in war propaganda were later proved not to have existed.”13 The Columbus (Ohio)Journal also associated these reports of “destruction of property, beatings and blacklisting” with the “exaggerated . . . stories the allies told about German atrocities during the war.” The link with World War I atrocity reports as a means of casting doubt on the current spate of stories was to become a common feature of the American public’s reaction to the news of the Final Solution. By the time World War II began, Americans had determined, according to Journalism Quarterly, “that they would not be such simpletons that they would be fooled again” as they had been in the previous war by the tales of German atrocities.14
The reports on Nazi brutality which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor were also decidedly skeptical in tone.15 In March the paper noted that the Frankfurter Zeitung had condemned as false the stories of the persecution of the Jews which had appeared in foreign newspapers. The Frankfurt paper was described as an “outstandingly outspoken” critic of the regime. The New York Herald Tribune’s John Elliott also cited the Frankfurt paper in his page 1 denial of reports that Jews were being molested. The implication was clear: if a newspaper which had been outspokenly critical of the government claimed that the brutality reports were untrue, then they obviously must be.16 The Chicago Tribune’s Taylor offered a very different assessment of the Frankfurt paper’s denunciation of the foreign coverage. Taylor pointed out that the paper was owned and edited by Jews and noted, not without a touch of sarcasm, that even though German Jewry was “living through the most systematic persecution known since the Middle Ages, and has had a fair taste of physical violence, by its own account it has seen nothing, heard nothing, remembered nothing.” To Taylor it was clear that this myopia was prompted by fear and not by a desire for journalistic accuracy.17 Similarly, the popular and widely syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson, who visited Germany in March 1933, assured her husband, Sinclair Lewis, that the Jews’ situation was “really as bad as the most sensational papers report. . . . It’s an outbreak of sadistic and pathological hatred.” When she returned to the United States she repeated this theme.18
In sum the picture that was drawn in the American press particularly during these early days was a confused one. There was the question of the truthfulness of the reports. Once it became clear that the reports were accurate—though there were those who would never accept them as completely accurate—there was the question of what this meant. Were these attacks actually being perpetrated and directed by the Nazi hierarchy, or had they been inspired by the Nazis’ extreme rhetoric? Was this the result of Nazi government policy, or was it simply an outgrowth of the chaos which often followed a revolutionary change in government? Were these events “boyish tricks” perpetrated by overzealous Nazi enthusiasts, or was this a reign of terror designed and controlled by those at the highest level of authority?
German authorities used a variety of tactics to reinforce American confusion. They followed a policy which the New York Evening Post’s Knickerbocker accurately described as “first, they never happened; second, they will be investigated; third they will never happen again.” In March 1933 a reporter asked Hitler’s foreign press chief, Ernst Hanfstaengl, if the reports “about alleged Jew baiting” were true. Hanfstaengl’s answer was entirely false but typical of the Germans’ tactics in dealing with news they did not wish to be reported. “A few minutes ago, . . . the Chancellor authorized me to tell you that these reports are every one of them base lies.” Hermann Goering also attacked those who had spoken these “horrible lies,” and declared that there were “no plundered, no broken up shops, no warehouses destroyed, robbed or interfered with.”19 Other German officials including Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and Reichsbank President Hjlamar Schacht, who visited the United States, made a point of attacking the news reporters’ credibility. When German officials could not deny the reports, they disavowed responsibility for the outbreaks and blamed them on “all sorts of dark elements” intent on pursuing “their anti-governmental purposes.”20
These protestations of innocence were continuously contradicted by both the recurring cycle of terror and the frequent predictions by Hitler and others in the Nazi hierarchy that the Jewish community in Germany would be “exterminated.” Some reporters tried to alert readers to this cycle of terror and the German duplicity in trying to disclaim responsibility for it. Edwin James, writing in the New York Times, pointed out that though the Germans claimed that “a few individual acts of violence have been grossly exaggerated,” the situation was severe enough for Hitler to have given “official orders” to stop the recurring violence. An Associated Press (AP) dispatch from Berlin in March also took note of the contradiction in Nazi claims. While Hitler instructed storm troopers to “remember their discipline [and] refrain from molesting business life,” Hermann Goering, who was described in the article as Hitler’s “confidential man,” was telling an audience that the police would never be used “as protective troops for Jewish merchants.” At the end of 1933 The Nation noted that this cyclical process continued unabated. Each time violence was reported, the German government “issues denials, punishes Jews for spreading atrocity stories, expels honest correspondents and continues to encourage the very violence and confiscation it is denying.”21Ultimately the reporters stationed in Germany grew so cynical about German disclaimers that when high-ranking officials vigorously denied a report, reporters became convinced that there was some truth to it.22
In June 1933 the New York Times described the denial of the terror as “more shocking” than the terror itself.
Even while Hitler [is denying] that such terror ever existed . . . and perfect calm reigns in Germany, the Collier reporter found the Jewish persecution in full swing and life in Berlin like sitting on the edge of a volcano.23
During this early stage of Nazi rule American officials joined German authorities in shedding doubts on the press reports. In late March 1933 Secretary of State Cordell Hull pressured the press to adopt a “spirit of moderation” and suggested to reporters that conditions in Germany may not have been “accurately” and “authoritatively” reported. He believed that the “gravity” of the press reports was not borne out by the facts.24 Hull apparently was convinced that many of the reports regarding “terror and atrocities which have reached this country have been grossly exaggerated,” despite the fact that American officials in Germany were sending him news to the contrary. George Gordon, American Chargé d’Affaires in Germany, reported to Hull that “numberless sources” agreed that the Jews’ situation was “rapidly taking a turn for the worse.”25 The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune placed Hull’s denials on the front page under headlines which proclaimed the “end” of German violence against Jews. Actually Hull did not succeed in convincing everyone that the violence was “virtually terminated.” Newsweek observed that “no great improvement was evident” in German behavior.26
Hull considered his claims that the severity of the situation had been exaggerated to be in America’s best interest. He told American officials stationed in Germany of his “fear that the continued dissemination of exaggerated reports may prejudice the friendly feelings between the peoples of the two countries and be of doubtful service to anyone.”27 His objective was to “try and calm down the situation created by a lot of extremists in Germany and inflamed by a lot of extremists in this country.”28Hull did not identify the American extremists to whom he was referring, but faulted the press for disseminating “exaggerated” stories.
Rather than exaggerate, American correspondents actually made a concerted effort to modulate the tone of their reports so as not to be accused of fomenting hysteria. Their reports were balanced, reserved and tended toward moderation, not exaggeration. Still, they were often met with skepticism in this country. The task of covering Berlin and being sure that your editors and readers would believe what you were reporting was not an easy one.
Throughout the 1930s American reporters felt sustained pressure both from readers and editorial boards, who wanted them to substantiate their information, and from the Nazis, who denied the veracity of their reports. The Nazis repeatedly accused reporters of lying and admitted doing so. In 1933, after most leading German communists and socialists had been arrested, at a luncheon given by the Foreign Press Association in Berlin for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief told the reporters that he was glad the foreign press was in Germany. They were wonderful scapegoats on whom to blame problems, “now that there was no [political] opposition” in Germany. In a letter to his daughter Betty at the University of Chicago, AP reporter Louis Lochner described problems the Berlin bureau faced in covering politically significant events such as the Reichstag fire trial. (The Reichstag was burned on February 27, 1933. The man accused of setting the fire was charged as a communist, was tried in the fall of 1933, and executed in January 1934.) If the foreign correspondents depended on German press reports, they only heard what pleased the Nazis. A correspondent who tried to present what Lochner described as a “fair picture of the trial, objectively giving what is said on both sides,” was immediately branded by the German press as a Greuelhetzer (atrocity monger).29 And as the decade wore on, the atmosphere the American reporters worked in became worse.
In May of 1933 Messersmith reported to the Secretary of State that ever since the Nazis’ rise to power, the situation of “a number of the American correspondents in Berlin has not been easy.” Because of the Nazi determination not to allow “undesirable news [to reach] . . . the outside world through the foreign correspondents,” the press was often censored.30*
Even when there was no overt censorship, the reporters stationed in Germany had to walk a “dangerous and difficult path” in order to avoid being prevented from sending their reports, thrown out of the country, or even thrown in Nazi prisons. The Nazis would “punish” reporters they deemed guilty of sending “atrocity stories” by banning their papers from Germany and preventing them from using the German mails, as was done to the Manchester Guardian in April 1933. Reporters’ lives were further complicated by an elaborate spy system that placed Nazi sources in their offices and homes. In Germany Will Try Again, the Chicago Tribune’s veteran Berlin correspondent Sigrid Schultz described how her maid became a “servant in the Gestapo system,” keeping tabs on her mail, telephone conversations, and visitors. Certain reporters, including the Chicago Daily News’s Edgar Mowrer, had SS men stationed outside their home as a means of limiting their freedom of movement.32 The Nazis, anxious to get Mowrer out of Germany, first tried to pressure him to resign his position as president of the prestigious Association of Foreign Correspondents in Berlin. When his colleagues refused to accept his resignation, the Nazis left him alone for a few months. But in August German embassy officials began to urge Secretary of State Hull to “facilitate or encourage” Mowrer’s departure from Germany. After some consideration, the State Department decided that it would not be “appropriate” to approach the Chicago Daily News and suggest Mowrer’s removal. German officials in Washington then went straight to Frank Knox, the paper’s publisher, and with a combination of “argument and veiled threats” convinced him to pull Mowrer out of Berlin. Earlier in 1933 the Germans had tried to do the same thing to H. R. Knickerbocker, but his paper had refused to recall him. In Mowrer’s case it appears that Knox, who had visited Nazi Germany earlier that year, was genuinely concerned about his safety and feared that the Nazis would use the forthcoming party rally which was held annually at Nuremberg to inflict bodily harm on him.33
William Shirer, who reported from Berlin for Universal Service and for International News Service (INS), the chief Hearst wire service, before joining CBS, described his experience in Berlin as “walking a real, if ill defined, line.” The line was real for every correspondent, and any one of them who strayed too far on what the Nazis considered the wrong side of it faced outright expulsion or even jail. S. Miles Bouton, the Berlin correspondent for the Baltimore Times for over a decade, was instructed by the German Foreign Office in March 1934 to “change his style of reporting or leave the country.” He chose to do the latter. Howard K. Smith has recalled another tactic of the Nazis: they would “entrap” certain reporters by making sure that they broke some obscure law or regulation. One common maneuver was to informally tell the reporters that a certain bank was offering a particularly high rate of exchange as a service to correspondents. Reporters would use the bank freely until suddenly one would be arrested and informed that he or she was breaking a little-known law regarding exchange rates. Other reporters were sent incriminating documents and then accused of spying. Sometimes the arrest was random, as in the case of Richard C. Hottelet of the United Press, who was arrested shortly after the beginning of the German invasion of Russian-occupied Poland and held for several months prior to being exchanged for some Germans being held in the United States. Hottelet believes that this arrest had little to do with what he wrote but was in retaliation for the arrest of certain German reporters in America on charges of espionage. Howard K. Smith believes Hottelet was arrested in order to intimidate the other American reporters still in Germany.34
Expulsion was not a badge of honor for foreign correspondents. They were quite anxious to avoid it because they were never “sure [their] newspapers would understand” or forgive them if they were forced to leave.35 G. E. R. Gedye, whose dispatches from Vienna appeared in the New York Times and London Daily Telegraph, described the price a foreign correspondent had to pay for the freedom to cover an exciting and controversial beat: “keep out of politics. It is a necessary price, but on occasions it is a hard one to pay . . . . When I failed to pay the price . . . [I] had no excuse to offer my newspaper if I . . . got into a mess.”36As it happened, shortly after the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Gedye was ejected from the country because of his dispatches. In his autobiography AP’s Louis Lochner summarized the orders he and his colleagues received from their superiors as orders “to tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts.” Ejection was, according to Lochner, “the one thing our superiors did NOT want.”37*
In What About Germany?, written immediately after his return from Germany in 1942, Lochner described how even though he would “write a story, discuss every word of it in a staff conference, revamp and modify it” in order to avoid any challenge from Nazi officials, he would still “leave the office with the uneasy feeling that we would be called to the Wilhelmstrasse the next morning and chided for our ‘Offense’ if not threatened with ejection.” Howard K. Smith recalled how, once a story was published in America, if a local consul discovered that it contained “something objectionable,” he would report to officials in Berlin, who in turn would call in the reporter and mete out punishment ranging from a “polite wrist-slap to banishment from Germany.” Percy Knauth and C. Brooks Peters, both of whom worked for the New York Times Berlin bureau, described how they would periodically be called to the Foreign Office or Propaganda Ministry to be “chewed out” for something they included in a dispatch. Sigrid Schultz was summoned to the Gestapo and berated several times for stories that the Germans said were “insulting.” Another tactic used by the Nazis was to refuse to grant a reporter a reentry visa after he or she had completed a vacation or assignment outside of Germany. They did this to Otto Tolischus and tried to do it to Schultz.39
Correspondents knew that there was little help they could expect from Washington if they got into trouble. When State Department officials, such as Undersecretary of State William Phillips, visited Berlin, they made it quite clear to the reporters that Washington would take no action if the Nazis expelled or arrested reporters. A number of reporters, including Mowrer, Knickerbocker, and Shirer, considered Consul General George Messersmith, Commercial Attaché Douglas Miller, and Consul Raymond Geist not only good sources of information about the Nazis, but among the few diplomats likely to come to a correspondent’s aid in case of difficulty with the regime. Even Ambassador William Dodd, a fierce anti-Nazi, was not always willing to aid a reporter who had problems with Nazi officials.40
When reporters were able to bypass the censorship and explicitly describe conditions, they still had to contend with other obstacles, most notably the concerted German effort to discredit stories critical of the Reich, on the one hand, and the American skepticism that these stories just could not be true, on the other. When Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, reported in March 1933 that Germany had become an “insane asylum,” even his brother who served as the paper’s correspondent in Paris thought he was “breaking under the strain.” Allen Dulles of the State Department visited Berlin and told Mowrer that he “was taking the German situation too seriously.” Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, was also convinced that Mowrer was exaggerating. Knox changed his mind when he visited Germany in 1933 and saw the situation first hand.41
The Germans further complicated the reporters’ task by repeatedly charging that they were not telling the truth. Various sources—both diplomats and visiting American journalists—defended the integrity of the journalists. American embassy officials in Berlin assured Washington that the correspondents stationed there included some of the most respected and accomplished individuals in their field. Their reports were considered by those familiar with the situation in Germany as “more truthful and less sensational” than those of many European newspapers.42 The Manchester Guardian believed that American and British reporters had understated, rather than inflated, the facts about the “terror,” not because they doubted its existence, but because so much of it was hidden and difficult to document. Indicative of the care exerted by the New York Times was the fact that for over two months in 1933 it refused to publish a story on Jews’ being subjected to various indignities until it could obtain independent confirmation.43 Edgar Mowrer, accused by Dulles and his own brother of exaggerating the severity of developments, was also one of those who actually underplayed the German terror. His wife recalled how he often chose not to tell the story of concentration camp victims who returned to their homes with “horrible wounds” because he feared it would further exacerbate their situation.44
Mowrer was not alone in adopting this policy. At the end of March 1933 Consul George Messersmith wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that “American correspondents in Berlin have brought to my attention cases of maltreatment of all sorts of persons of various nationalities which they have personally investigated and found correct but which more recently they have not been able to publish” because of fear of the consequences to themselves and the victims. Messersmith expressed his “confidence” in these correspondents and their reports.45 Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, who was in Germany in 1933, described American and British correspondents as having “kept their heads in trying circumstances.” Armstrong was particularly impressed by the fact that reporters sent their papers “documented accounts of specific acts of violence” and statements by Nazi leaders “explaining and justifying” this behavior. Many years later he recalled how correspondents would avoid trying to interpret events for their readers because the obvious interpretations seemed so outlandish, and instead would simply quote statements by Nazi leaders. These leaders often admitted that the events had happened just as the reporters had claimed. Ambassador Dodd’s daughter, Martha, acknowledged that while reporters occasionally chased down “stories that were clearly implausible,” the portrait they painted of Nazi Germany represented an “accurate picture of what was happening there.”46
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.
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, enthusiasm 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
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
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
But it was not only tourists and students who praised conditions in Germany. Americans with business there did so as well. Sometimes this resulted from what the American Consul General in Berlin described as “real pressure” placed on American businessmen and exchange professors by German officials to “send statements which would not give a really correct picture of the situation.”70 When these Americans returned home, they often told their local paper a very different and far more positive story than the one being carried by the news services. The praise by some came of their own volition and they had no ulterior motive; others had an economic motive for praising Germany. Sigrid Schultz claimed that many American businessmen were lured into snapping up “lucrative contracts” proffered by Nazi business interests and then threatened by Nazis that irregularities in these deals would be exposed if they failed to publicly extol Germany.71
The American business community was impressed by the way in which Hitler was directing Germany’s economic recovery.72 Business Week believed that in terms of economic programs, “in many ways the Hitler administration is paralleling the Roosevelt administration.” By the end of 1934 there was a general consensus in much of the American business community that the recovery in Germany was healthier than in the United States. Germany managed to reduce the number of jobless from 6 million in 1933 to 1.17 million by the summer of 1936. The armament program, road-building projects, and forced sharing of work continued to whittle away at the number of unemployed, so that by 1937 joblessness was not a problem for Germany. The American business world envied the increasingly improving economic conditions enjoyed by the Reich. (By the mid-1930s, however, many business publications, while strongly isolationist, were critical of German economic affairs because of their highly controlled nature. The business press was also disturbed because of the demise of a free press in Germany.)73 There were numerous American firms with extensive business interests in Germany. One American company was making more than half of all the passenger cars in Germany, another was building the ambulances for the Wehrmacht, still another had 20,000 filling stations, and many others had millions of dollars invested in all sorts of plants and equipment. According to Douglas Miller, American Commercial Attaché in Berlin, all these firms were “peculiarly subject to pressure and threats from Nazi quarters.”74
Thus, even as much of the press was telling one story, visitors, businessmen, and German propaganda mills were telling another. But they were not the only ones who related wondrous accounts of life in Germany. The Christian Science Monitor seemed particularly intent on describing life in Germany as “normal and serene.” Praise of Germany’s natural beauty and social order was to be frequently found in its news and editorial columns. In August 1933 a two-part, unsigned series entitled “A Traveler Visits Germany” told of a satisfied, industrious, contented nation whose populace was fully devoted to the Nazis: “The train arrived punctually . . . . traffic was well regulated . . . . An occasional mounted policeman in smart blue uniform was to be seen . . . . street cafes are busy.” Even the infamous Brown Shirts emerged in a benevolent light. They behaved like they were “members of some student corps.” Little seemed amiss: “I have so far found quietness, order and civility.” This traveler found “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.” Doubts were also cast upon the tales of Jewish suffering. The “harrowing stories” of Jews “deprived of their occupations” applied, the reporter assured readers, “only to a small proportion of the members of this . . . community.” Most Jews were “not in any way molested.”75
Other papers and journals were reporting a strikingly different story. At the same time that the Christian Science Monitor’s traveler was painting a portrait of a Germany peaceful, joyous, on the road to recovery, and above all united behind Hitler, who was bringing to a “dark land a clear light of hope,” Newsweek reported the arrest of 200 Jewish merchants in Nuremberg who were accused of “profiteering,” beatings inflicted on American Jews who were in Berlin, and the closing of Jewish Telegraphic Agency offices in Germany.76 Hamilton Fish Armstrong described the red proclamation affixed to the door of the Jewish research institute, the Berlin Hochschule, and the doors of similar institutions throughout the Reich proclaiming the Jew as the enemy of German thought and culture. By this time the Los Angeles Times had reversed its stand, and now branded Hitler’s denial of antisemitic persecution as “feeble and unconvincing.” The Los Angeles Times carried the harrowing description of how a young German woman was publicly humiliated for spending time with a Jewish man. Her head was shaved clean, and she was forced to march through a hostile crowd wearing a placard stating “I have offered myself to a Jew.” The incident was witnessed by a number of American correspondents including Quentin Reynolds, who was touring the area with Ambassador Dodd’s children. In a series of front-page stories the Los Angeles Times described the “campaign of indignities” against German girls who kept company with Jewish boys. It featured “documentary evidence” of this campaign in the form of a card given to these girls threatening them with violence if they continued this practice.77
Some papers and journalists who acknowledged that persecution existed still maintained a benevolent attitude toward Nazi Germany. This was particularly the case when their support of Germany had an ideological basis. Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, visited Germany in August 1933 and wrote a series of three articles about what he saw. He found a reign of terror which placed “suspected Communists, members of former opposition parties and all Jews . . . in constant danger.” McCormick’s comments are particularly important in light of the fact that the Tribune considered Hitler a force against communism and supported him as such.78* Even The Christian Century, which had been and would continue to be skeptical about the accuracy of the reports of persecution, momentarily set aside its dubiousness when Paul Hutchinson, an editor of the journal, returned from visiting Germany to report that “the actual brutalities inflicted on Jews, socialists, communists and pacifists have been even more severe than the American press has published.”80
But these negative assessments of German life did not dispel the doubts of some of those who had not personally witnessed these developments. As late as 1935, when America’s participation in the Olympics was being vigorously debated, some papers opposed the boycott because, they said, the news from Germany regarding the treatment of Jews was unsubstantiated “hearsay” on the basis of which it would be wrong to withdraw. A similar argument was made in the summer of 1935 by the Minneapolis Tribune after AFL President William Green recommended that Americans boycott Germany. Ignoring the numerous eyewitness accounts of events in Germany, it argued that a boycott would mean “involving this country in a dispute about which it has little accurate information.” Earlier that year, in January, an article in Harper’s observed that when it came to press reports of Nazi persecution of Jews “what relation the news we get on the subject bears to the truth cannot be accurately calculated.”81
By this point in time extensive accounts of the riots and other violent outbreaks in Germany, many of which SS officials had verified, had appeared in the press. Various legal and quasi-legal actions against Jews had been announced by German officials and reported by the German news agency. Nonetheless, there was a feeling in much of the press that America did not really have completely “accurate information” about the persecution of the Jews. There were papers, such as the Philadelphia Record and New York Evening Post, which dismissed German attempts to deny the persecution as “absurd statements.”82 More prevalent, however, was a state of skepticism and confusion about whether things were as bad as reported. Even while they condemned the Nazis’ brutality, editorial boards expressed reservations about the accounts of brutality because they seemed beyond the pale of believability. Initial doubts regarding the veracity of the reports notwithstanding, the abundance of detail and eyewitness accounts constituted strong evidence of persecution. Most papers were never totally swayed by German denials and generally agreed that the accounts of what had been perpetrated upon a “defenseless Jewry” were too numerous and similar to believe “the blanket denial” offered by German officials. However, they also seemed never to fully accept the accuracy of the reports.83 Newspaper stories and editorials increasingly echoed the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s assessment that while the reports of persecution, including looting and even murder, might be “somewhat exaggerated,” they nonetheless demanded attention because they were so “uniform in tenor.” The press did not doubt that terrible things were happening, but its belief was a grudging belief, sometimes bordering on disbelief. As one paper expressed it, “when there is so much smoke there must be some fire.”84
This persistent incredulity would not fade with the passage of time, but would instead come to characterize the American reaction to Nazi persecution. Often this skepticism persisted in the face of detailed information to the contrary. In February 1939, three months after Kristallnacht, Quentin Reynolds, writing in Collier’s, noted that since that pogrom, which had been described in great detail in practically every American paper and magazine, the “plague of hate” against Jews had grown “in intensity every day.” Nonetheless “there are those,” he complained, “in England and in America who shrug complacent shoulders and who say: Oh things can’t be as bad as we hear.’” The truth was, Reynolds observed, the Jews’ plight was “actually much worse than we have heard.”85
Over the course of the years to 1945 the details would multiply, but the doubts would never be completely erased. By early in the Nazis’ rule a pattern had emerged which would characterize the reaction of the press as well as the public to the entire Nazi persecution. Americans did not doubt that things were difficult for the Jews but seemed reluctant to believe that they were as bad as reporters on the scene claimed. Whether the story was of Jewish judges being dragged from their courtrooms or Jews being rounded up and shot en masse, the news was greeted with both horror and disbelief, condemnation and skepticism.