The disclosure of genocide

By Steve Rodan

Henry Shoskes was once an important man in Poland. He served as general manager of the Central Cooperative Bank in Warsaw as well as communal leader until the German invasion of his country in 1939. Shoskes escaped to the United States and eventually was appointed chairman of the International Committee for Cooperative Reconstruction. He received steady information from his occupied country, particularly on the genocide of the Jews.

In early 1942, Shoskes, now a writer for a New York Yiddish daily newspaper, believed he had enough information to speak out. He told of the German plan to destroy all the Jews in Poland. He predicted that at least 20 percent of the Warsaw ghetto, or more than 100,000 Jews, would die by the end of the year.

"There will be no more Jews in Poland in five or six years," Shoskes said.

Shoskes' warning was published in the leading newspaper in the United States -- the New York Times. On March 1, 1942, the daily ran a headline "Extinction feared by Jews in Poland" and provided details of the Jewish ghettos in Poland. The article pulled no punches: the Jews in Poland were being wiped out. The average monthly death rate in the Warsaw ghetto was now 10,000. And the figure was expected to increase.

The conventional narrative, still propagated by historians in Israel, is that Americans knew nothing of the Holocaust until toward the end of World War II. The United States was said to have been too busy fighting Hitler to notice his Final Solution for the Jews. The U.S. media ignored the genocide and focused on the war -- whether in the Pacific or Europe.

Actually, Americans were informed of Hitler's extermination campaign even before Germany's death machine reached full capacity. Leading newspapers and magazines reported on Germany's mass murder in Eastern Europe and even provided graphic photographs.

On Feb. 23, 1942, Time Magazine published the first photos of the Final Solution. The images showed piles of bodies somewhere in occupied Europe, part of Time's lead story on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was regarded as the architect of the Final Solution and responsible for crushing resistance throughout German-occupied Europe.

"In Poland, where starvation was oldest, grotesquely emaciated bodies, like half-clothed skeletons, were picked up off the streets and carted away in heaps," Time said. "In two and a half years some 120,000 Poles have been hanged or shot ... German propaganda promises a unified Europe; there is nothing Germany wants less. She treats every captive nation differently: Danes the best, Poles the worst, Polish Jews worst of all." [1]

The reports were largely ignored in the Zionist media, particularly in Palestine. There, the daily newspapers of Zionist political parties engaged in obfuscation, questioning reports of massacres and providing only the barest of details.

But many American newspapers were also cautious. Time, for example, did not identify the photos that showed piles of bodies killed by the Germans. The magazine did not disclose the obvious -- that they were Jews.

The New York Times did specify the target of the German extermination. In an unsigned article, the Times quoted Shoskes as saying that the death rate of Jewish children in Poland was 30 times that of other nations. But the newspaper of record buried the most important story of World War II on Page 28. In its more than 70-page Sunday edition, the article was easy to miss.

"The situation inside the ghetto is worse than that in the camps for the internment of prisoners of war," Shoskes said. "Why then not give these unfortunates the international status of war prisoners, which will permit them to receive some food from abroad, and this in spite of the blockade?"

The media reports should have sparked intensive efforts by U.S. Jewish leaders to save their European counterparts. The opposite was the case: Jewish leaders sat on information that millions of Jews were being killed. Only at the end of June 1942, months after the reports in the U.S. media, did the World Jewish Congress report figures of Hitler's campaign -- at least one million Jews dead, half of them in Poland.

WJC knew a lot more. The head of the organization, Stephen Wise, received a telegram from its representative in Geneva that Hitler was discussing a plan to kill all the Jews. Gerhard Riegner, the representative, quoted a German industrialist close to the Nazi regime as saying that the plan would be implemented within several weeks. The only thing left to decide was the method of extermination.

But Wise, at the urging of the State Department, failed to release the Riegner telegram. State claimed that the telegram needed to be verified. Wise could have pointed to the reports by Time and the New York Times and rejected the censorship. But the Reform rabbi, who bragged of his friendship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, obeyed. It would take until November 1942 until State approved the release of the telegram.

The U.S. intelligence community closely followed Hitler's destruction of European Jewry. The OSS and FBI were receiving information on an almost daily basis from everybody from deserters, spies, fugitives, visitors from Germany and intercepted cables that told of the mass killings. The intelligence services could also rely on the American colony in Warsaw, which witnessed German persecution.

But the average American would have known most of this information as well. The British and Soviet governments were releasing details of Germany's elimination of entire Jewish communities in the Soviet Union throughout 1941. The Polish government-in-exile was disclosing the death camps and their methods, including the use of poison gas.

The American Jewish media also served as a source. In December 1941, the Jewish Chronicle of Newark, N.J., published a front-page article with the headline "Nazi Plan Systematic Extermination of Jews." The article told of the massive killings, deportations, slave labor and ghettos in German-occupied Europe. Two months later, the Chronicle reported a German plan to create a "Jewish state" cut off from the rest of the world. Later, the newspaper detailed the German and Ukrainian massacre of 52,000 Jews in Kiev. [2]

German confirmation of these reports proved surprisingly easy. In February 1942, a Nazi newspaper in Poland reported a plan to "liquidate" the huge Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. The Warschauer Zeitung said the Germans, under orders from Hitler, would deport all 500,000 Jews from the city to a "reservation" in the Lublin district. [3] Some of the German functionaries in Poland thought this unnecessary. They argued that starvation and disease alone would kill the Jews and save Berlin the expense of transports.

Shoskes agreed: "[The Germans] have] deliberately managed to create such a condition in the ghettos as to annihilate the inhabitants in the shortest possible time," he said.

The burial of the Shoskes story on the decimation of the Warsaw ghetto was more than an editorial decision. It reflected the policy of the British and U.S. governments to do nothing to help the Jews. In the article, Shoskes wondered why London and Washington were allowing massive food shipments to Greece while maintaining a blockade on Poland, which resulted in the starvation of the Jewish ghettos. In his words, the Allies were maintaining a "formal attitude toward the specific situation of 3,500,000 people condemned to cruel death -- to complete annihilation."

As it turned out, Shoskes' warning could not have been more prescient. On March 17, 1942, some two weeks after the Times article appeared, the Germans began the systematic decimation of the ghettos. Trains took thousands of Jews from Lublin to the death camp at Belzec. Later, the Germans would use their facilities at Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka to end the "Jewish problem."

Notes:

1. "Europe: Pattern of Conquest" Time Magazine. Feb. 23, 1942.

2. "The Long Damn Summer of '42: An Untold Story of Stolen Dreams" Robert Leonard Berkowitz. https://rlberko-42995.medium.com/the-long-damn-summer-of-42-aaa841bf2242

3. "Hitler Plans to 'liquidate' Warsaw Ghetto; All Jews to Be Sent to Lublin Reservation. JTA. March 3, 1942.

Below: The New York Times article that quotes Shoskes.