How did Hitler get away with killing so many? Our media wouldn't report what was happening

[NNN0LHI]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E5D8153BF931A15751C1A963948260

THIS book is a study of the American press and radio (principally daily newspapers) and how their generally uninformed coverage, with notable exceptions, of the rise of Adolf Hitler led to their uninformed reporting, again with notable exceptions, of the Holocaust. The title refers to the unwillingness of some but not all important dailies to publish reports of the Final Solution or to publish them prominently because they were ''beyond belief.'' A similar charge could be made about uninformed reporting in the American press about the rise of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet war against Russia's peasantry and the organization of the Soviet gulags.

Understandably, Deborah C. Lipstadt limits her examination of the news media's record regarding totalitarian ideologues to Hitler, and it is a sorry story indeed. However, she tries to avoid charges of collective guilt against the press and does not suggest that there was a conspiracy to suppress news about the Holocaust.

Yet there is this underlying theme: Had the press, particularly the prestigious newspapers and radio networks, been less skeptical and scornful of refugee reports, they might have published more about what was going on. Such reporting could have influenced public opinion and a largely ignorant Congress and might have resulted in more enlightened and humane immigration policies during the prewar years and, later, when their existence was authenticated, more aggressive military action against the death camps. In other words, the news media, through editorial pressure, might have forced the Roosevelt Administration to change its policy of ''rescue through victory'' - the concentration on battlefield triumphs to hasten the war's end and with that the rescue of the Jews.

Did the press during the Roosevelt era have such clout in foreign affairs and on war policy? Judging by its collective failure to help elect Franklin D. Roosevelt's opponents to the Presidency (during his four national campaigns, the overwhelming majority of the press opposed Roosevelt), it did not have too much say in national debates. Some newspapers did try to effect changes in refugee policy but with little success.

[Warpy]

1. Rumors circulated at the time, but nobody wanted to believe it

That was a large part of the problem. Oh, the media reported the usual war propaganda about how the Germans ate babies for breakfast, but the sheer lunacy and unmitigated horror of setting up factories wholly devoted to killing people and burning their bodies were something few people could wrap their minds around. They knew people were being beaten and starved to death in forced labor camps, and that was about all they could absorb.

I have always gotten the sense that the media held back reporting the nature of that "labor" in those camps to preserve their credibility. To their credit, they published the photos of the horror of those camps when they were liberated and tangible proof of what had been going on there was available.

(I had the advantage of a granny who kept huge scrapbooks of news, newspaper doggerel, editorial cartoons, and other ephemera, none of which I still have. It all succumbed to mildew when my mother moved the lot to Florida)

[libnnc]

2. On that subject, here's a link to some radio broadcasts of the time

I listened to a 1938 CBS News Roundup broadcast yesterday.

http://www.otr.net/?p=news

[Nickster]

3. This is really cool, thanks for the link. n/t