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When the Media Was Blind
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11604 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1986 |
2,723 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
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BEYOND BELIEF
The American Press and the Coming
of the Holocaust 1933-1945
Deborah E. Lipstadt
New York: The Free Press, 1986
370 pp., $19.95
The subtitle of Deborah Lipstadt's important book, Beyond Belief, by its very matter-of-factness - The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945- hardly prepares the reader for the appalling record that follows.
Methodically, almost dispassionately, Lipstadt has documented the coverage given by the American press to Jews first in Hitler's Germany, and then in Hitler's Europe, from 1933 through the Final Solution. It does not make for comfortable reading. With the rarest exceptions, the American media, including all the most distinguished and high minded publications of the day, seem to us with historical hindsight, to have displayed an almost willful blindness as to what was going on virtually before their eyes.
Two recent works - The Terrible Secret by Walter Laquer and The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman - have set forth in abundant and shaming detail the actions of the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office on the question of Hitler's Jews. "Polite” anti-Semitism was the accepted of the time, many of whose members peopled our State Department and the British Foreign Office. The British also had to consider the fact that Palestine was a British protectorate, and that any large influx of Jewish refuges might endanger the British positions there.
It is one thing, however to accept that elite groups may have been guilty of an anti-Semitism that allowed millions to go to their deaths, but to realize that the American media, over a period of years, daily reflected the same kind of anti-Semitism cannot but be shocking to our contemporary sensibilities. Take, for example, the lead editorial in the Christian Science Monitor in 1933 following the German boycott of Jewish stores and businesses.
The paper accused American Jews of exacerbating the situation by demanding that the State Department and the League of Nations condemn Germany. The editorial argued that the German people had the right to be indignant over "atrocity" stories and to punish "rumor mongers." The word "atrocity" was placed in quotation marks, thereby indicating doubts about the accuracy of the reports, and the Nazi explanation of the boycott was reiterated almost verbatim. The Christian Science Monitor went even further by exonerating the non-Jewish world of responsibility for its anti-Semitism by declaring that it was the Jews' "commercial clannishness which…gets them into trouble."
The newspaper was not alone in failing to condemn Germany. Walter Lippmann, for decades considered America's most influential and distinguished columnist, urged his readers not to judge Germany on the basis of the Nazis, arguing that people possess "dual nature" - they could be both good and evil. Lippmann argued that "to deny that Germany can speak as a civilized power because uncivilized things are being said and done in Germany, is in itself a deep form of intolerance." And perhaps not unreasonable statement, but one that he proceeded to follow by citing other
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