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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]PART TWO: "A PLAN TO EXTERMINATE ALL JEWS"
2. THE NEWS FILTERS OUT
The First Reports and Their Impact[/b]
The perpetrators of annihilation sought to conceal their operations, Even in secret communications, they used code words such as final solution (for systematic extermination) and special treatment (for gassing), They told Jews destined for the death factories in Poland that they were going to labor camps in the East. From time to time, the Germans forced Jews arriving at killing centers to write postdated cards assuring friends and relatives that they were working and living under reasonably good conditions. The efforts at secrecy, along with the location of the killing centers deep inside Nazi-held territory, kept clear information about the annihilation process from reaching the outside world for many months. [1]
But so extensive and sensational a campaign could obviously not be hidden indefinitely, Initially, reports on the massacres were few, like the first spits of snow that hint at what the winter air holds in store. With time, they increased in number and clarity, Even so, throughout the war the regular American newspapers published comparatively few of these disclosures and nearly always relegated them to the inner pages. [2]
Almost from the start, intimations of the bloody swaths cut by the Einsatzgruppen reached the American Jewish press via the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a news bureau with extensive foreign contacts. For instance, in July 1941 the New. York Yiddish dailies revealed that hundreds of Jewish civilians had been massacred by Nazi soldiers in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov, and other places, all within the first thrust of the German attack on Russia. The same papers relayed an August broadcast from Moscow that made essentially the same charges. Several weeks later, to cite only one other example, they carried a summary from the Polish government-in-exile in London telling of the machine-gunning of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland and the Ukraine. In late October 1941, a similar report appeared in a small article inside the New York Times. The story, based on unspecified "reliable sources," drew on eyewitness accounts from Hungarian army officers who had returned to Hungary from Galicia. It included estimates of ten to fifteen thousand Jews killed in Galicia. [3]
During the first half of 1942, disclosures of slaughter on the Russian front continued to reach the United States, along with more and more reports of deportations of Jews to Poland from Slovakia, Germany, and elsewhere. These accounts, many of them taken from Swedish and other neutral newspapers, received wide coverage in the Yiddish and English-language Jewish press and occasionally appeared in major American newspapers. [4]
An extremely trustworthy source of information, used by the New York Times as well as by several Jewish publications, was a New York press conference held by S. Bertrand Jacobson in mid-March 1942. Jacobson was back from Budapest after two years as chief representative in eastern Europe for the relief activities of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He based much of his report on eyewitness statements. Estimating that the Nazis had already massacred 240,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone, Jacobson stated that the killing in eastern Europe was continuing in full fury. Among the most horrifying relevations to appear in the United States until that time (but omitted from the Times's account) was a description by a Hungarian soldier who had seen a vast burial site near Kiev. Seven thousand Jews, some shot dead but others wounded and still alive, had been thrown into the shallow grave and covered thinly with dirt. Burned into the soldier's memory was the sight of that field, "heaving like a living sea." [5]
In discussing the despair that enveloped East European Jews, Jacobson noted that the Jews of Slovakia had already been crowded into concentration centers, most likely a harbinger of wholesale deportation to Poland. In fact, two weeks after he spoke, the deportations began. By June 1942, this forced evacuation would carry away 52,000 of Slovakia's 90,000 Jews. Most went to Auschwitz. A terse message in March from the Slovakian capital to an American relief agency summarized the situation from another perspective: "Bratislava will require no matzoth for Passover this year." [6]
On May 18, the New York Times published a report by Glen Stadler, a UP correspondent caught in Germany when the United States entered the war. In Lisbon with a group of American citizens who had been exchanged for Axis nationals, Stadler revealed reports that German gunners had killed more than 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, nearly that many in Poland, and over twice as many in western Russia. [7]
Sometime that same May, the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland compiled a summary of verified massacres and succeeded in transmitting it, along with an anguished plea for action, to the Polish government in London. The persistence of the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council in London-Szmul Zygielbojm, of the Bund, and Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, of the Zionist group-forced British and American government officials and news media to take notice. The Bund report became the decisive factor in the first breakthrough of extermination news. [8]
In their message, the Jews in Poland traced the path of murder through their country, city by city, region by region, month by month. They described the Chelmno killing center, including the gas vans: "For gassing a special vehicle (gas chamber) was used in which 90 people were loaded at a time.... On the average, 1,000 people were gassed every day." They estimated the number of Polish Jewish victims to be 700,000 already. Their conclusions: Germany had set out to "annihilate all the Jews in Europe" and millions of Polish Jews faced imminent death. To save the remaining Polish Jews, they called on the London Polish government to press the Allies for a policy of immediate retaliation against German citizens living in their countries. [9]
One of the very earliest rescue proposals, the retaliation entreaty seemed plausible to the desperate and despairing Jews in Poland. But it was not feasible. The Germans would have responded with counter-threats against Allied nationals under their control. Furthermore, even had the plan offered some hope of effectiveness, it is inconceivable that the American and British legal systems could have sanctioned the execution of individuals who were not themselves involved in Nazi crimes. [10]
On June 2, shortly after the Bund report reached England, the BBC broadcast its essence, including the estimate of 700,000 Jews killed. But the broadcast did not emphasize the conclusion that an extermination program was under way. A week afterward, the Polish National Council officially informed the Allied governments of the report's contents. On June 25, Zygielbojm released the full document to the press and on the following day broadcast a summary over the BBC. As the month ended, the British section of the World Jewish Congress held a press confer ence in London to which Schwarzbart brought further information on Jewish deaths. He also emphasized the impending extermination of all the European Jews. These efforts brought no reaction from the Allied governments, so the Polish National Council, on July 8, repeated its earlier notice to the Allies and added that it had new evidence of planned destruction of masses of Poles, both Jews and non-Jews. [11]
As the Allied governments marked time, newspapers slowly began to publish the information. Indicative of the early confusion was a UP report from London on June 1. In striking contrast to the figure of 700,000 slain Polish Jews that the BBC would broadcast the next day, it declared that the Nazis had killed 200,000 Jews in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states. The Seattle Times chose this report for its top story on June 1; the paper's main headline read, "JEWS SLAIN TOTAL 200,000!" (It was one of the very few times during World War II when a Holocaust event received a front-page headline in an American metropolitan daily.) [12]
Probably the first American newspaper to carry information on the Bund report was the Boston Globe, in its morning edition of June 26. Relegated to the bottom of page 12, the Globe story was nonetheless noticeable because of its three-column headline: "Mass Murders of Jews in Poland Pass 700,000 Mark." Wired from London by the Overseas News Agency, the dispatch minced no words: "A systematic cam paign for the extermination of the Jews in Poland has resulted in the murder of more than 700,000 in the past year." That evening, the Seattle Times published much the same information, on page 30, under a tiny headline, "700,000 Jews Reported Slain." Originating in London with the Chicago Daily News service, this article characterized the Bund report as "new evidence" of "the systematic extermination of the Jewish population." Polish sources, it stated, spoke of portable gas chambers at Chelmno.
The New York Times devoted two inches to the Bund report on June 27. It had picked up the information from CBS in New York, which had recorded Zygielbojm's BBC broadcast the preceding day. The Times's brief account noted that 700,000 Polish Jews had been slain, and it quoted the broadcast's disclosure that "to accomplish this, prob- ably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed-machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation." Not until July 2 did the Times publish (on page 6) a thorough summary of the Bund report, including details on the mobile gas chambers at Chelmno. [13]
The World Jewish Congress (WJC) press conference, held in London on June 29, generated additional information. Combining the Bund report with other evidence received from the Continent, the WJC com piled a country-by-country summary of the Nazi assault on the Jews. The WJC estimated that the Nazis had already killed over a million Jews, mostly in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and Rumania. (The estimates were low as measured against today's knowledge.) In the words of WJC spokesmen, the Germans had turned eastern Europe into a "vast slaughterhouse for Jews." From Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands, Jews had been deported en masse to Poland to be shot in large groups. All of it, the WJC claimed, was part of a Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews. [14]
Full reports on the WJC press conference were carried on both the AP and the UP wires from London. But few American daily papers printed more than brief notices to the effect that the World Jewish Congress had charged the Germans with killing over one million Jews. [15]
Soon afterward, two authoritative voices in Great Britain reinforced the Bund disclosure of mass murder. In a press conference, the British minister of information, Brendan Bracken, announced that "700,000 Jews alone have been murdered in Poland." He declared in the strongest terms that when the war ended the United Nations would bring to speedy and severe punishment the persons responsible for the war crimes committed in Poland against Jews and against other Poles as well. [i] [16]
And in a special broadcast Arthur Cardinal Hinsley, the seventy-six-year- old archbishop of Westminster and Britain's leading Roman Catholic prelate, stated that "in Poland alone the Nazis have massacred 700,000 Jews." To those who might doubt the charges of Nazi mass atrocities against both Jews and Christians in Poland, Cardinal Hinsley pointed out that some people "reject offhand anything and everything that does not directly touch their own noses" and that others "dismiss even the clearest evidence with the sneer, 'Oh! British propaganda!'" "But," the Cardinal maintained, "mighty is the truth; murder will out." The outspoken Hinsley persisted in decrying the Western world's failure to respond to the slaughter of the Jews until death took him, in March 1943. [17]
Only in early July 1942 did the State Department begin to inquire into the massacres of Jews in eastern Europe. In response, the American minister to Sweden sent information to Washington indicating that at least 284,000 Jews had been executed by the Nazis in areas wrested from the Russians since mid-1941. One Estonian officer who had been with the German occupation forces in the Baltic states reported seeing an SS firing squad force 400 Jews to dig their own graves and then shoot them. Another source cited similar executions elsewhere in the Baltic area and in Kiev. From the American representative to the London Polish government, the State Department received a statement by Schwarzbart based on the Bund report as well as other sources smuggled from Poland. [18]
The flow of news about the European Jewish situation, which had surfaced here and there in the regular newspapers, flooded the American Jewish press. It set off calls for mass protests and for American and United Nations action. The American Jewish Congress, the B'nai B'rith, and the Jewish Labor Committee (later joined by the American Jewish Committee) organized a mass demonstration in New York City, where Americans could express their grief and indignation over the massacres. [19]
On the evening of July 21 -- one day before the eve of Tishab'Ab, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem20,000 people crowded Madison Square Garden, while thousands more stood outside, to protest the Nazi atrocities. Among the main speakers were Rabbi Stephen Wise, Governor Herbert Lehman, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the Methodist bishop Francis McConnell, and William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. [20]
President Roosevelt sent a message in which he expressed the sorrow of all Americans and declared that the American people "will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come." Repeatedly during the evening, the mention of Roosevelt's name set off ovations. A companion message from Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted that "the Jews were Hitler's first victims." Churchill reminded listeners that he and Roosevelt had spoken out on Nazi atrocities nine months earlier and had then resolved "to place retribution for these crimes among major purposes of this war." [21]
The assembly adopted a declaration that hailed the heroic spirit of the trapped Jews and called on the United Nations to take public notice of the Jewish tragedy and to express their determination to bring the Nazis to justice. It pledged that American Jewry would "make every sacrifice to support the United Nations in their struggle for freedom and human decency." [22]
American Jewish organizations expressed satisfaction with the results of the mass meeting, particularly with the strong public assurances from the highest levels that those responsible for the monstrous crimes would be brought to justice. But neither Roosevelt nor Churchill, nor the declaration adopted by the assembly, nor any of the speakers had proposed measures to rescue the Jews still alive in Hider's Europe. Rabbi Wise even asserted that "the salvation of our people and all peoples who would be free can only come under God through a victory speedy and complete of the United Nations." [23]
Did Stephen Wise and the others who said nothing of rescue operations that night really mean that the only way to save Jews from the Nazis was to win the war? Could the trapped Jews look for no efforts to help them throughout the months and years that lay between the summer of 1942 and the Allied victory? Who among them would be alive to see that victory? After many more months and several more shocks, American Jewish leaders would respond to these questions by pressing a program of rescue on the American government. But then other questions would develop: How high a priority would these Jewish leaders place on rescue? What part of their energies and resources would they commit to it?
In July 1942, Jewish leaders may well have been in a state of shock at learning of the huge and still rising Jewish death toll in Europe. They also were sorely worried about the threat to the Jewish settlement in Palestine resulting from the German drive across Africa and toward Suez that summer. Initially, when the war was running heavily in the Germans' favor, the obstacles to mounting potentially effective programs of aid must have seemed insurmountable. Clarification and reassessment could be expected.
Other observances followed the Madison Square Garden demonstration. The Synagogue Council of America called upon all Jewish congregations to make July 23, Tishab'Ab, a day of memorial to the victims of the Nazis, and the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives opened that day's session with a prayer for the murdered Jews. The Federal Council of Churches and the Church Peace Union sent messages of sympathy to the Synagogue Council. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada proclaimed August 12 a day of prayer and fasting. [24]
Other mass meetings were organized to protest the murderous Nazi assault on the Jews. Ten thousand people attended the one held in the Chicago Coliseum, and smaller demonstrations took place in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Hartford, and other cities. At these meetings) mayors, governors, congressmen, labor leaders, and spokesmen for Christian churches joined Jews in expressing sorrow and indignation. In Cincinnati, more than one hundred Protestant ministers endorsed a public statement to the Jews of their community declaring, "We of the Christian ministry cannot and will not remain silent before the spectacle of mass murder suffered by Jews of Nazi-controlled Europe." Expressing insights that should have been obvious, but which seem to have gone widely unrecognized in American Christian circles during World War II, the Cincinnati ministers pointed out:
The mass meetings undoubtedly had some effect on the American public's hitherto nearly complete ignorance about the Jewish catastrophe in Europe. Yet, although well covered in the daily press, the demonstrations fell far short of realizing their full potential for publicizing the disastrous situation. The New York Times, for instance, placed a sizable part of its report on the Madison Square Garden meeting in the middle of page 1. But nothing on that page indicated that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered. In fact, Jews were barely mentioned, and the event came across as no more than a "mass demonstration against Hitler atrocities." The Chicago Tribune provided substantial publicity prior to the Chicago mass meeting, but its report on the demonstration itself, while comprehensive, offered little understanding of what had caused the meeting. The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, publicized the demonstration in Los Angeles for more than a week and made it clear throughout that the issue was "the terrible mass murders of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe." [26]
How deeply did the disclosures about annihilation of the Jews penetrate? Obviously, the answer would differ from individual to individual and from group to group. The extent to which the information spread in the United States, and the related matter of how much credence people actually gave it, crucially influenced the American response to the Holocaust. Those who were concerned that the United States do what was possible to rescue the Jews encountered difficulties on both counts, not only in 1942, when hard evidence first appeared, but throughout the war, and this despite the increasing confirmation that came out of Europe as time passed.
By May 1943, for instance, extensive news had appeared regarding the destruction of European Jewry. Yet Dorothy Day, the leader of the Catholic Worker movement, recalled speaking at a meeting that month at which "a member of the audience arose to protest defense of the Jews and to state emphatically that she did not believe the stories of atrocities.... She was applauded by the several hundred present." "Against such astounding unbelief," Day reflected, "the mind is stunned." [27]
The tendency to discount the extermination reports arose mainly from two causes. First, many people simply could not believe them. They refused to accept the fact that civilized people would commit such barbaric acts. Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm, the men who vouched most strongly for the accuracy of the Jewish Labor Bund's report from Poland, recognized the problem. At a press conference in July 1942, Zygielbojm stated that he realized that the facts "are so horrifying that one may ask if human beings can be degraded to such a brutality." Schwarzbart granted that "it is difficult to grasp that a human being could fall so low as has the contemporary German, educated by Hitlerism. It is difficult to believe these facts-and yet they are true." [28]
Skepticism about the annihilation reports also. stemmed from the abuse of the public's trust by British propagandists during World War I. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor has noted that some of the atrocity charges leveled at Germany in World War I were true but most were inflated; "the violated nuns and babies with their hands cut off were never found." Yet "nearly everyone believed the stories." [29]
During the late 1920s and the 1930s, historians had laid bare the falsity of Britain's World War I atrocity propaganda. By the late 1930s, these exposures had worked their way into the popular mind, and atrocity stories in the first stages of World War II consequently met with much skepticism. As the war ground on, however, and as an increasing volume of information on Nazi crimes against occupied populations issued from numerous trusted sources, and as hatreds built, most Americans came to believe much of the news. Nevertheless, a tendency to see the atrocity reports as at least partly exaggerated persisted throughout the war and weakened the impact of the disclosures. [30]
Besides the problem of the credibility of the reports, two additional factors regarding the flow of information impaired the growth of American concern for rescue. For one thing, only a limited amount of news about the murder of the European Jews reached the American public. The mass media reported it only sporadically and almost always without emphasis. Newspapers printed comparatively little of the available knowledge and commonly buried it in inner pages. Radio seems to have offered even less information. Government-sponsored and independently produced films alike gave almost no hint of the attempt to exterminate the Jews. Mass circulation magazines hardly noticed it. [31]
Of course, Jewish magazines and weekly newspapers and the Yiddish daily press provided thorough coverage of the catastrophe. A few limited- circulation periodicals, such as the Nation and the New Republic, also made readers aware of the issue. But most Christian publications, both Protestant and Catholic, had little or nothing to say. Only a few Christian church leaders tried to inform their constituencies of the Jewish situation in Europe. Except for a small number of voices, those who spoke with the authority of government either kept silent or very infrequently referred to the Jewish disaster. The main American channels for publicizing events did not entirely black out the extermination news, but they did little to bring it to the attention of the public. [32]
The impact of Holocaust information was further diluted by the background against which it appeared. Throughout World War II, reports of Nazi terror against civilian populations in occupied countries repeatedly made the news. Accounts of German reprisals, mass killings of hostages, executions of suspected anti-Nazis, and other atrocities were regular features in newspapers and news magazines. These war crimes most often were related to the Nazi tactic of terror to control populations and to counter sabotage and assassinations.
Several times, disclosures of Nazi mass killing of Jews appeared within stories of the more general German crimes against civilian populations. News services frequently provided summaries of Nazi repression, country by country. Incorporated into these dispatches were accounts of mass executions of Jews. Even when massacres of the Jews were reported separately, they blended into the background of Nazi terror against civilians all across Europe. Thus, quite by chance, widespread Nazi repression of all subject peoples obscured the fact that a distinct program of systematic extermination of Jews was in progress. [33]
In mid-1942, an especially virulent wave of Nazi terrorism swept over Europe. Mass killings of Poles, both Jews and non-Jews, had increased since SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had visited Poland in the spring. Other reports of severe repression came steadily from all across the Continent. In June, the world was stunned to learn that the Germans had obliterated the small Czech mining village of Lidice in reprisal for supposed complicity in the assassination of Heydrich. (The 190 men of Lidice were shot, the women deported, mostly to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and the children dispersed among German families.) [34]
In response to the campaign of intensified terror, and at the initiative of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, the leaders of nine occupied European countries urged President Roosevelt to retaliate for the atrocities. Following State Department advice, Roosevelt rejected the appeal, as well as Sikorski's specific proposal to bomb German cities in reprisal for the mass executions, especially those of Polish Jews. According to the Polish ambassador in Washington, Roosevelt explained that the Allies had not yet attained full air strength and that, furthermore, Germany might respond with an even higher level of terror. [35]
Actually, the Allies were already bombing German cities as a war measure and surely would not have ceased if massacres of the Jews had stopped. In addition, German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels had preempted the issue some weeks before. In mid-June, he had publicly declared that American and British Jews were responsible for the bombing of German cities and that the German people were suffering intensely from the attacks. Germany, said Goebbels, would repay "blow by blow," by "mass extermination of Jews in reprisal for the Allied air bombings of German cities." The Sikorski proposal had reached a standoff. Extermination of the Jews had been going on for a year. Little hope for stopping it could be placed in a tactic already in use against Germany and in response to which a top Nazi promised to exterminate the Jews. [36]
Although Roosevelt did not agree to the call for retaliation against Germany, he again warned the Axis, on August 21,1942, that perpetrators of war crimes would be tried after Germany's defeat and face "fearful retribution." During the rest of the year, American and British officials worked on plans to set up a United Nations commission to investigate war crimes. In October, in the midst of these negotiations, Roosevelt once more spoke out about war crimes, declaring that those responsible would receive "just and sure punishment." But he also announced that mass Allied reprisals would not take place. Neither in this statement nor in the one the President had issued in August did he refer to Jewish victims. During the same months, efforts by the United States and other governments to persuade the Vatican to voice public condemnation of Nazi atrocities against civilians came to nothing. [37]
By the time of the July 21 Madison Square Garden mass meeting, American Jewish leaders and much of the Jewish public recognized that the European Jews were suffering terrible losses. They probably did not realize, however, that Nazi barbarism had actually gone as far as the most horrifying reports indicated. And despite increasing use of the term systematic extermination, none quite understood then that a planned, step-by-step program to annihilate all of European Jewry was in progress. The outlines of that hideous scheme were only vaguely coming into sight.
[b]Destination Unknown[/b]
Within a few days of the July demonstrations, another important dimension of the "final solution" began to become apparent. From the Nazi ,perspective, this development was an obvious part of the extermination plan, but it could not yet be recognized as such from the outside. It was a massive deportation of Jews from western Europe to "an unknown destination" in the East. Labor service was the announced purpose. But in reality these evacuations were part of the Europe-wide transportation of Jews to the still-secret killing centers already in operation in Poland. [38]
The deportations from France in 1942, especially those from the Vichy, or Unoccupied, Zone, were more fully exposed to the scrutiny of the outside world than any other Holocaust development. At work were the usual European news outposts in Switzerland, England, and Sweden. Beyond that, the peculiar status of Vichy France, which was partially autonomous and maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, meant that American newsmen could operate in the Unoccupied Zone, yet bypass Vichy censorship by dispatching their reports from Switzerland. Even closer to the deportation events were Americans and others who had been assisting some of the many thousand Jewish refugees who had earlier fled to France to escape Nazi persecution. These relief workers were in touch with their agencies in other countries and could thus transmit to the outside world detailed information on events in the Unoccupied Zone.
The relief organizations had been active in southern France for some time, helping refugees in applying for visas to countries abroad and in arranging the necessary transportation. After mid-1940, emigration became more and more difficult as overseas nations, the United States included, all but closed their doors to immigration. Accordingly, the relief agencies had increasingly concentrated on supplying food, clothing, and other assistance to the refugees caught in France. By the time the deportations struck, two years of hard work had raised conditions to a barely livable level in the squalid detention camps in which the Vichy government had incarcerated thousands of the fugitives. [39]
Whatever stability Jewish refugees had attained in France was smashed by a series of ruthless roundups that began in mid-July 1942 in the Occupied Zone. Lacking sufficient forces to carry out mass seizures, the Nazis had to secure the collaboration of the Vichy government and the French police. The price of that cooperation was the exemption of French-born Jews from deportation, at least temporarily. Left vulnerable were 75,000 Jewish men, women, and children, most of whom had already endured a variety of hells in their attempts to escape the Nazis. [40]
At four o'clock on the morning of July 16, the trap was sprung in Paris. French police dragnets swept up 13,000 refugee Jews amid scenes of anguish and terror. Buses backed up to apartment buildings and were filled with screaming, crying people. Hospital beds were emptied. A cancer patient operated on the previous day was carried away. One woman gave birth while police waited to haul off mother and baby. Younger children were permitted to be left behind, and many parents desperately accepted that choice in the hope that neighbors or orphanages would take them in. Family groups, comprising some 9,000 people (half of them children), were funneled into the winter sports arena (Velodrome d'Hiver) and penned up like animals. Water and food were scarce; some infants died for lack of milk. Since only ten latrines were available, people stood in line for hours to use the toilet. After five days of this nightmare, adults and children were separated and transferred to different deportation centers to await shipment to Poland. [41]
Relief organizations in the Unoccupied Zone learned later what had become of the children left behind in Paris. Many were hidden. But French police gathered up thousands of others who were found in apartments, wandering the streets, or crying at locked doors of houses. Nearly 4,000 of them, aged two to fourteen, were sent to "unknown destinations," packed into windowless boxcars without adult escort, without food, water, or hygienic provisions, without so much as straw to lie on. They were even without identification. The Nazis had destroyed their papers. [42]
Close to 50,000 refugee Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Occupied Zone, mostly from Paris, before France was liberated in 1944. More than half of them were seized in the roundups of July, August, and September 1942. [43]
Early in August, the Vichy chief of government, Pierre Laval, began the evacuations from the Unoccupied Zone. The Vichy police started with refugees who had already undergone misery and degradation in the internment camps of southern France. In the words of an American relief worker, they were now exposed "like fowl in a chicken pen with a hawk circling overhead, only here very few, if any, escape." [44]
In rapid order, 3,600 Jews were collected from the camps and dispatched to the Occupied Zone for transshipment to Poland. The first train pulled out of the camp at Gurs on August 6, carrying a thousand refugees into the night. Within four days, two more trains swallowed the rest from Les Milles, Rivesaltes, Vernet, and other camps which, though their names had come to mean wretchedness, had not killed all hope of survival. [45]
A French citizen who witnessed a deportation recorded what he saw:
The YMCA's Donald Lowrie, an American relief worker, described the evacuation:
In the first stage of the deportations from Unoccupied France, refugee parents were allowed to leave children under eighteen behind. Fearing the worst from their return into German hands, most chose separation. After watching the leave-taking, relief workers felt they could "never forget the moment when these truck loads of children left the camps, with parents trying in one last gaze to fix an image to last an eternity." Later in August, however, the powers in Vichy betrayed both children and parents with an order requiring deportation of all refugee youngsters. "We are solving the problem humanely," lied the Vichy spokesman. "We want children to go with their parents." Many whose parents had already been carried away were now deported. The others remained in constant danger of evacuation. [47]
After clearing the camps, the Vichy government moved to hunt down the thousands of foreign Jews who had managed to avoid detention or had gained release from the camps before the deportations had commenced. Houses and hotels were searched before dawn. Mass arrests took place. Frantic parents, hearing of the raids, besieged the relief groups, begging them to hide their children. But French police had also started tracking down children who were in orphanages and care homes throughout Vichy France. These roundups of children, frequent in the summer and fall of 1942, continued sporadically throughout the war. This firsthand account is typical:
The great tide of Vichy roundups outside the camps lasted from late August until mid-September 1942. It swept another 7,000 Jews onto trains to Occupied France and then to Auschwitz. These large-scale deportations from the Unoccupied Zone in August and September carried away about 10,600 Jews. Before the Germans were driven from France, nearly 4,000 more were transported to Auschwitz, making a total of over 14,000 delivered to the Nazis from the southern sector of the country. [49]
Shock waves from the calamity that struck in the Unoccupied Zone quickly registered in the offices of relief organizations in the United States. As early as August 10, Donald Lowrie traveled to Geneva to send the first in a series of thorough reports to the YMCA in New York. The New York headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began receiving detailed information by cablegram from its Lisbon office by August 13. Many starkly brief messages of despair were dispatched from Marseilles to the American Friends Service Committee office in Philadelphia. These telegrams reported on people for whom the Quakers had been trying to arrange immigration to the United States. Filed away a generation and a half ago, they may stand as the only epitaphs that scores of Jews ever received. These three are representative:
The deportations were devastating on the personal level, even before people realized that evacuation meant murder by gas. A family that had done everything possible to escape from the Nazi grasp offers an ex ample. The fragments of information that remain show that the S__ family had fled German territory some time before and had made its way to southern France. It succeeded. in moving one young son into safekeeping in Switzerland. And a second boy, C__ , had been lucky enough to reach the United States earlier in 1942. But the parents had to remain in France, even though the relevant American immigration quotas were 90 percent unfilled at the time. The manner in which U.S. immigration laws were administered during World War II kept most refugees out. [51]
After reaching the United States, C__ wrote to his parents several times. He became increasingly concerned when he received no re sponse. The explanation came in November in a letter from C__ 's sponsoring agency in New York to his case worker in the city where he lived with his new foster parents. Enclosed was one of C__ 's letters to his father. The agency worker wrote:
Several other children who reached the United States from south ern France in July 1942 sent postcards to their parents. Most of the cards came back marked "DEPARTED-DESTINATION UNKNOWN." [53]
In France, the deportations brought a barrage of denunciation.-several Roman Catholic prelates, including the archbishops of Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse, protested vigorously. The cardinals and archbishops of the Occupied Zone united in condemnation. [ii] [54][/quote]
A statement by Bishop Pierre Theas, of Montauban, read in all the churches of his diocese, was representative of the attitude of the Catholic leadership:
Pastor Marc Boegner, leader of the Protestant Federation of France, assailed the Vichy government for its collaboration in the roundups and the deportations. With the explicit support of the archbishop of Lyon, Pastor Boegner insisted on an audience with Laval in September in a last, unsuccessful attempt to halt the evacuations. [57]
The outrage of church leaders was shared by many others in the French population. It broke out even within the ranks of the police, many of whom resigned or accepted dismissal rather than round up Jews. The military governor of Lyon was removed because he refused to send his troops to hunt out Jews. [58]
Although the protests failed. to stop the evacuations, they may have contributed to the fact that the Nazis never undertook large-scale removal of France's native-born Jews. Moreover, the denunciations voiced by church leaders and spread by local clergy shattered the secrecy that the Vichy regime tried to impose by banning the news from the French press and radio. Several religious leaders sent out pastoral letters calling on church members to help Jews. Many French families took in Jews and hid them. Children, especially, could be concealed, and, despite some betrayals and disasters, about 8,000 were saved by the combined efforts of Jewish organizations, private families, schools, youth groups, and Catholic convents and monasteries. [59]
Interfaith cooperation flourished. The head of the Jewish Boy Scouts in France came to the leader of a Protestant youth federation and simply stated, "Mademoiselle, I have 600 foreign Boy Scouts to be hidden from the police," They were hidden. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Protestant village, successfully concealed scores of Jews, despite persistent police searches as well as government threats to reduce the town's food rations. Again, a force of Protestant and Catholic social workers broke into a prison in Lyon and "kidnapped" ninety children who were being held there with their parents for deportation. The parents signed releases placing their children under the care of a Christian organization, with the assurance that it was simply acting as a protecting cover. The parents were deported the next day; the children were hidden in convents. When Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, refused an order to surrender the children, Laval struck back by arresting Father Pierre Chaillet, a member of the cardinal's staff. Cardinal Gerlier responded by again instructing the priests in his diocese to conceal Jews. His personal commitment and prestige enabled him to face down Laval; the children remained hidden and Father Chaillet was released. [60]
Americans also spoke out vigorously against the deportations. As soon as they learned of the crisis, American relief workers in France alerted the news agencies and moved to press the issue with the Vichy government. Early in August, Donald Lowrie, a spokesman for several of the relief agencies, and Father Arnou, a special representative of Cardinal Gerlier, saw the chief of state, Marshal Henri Petain. The aged leader, who seemed barely aware of the developments, agreed that the matter was regrettable but indicated that he was helpless to change it. "You know our situation with regard to the Germans," he said. That same day, Roswell McClelland and Lindsley Noble, of the American Friends Service Committee, had a conference with Laval in which he offered no hope of moderation. Instead, he broke into a long tirade against the Jews generally and the damage Jewish refugees allegedly had caused to France. During their visit to Vichy, the American relief workers gave the U.S. embassy its first detailed information about the roundups and evacuations. [61]
Following an exchange of communications with the State Department, Pinkney Tuck, charge d'affaires at the embassy, saw Laval and registered an extremely sharp protest against the "revolting" and "inhuman" treatment of the Jews. In fact, Tuck's deeply felt vehemence disturbed middle-level policymakers in the State Department who complained to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles that Tuck had exceeded his instructions. Tuck, in fact, was even in advance of the leadership of the main American Jewish organizations, which on August 27 submitted a joint letter to the State Department calling on the United States to protest to the Vichy government. Welles replied that the American embassy in Vichy, "in compliance with instructions sent by the Department," had already made "the most vigorous representations possible." [62]
Some two weeks later, Secretary of State Cordell Hull followed up by personally delivering a blunt condemnation of the "revolting and fiendish" deportations to the Vichy ambassador to the United States, Gaston Henry-Haye. (The next day, Henry-Haye privately expressed his own disgust, with respect both to his rough handling by American officials and to the situation in France. He reportedly told a visitor that his ambition when he went back to France was to become a farmer "so that his dealings will be with animals instead of people. He feels that his dealings with people have spoiled his enjoyment of their society.") [63]
While in Vichy to see Petain and Laval, Lowrie and the two American Friends workers had asked the Vichy leaders and the American embassy about the possibility of permitting some of the Jewish refugee children to leave for safety in the United States. Laval offered almost no hope but did not refuse outright. At the suggestion of American relief workers in France, their organizations' home offices appealed to the State Department for 1,000 immigration visas for Jewish children stranded in France. Actively aided by Eleanor Roosevelt and the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, the plea was successful. On September 18, the State Department cabled its consuls in France authorizing the 1,000 visas and instructing the consuls to waive virtually all the usual red tape involved in visa issuance in order to hasten the process. Because of increasingly dire reports from France, the American relief agencies soon asked Washington to raise the number to 5,000. By the end of September, the State Department had compiled. [64]
But the great difficulty was extracting exit visas from the Vichy regime. While the children were being collected and readied, a sleight-of-hand game was played out in Vichy. On September 30, Tuck sought Laval's cooperation. Laval replied that he agreed "in principle" to the exodus of the children, adding, as Tuck reported it, "that he would be only too glad to be rid of them." But when it came to arranging the details with Laval's underlings, it turned out that a combination of German pressure and Vichy recalcitrance had shifted the ground. [65]
Throughout October, the Vichy government stalled on releasing the children, falling back on sham arguments to drag out discussions. Some religious groups, asserted the secretary-general of police, had illegally hidden children. For the government now to allow those children to emigrate would be to justify illegal acts and encourage such conduct in the future. Vichy officials hypocritically spoke of their government's great concern about separating families and its belief that eventual reunion was more likely if the children remained on the same continent as the parents. [66]
Tuck's constant pressure finally wrenched out of Laval a promise of 500 visas. It was then the end of October, and before a convoy of children could be assembled, moved through the documentation process, and placed on a train for Lisbon, the entire project ended precipitously. On November 8, Allied forces landed in French North Africa. The Vichy government severed diplomatic ties with the United States the next day. By then a group of a hundred children with the precious exit visas had reached Marseilles and needed only their U.S. visas. But the American consulate was closed. On November 11, the Germans occupied the southern sector of France and demolished the chances of salvaging anything from the project. Until spring 1944, diplomatic efforts were made, chiefly by the Swiss government, to persuade the Vichy regime to allow at least the promised 500 to leave. These attempts were fruitless. [67]
American newspaper readers in the summer of 1942 could follow the main configurations of the Jewish tragedy in France. Most metropolitan dailies provided fairly thorough coverage of the mass arrests of mid-July in Paris. The fearful and chaotic conditions connected with those roundups appeared in many of the major newspapers, and some of them carried partial descriptions of the Velodrome d'Hiver episode. Almost none reported the barbaric shoving of 4,000 children into boxcars for shipment across the Continent without the necessities of life and without adult escort. But the UP did reveal that outrage, and the Los Angeles Times, for one, ran the dispatch. [68]
The deportations from the camps in southern France and the roundups in the Unoccupied Zone received widespread notice. Nothing specific appeared, however, concerning conditions on the deportation trains. But the protests raised by the French archbishops and other members of the clergy drew repeated coverage. Accounts of the church's role in hiding children and the Vichy government's challenge to the church by arresting a priest also ran in most major newspapers.
Much of the French deportation story thus appeared in the American press. But it was almost never featured. For instance, the New York Times published some twenty-five items but placed only two on the front page. Those reports reached page 1 apparently because they involved leaders of the Catholic church. Even so, each story received only a few inches of type at the foot of the page. One told very little, the other nothing, about what was actually happening to the Jews. Other major newspapers generally conformed to the same pattern. They printed considerable information, but almost always on inner pages, and even there it was often barely noticeable. [69]
In sum, the American daily press carried fuller information on the calamity of the refugee Jews in France than it did on any other development in the Nazi extermination program. As with all news about the Holocaust, though, American newspapers gave this information very limited emphasis.
The disaster that struck France in the summer of 1942 was the most noticeable part of a large wave of deportations from western Europe to the gas chambers in the second half of that year. Though the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway were nearly walled off from the Allied world, bits of information filtered out about the mass arrests and evacuations there. In July a roundup of 60,000 Jews began in Amsterdam. Convoys rolled to the East, despite the protests of Dutch Protestant and Catholic church leaders. Popular demonstrations against the deportations, urged on by broadcasts from the Dutch government-in-exile in England, obliged the Germans to reschedule train deportations for the middle of the night. But the transports continued to move. (The first of the trains to reach Auschwitz from Holland arrived while SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was there on an inspection tour. Himmler observed the whole murder process, from opening the railway cars to removal of the bodies from the gas chamber.) [70]
The few accounts to break out of Belgium mentioned nighttime roundups and mass deportations. Isolated reports from Norway told of the arrest and later removal by Ocean freighter of many members of that country's tiny Jewish population. [71]
The massive deportations from western Europe in 1942 were one step in the still-secret program of genocide. The Nazi explanation -- labor service at an unnamed destination in the East-seemed plausible at the time. It especially appeared to make sense in view of the poor response to the Vichy government's effort to recruit 150,000 French workers to go to Germany to help fill the labor Shortage there. News reports concerning the deported Jews regularly referred to "forced labor" and "slave labor" as their fate, a view that was generally accepted. But some observers, especially those dose enough to witness the events, had doubts. [72]
Commenting in August on the announcement that the Jews were being sent to a labor area in Poland, Donald Lowrie pointed out certain inconsistencies:
Two months later Lowrie was still suspicious, although he did not speculate on what was actually happening:
A Jewish refugee physician working at the Unitarian Service Committee's medical facility in Marseilles had just about figured It out. Months of hoping for a favorable decision on his application for a visa to the United States had run out. Shortly before being forced onto the deportation train, he said, "I waited for the help that was promised.
In the midst of the disclosures from France came news from the London Polish government concerning the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been crowded into the Warsaw ghetto since late 1940. The report revealed that the ghetto mayor, Adam Czerniakow, had committed suicide rather than obey orders to prepare deportation lists that would help the Nazis in their announced plan to evacuate 100,000 Jews to "an undisclosed place in Eastern Europe." (The real destination was death in the killing centers, principally Treblinka. Deportation of the 380,000 Warsaw Jews began on July 22; by the end of 1942, over 310,000 were gone. The remnant included those who would ignite the Warsaw ghetto revolt of April 1943.) [75]
During the summer of 1942, another shocking report was smuggled from Poland by the Jewish Labor Bund, the group that had sent word in May of the murder of 700,000 Polish Jews. A gruesome account of the mass-gassing process at Chelmno, it was the first thorough description of a German killing center to reach the West. The victims, told to undress for a bath, were led down a hallway and suddenly forced into a large truck. Shut and sealed, the truck drove to a deep ditch in a nearby wood, where it became an execution chamber. Exhaust gases killed those trapped inside. A squad of Jewish gravediggers unloaded the bodies. After German workers stripped rings, gold teeth, and other valuables from the corpses, the gravediggers buried the dead Jews in layers in the ditch. Six to nine truckloads were murdered in this way daily. The gravediggers themselves were killed after a time, but three escaped in late January 1942. They succeeded in reporting their experiences to the Polish Jewish underground, which was already aware that thousands of Jews sent to the Chelmno area had disappeared without a trace. [76]
The American affiliate of the Jewish Labor Bund printed the gravediggers' account on August 5, 1942, in a special issue of its publication The Ghetto Speaks. A month later, a closely allied journal, the Workmen's Circle Call, carried the same report, as did the Jewish Frontier.
The American mass media did not mention the gravediggers' revelations. Nor did most of the Jewish press, apparently because the story seemed so incredible. The quandary of the Jewish leadership is illustrated by the case of the Jewish Frontier, an important American labor Zionist monthly. Its editors could not believe the report. (We were then "psychologically unschooled for the new era of mass carnage," explained one of them a quarter of a century later. "Such things did not happen in the twentieth century.") But they hesitated to ignore an account that came from a most dependable underground source. So they compromised by printing the story in small type in the back of the September issue. There it appeared, placed with unintended irony among advertisements bearing New Year's greetings from commercial enterprises. This decision, taken by a conscientious and deeply concerned segment of the American Jewish leadership, was not, as one of the editors later termed it, "gross stupidity." Rather it was a reflection of the confusion that gripped American Jewish leaders when first confronted with explicit descriptions of such unprecedented barbarism."
***
The summer of 1942 revealed disaster after disaster for European Jewry. It was also a time when the war was still running against the United States and its allies. The Germans continued to advance in Russia. The Wehrmacht swept to the Don River early in July and opened the assault on Stalingrad in August. Other forces took Rostov late in July and began to move on the Caucasus oil fields. Rommel's drive across North Africa toward the Suez lifeline and the Mideast reached El Alamein as July opened. Though the Germans were stopped there, the struggle, only 200 miles from the Suez Canal, remained in doubt well into the fall. In the Pacific, the Japanese outward thrust was not halted until June, in the naval battle of Midway. It was August before a limited American offensive, the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, planted the earliest small footholds on the long road back across the Pacific.
But the turning point was approaching. The Russian winter, an ominous threat to the Germans with their overextended supply lines, was approaching. At the start of November, the British would shatter Rommel's forces at El Alamein and Allied troops would storm ashore in northwest Arica. Six months later, the two Allied drives would force the Axis out of Africa. The fight in the Pacific, where the United States applied only 15 percent of its war resources until V-E Day, would be halting and very costly, but the balance was beginning to shift there too.
As the autumn of 1942 unfolded, the situation for America and its allies was becoming more hopeful. For American Jews, though, even more terrible news about the fate of their people in Europe was soon to hit.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] The term United Nations was beginning to be used by early 1942 to refer to the countries allied in the war against the Axis.
[ii] At the time, the American press reported that the Pope protested to the Vichy government three times during August. But apparently this did not happen, for no confirmation of it has been found. [55]
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