As the Holocaust raged, US newspapers buried reports on Hitler’s Final Solution
On June 29, 1942, the Chicago Daily Tribune devoted one paragraph to Germany’s “Final Solution” in Europe:Jewish History Soundbites: Jewish Saviors of the Holocaust Part I: Monsieur & the Belgian Orphans
“The British section of the World Jewish Congress estimated today that more than 1,000,000 Jews have been killed or have died as the result of ill treatment in countries dominated by Germany,” read an Associated Press brief on page six.
Like other US newspapers that summer, the Daily Tribune allocated a bare minimum of inches to reporting on the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. Literally burying the story, dailies placed news of the slaughter away from their front pages — and usually mixed in among other news briefs.
“If the news in June 1942 about 1 million Jews being slaughtered was considered sufficiently credible to publish, then according to conventional editorial standards, it should have been treated as front-page news or something close to it,” said Rafael Medoff, author of the book “America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History,” published this year.
Like the Chicago Daily Tribune, The Los Angeles Times published the “1 million killed” Associated Press brief at the end of June. However, the milestone in Germany’s “Final Solution” was placed on page three, underneath a story about British soldiers taken captive by Germany: “Nazis Kill Million Jews, Says Survey.”
By this point in the Holocaust — the summer of 1942 — the American Joint Distribution Committee had issued a report, based on local sources, about the massacre at Babyn Yar (Grandmother’s Ravine) outside Kyiv. In graphic detail, the report described how the earth moved for days after the execution, even with the mass grave of 33,771 victims covered by several feet of sand.
“In the spring of 1942, as the reports of mass murder multiplied and many additional details were relayed to the Free World by reliable sources, a new and disturbing picture began to emerge,” wrote Medoff, who directs the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
“But instead of questioning Roosevelt administration officials about the emerging genocide, journalists usually avoided the subject altogether,” Medoff told The Times of Israel, adding that many reporters and public officials believed reports of the slaughter were exaggerated.
This September, PBS International will air “The US and the Holocaust,” a three-part series directed by Ken Burns. Voice actors in the documentary include Hope Davis, Werner Herzog and Meryl Streep. In addition to then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the series will depict broadcaster Dorothy Thompson, a notable exception to the rule regarding American media coverage of Nazi Germany.
“Few American journalists ever questioned president Roosevelt or his senior aides about their no-rescue policy during the Holocaust,” said Medoff. “That was both an abdication of their responsibility as journalists and a moral tragedy.”
Jewish History Soundbites is proud to launch a special series entitled ‘Jewish Saviors of the Holocaust’. It will explore the narratives of Jews under Nazi occupation risking their lives to save others during the Holocaust. Each unique profile will explore another story, angle and individual (or group of individuals) who though their own lives were at risk still did everything in their power to save others.Jewish History Soundbites: Jewish Saviors of the Holocaust Part II: From a Tunnel in Novogrudok to the Bielski Partisans
The series opens with the story of Yona Tiefenbrunner, known to the orphans he saves as ‘Monsieur’. Born in Germany, he arrived as a refugee in Belgium shortly before the war’s outbreak. He initially opened an orphanage at his own expense in order to assist German Jewish refugee children. With the Nazi occupation of Belgium and the subsequent deportations in 1942, his Brussels orphanage emerged as an island of rescue, as the Nazis miraculously allowed the orphanage to operate and spare the children from deportation to the east. Maintaining a semblance of normalcy under increasingly challenging conditions, Yona managed to care for the orphans' physical and religious welfare until liberation. Following the war, the orphanage relocated to Antwerp and cared for children survivors until its closing in 1960.
On the night of September 26, 1943 232 Jews escaped through a tunnel from the Novogrudok Ghetto. Nearly 170 survived, primarily by joining the Bielski partisans who operated nearby in the Naliboki forest. This was likely the greatest escape in Nazi occupied Europe throughout the entire war and Holocaust.Jewish History Soundbites: Jewish Saviors of the Holocaust Part III: The Sobibor Revolt
The tenacity and courage of the last Jews of the Novogrudok ghetto to dig a 250 meter tunnel leading to the forest, combined with the capability of joining Tuvia Bielski and his partisans, facilitated one of the most astounding stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust. Tuvia Bielski famously said that he prioritizes saving lives over killing Germans. The result was that his partisan unit was a family camp which saved over 1,200 Jews, among them the escapees of the Novogrudok tunnel.
Within the framework of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi extermination of Polish Jewry, the SS built three death camps in Eastern Poland - Belzec, Treblinka & Sobibor. The latter was the smallest of the three, and a quarter of a million primarily Polish and Dutch Jews were killed in its gas chambers during its year and a half of existence. It was at Sobibor that on October 14, 1943 a great prisoner escape took place. Led by the son of a Polish rabbi named Leon Feldhendler & a Soviet Jewish Red Army officer named Sasha Pechersky, these two unlikely leaders joined together to formulate a plan to save not just themselves but to give all of the 600 inmates at Sobibor an equal chance to escape.
The revolt killed several SS officers, 300 Jewish prisoners made it to the forest and nearly 50 survived the war. As they broke for the fences, Pechersky demanded that anyone who survive should tell the world what went on in Sobibor.
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