Tuesday, December 31, 2013

How the NY Times reported the genocide in the Holocaust

Via DovBear, here is the front page of the New York Times for Nov 26, 1942.

Front page stories on Fall Gas Rationing Ordered by the President, Dewey to press income tax cut, Victory Prayers Voices in Service at White House.

And then, buried in other war news on page 16 of the paper:

SLAIN POLISH JEWS PUT AT A MILLION; One-third of Number in Whole Country Said to Have Been Put to Death by Nazis ABATTOIR FOR DEPORTEES Mass Electrocutions, Killing by Injection of Air Bubbles Described in Reports
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. ();
November 26, 1942,
, Section , Page 16, Column , words
[ DISPLAYING ABSTRACT ]

LONDON, Nov. 25 -- Nearly a third of Poland's Jewish population -- 1,000,000 persons -- has perished in three years of German occupation, Dr. Ignacy Szwarcbart, Jewish member of the Polish National Council in London, told this correspondent today, amplifying Polish Government information on the new Nazi onslaught on the Jews.
Based on this, you can perhaps understand what Max Frankel, former executive editor for the Times, meant when he wrote as follows:
Yet what they printed made clear that the editors did not long mistrust the ghastly reports. They presented them as true within months of Hitler's secret resolve in 1941 to proceed to the ''final solution'' of his fantasized ''Jewish problem.''
Why, then, were the terrifying tales almost hidden in the back pages? Like most -- though not all -- American media, and most of official Washington, The Times drowned its reports about the fate of Jews in the flood of wartime news. Its neglect was far from unique and its reach was not then fully national, but as the premier American source of wartime news, it surely influenced the judgment of other news purveyors.

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