'The Semitic question should be avoided'

The New York Times knowingly downplayed the Holocaust as a matter of policy according to Laurel Leff, author of the new book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.

Daniel Johnson, reviewing the book in Commentary writes:

For the Times, the Holocaust was not a story.

Why not? As Leff writes, to have drawn attention to the genocidal aims and methods of Nazi anti-Semitism, or to focus on the fate of individual victims, would have imposed a duty upon the Times to mobilize public opinion. The newspaper would have been obliged, through its news columns and editorial pages, to raise the national consciousness and thereby put pressure on the U.S. government to save as many Jewish lives as possible. That, however, was precisely what Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, and his senior staff were determined not to do. Instead, all reports of deportations, massacres, and death camps were fitted into a framework that required no action to be taken beyond the overriding aim of winning the war.

Thus, according to the paradigm that dominated the mentality of Times executives, the Jews were only one of many targets of Nazi barbarity. The notion that, as a people, they could have been singled out for a global “Final Solution” was, despite the overwhelming evidence, rejected. Even when the Nazis manifestly treated the Jews as a people or a race, Sulzberger denied that they were one. Indeed, he seems to have thought that taking at face value the Nazis’ intentions toward the Jews—as openly advertised in speeches, books, and propaganda— would somehow lower the Times to their level.

Arthur Sulzberger was loathe to make any special pleas for the Jews, according to Johnson, because he was afraid of risking "a century of successful Jewish assimilation in American society. Above all, he was wary of any new influx of European Jews into the United States. Assimilation, for Sulzberger, was a prize for which he was prepared to let other Jews make any sacrifice." Sulzberger's attitude toward the Holocaust was in line with the Roosevelt's administration. Just the same, the policy at the Times was widely criticized at the time.

In its anxiety to avoid accusations of philo-Semitic bias, the Times thus willingly allowed itself to become an instrument of raison d’état.

In doing so, it committed multiple acts of betrayal. Turning down Albert Einstein himself, who had pleaded with him to assist the famous Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr, Sulzberger claimed that he had to remain “dissociated from any movement which springs from the oppression of the Jews in Germany. Only in this way can the unprejudiced and unbiased position of the Times be understood.” In other words, as between oppressors and oppressed, the great organ of American liberalism would remain fastidiously neutral.

The Times betrayed the Jews of Europe by abandoning them. It betrayed its American readers by misleading them. And it betrayed its own exalted self-image by failing utterly to discharge its public responsibility in reporting the Final Solution.