The Holocaust in American Life

Mariner Books

Chapter One

"We Knew in a General Way"

We begin at the beginning, with the response of Americangentiles and Jews to the Holocaust while the killing wasgoing on. Though we'll be concerned mostly with how theHolocaust was talked about after 1945, the wartime years are theappropriate starting point. They were the point of departure for subsequentframing and representing, centering or marginalizing, andusing for various purposes the story of the destruction of EuropeanJewry.

    At the same time, America's wartime response to the Holocaust iswhat a great deal of later Holocaust discourse in the United States hasbeen about. The most common version tells of the culpable, sometimeswilled obliviousness of American gentiles to the murder of EuropeanJews; the indifference to their brethren's fate by a timid andself-absorbed American Jewry; the "abandonment of the Jews" by theRoosevelt administration ? a refusal to seize opportunities for rescue,which made the United States a passive accomplice in the crime.

    By the 1970s and 1980s the Holocaust had become a shocking, massive,and distinctive thing: clearly marked off, qualitatively andquantitatively, from other Nazi atrocities and from previous Jewishpersecutions, singular in its scope, its symbolism, and its world-historicalsignificance. This way of looking at it is nowadays regarded as bothproper and natural, the "normal human response." But this was notthe response of most Americans, even of American Jews, while theHolocaust was being carried out. Not only did the Holocaust have nowherenear the centrality in consciousness that it had from the 1970son, but for the overwhelming majority of Americans ? and, onceagain, this included a great many Jews as well ? it barely existed as asingular event in its own right. The murderous actions of the Naziregime, which killed between five and six million European Jews, wereall too real. But "the Holocaust," as we speak of it today, was largely aretrospective construction, something that would not have been recognizableto most people at the time. To speak of "the Holocaust" as adistinct entity, which Americans responded to (or failed to respond to)in various ways, is to introduce an anachronism that stands in the wayof understanding contemporary responses.

    The sheer number of victims of the Holocaust continues to inspireawe: between five and six million. But the Holocaust took place ? weknow this, of course, but we don't often think of its implications ? inthe midst of a global war that eventually killed between fifty and sixtymillion people. There are those for whom any such contextualizationis a trivializing of the Holocaust, a tacit denial of the special circumstancessurrounding the destruction of European Jewry. Certainlysuch contextualization can be used for these purposes, as when theFrench rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen dismisses the Holocaust as a mere"detail" of the history of the Second World War. But it was the overallcourse of the war that dominated the minds of Americans in the earlyforties. Unless we keep that in mind, we will never understand how theHolocaust came to be swallowed up in the larger carnage surroundingit. By itself, the fact that during the war, and for some time thereafter,there was no agreed-upon word for the murder of Europe's Jews is notall that significant. What is perhaps of some importance is that insofaras the word "holocaust" (lowercase) was employed during the war, as itoccasionally was, it was almost always applied to the totality of thedestruction wrought by the Axis, not to the special fate of the Jews. Thisusage is emblematic of wartime perceptions of what we now single outas "the Holocaust."

    There are many different dimensions to the wartime marginality ofthe Holocaust in the American mind: what one knew, and what onebelieved; how to frame what one knew or believed; devising an appropriateresponse. In principle these questions are separable; in practicethey were inextricably entwined. In this chapter we'll look at the perceptionsand responses of the American people as a whole; in Chapter2, at American Jews; in Chapter 3, at the American government.

Although no one could imagine its end result, all Americans ? Jewsand gentiles alike ? were well aware of Nazi anti-Semitism from theregime's beginning in 1933, if not earlier. Prewar Nazi actions againstJews, from early discriminatory measures to the enactment of theNuremberg Laws in 1935 and culminating in Kristallnacht in 1938, werewidely reported in the American press and repeatedly denounced at alllevels of American society. No one doubted that Jews were high onthe list of actual and potential victims of Nazism, but it was a long list,and Jews, by some measures, were not at the top. Despite Nazi attemptsto keep secret what went on in concentration camps in thethirties, their horrors were known in the West, and were the mainsymbol of Nazi brutality. But until late 1938 there were few Jews, asJews, among those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in the camps.The victims were overwhelmingly Communists, socialists, tradeunionists, and other political opponents of the Hitler regime. And itwas to be another four years before the special fate that Hitler had reservedfor the Jews of Europe became known in the West.

    The point should be underlined: from early 1933 to late 1942 ? morethan three quarters of the twelve years of Hitler's Thousand - YearReich ? Jews were, quite reasonably, seen as among but by no means asthe singled-out victims of the Nazi regime. This was the all-but-universalperception of American gentiles; it was the perception ofmany American Jews as well. By the time the news of the mass murderof Jews emerged in the middle of the war, those who had been followingthe crimes of the Nazis for ten years readily and naturally assimilatedit to the already-existing framework.

    Only in the aftermath of Kristallnacht were large numbers ofJews added to the camp populations, and even then for the mostpart briefly, as part of a German policy of pressuring Jews to emigrate.Up to that point, German Jewish deaths were a tiny fraction ofthose inflicted on Jews by murderous bands of Ukrainian anti-Sovietforces twenty years earlier. Though American Jews responded withdeeper dismay and horror to prewar Nazi anti-Semitism than did gentileAmericans, their reaction was not unmixed with a certain wearyfatalism: such periods had recurred over the centuries; they wouldpass; in the meantime one did what one could and waited for betterdays.

    In the West, the onset of the war resulted in less rather than moreattention being paid to the fate of the Jews. The beginning of the militarystruggle ? and dramatic dispatches from the battlefronts ? droveJewish persecution from the front pages and from public consciousness.Kristallnacht, in which dozens of Jews were killed, had been onthe front page of the New York Times for more than a week; as thewartime Jewish death toll passed through thousands and into millions,it was never again featured so prominently.

    From the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1941 everyone's attentionwas riveted on military events: the war at sea, the fall of France,the Battle of Britain, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. AsAmericans confronted what appeared to be the imminent prospect ofunchallenged Nazi dominion over the entire European continent, itwas hardly surprising that except for some Jews, few paid much attentionto what was happening to Europe's Jewish population under Nazirule. That the ghettoization of Polish Jewry and the deportation ofGerman and Austrian Jews to Polish ghettos had brought enormoussuffering no one doubted. Beyond this, little was known with any certainty,and the fragmentary reports reaching the West were often contradictory.Thus in December 1939 a press agency first estimated that aquarter of a million Jews had been killed; two weeks later the agencyreported that losses were about one tenth that number. (Similar wildlydiffering estimates recurred throughout the war, no doubt leadingmany to suspend judgment on the facts and suspect exaggeration. InMarch 1943 The Nation wrote of seven thousand Jews being massacredeach week, while The New Republic used the same figure as a conservativedaily estimate.)

    In the course of 1940, 1941, and 1942 reports of atrocities againstJews began to accumulate. But these, like the numbers cited, wereoften contradictory. In the nature of the situation, there were no firsthandreports from Western journalists. Rather, they came from ahandful of Jews who had escaped, from underground sources, fromanonymous German informants, and, perhaps most unreliable of all,from the Soviet government. If, as many suspected, the Soviets werelying about the Katyn Forest massacre, why not preserve a healthyskepticism when they spoke of Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews?Thus, after the Soviet recapture of Kiev, the New York Timescorrespondent traveling with the Red Army underlined that while Sovietofficials claimed that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed at BabiYar, "no witnesses to the shooting ... talked with the correspondents";"it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity ofthe story told to us"; "there is little evidence in the ravine to prove ordisprove the story."

    The most important single report on the Holocaust that reachedthe West came from a then-anonymous German businessman, andwas passed on in mid-1942 by Gerhard Riegner, representative of theWorld Jewish Congress in Switzerland. But Riegner forwarded thereport "with due reserve" concerning its truth. Though the main outlinesof the mass-murder campaign reported by Riegner were alltoo true, his informant also claimed to have "personal knowledge" ofthe rendering of Jewish corpses into soap ? a grisly symbol of Naziatrocity now dismissed as without foundation by historians of theHolocaust. By the fall of 1943, more than a year after Riegner's informationwas transmitted, an internal U.S. State Department memorandumconcluded that the reports were "essentially correct." But it washard to quarrel with the accompanying observation that the 1942 reportswere "at times confused and contradictory" and that they "incorporatedstories which were obviously left over from the horror tales ofthe last war."

    Such embellishments as the soap story furthered a will to disbelievethat was common among Jews and gentiles ? an understandable attitude.Who, after all, would want to think that such things were true?Who would not welcome an opportunity to believe that while terriblethings were happening, their scale was being exaggerated; that muchof what was being said was war propaganda that the prudent readershould discount? One British diplomat, skeptical of the Soviet storyabout Babi Yar, observed that "we ourselves put out rumours of atrocitiesand horrors for various purposes, and I have no doubt this game iswidely played." Indeed, officials of both the U.S. Office of War Informationand the British Ministry of Information ultimately concludedthat though the facts of the Holocaust appeared to be confirmed, theywere so likely to be thought exaggerated that the agencies would losecredibility by disseminating them.

    If American newspapers published relatively little about the ongoingHolocaust, it was in part because there was little hard news about itto present ? only secondhand and thirdhand reports of problematicauthenticity. News is event-, not process-oriented: bombing raids, invasions,and naval battles are the stuff of news, not delayed, oftenhearsay accounts of the wheels of the murder machine grinding relentlesslyon. And for senior news editors the experience of havingbeen bamboozled by propaganda during the First World War was notsomething they'd read about in history books; they had themselvesbeen made to appear foolish by gullibly swallowing fake atrocity stories,and they weren't going to let it happen again.

    Perhaps another reason for limited press attention to the continuingmurder of European Jewry was that, in a sense, it didn't seeminteresting. This is not a decadent aestheticism but is in the very natureof "the interesting": something that violates our expectations. Weare interested in the televangelist caught with the bimbo, the gangsterwho is devout in his religious observance: vice where we expect virtue,virtue where we expect vice; that which shatters our preconceptions.To a generation that was not witness to the apparently limitless depravityof the Nazi regime, the Holocaust may tell us something aboutwhat mankind is capable of. But Americans in the early forties took itfor granted that Nazism was the embodiment of absolute evil, even ifthe sheer scale of its crimes was not appreciated. The repetition of exampleswas not, as a result, "interesting." (For some dedicated anti-Communists,including a number of Jewish intellectuals writing forPartisan Review and The New Leader, it was Soviet iniquity,played down in the press during the wartime Russian-American honeymoon,that was more interesting, and more in need of exposure.)

    Throughout the war few Americans were aware of the scale of theEuropean Jewish catastrophe. By late 1944 three quarters of the Americanpopulation believed that the Germans had "murdered many peoplein concentration camps," but of those willing to estimate howmany had been killed, most thought it was 100,000 or fewer. By May1945, at the end of the war in Europe, most people guessed that abouta million (including, it should be noted, both Jews and non-Jews) hadbeen killed in the camps. That the man in the street was ill informedabout the Holocaust, as about so much else, is hardly shocking. Butlack of awareness was common among the highly placed and generallyknowledgeable as well: only at the very end of the war did ignorancedissipate. William Casey, later the director of the Central IntelligenceAgency, was head of secret intelligence in the European theater for theOffice of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.

The most devastating experience of the war for most of us was the first visit to a concentration camp.... We knew in a general way that Jews were being persecuted, that they were being rounded up ... and that brutality and murder took place at these camps. But few if any comprehended the appalling magnitude of it. It wasn't sufficiently real to stand out from the general brutality and slaughter which is war.

William L. Shirer, the best-selling author of Berlin Diary, who duringthe war was a European correspondent for CBS, reported that it wasonly at the end of 1945 that he learned "for sure" about the Holocaust;the news burst upon him "like a thunderbolt."

    How many Americans had knowledge of the Holocaust while it wasgoing on is as much a semantic as a quantitative question. It calls fordistinctions among varieties of awareness, consciousness, belief, attention.There was an inclination on the part of many to avert their eyesfrom things too painful to contemplate. Life magazine, in 1945, printeda letter from a distressed reader:

Why, oh why, did you have to print that picture? The truth of the atrocity is there and can never be erased from the minds of the American people, but why can't we be spared some of it? The stories are awful enough but I think the picture should be retained for records and not shown to the public.

The picture in question was not of Jewish bodies stacked like cordwoodat a liberated concentration camp, but of a captured Americanairman on his knees, being beheaded by a Japanese officer. (Inundatedas we have been in recent decades by images of violence ? oceans ofblood, in vivid color, brought by television into our living rooms ? itis easy to forget how much less hardened sensibilities were in the forties.)War doesn't put concern for civilians ? especially civilians whoare not one's own citizens ? anywhere on the agenda. War is aboutkilling the enemy, and in World War II this included killing unprecedentednumbers of enemy civilians. War isn't about softening one'sheart, but about hardening it. A much-decorated veteran of the EighthAir Force:

You drop a load of bombs and, if you're cursed with any imagination at all you have at least one quick horrid glimpse of a child lying in bed with a whole ton of masonry tumbling down on top of him; or a three-year-old girl wailing for Mutter ... Mutter ... because she has been burned. Then you have to turn away from the picture if you intend to retain your sanity. And also if you intend to keep on doing the work your Nation expects of you.

    It has often been said that when the full story of the ongoing Holocaustreached the West, beginning in 1942, it was disbelieved becausethe sheer magnitude of the Nazi plan of mass murder made it, literally,incredible ? beyond belief. There is surely a good deal to this, but perhapsat least as often, the gradually emerging and gradually worseningnews from Europe produced a kind of immunity to shock. A finalpoint on disbelief. Accounts of the persecution of Jews between the fallof 1939 and the summer of 1941 often spoke of "extermination" and"annihilation." This was not prescience but hyperbole, and prudentlisteners took it as such. By the following years, when such wordswere all too accurate, they had been somewhat debased by prematureinvocation.

Probably more important than "knowledge" in the narrow sense is howknowledge is framed. We have already seen how prewar experience ? indeed,experience down through 1942 ? placed Jews among but notas the singled-out victims of Nazism. (As of the spring of 1942, theGermans had murdered more Soviet prisoners of war than Jews.)This kind of preexisting framework lasted for most Americans throughthe remainder of the war. But there were other reasons why the particularlysavage and systematic program of murdering European Jewrytended to be lost amid the overall carnage of war.

    For most Americans, the Pacific conflict was a matter of muchgreater concern than the war in Europe. Working fourteen hours a dayin the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the future playwright Arthur Miller observed"the near absence among the men I worked with ... of anycomprehension of what Nazism meant ? we were fighting Germanyessentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attackedus at Pearl Harbor." American soldiers and sailors were continuouslyengaged in combat with the Japanese from the beginning tothe end of the war ? first retreating, then advancing across the islandsof the Pacific. It was not until the last year of the war, after the Normandyinvasion, that there was equal attention given to the Europeantheater. Certainly in popular representations of the war, especially inthe movies, it was the Japanese who were America's leading enemy."Axis atrocities" summoned up images of American victims of theBataan Death March ? not of Europeans, Jewish or gentile, under theNazi heel.

    When wartime attention did turn to Nazi barbarism, there weremany reasons for not highlighting Jewish suffering. One was sheerignorance ? the lack of awareness until late 1942 of the special fate ofJews in Hitler's Europe. The Nazi concentration camp was the mostcommon symbol of the enemy regime, and its archetypal inmate wasusually represented as a political oppositionist or member of the resistance.Probably one of the reasons for this was that the seeminglynatural framework for the war was one of actively contending forces:the dramatically satisfying victim of Nazism was the heroic and principledoppositionist. By contrast, Jews killed by the Nazis were widelyperceived, less inspirationally, as passive victims, though sometimesthey were portrayed as opponents of Nazism to fit the script. Thus theeditor of the Detroit Free Press explained that the Nazi prisoners hesaw liberated had been in the camps because "they refused to accept thepolitical philosophy of the Nazi party.... First Jews and anti-Nazi Germans,then other brave souls who refused to conform."

    In the Hollywood version of the camps, which perhaps reachedmore Americans than any other, it was the dissident or résistant whowas the exemplary victim. One of the few wartime Hollywood filmsthat depicted Jewish victimhood and resistance was None ShallEscape, which concludes with a rabbi exhorting his people to resist theNazis ? which they do, "dying on their feet" and taking some Germantroops with them. The rabbi's speech included a line about "tak[ing]our place along with all other oppressed peoples," and the rebellionended beneath a cruciform signpost on a railroad platform, the rabbiand his people dying at the foot of a cross.

    If some of the reasons for deemphasizing special Jewish victimhoodwere more or less spontaneous, others were calculated. In the case ofGermany ? unlike Japan ? there was no offense against Americansto be avenged, no equivalent of "Remember Pearl Harbor." The taskof American wartime propagandists was to portray Nazi Germany asthe mortal enemy of "free men everywhere." That the Nazis were theenemy of the Jews was well known; there was no rhetorical advantagein continuing to underline the fact. The challenge was to show thatthey were everyone's enemy, to broaden rather than narrow the rangeof Nazi victims. In meeting this challenge, the Office of War Informationresisted suggestions for a focus on Jewish victimhood. Leo Rosten,head of the OWI's "Nature of the Enemy" department and a popularJewish writer, responding to a suggestion that atrocities against Jewsbe highlighted, said that "according to [our] experience, the impressionon the average American is much stronger if the question is notexclusively Jewish." Indeed, it was stronger among one segment ofthe population engaged in fighting the Nazis. In November 1944 thearmy magazine Yank decided not to run a story of Nazi atrocitiesagainst Jews on the grounds ? as related to the man who wrote thestory ? that "because of latent anti-Semitism in the Army, he ought, ifpossible, to get something with a less Semitic slant."

    There was another reason for not emphasizing Hitler's "war againstthe Jews": to sidestep the claim that America's struggle with Germanywas a war for the Jews. The claim that American Jews were draggingthe country into a war on behalf of their brethren in Europe was a stapleof prewar isolationist discourse. The America First Bulletin hadspoken of "numerous groups which fight for America's entry into thewar ? foreign and racial groups which have special and just grievancesagainst Hitler." This view was endorsed by Charles Lindbergh ina notorious speech. Public assertions of this kind ceased with PearlHarbor, but they had a lively underground existence thereafter. In 1943former ambassador William Bullitt was telling people that "the Rooseveltadministration's emphasis on the European war as opposed tothe Asian one was the result of Jewish influence."

    The charge of Jewish warmongering had often focused on Hollywood.Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Senator Gerald Nye of NorthDakota held hearings on the subject, summoning for interrogationthose with "Jewish-sounding" names. The Nye hearings were calledoff after the war began, but there was continued sensitivity on thisscore in Hollywood. And it was reinforced by Washington. A June 1942Government Information Manual for the Motion Pictures feared that"there are still groups in this country who are thinking only in termsof their particular group. Some citizens have not been aware of the factthat this is a people's war, not a group war." Hollywood executivesprobably didn't need prodding on this score. Responding to a 1943suggestion that a film be made about Hitler's treatment of the Jews,studio heads who were polled replied that it would be better to considera film "covering various groups that have been subject to the Nazitreatment [which] of course would take in the Jews."

    Along with the minimizing of particular Jewish victimhood was thedevelopment of formulas stressing Nazi "godlessness," which exaggeratedNazi animus toward Christian denominations. Wartime discoursewas filled with references to the "Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish"victims of Nazism. (It was during the Hitler years that Americanphilo-Semites invented the "Judeo-Christian tradition" to combat innocent,or not so innocent, language that spoke of a totalitarian assaulton "Christian civilization.") A variant of this theme acknowledgedthe present Jewish priority in victimhood but held that, oncefinished with Jews, Hitler would turn on others.

    For all of these reasons, in all media and in almost all publicpronouncements, there was throughout the war not much awareness ofthe special fate of the Jews of Europe. Sometimes this was simply dueto a lack of information, sometimes the result of spontaneous and"well-meaning" categories of thought and speech. When downplayingJewish victimhood was conscious and deliberate, the purposes werehardly vicious: to emphasize that the Nazis were the enemy of allmankind, in order both to broaden support for the anti-Nazi struggleand to combat the charge that World War II was a war fought for theJews. Among those who minimized special Jewish suffering there weresurely some with less high-minded motives, but there is little reason tobelieve they had much influence. In any event, the result was that forthe overwhelming majority of Americans, throughout the war (and, aswe will see, for some time thereafter) what we now call the Holocaustwas neither a distinct entity nor particularly salient. The murder ofEuropean Jewry, insofar as it was understood or acknowledged, wasjust one among the countless dimensions of a conflict that was consumingthe lives of tens of millions around the globe. It was not "theHolocaust"; it was simply the (underestimated) Jewish fraction of theholocaust then engulfing the world.

Continues...
Excerpted from The Holocaust in American Lifeby Peter Novick Copyright © 2000 by Peter Novick. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.