Posted on 04/21/2005 9:43:22 AM PDT by lizol
Times didn't hide Holocaust, just buried it
It's a given that The New York Times ignored the Holocaust, a sin of omission confessed by the paper itself. Now we have a book that says it ain't so - that from the beginning to the end of World War II, The Times published 1,186 stories about the extermination of the European Jews. It just buried the stories inside.
"Buried by The Times" is the title of the book, and it's more damning by far than anything the critics ever said about the paper's coverage of the worst mass murder in history.
This book proves that The Times not only knew about the Holocaust but printed many of the horrific details. In the six years of the war, just 26 pieces made the front page, half of them in 1944, when most of the Jews were dead. And only a half-dozen mentioned that Jews were the victims.
The author, Laurel Leff, a professor of journalism and a former reporter for TheWall Street Journal, has done a fine job of research in the archives of the paper of record. Others could have done that, but nobody has. More important, she has brilliantly analyzed the reasons Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the German-Jewish publisher of The Times, brought Jewish self-hatred to a head long before the rubric gained popularity.
In 1939, when the Nazis began to destroy the Jews of Poland, what bothered Sulzberger was Franklin Roosevelt's casual remark that Jews were a "race." He got FDR to call them a "faith," which settled the issue of the Warsaw Ghetto for him.
On the eve of Thanksgiving 1942, the State Department confirmed that 2 million Jews were dead in Europe, and it allowed Rabbi Stephen Wise, the leader of American Jewry, to announce the news. The Times didn't send a reporter to the press conference in Washington. Instead, it ran a short from The Associated Press - on page 10, surrounded by turkey ads.
What if FDR had announced the news? Then, even a scared Jew like Sulzberger would have been afraid to keep it off the front page. And if that happened, millions of Jews could have been saved.
But Roosevelt didn't give a damn about the Jews. When the chips were down, they were expendable. He never lifted a finger to save them, and when faced with the 1944 election, for the first time he spoke out against the massacre and it made page 1: "Roosevelt Warns Germans on Jews."
If I have a cavil about this wonderful book, it's that the author doesn't blame FDR enough. It doesn't excuse Sulzberger, who, as a publisher should have exposed the Holocaust by himself. But as Passover approaches, we should remember that even Moses needed help at the Red Sea.
Now compare this to the 46 front page articles of the "Abuses of Abu Ghraib"
What if FDR had announced the news? Then, even a scared Jew like Sulzberger would have been afraid to keep it off the front page. And if that happened, millions of Jews could have been saved.
To save millions of Jews the Normandy invasion would have had to have been accelerated, and the Allies would have had to have been willing to bomb the extermination camps. I do not see either of those things happening.
Ping!
True. The extermination camps were too far and too hard to target to risk attack, especially in the days before targetted bombing. Churchill could not spare the planes. People have spoken of attacking the railways but this would not have delayed things for more than day. At this time the German Army had an entire section of engineers dedicated to keeping the trains running.
Why does modern-day Holocaust stories or refrences only speak of Jews who were exterminated, when they really only made up slightly more than half of all victims? I don't get it.
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"What if FDR had announced the news? Then, even a scared Jew like Sulzberger would have been afraid to keep it off the front page. And if that happened, millions of Jews could have been saved."
Millions of Jews could have been saved ? How ?
"Why does modern-day Holocaust stories or refrences only speak of Jews who were exterminated, when they really only made up slightly more than half of all victims? I don't get it."
....because a tiny ethnic group has been targeted for extermination and ended up comprising of more than half of the nazi death camp victims - because Hitler destroyed the entire European Jewish way of life!
Thanks for the ping.
Here is what the current Sulzberger running the NY Times had to say during the Vietnam War in answer to a question from his father.
"If a young American soldier comes upon a North Vietnamese soldier, which do you want to see get shot?" Sulzberger Jr. replied, "I would want to see the American get shot."
Reason given -- we are in their country.
Such people do not know the meaning of allegiance.
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