What Did They Know? When Did They Know? How Did They Interpret the Information? By Alex Grobman, PhD
https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25865-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information
Part I
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recently announced it is opening a new special exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” in the spring of 2018 as a part of a museum-wide initiative exploring American responses to the Holocaust.
Among the questions the exhibit will attempt to answer are: What did American Jews know about the Holocaust, when did they know about the destruction and how did they respond?
If we are to learn from our past, we need to understand what American Jews knew about the plight of the Jews in Europe. When did the first reports appear in the Anglo-Jewish, American, Yiddish, and press about attacks against Jews? Did the accounts appear sporadically or often? How were they interpreted by American Jews? At any point did American Jews realize that the Nazi onslaught might be different than past massacres and persecution?
We begin our inquiry on September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began. A wide range of national, regional and organizational papers and periodicals were reviewed. Another major source of information is derived from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA), a bureau established in 1914 to gather and distribute news about Jews. The New York Times is included in the survey since it is the newspaper of record in the U.S. The Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper. But this did not mean Jews did not see these articles. When reading a newspaper, Jews generally tend to look for items about the Jewish community no matter where they are positioned in the paper.
Individual American Jewish leaders were privy to confidential organizational reports and sometimes to classified State Department documents. The primary source of news for average Jews was the American, Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish press. Many contemporary Jews assert they knew little or nothing about the Shoah because the press in the U.S. did not or could not provide information about the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Is this true?
Subjugation of Poland
Throughout the first several months of the war in Europe, the American press provided sporadic news about the condition of the Jews in Poland. The Yiddish press and the JTA were among the only sources providing daily accounts of Jewish suffering. Not all of the news was accurate or complete. Fragmentary and exaggerated dispatches made it challenging at times to determine the extent of the devastation. Yet the Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR), a bimonthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, stated in its November/December 1939 issue that “despite the paucity of reliable news from the invaded Polish areas, it is now possible to obtain a fairly accurate but general picture of the fate suffered by Polish Jewry during the first two months of the war.”
Initial reports from Poland told of Nazi air raids on Polish cities where the Jewish sections were intentionally targeted. Mendel Mozes, chief of the Warsaw Bureau of the JTA, visited a number of these areas where he found that many Jews had been killed and wounded with extensive damage to Jewish institutions. His eyewitness account of the destruction was broadcast throughout the U.S.
Thousands of Jews from Warsaw and other Polish cities fled their homes in panic. Vilna and other cities were soon overwhelmed by the large influx of Jewish refugees. Jewish leaders in these cities appealed to Jews abroad for food, clothing and money. Jews seeking refuge in Latvia and Lithuania were turned away at the borders. Strict security measures were enforced by the Latvian authorities to thwart these Jews from entering. Many Jews went to Romania but were not permitted to stay for more than several months.
One of the most distressing reports from Poland during these early months appeared in The New York Times on September 13, 1939. Otto D. Tolischus, a Prussian-Lithuanian-born journalist on the Berlin staff of the Times, had been allowed to observe German military units fighting in Poland. In the western Polish border town of Wieruszow, 50 Jews were shot for alleged sniping and resistance. So many Jews in other towns in western Poland were killed for the same alleged offense, that it appeared they were leading a guerilla war against the Germans instead of the Poles.
These murders were the work of the Police Einsatzgruppen (action groups) or mobile killing units that accompanied the frontline German army units into Poland. They remained in the rear of these units where they terrorized Jews and the Polish intelligentsia and clergy. Fifteen thousand Jews and Poles were killed in this operation, which continued for approximately two months. Jews were a special target of the Einsatzgruppen.
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