A Tiny Fraction of the Truth

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, , and the London Times on Majdanek and the Death Camps, 1940-1944

Andrew Shaffer

Master’s thesis in and Studies University of , June 2015

Supervisor and First Reader: Dr. Karel Berkhoff (NIOD) Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate (NIOD) University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2

Contents

Contents.…………………………………………………………………………………………..2 Acknowledgements..………………………………………………………………………………4 Introduction.……………………………………………………………………………………….7 Historical Nature of this Study (7) Goals and Aims (9) The Sources and the Historiography (9) Importance (13) Chapter 1: Majdanek.…………………………………………………………………………….14

A Historical Overview (14) Majdanek: The Article Collection (17) The JTA on Majdanek (17) The New York Times on Majdanek (28) The London Times on Majdanek (35) Conclusions (37)

Chapter 2: Belzec.………………………………………………………………………………..39 A Historical Overview (39) Belzec: The Article Collection (41)

The JTA on Belzec (41) The New York Times on Belzec (44) The London Times on Belzec (49) Conclusions (49) Chapter 3: Sobibor……………………………………………………………………………….52 A Historical Overview (52) Sobibor: The Article Collection (54) The JTA on Sobibor (54) The New York Times on Sobibor (57) 3

Conclusions (58) Chapter 4: Treblinka……………………………………………………………………………..60 A Historical Overview (60) Treblinka: The Article Collection (62) The JTA on Treblinka (62) The New York Times on Treblinka (72) Conclusions (74)

Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………………………76 The Numbers (76) Comparing the Sources (76) Comparing the Themes (82) Final Thoughts (84) Appendices..……………………………………………………………………………………..86 Bibliography.…………………………………………………………………………………….97 4

Acknowledgements One of the benefits of the technological age has been the advancement of online archiving. Undoubtedly, without the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the New York Times (NYT), and The London Times () online archives, this thesis would not be possible. In addition, the wonderful staff at the University of Amsterdam’s library were quick to answer my questions, as I sought access to the NYT and The Times archives. Two other places that have benefited the thesis, throughout its duration, were the NIOD library and the Science Park Study Center and Library. The NIOD offered an array of literature for perusal, and an incredible place to work. The Science Park Study Center and Library bore the entirety of my printing needs, which were seemingly limitless to my peers. I thank their staff for their patience and assistance throughout the process. I would also like to thank my professors from this past academic year for their advice and suggestions that helped me better myself as a researcher, writer, student, and person. Thank you Dr. Nanci Adler, Dr. Kjell Anderson, Dr. Karel Berkhoff, Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate, and Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör for your support, guidance, and aid throughout this past year. Your guidance meant more than you could ever truly know, and added to the great depth of knowledge you presented to me. I am grateful to call myself your student, as the education you have provided me was rich, abundant, and created a strong foundation to pursue my academic career further. I also thank those whom served on the Board of the Amsterdam Excellence Scholarship (AES), and elected to put their trust in me in the form of the AES Scholarship. Without this scholarship, I would not have had the fortune to attend one of the most stimulating universities in the world. Thank you for the great honor of this prestigious grant that enabled me to pursue my dreams at your excellent institution. Prior to my studies at the University of Amsterdam, I had the joy of undertaking my undergraduate degree at West Texas A&M University, and Jagiellonian University. I thank Drs: Bruce Brasington, Jim Calvi, Paul Clark, Anand Commissiong, Marty Kuhlman, Jessica Mallard, Keith Price, Wade Shaffer, Dwight Vick, Bryan Vizzini, and Reed Welch from West Texas A&M. I also thank my former mentors. First, Dr. Elizabeth Morrow Clark, one of the finest professors a 5 student could ever ask for. She taught me invaluable lessons during my time at West Texas A&M: 1) a cluttered desk is a sign of a functioning intellectual, 2) passion and emotion are central to finding yourself as a researcher, writer, and historian - when used correctly, you can produce something amazing, 3) she pushed me to take risks, and to never settle for the mundane, 4) she helped me find my voice not only as a writer, but in the classroom as well, and finally, 5) for never giving up on me as a student, writer, and friend. You remain an invaluable part of who I am today, and who I hope to be tomorrow. Another mentor along my journey was Dr. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska of Jagiellonian University. When I attended Jagiellonian University, I believed I would end up studying European history - specifically, the rise and use of nationalism. Luckily, Dr. Elizabeth Clark knew Dr. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, saw that she was teaching a class on and its Cultural Meanings, and recommended it immediately. It was this class that sparked my interest in Holocaust and genocide studies. Her class was always stirring, vivid, engrossing, and invaluable. It influenced me so greatly, that for the remainder of my courses, I made sure to write papers that reflected both the course and the Holocaust. Her passion and knowledge were vast, and she was kind enough to meet with me to suggest future universities to apply to and attend. For her support, caring spirit, and vibrant lectures, she is thanked profusely. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and my family. To my Dutch peers, I thank you for the constant reminder that you can always make time to relax. I especially thank my closest friends: Koen Sinke, Robbin Looye, Jos Ruijter, Mark Spill, Chung Dang, Pedro Jordana, Gerben Post, Tessa Bouwman, Danielle Schalkwijk, Tim van Noord, and Marieke Verweij for their constant support, hospitality, and reminders to enjoy this beautiful city with friends over a beer or a party. Finally, I would not be half the man I am today, nor student for that matter, without the unwavering support of my family. No matter what changes I made in my life, or what adventures I sought to go on, my parents always supported my choice. Be it fiscally, physically, emotionally, or psychologically, they have always been there for me. I thank them for this, as my life to date would not be possible without them. From birth to late Skype calls, they never failed to answer. For all the times that they said they were proud of me, they believed in me, and that they 6 loved me, I thank them. And it is far past time to say, that I am proud to call you my Mother and Father. I love you both, and believe in you too. Before turning to the chapters themselves, I want to dedicate this work to my grandmother. She passed away in October, after her battle with dementia, depression, and multiple injurious falls. In my life, nothing hurt more than the day I received the news, and not being able to return home for her funeral. She was a wonderful woman, and her spirit lives on in us. Not a day goes by where I do not miss her, especially this past spring. She taught me: 1) the difference between being a child and a man meant: being respectful, helping others, and not starting conflicts, 2) that time with family is to be cherished and treasured, as life makes no guarantees, and 3) always bleed blue when supporting anyone, anything, or any team because loyalty is important throughout life. Undoubtedly, she would have loved watching our Kentucky Wildcats basketball team play and chase history. She would have loved to see her grandkids graduate with two receiving Master’s degrees, and one a Bachelor’s degree. She would have loved to see us today, and been proud of us for every step we have taken since childhood. In honor of her life, love, and lessons, I dedicate this work to my grandmother. 7

Introduction

One of the most important sources that has provided information to society has been the media. Broadly, the media can be understood to mean newspapers, radio broadcasts, television and television reporting, Internet news, and podcasts. During the Holocaust, of these aforementioned methods, the newspaper was the predominant means to keep informed. Surprisingly, only a select few works have dealt with journalism and the Holocaust. As a result, this thesis was intended to contribute to the scant literature on this subject. Unlike most extant studies, this work does not deal with a single newspaper, or the Holocaust as a whole. Instead, this thesis utilized two newspapers, one news agency, one main time period, the Operation Reinhard camps, and Majdanek; similar in many ways to the Operation Reinhard camps. It should be clarified here, that the term Operation Reinhard camps applies to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. This term will be used throughout the thesis to combine these camps under a single phrase, as it has become a widely-used moniker for them. Thus, when it is used within the analyses of the articles, it is my own use of the term; not the article’s or journalist’s.

Historical Nature of this Study

Between 1940 and 1944, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were constructed, and functioned as killing centers for the Nazis. Whether they ended in 1943 or 1944, they all ended the same way. They were all liberated by the , and neither the US nor the British saw them - until of course, correspondents were allowed to visit the camps in 1944 and 1945.1 It was then that journalists like W.H. Lawrence, Konstantin Simonov, and saw the horrific sites that would make up their wartime reports. In this thesis, only the works of Lawrence and Simonov were found; regrettably, the search for articles produced none of Grossman’s pieces, or even references to them. As these men wrote, it was apparent that Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps were meant to kill. It was these four camps, along with Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau, that “marked the culmination of the killing process.

1 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), xiv. 8

They were not separate from the Nazi German war for race and space but were an integral part of it. In all, an estimated 3 million were murdered in the six killing centers outlined here.”2 As for the estimated death total of the camps analyzed in this thesis, disparities were found. In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, he stated that: “In all, Operation Reinhard claimed the lives of some 1.3 million Polish Jews,”3 and by camp, “(more than 700,000 at Treblinka, roughly 400,000 at Belzec, 150,000 at Sobibor, and 50,000 at Majdanek).”4 On the other hand, the Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) stated that the Operation Reinhard camps claimed the lives of 1.7 million Jews, and an unknown number of gypsies, POWs, and Poles.5 However, these estimates only represented a ‘drop in the bucket.’ Sadly, they were just a small portion of the Jewish lives claimed by the Holocaust. Overall, “Between five and six million Jews had been killed, among them almost a million and a half under the age of fourteen.”6 A created range showed that 4,300,000 to 5,870,000 Jews died outside of Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps. Their deaths can be attributed to disease, executions, mass shootings, and suicide. However, it was the Operation Reinhard camps, Majdanek, and the use of that proved to be a faster and more efficient way for the Nazis to commit this genocide. That provided a reason to conduct this thesis, as these camps were critical to the Nazis because of their capabilities even if their deceased total only represented roughly 22% to 28% of the Jewish deaths during the Holocaust.7 The historical significance of this study came from personal interests in finding out what some of the world knew about these camps as the Holocaust

2 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009), 190.

3 Snyder, Bloodlands, 273.

4 Ibid., 275.

5 “Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard),” last modified June 20, 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php? ModuleId=10005195.

6 Saul Friedlander, Nazi and the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 422.

7 To reach this number, I divided 1.3 million into both 5 and 6 million, and 1.7 million into both 5 and 6 million - then multiplied the results by 100. This resulted in the production of approximately 22, 26, and 28% (twice). 9 occurred, and how that information compares to what we now know about them. To date, no such study has been conducted.

Goals and Aims This multi-faceted approach was taken in order to convey what the articles wrote about the camps and how accurate that information was, to find any themes in the reporting, and to produce coverage trends (i.e. when did camps get mentioned most). When combined, these analyses should provide a new outlook on the role print media played during the Holocaust. As previously mentioned, this thesis utilized multiple sources and camps. This variety enabled the thesis to approach the topic of Holocaust journalism on a micro-level. Thus, this thesis aimed to eschew monocausal research by focusing on multiple news agencies and camps and their unique histories; discover what the press said about the, now, better known death camps; and see how coverage on the camps evolved as the years of operation passed. The goals were to produce a thesis that showed what role the media played in discussing the Operation Reinhard camps, and Majdanek, and to compare the accuracy of the reports to our current historical knowledge. It also strives to eliminate hindsight bias while discussing any flaws in the coverage and to take a more comparative approach by analyzing and comparing multiple camps, years, themes of reports, and news outlets, to a subject often reduced to a single variable. Hopefully, this thesis then filled some of the gaps left behind by previous works.

The Sources and the Historiography This thesis relied heavily on newspaper articles, and bulletins. As a result, the most important sources were the online archives of the JTA, NYT, and The Times. These sources provided 119 articles about Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard Camps from 1940 to 1944.8 These particular news outlets were chosen for a plethora of reasons. The JTA was a source that Dr. Karel Berkhoff recommended looking into, as previous students had found it useful for their works. Upon searching for the camps by name, any alternate spellings, or location, it became apparent that the JTA had a vast amount of bulletins

8 See Appendix 1. 10 that would be useful for the thesis. As a result, it quickly became the main source of the thesis. That being said, one archive was not enough, so other newspapers came to mind. Immediately, the addition of the NYT seemed suitable because it has been heavily discussed in the historiography, and it was one of the more important American newspapers at that time. The Times was chosen as another source because it was one of Britain’s major newspapers based out of London, which was where many of the JTA’s bulletins came from. It was important that these three primary sources provided articles in English; were subjects of secondary literature; and had online archives to conduct the required research. It was incredibly fortunate that they produced varying degrees of coverage, which made drawing comparisons between them significantly easier. Due to these factors, the JTA, NYT, and The Times became the main sources over any alternative sources. However, this thesis would not have been accomplished without secondary literature that provided important insight into newspaper operations, and why articles were presented in certain ways. The most crucial secondary sources utilized were Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 (1993), a volume of essays edited by Moses Shapiro, Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust (2003), Laurel Leff’s Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (2005), and Yosef Gorny’s The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the (2012). Deborah Lipstadt wrote the seminal work, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. Her work starts with the rise to power of the and Hitler, and follows with chapters about pre-war Germany, the , and the American refusal to allow refugees into the country. In part two of her work, she addresses topics such as the deportation of Jews to extermination camps, and public response to the published reports. The most relevant chapters are chapters seven and eight. Here Lipstadt relies on accounts of reporters who were on location and watched as deportations and resettlements began, or heard about the horrors being perpetrated from soldiers. These accounts did not always make it to the press, as editors 11 exercised control over the pieces.9 Nevertheless, Lipstadt stated, “an astonishing amount of information was available long before the end of the war. There was practically no aspect of the Nazi horrors which was not publicly known in some detail long before the camps were opened in 1945.”10 Lipstadt meticulously strung together the narrative in a way that suggested that the press did not fully live up to its duties to provide the facts, or instigate a call to action via the public and the US government. These particular notions made her study an important contribution to the field. In Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust, editor Robert Moses Shapiro worked to combine various writings on regional newspaper coverage of the Holocaust. The genesis of Shapiro’s work was a 1995 conference held at Yeshiva University, which looked at contemporaneous primary sources.11 Of the studies evaluated so far, this collection was the first that demonstrated how international Holocaust journalism truly was. Besides British and American journalism, Shapiro collected and edited works on Soviet, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Greek and Hebrew journalism. In the American journalism chapters, the most important chapters to the thesis were Ron Hollander’s “We Knew: America’s Newspapers Report the Holocaust;” Laurel Leff’s “When the Facts Didn’t Speak for Themselves: The Holocaust in the New York Times, 1939-1945;” and Max Frankel’s “Turning Away From the Holocaust: The New York Times.” The Hollander essay is crucial as it analyzes articles from 1941 to 1944, a period that included the construction, function, and height of Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps. Leff contributes an article about the shortcomings of the New York Times to the book, which carries over to her own monograph. Frankel’s article provides an unseen perspective in the literature examined so far, in that Frankel was a former editor of the New York Times. His unique

9 Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 (New York: Touchstone, 1993), Kindle edition.

10 Lipstadt, Beyond Belief.

11 Robert Moses Shapiro, ed., Why Didn’t the Press Shout?” American and International Journalism During the Holocaust (Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2003), xiii. 12 perspective was insightful as the New York Times and their coverage of the Holocaust was assessed.12 On British Journalism, Colin Shindler’s “The “Thunderer” and the Coming of the Shoah: 1933-1942” was the most useful article, for it looks at the articles of The Times. While it does not dive deeply into Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps, it evaluates one of the most well- known newspapers of London. It helps to understand the articles collected from the archives of The Times, and why The Times proceeded as it did during the Holocaust. Another important work in the canon of Holocaust journalism was Laurel Leff’s Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. In it, Leff took on the Western world’s journalism; specifically, the New York Times. Her work was critical of the NYT and its published articles representation of the Holocaust. This criticism stemmed from the fact that Leff believed that, “No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so. The first reason makes the Times’ failure more puzzling, the second more devastating.”13 Ultimately, the monograph provided the reader with the understanding that, “The Times never treated the news of the Holocaust as important - or at least as important as, say, informing motorists to visit the Office of Price Administration if they did not have their automobile registration number and state written on their gasoline ration coupons.”14 Such scathing rhetoric and examples permeated her work, and left the reader to wonder what more the paper could have done to get the news on the front pages. This monograph provided much needed insight into the way the NYT operated during the Holocaust. Lastly, Yosef Gorny’s The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, provides a discourse on Jewish press on an international scale. The book fills a gap because it specifically compares Jewish papers from a

12 Shapiro, Why Didn’t the Press Shout?, xiv.

13 Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Kindle edition.

14 Leff, Buried by the Times. 13 number of nations, instead of one paper from one nation.15 Further, his work is one of the few that did not seem to have an inherent level of disdain for the press, or an anti-press agenda. Instead, Gorny truly believes that the press played a pivotal role in raising awareness about the plight of European Jewry. As Gorny states, “This awareness also influenced the way overt Jewish public action for the rescue of European Jewry was assessed in state diplomatic echelons and at the grassroots political level…and at the level of public morality.”16

Importance This thesis evaluated multiple articles from one of the most important sources of information of that time period - print journalism. Importance also came from the research focus on four of the most notorious Nazi death camps, and what the outside world knew about them. When trends were found and established, it became possible to weave a narrative about the knowledge the international citizenry had of these camps. Further, one can potentially use this research in the oft-debated topic of international bystanders (i.e. if the articles were well- circulated, why did the bystanders not act to destroy rail lines to death camps, or bomb death camps themselves?). Finally, the thesis added to the topic of Holocaust-related journalism and the idea of knowing about the Holocaust. As prominent Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote, “As far as the actual information was concerned, there can be no doubt at all that whoever read the papers, listened to the radio, or read the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s daily reports could have had all the information about Europe’s Jews that was needed to establish the facts about the mass murder. We already know that information did not mean knowledge, but the information at any rate was there.”17 It was this information that will be assessed throughout this thesis.

15 Yosef Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Kindle edition.

16 Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945.

17 Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 19. 14

1 Majdanek

A Historical Overview On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which started World War II. Two days later, both Britain and declared war with Germany.18 It was the German invasion of the Soviet Union, known as , that escalated both the war and the of the Jews. Doris L. Bergen, historian at the University of Toronto said, “From the beginning of war with the Soviet Union, the German leadership advocated unprecedented, ruthless measures…With the invasion of the Soviet Union the Nazi leadership would move to full implementation of their ideas of race and space on a massive scale…Most noticeably they crossed the line from persecution and killing of Jews to a systematic attempt at total destruction.”19 For total destruction of their enemies, the Nazis relied on a vast network of camps. That network included six death camps, four of which were analyzed for this thesis. The first death camp, Chelmno, was in operation in 1941. Four of the other death camps were constructed after the of 1942.20 They included the Operation Reinhard camps, named after , and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Key facts on Majdanek will be presented in this section, and represent what we now know about the camp, whereas the articles portrayed what was known then. Majdanek, the Nazi labor and death camp, was located in the Majdan Tatarski suburb of the city of , and it was built as a prisoners of war (POW) camp in the winter of

18 Bergen, War and Genocide, 136.

19 Ibid., 153-154.

20 Ibid., 183. 15

1940-1941.21 The Nazis referred to the camp as a POW camp in order to avoid scrutiny, anger, and local government disagreements in Lublin, which may have occurred if they referred to it as a concentration camp. The camp, originally known as Waffen-SS Camp Lublin, came from Reichsführer-SS ’s 1941 decision to create a major concentration camp outside the Reich, and in Lublin. For Himmler, establishing such a camp was integral to his ultimate plan in making Lublin an SS-military industrial complex. It was on July 20-21, 1941 that Himmler charged SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, to build a camp for 25,000-50,000 prisoners.22 As a result, the so-called ‘Other Auschwitz,’ was constructed by Polish-Jewish POWs interned in the area in October 1941, and its gas chambers were added a year later.23 Prior to the gas chambers being functional, alternative methods to kill prisoners included: shooting, torture, starvation, and death vans. The gas was primarily used on Jews, who usually went straight to the gas chambers upon arrival.24 It was only on February 16, 1943 that the camp was called a concentration camp, and Globocnik used it to meet three goals of Operation Reinhard: to exploit Jewish labor, expropriate Jewish belongings, and murder Jews. Majdanek was often used as a camp to concentrate Jews that were being sent to work for the SS; however, mass extermination was used to get rid of overflowing prisoners that came from Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. From April 29, 1942 to November 3, 1943 Jewish internees made up the majority of prisoners at Majdanek, with roughly 78.45% of the camp populace being Jewish in mid-October 1942. That population statistic changed drastically with the event that transpired on November 3, 1943.25

21 Bergen, War and Genocide, 188, and Elizabeth White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), Part B, ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 876.

22 White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” 876.

23 Bergen, War and Genocide, 188, and “Timeline of Events: Liberation of Lublin-Majdanek,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 29, 2015, http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/ liberation-of-lublin-majdanek.

24 Bergen, War and Genocide, 187-188.

25 White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” 877. 16

On that day, the “guards at Majdanek mowed down some seventeen thousand prisoners with machine gun fire and forced the few left alive to conceal the evidence.”26 Saul Friedlander, Holocaust historian at UCLA, wrote about this event, now referred to as Operation Harvest Festival. He suggested that its death total was 18,400, and he added that they were shot with music blared to prevent the killings from being heard.27 Operation Harvest Festival devastated the Jewish prisoner population, which was reduced to a mere 71 Jews of 6,562 registered prisoners at the end of 1943, or approximately 1.08% of the internees at Majdanek. That number increased to 834 Jews imprisoned at Majdanek in mid-March 1944, when prisoners were brought from Majdanek’s sub-camps to the main camp; an unknown number were gassed, while the rest were sent to Auschwitz or Krakau-Plaszow.28 With the exception of 500 disabled Soviet POWs, and 1,000 peasants, Majdanek was completely evacuated on July 22, 1944. One day later, the Red Army arrived and liberated the camp. 29 Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale, added that Majdanek was liberated on July 24, 1944, suggesting that either the day remains disputed, or that it took two days for the Red Army to liberate the camp.30 The liberation of Majdanek was important because it was the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated, the first liberated by the Red Army, and the first to allow journalists to visit the camp and write about it.31 During its period of operation Majdanek interned a minimum of 240,000-250,000 registered prisoners, and more were likely interned; however, many of the records were destroyed by the Nazis before the arrival of the Red Army. Of that estimate, the USHMM has established that a minimum of 80,000-110,000 victims died at Majdanek’s main camp.32

26 Bergen, War and Genocide, 189.

27 Friedlander, and the Jews, 378.

28 White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” 877.

29 Ibid.

30 Snyder, Bloodlands, 278.

31 “Timeline of Events: Liberation of Lublin-Majdanek,” and White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” 879.

32 White, “Lublin Main Camp [AKA Majdanek],” 879. 17

Whereas, Bergen has said that Majdanek claimed the lives of “two hundred thousand people… About 75,000 were gentiles; the other 125,000 were Jews,”33 a number that may have included death totals from Majdanek’s sub-camps. These estimates have been debated as some sources suggested 350,000 died, and others believed that 235,000 was more accurate.34 Ultimately, some facts still remain contested to this day, which suggests that Holocaust information may never be complete.

Majdanek: The Article Collection Between 1940 and 1944, the JTA produced thirty pieces on Majdanek, from June 26, 1942 to December 26, 1944. Meanwhile, the NYT wrote eighteen articles on Majdanek, from July 2, 1942 to December 16, 1944. During the same period, The Times published only seven articles about Majdanek, from January 28, 1943 to October 27, 1944. In total, Majdanek was mentioned in fifty-five articles evaluated in this chapter.

The JTA on Majdanek On June 26, 1942, the first report to mention Majdanek, as a city and barracks, was produced. This JTA bulletin came from London, and included numerous reports that covered the atrocities and killings of Jews. The article said, “3,000 Jews from Lublin are now being held in barracks at Majdanek-Tatarowy, a Lublin suburb.”35 It also stated that over 2,000 Jews had been killed in Lublin, and that 25,000 had been deported to an unknown destination.36 The second piece was released over half a year later, on January 28, 1943 and also came from London. It was a note from the Polish Government that hoped to call others to act and stop the atrocities in Poland. In it, General Sikorski spoke of the deportation of Jews from

33 Bergen, War and Genocide, 189.

34 “Majdanek: Inside Majdanek,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed May 31, 2015, https:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Majdanek1.html.

35 “25,000 Jews ‘Disappear’ from Lublin; Warsaw Jews Shot in Streets,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 26, 1942, 2.

36 “25,000 Jews ‘Disappear’ from Lublin,” 2. 18 and asserted that in the span of four days, January 16-20, the Nazis had deported 35,000 Jews from the city. Some of those Jews were sent to Majdanek, and others to “so-called ‘Jewish extermination camps.’”37 Of particular interest was the fact that it did not refer to Majdanek as an , and that it referred to death camps in a questionable manner (so-called). The third report was published on March 23. This London report labelled Majdanek as a Jewish concentration camp that claimed the lives of 200 Jews a day. It stated that the sanitary conditions at the camp were atrocious and led to typhus.38 Two Jewish deputies of the Polish National Council, Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart and Samuel Zygelboim, called for actions to save Jews. They warned that the Nazis could achieve their goal to “exterminate all the Jews in Poland if nothing is done to check him (Hitler).”39 The article that followed added significant details about the organization of Majdanek. On May 12, 1943, another report from London was published by the JTA. It was based on a broadcast made by SWIT, an underground Polish radio station. The broadcast mentioned that the former premier of France, Leon Blum, was “in the newly established concentration camp at Majdanek in central Poland.”40 In addition to Blum, Jews that fled the , and Jewish politicians were incarcerated there. The story then detailed the camp as follows:

The new camp holds about 15,000 prisoners, divided into five sections the broadcast said. The first is for Jews; the second for Jews and Poles who have been sentenced to death; the third for prisoners transferred from Pawiak prison in Warsaw; the fourth for victims of street roundups; the fifth being reserved for women. Under command of S.S. troops, the warders are both Germans and Ukrainians. The barracks are said to be unheated and

37 “Polish Government Addresses New Note on Nazi Atrocities to United Nations,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 28, 1943, 1.

38 “200 Jews Dying Daily in Concentration Camp in Poland; Jewish Deputies Appeal for Aid,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 23, 1943, 1.

39 “200 Jews Dying Daily in Concentration Camp in Poland,” 1, parenthetical added.

40 “Warsaw Ghetto Finally Liquidated Despite Heroic Resistance, Secret Polish Radio Says,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 12, 1943, 2. 19

full of vermin, with daily rations consisting of 300 grams of bread and a half pint of soup.41

The next report was from May 28, 1943, and came from Zurich. It established that Majdanek was expanded “to hold 80,000 internees.”42 Further, it was no longer a new camp, but a “notorious concentration camp.”43 The last lines of the reports emphasized that the victims were both Jews and Poles. It went on to say, “Most of the victims are treated with such brutality that they do not live long in detention. The mortality rate at the camp is termed ‘horrible.’”44 The JTA continued its reports on Majdanek on July 23, 1943, with a bulletin from London. It first discussed the liquidation of Polish ghettos, and then Majdanek. It said that Majdanek, the town, was home to both a camp and a ghetto for Jews. According to the report, based on a newspaper article from Dziennik Polski, “about 3,000 Jews died from lack of food and mistreatment and their clothes were stripped from them for use by the Germans.”45 The next bulletin came from London on November 22, 1943, and it discussed the liquidation of Majdanek. The Polish Government passed on the news that at the end of October, the Germans had massacred 15,000 Jews at Majdanek. Any survivors were sent to Krakow as forced laborers.46 On December 6, 1943, an article from London listed camps established in Poland. The camps were located at “Belezec, Starogard, Potulice, Sobibor, Kosow-Podlaski, Treblinka, , Poniechowek, and also one between Chelo and Wlodawa(sic).”47 Majdanek was

41 “Warsaw Ghetto Finally Liquidated Despite Heroic Resistance, Secret Polish Radio Says,” 2.

42 “Nazis ‘Clearing’ Upper of Last Groups of Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 28, 1943, 3.

43 “Nazis ‘Clearing’ Upper Silesia of Last Group of Jews,” 3.

44 Ibid.

45 “Polish Government Paper Publishes Eye-Witness Accounts of Liquidation of Ghettos,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 23, 1943, 3.

46 “ Massacres 15,000 Jews in Majdanek Camp; Award for Denouncing Jews Announced,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 22, 1943, 1.

47 “Germans Have Established Nine Separate Concentration Camps for Polish Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 6, 1943, 4. 20 mentioned as a camp that confined Jews whereas the others were labelled as Jewish camps (Belzec and Sobibor), or death camps (Treblinka).48 The bulletin mentioned that one hundred camps of nine different categories existed in Poland: “Segregation camps, where Poles and Jews are sent for a short period after immediately being arrested, concentration camps proper, forced labor camps, camps for priests, camps for women (non-Jewish), camps for Jews, ‘racial improvement’ camps, corrective camps for young Poles, and children’s camps.”49 The article that appeared six days later discussed technical problems at Majdanek. According to this bulletin that came from London, the incinerator malfunctioned at the camp and was non-functional for days. As a result, “hundreds of bodies of executed Jews piled up in the fields adjoining the camp until it became necessary for sanitary reasons for the Germans to build a huge pyre on the spot where the bodies lay.”50 It was the last report from 1943. The majority of the JTA’s reports on Majdanek were published in 1944. The first bulletin of that year dealt with the number of Jews sent to extermination camps. It was published on January 6, and came from Jerusalem. It stated that “1,071,600 doomed Jews were transported to Treblinka, Belzetz and other ‘extermination camps’ during the year beginning April 1, 1942 and ending March 31, 1943.”51 According to Dr. Isaac Gruenbaum, an executive in the Jewish Agency, that number was not complete because Jews sent to Sobibor, Majdanek, and Malkinia were not included. This was worsened by the fact that in those camps, “few Jewish internees were left alive.”52 On May 29, 1944, a Zurich based report was made about death totals, and the elimination of evidence that the Nazis had committed. The elimination of evidence required bodies to be dug up from mass graves and burnt. Another form of evidence destruction was killing, as camps were

48 “Germans Have Established Nine Separate Concentration Camps for Polish Jews,” 4.

49 Ibid.

50 “Germans Build Huge Funeral Pyre to Incinerate Polish Jews, Underground Reports,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 12, 1943, 3.

51 “German Data Reveals 1,071,600 Polish Jews Transported to Extermination Camps,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 6, 1944, 3.

52 “German Data Reveals 1,071,600 Polish Jews Transported to Extermination Camps,” 3. 21 ordered to liquidate their internees.53 The report said that: “50,000 Jews have been murdered by the Germans in the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatow.”54 The next relevant item was primarily about property restoration. Dated July 25, 1944, and compiled in London, it was based on the work of the Polish Committee of National Liberation. This committee assured Polish Jews that their property would be returned to them. The report then turned to the committee’s manifesto, which urged Poles to participate in the war with Germany. The incentive was that, “the hour of revenge against the Germans has struck - revenge for the burnt villages, destroyed cities, ruined churches, slave labor, concentration camps, the executions at Majdanek, Treblinka, and Oswieicim, and the massacres in the ghettos.”55 This particular report started a trend, as several 1944 articles dealt with the concept of justice, and how to attain it. On August 17, 1944, the JTA published an article from Moscow correspondents that discussed the Nazis’ destruction of the death camps. The item chiefly dealt with Treblinka, which it said was completely razed to the ground. The correspondents found survivors to detail what happened in Treblinka. Similar methods were said to be used to destroy evidence at Sobibor, Trawniki, Poniatow and Majdanek, all of which were now held by the Red Army.56 Another JTA report from Moscow, on August 21, discussed the discovery by Soviet investigators of a list of Jews killed at Majdanek. As the publication stated, the list primarily included 600 names of French Jews and it was the only book made available to journalists. However, the report emphasized that books with thousands of names existed, and they just needed to be interpreted.57

53 “Germans Eradicate Traces of their Mass-Executions of Jews in Poland; Burn Bodies,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 29, 1944, 1.

54 “Germans Eradicate Traces of Their Mass-Executions of Jews in Poland,” 1.

55 “Restoration of Looted Property, Full Rights, Promised Polish Jews by New Committee,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 25, 1944, 1.

56 “Germans Raze All Traces of the ‘Jewish Extermination Camps’ Before Leaving Poland,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 17, 1944, 1.

57 “Moscow Releases Names of French Jews Killed by Gestapo in ‘Death Camp’ in Poland,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 21, 1944, 1. 22

On August 31, multiple pieces were published by a JTA correspondent in Lublin. The first stated that as many as 1.5 million men, women and children were killed in Majdanek. Of those 1.5 million, two-thirds were Jewish victims. The reporter found around 1,000 Jewish survivors of the camp.58 The reports on the situation in Lublin continued via a bulletin that gave former prisoners a voice. Those who survived, and spoke to the correspondent, wanted revenge for what happened. The report said, “Revenge is a common word among the Jews in Lublin. It is also a common word among non-Jews here who are horrified at the annihilation by the Germans of 1,500,000 people at Majdanek.”59 After the correspondent discussed revenge, the report covered what American and British reporters saw when they visited the camp. It discussed the gas chambers, storage facilities for victims’ possessions, and the arrival routine (i.e. bath ruse that led to gas chambers). The correspondent also spoke to German POWs and officers who “were associated with the camp.”60 The German POWs told the correspondent that children had been killed at Majdanek, and one admitted that he was responsible for sending valuable items, stripped from the victims, to Germany.61 On September 1, the JTA published many reports about Majdanek. One came from Lublin, another from London, and the last one from New York. The first report dealt with the trauma Majdanek survivors faced. Survivors in Lublin were “too shaken today to write down the addresses of their relatives in the United States.”62 The correspondent was there to try to establish communication between survivors and their friends or family. Unfortunately, the trauma ran so deeply, that victims had forgotten the names of the cities where their family members

58 “JTA Correspondent Reports 1,000,000 Jews Exterminated at Majdanek; Finds 1,000 Survivors,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 31, 1944, 1.

59 “Jews in Lublin Clamor for Revenge; Majdanek Horrors Described,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 31, 1944, 2.

60 “Jews in Lublin Clamor for Revenge,” 2.

61 Ibid.

62 “Surviving Jews in Lublin Still Suffering from Effects of German Terror,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 1, 1944, 1. 23 lived. The item ended with a personal letter from a survivor that said no friends or family had survived the German occupation.63 The bulletins from London and New York, also released on September 1, were primarily about the pursuit of justice. In London, the News-Chronicle produced a report that demanded “rigorous punishment of those directly responsible for the extermination of 1,500,000 persons - mainly Jews - at the Majdanek camp in Poland and taxes the entire German nation with acquiescence in ‘these crimes against civilization.’”64 It also said, “it is hard to imagine any crime which could outstrip Majdanek in scope or the degradation to which its planners descended.”65 Additionally, “the editorial suggests that the horrors of the camp should be filmed by the Allies and every German should be forced to see them.”66 The succinct JTA report from New York dealt with the American call to justice. It reiterated that 1,5000,000 victims died at Majdanek, and then presented two editorials: one from the Herald-Tribune, and the other from the New York Times. The Herald-Tribune called for the annihilation of the Nazi regime and no leniency for the German populace, for “a people who would support this regime hasn’t the remotest excuse for any expectation of leniency in the terms of surrender.”67 On the other hand, the New York Times hoped that the lessons from Majdanek would create a bond among humanity that included “all groups, all factions, all free nations together.”68 Multiple writings on Majdanek were part of the September 5, 1944 bulletin. One came from New York and dealt with justice, and the other came from Lublin and discussed Greek Jews. In the first report, the American Jewish Committee asked for a United Nations (UN)

63 “Surviving Jews in Lublin Still Suffering from Effects of German Terror,” 1.

64 “London Press Demands Vigorous Punishment of Majdanek Camp Officials,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 1, 1944, 2.

65 “London Press Demands Vigorous Punishment of Majdanek Camp Officials,” 2.

66 Ibid.

67 “American Press Says No Leniency Must Be Shown to Germans for Majdanek,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 1, 1944, 2.

68 “American Press Says No Leniency Must Be Shown to Germans for Majdanek,” 2. 24 commission to investigate Majdanek. The committee sent their request to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and UN representatives in the US.69 Their letter quoted Joseph M. Proskauer, President of the American Jewish Committee, who called for justice to be served to those that broke both moral and legal laws. If justice was not pursued and served, future peace in the world would be hampered.70 Proskauer urged Secretary of State Hull to make the US the leaders of the UN commission. He also wanted the commission to visit the camp “at once, in order that the incredible evidence might be viewed first hand. The findings of such a body would be unimpeachable.”71 The last words of the report mentioned that Jewish victimhood ran up to three million people, and Majdanek served as evidence “of our worst fears.”72 To Proskauer, the entire world was “stunned by this latest proof of Nazi inhumanity to man.”73 The second report from September 5, came from Lublin, and it discussed the fate of Greek Jews in Majdanek. Several thousand Greek Jews were deported in 1943, and “1,200 of those deportees were executed at the Majdanek camp. It is likely that many others were also murdered.”74 The work then talked about the main difficulty behind death estimates: “The names of most of the 1,000,000 Jews exterminated at Majdanek and other camps will probably never be known, since it has been definitely ascertained that the Germans kept no list of their Jewish victims, lists were kept only of the executed non-Jews. A few score names are available from the pitiful possessions of the dead Jews found piled up in Majdanek storehouses awaiting shipment to Germany.”75 The correspondent suggested a thorough inspection of the property in the storehouses, so some of the dead could be calculated. As for the Greek Jews, other Majdanek

69 “American Jewish Committee Urges Punishment of Nazis Responsible for Majdanek Massacre,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 5, 1944, 2.

70 “American Jewish Committee Urges Punishment of Nazis Responsible for Majdanek Massacre,” 2.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 “Mystery of Fate of Athens Jews Solved with Discovery they Executed at Majdanek,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 5, 1944, 2.

75 “Mystery of Fate of Athens Jews Solved with Discovery they Executed at Majdanek,” 2. 25 survivors said they were not gassed but “systematically beaten to death over a period of several weeks.”76 On September 7, a report from Lublin discussed the decimation of Jewish children. Of the 1,000 Jewish survivors in and around Lublin, only ten were children, and six of them were found in the Majdanek camp.77 The birth rate of Jewish children was also discussed, as only one child was born after the war started. This fact, and the ages of survivors and their possible emigration were seen as “the chief obstacles to the eventual development of revived Jewish life in Poland.”78 A brief article that discussed the gas used at death camps was presented on September 14, 1944. The article was from London, and it was about former German-Jewish chemist, Dr. Martin Schauf. Schauf explained that cyclone gas (Zyklon B) was originally created to be an insecticide/ disinfectant; however, it was being used by Nazis to kill Jews within Majdanek’s gas chambers. Schauf had worked for one of the companies that produced the gas. His testimony was that the gas he experimented with caused the deaths of his brother and friends at Majdanek, and that he was eventually fired for being Jewish.79 An article from London, published on October 17, discussed Hungarian Jews. The work first talked about Nazi troops in with orders to kill the 300,000 Jews left in the country. However, reports from Switzerland suggested that two transports of 150,000 Jews each were being prepared. The report then turned to Jewish POWs noting that the Polish Government-in- Exile stated that the Germans had taken 2,000 Jewish POWs to Majdanek, and killed them via

76 “Mystery of Fate of Athens Jews Solved with Discovery they Executed at Majdanek,” 2.

77 “Germans Left Practically No Jewish Children in Poland, J.T.A. Correspondent Finds,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 7, 1944, 1.

78 “Germans Left Practically No Jewish Children in Poland,” 1.

79 “German-Jewish Chemist in England Helped Develop Majdanek ‘Death Gas,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 14, 1944, 3. 26 gas.80 The Poles also stated that, “last February 2,000 Jewish forced laborers from Hungary were also brought to Majdanek ‘apparently for extermination.’”81 Another report from London, dated November 3, focused on atrocity photography. The exhibition, “Germany - The Evidence,” was created by the United Nations Information Organization. There were pictures of anti-Jewish riots, Jewish roundups, and Majdanek.82 This was followed by a piece on the dark side of arts in camp life. On November 26, 1944, a particularly morbid report came from Washington on the torture of Jewish inmates at Majdanek. The torture was referred to as concert parties, and took place after the day’s work ended. The inmates stood for hours and sung along with a Jewish orchestra and its conductor.83 A report that came from Atlantic City on November 30, 1944 called for the creation of Jewish organizations in Jerusalem and Moscow. These proposals were shortly discussed before emotional speeches were made about the atrocities that were committed against the Jews. Eliezer Szcupakewich, a member of the Representation of Polish Jewry in America, said:

This hall should be draped in black. Instead of speeches we should be reading the chapters inscribed in cold blood from the records of the death camps of Maidanek and Tremblinka[sic]. We should consider ourselves guilty of the passivity with which we have allowed all the miserable events to occur. We are all criminals and any Jew who returns to Germany will deserve a curse upon his head. Our hands are covered with blood. The blood of our brothers and sisters.84

80 “Gestapo Division Arrives in Hungary with Orders to Exterminate All Remaining Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 17, 1944, 1.

81 “Gestapo Division Arrives in Hungary with Orders to Exterminate All Remaining Jews,” 1.

82 “Nazi Atrocities Against Jews Pictured at United Nations Exhibit in London,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 3, 1944, 4.

83 “‘Concert Parties’ Conducted to Torture Jewish Inmates,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 26, 1944, 4.

84 “Considers Establishment of Special Bureau in Moscow and Jerusalem,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 30, 1944, 3. 27

In addition, Dr. Nahum Goldmann said that American Jews had failed to help European Jewry, or to get the government to help. On December 5, 1944 two items appeared - one from Washington, and one from Moscow. The Washington report evaluated how Soviet Russia had responded to anti-Semitism. First, they no longer considered it a “purely internal affair of the country where it is practiced.”85 Professor Komarov, president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, was quoted throughout the bulletin. He quoted , who said anti-Semitism was dangerous, and a punishable offense because it was “inimical to the Soviet system.”86 Komarov said the killings at Majdanek, stemmed from “stupid anti-Semitic jokes in the beer halls of .”87 To Komarov, this explained why racial attitudes in the Soviet Union had changed from ignoring vile acts of persecution to trying to prevent and end persecution permanently. He also said that forgive and forget should not be accepted, as “any leniency that will be shown to the Germans for Maidanek will only ‘pave the way for new fascist .’”88 Thus, they believed anti-Semitism should be removed from society because of its inherent dangers. The article on anti-Semitism was followed by a short piece on a trial in Lublin of five Majdanek officials. Evidence was supplied by the American War Refugee Board; however, it only discussed Auschwitz - but it was still admitted. Ultimately, the trial ended on December 4, 1944, “when the executioners were sentenced to hang.”89 On December 6, the JTA reported from Moscow that the men “were hanged on Monday in the presence of 20,000 persons.”90 The final report produced by the JTA came from Geneva on December 26, 1944. It focused on the dire situation of Jews in Hungary. According to the article, Premier Ferenc

85 “Russia Will No Longer Consider Anti-Semitism an Internal Affair of Each Country,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 5, 1944, 3.

86 “Russia Will No Longer Consider Anti-Semitism an Internal Affair of Each Country,” 3.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid.

89 “War Refugee Board Evidence Used in Trial of Maidanek Executioners; Five to Be Hanged,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 5, 1944, 3.

90 “Five Maidanek Executioners Hanged in Lublin Square Before 20,000 Witnesses,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 6, 1944, 4. 28

Szalasy wanted to kill the Jews left in the city before the Red Army arrived. At the beginning of December, “no more than 75,000 Jews remained in Budapest…following the ‘’ of 100,000 Budapest Jews to the Austrian frontier.”91 He promised no mercy to the Jews and had anti-Semitic Arrow Cross units watch the ghetto, prepared to act. The report went on to say that the regime intended to leave no Jews alive, which the Germans supported. It boldly stated, “Only the tortures of Jews in the Maidanek and Oswiecim camps can be compared with the martyrdom of the Jews in Hungary today.”92

The New York Times on Majdanek On July 2, 1942, the first report, which came from London, was published. It urged the Allies to help Poland protect their population. It also said punishment would come to the Germans for their crimes, which included the murder of 700,000 Jews. The report mainly focused on killing, and it said that Jews were being shot after they dug their own graves. The writing also said that the young, the old, and women were being killed in the streets. It then displayed death figures for various cities, before discussing how Jews were being gassed in death camps.93 It talked about the gassings at Chelmno before it mentioned the Jews of Lublin and Majdanek. The report said that 25,000 Jews had been deported to an unknown location in Lublin, and, “Nothing has been heard of them since. A few were detained in the suburb of Majdanek; the others disappeared. No Jews were left in Lublin.”94 Milton Bracker wrote the next report, which appeared in the NYT over a year later, on July 27, 1943. His report was based on government reports from Wladsylaw Banaczyk, Polish Minister of Home Affairs. The death toll was “estimated at 3,200,000 including 1,800,000 Jews,

91 “Last 75,000 Jews in Budapest in Danger of Being Massacred, Alarming Message Warns,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 26, 1944, 1.

92 “Last 75,000 Jews in Budapest in Danger of Being Massacred, Alarming Message Warns,” 1.

93 “Allies are Urged to Execute Nazis: Report on Slaughter of Jews in Poland Asks Like Treatment for Germans; Curb on Reich is Sought, ‘Only Way to Save Millions from Certain Destructions,’ Says the Appeal,” New York Times, July 2, 1942, 6.

94 “Allies are Urged to Execute Nazis,” 6. 29 as of May 1.”95 The report so alarmed a British correspondent, that he questioned the minister. It was then that Banaczyk detailed how he got the data from the Polish underground, and then discussed the horrors committed at death camps. His facts on Majdanek included: 1) the type of victims - children, women, and the elderly, 2) where they were killed - “death chambers,” and 3) the speed and efficiency with which the camp operated.96 The speed was evidenced by two transports, with 30 freight cars filled by 100 people per car, being liquidated within a “few hours…in gas chambers. Such executions are taking place every day.”97 One more year later, on August 30, 1944, W.H. Lawrence wrote an article about his visit to Majdanek. His opening words were memorable, “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth - the German concentration camp at Maidanek, which was a veritable River Rouge for the production of death, in which it is estimated by Soviet and Polish authorities that as many as 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years.”98 His work detailed what he saw: the gas chambers, crematoriums, skeletons of the deceased, and ashes of the dead. He also saw the exhumation of mass graves, and the storehouses of expropriated Jewish property. His report, which started on page 1 and continued on page 9, was vivid with details. But it was his quote on evidence that stood out, “This is a place that must be seen to be believed. I have been present at numerous atrocity investigations in the Soviet Union, but never have I been confronted with such complete evidence, clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating German crimes. After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel, and depraved.”99

95 Milton Bracker, “Polish Executions Put at 3,200,000: Wladyslaw Banaczyk Draws Gruesome Picture of Nazis’ Extermination Methods, Children Kicked to Death, Minister Details Gassing of Adults - Sees Reich Aim at Ethnographic Defense Line,” New York Times, July 27, 1943, 9.

96 Bracker, “Polish Executions Put at 3,200,000,” 9.

97 Ibid.

98 W.H. Lawrence, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp: Victims Put at 1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories,” New York Times, August 30, 1944, 1.

99 Lawrence, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp,” 9. 30

He then listed criminals that would be charged for their roles in Majdanek, and told a first person narrative about the killings which he heard from a German prisoner. After that, he led his readers through the camp grounds and its layout. He talked about how the gas chambers functioned, the specific gas used, and how quickly the operations ran. His report ended with the fact that Majdanek would be maintained as a place of evidence, and that Poles in the area thought those responsible for Majdanek should be killed within the camp.100 This was one of the most thorough and descriptive articles found. The next day’s report reiterated much of Lawrence’s work. The first paragraph of the report called to our attention the rift between the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Polish Committee of National Liberation in Lublin. The correspondent then said that the failed mergers should be overshadowed by what Lawrence wrote about Majdanek. The writer let us know that Lawrence had his job because he was thorough and accurate, and showed that with his piece on Majdanek.101 The article stated that punishment needed to be handed out, and that such a power (as the Nazis) should be prevented from rising again. As it said, “It is civilization itself that is at stake. Over the graves of the Maidanek dead the common bond of humanity should surely draw all groups, all factions, all free nations together.”102 Punishment was also the theme of a letter written by Henry Waldman, published in the NYT on September 3, 1944. Waldman’s letter responded to both Lawrence’s piece and the August 31 writing. He was convinced that those responsible for Nazi atrocities would be punished, but he also called for the nation of Germany to be punished as well. As Waldman put it, “Germany as a sovereign entity must cease to exist. It has committed premeditated homicides.”103 He noted that a government and nation cannot be subjected to a death penalty, suggesting instead that

100 Lawrence, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp,” 9.

101 “The Maidanek Horror,” New York Times, August 31, 1944, 16.

102 “The Maidanek Horror,” 16.

103 Henry Waldman, “Letters to The Times: Dismemberment Urged - Abolition of Germany as Country Suggested as Reprisal,” New York Times, September 3, 1944, 8. 31

Germany be split into the twenty-six states that it was prior to 1871. Lastly, he urged that Prussia be split into multiple states, and that none of them be allowed to merge again.104 The theme of justice continued when a report from Moscow made the paper on September 4. The Red Army had captured a former German commander, Lieut. Gen. Milmar Moser of the 372d Feldkommandatur, in Lublin. Moser “denounced the infamous Maidanek ‘murder factory’ and called on all soldiers who were under his command to testify ‘about the unheard of crimes which occurred in the extermination camp of which they have knowledge.’”105 He also knew that “‘hundreds of thousands’ of persons had been killed”106 because he was stationed at Lublin; however, the article did not establish his exact role in the camp. Also on September 4, an escapee talked about his experiences in a Nazi death camp. The story mentioned Majdanek twice in comparison to Sobibor - spelled Sobibur in the report. It said that Sobibor was smaller than Majdanek, and that both camps were close to Lublin.107 As the report was primarily about Sobibor, it will be fully discussed in the Sobibor chapter. Blair Taylor, a concerned reader of the NYT, had a letter he sent to them published on September 6, 1944. In it, Taylor lamented about the departure from prototypical NYT works. As he put it, “Usually you are an enviable example of lucidity and balanced judgement,”108 however, “The Maidanek Horror” piece “begs several questions which are still moot, and lumps together matters which have no common meaning.”109 Those matters included who should have control over Poland, and Taylor decried the fact that the Poles ought to accept Russian dominion because it was the Germans who had committed the atrocities in Poland. Taylor aptly stated that either way, the Poles faced death somehow - via torture and the camps by Germans, or no support provided by the nearby Red Army during uprisings against the Germans (i.e. Warsaw). Taylor

104 Waldman, “Letters to The Times: Dismemberment Urged,” 8.

105 “Nazi Admits Maidanek Horror,” New York Times, September 4, 1944, 9.

106 “Nazi Admits Maidanek Horror,” 9.

107 “Young Pole’s Tale Bares Death Camp: Another Horror Site Reported Near Lublin - Thousands of Victims Cremated,” New York Times, September 4, 1944, 9.

108 Blair Taylor, “Letters to The Times: Question to Be Settled,” New York Times, September 6, 1944, 18.

109 Taylor, “Letters to The Times: Question to Be Settled,” 18. 32 curtly replied that sovereignty, and borders mattered; if they did not, then we would soon find that Warsaw was no different than Prague in 1938.110 On October 6, 1944, W.H. Lawrence wrote another piece on Nazi death camps. This time Lawrence and other correspondents visited Klooga labor camp in . Much like his earlier piece on Majdanek, Lawrence led the readers through the camp and showed them the destruction he saw.111 Within the article, Lawrence mentioned Majdanek as a point of comparison to Klooga. Lawrence referred to Majdanek as an “organized production-line death camp.”112 Further, “Maidanek at least had the virtue of being preconceived, calculated and carefully organized.”113 Klooga seemed to be an act of desperation before an enemy reached the territory, as Lawrence argued in his piece. Thus, Lawrence showed us two different articles: 1) the meticulously planned death camp, and 2) the last act of a dying regime. What followed the expose was a rather unique article about an award granted by the Polish Government-in-Exile. On October 20, 1944, an article appeared about Reverend (Rev.) Robert I. Gannon. Gannon, then the president of Fordham University, was awarded the Grand Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restitua by President Wladyslaw Raszkiewicz.114 During the occupation of Poland, the Germans shut down the University of Lublin, which was “the only Catholic university in the country - situated near the infamous Maidanek death camp.”115 In 1943, Rev. Gannon “dedicated ‘Lublin Room’ in Keating Hall, on the university campus, as the wartime home of the Polish university.”116 The Poles saw this as a

110 Taylor, “Letters to The Times: Question to Be Settled,” 18.

111 W.H. Lawrence, “Nazi Death Camp A Scene of Horror: Story of Massacre of 3,000 in Estonia Evident in Piles of Burned Bodies, Babies Among Victims, Correspondents Inspect Site of German Mass Atrocity During Baltic Retreat,” New York Times, October 6, 1944, 6.

112 Lawrence, “Nazi Death Camp A Scene of Horror,” 6.

113 Ibid.

114 “Gannon is Honored by Poles in Exile: Gets One of Nation’s Highest Awards for ‘Adoption’ of Its Catholic University,” New York Times, October 20, 1944, 6.

115 “Gannon is Honored by Poles in Exile,” 6.

116 Ibid. 33 defense of the Polish nation, by maintaining its survival via culture and education.117 In stark contrast to a celebratory honor, the next article published focused on justice; a November 4, 1944 report from Moscow discussed the trial of six Germans that worked at Majdanek. They were to be tried for their roles in the camp that claimed the lives of 1.5 million people.118 The remainder of the article discussed a Pole, Mouselsky, who was given a death sentence for leading a camp in Lublin. That camp sent forced laborers to Germany, and he received the job because he said he was German.119 A report from Stockholm published in the NYT on November 7, 1944 told the story of a young Jewish man who had escaped the grasp of the Nazis. The young man first escaped from Warsaw in 1942, and then he worked as an arms smuggler for the resistance. In 1943, he was arrested and sent to Pawiak before being sent to Majdanek. He saw “5,000 Jews exposed to the cruelest tortures” at Majdanek.120 He escaped the camp as he hid under a truck that went to Lublin, and he later returned to Warsaw with false papers. The young man was then sent to Finland to work before he escaped to Helsinki, and then Sweden - this escape was necessary because he was accused of .121 The article that followed the escape tale was about musical performances. The work appeared on November 19, 1944, and listed multiple new musical events in New York. One of the musical pieces, a violin sonata, had been found in Majdanek on top of a pile of trash, and was believed to be composed by Ernst Weil of Prague.122 As for the composer, not much was known

117 “Gannon is Honored by Poles in Exile,” 6.

118 “Pole Doomed to Die For Death Camp Role,” New York Times, November 4, 1944, 4.

119 “Pole Doomed to Die For Death Camp Role,” 4.

120 “Foils Gestapo 4 Years: Pole Reaches Sweden Via Lublin, Maidanek and Helsinki,” New York Times, November 7, 1944, 16.

121 “Foils Gestapo 4 Years,” 16.

122 “Events in the World of Music: New Friends Organizer Defines Significance of Current Series,” New York Times, November 19, 1944, 5. 34 except that he had died at a young age. As a result, Joseph Szigeti considered the piece as a performance because of its sad background.123 The articles published after the musical piece all focused on an aspect of justice: trials, death penalties, and suicides of convicted criminals. The first of these reports was published on November 28, and the story came from London. The article stated that six German SS men were captured by the Red Army, and would be tried for murder and rape in Lublin. The men had worked at Majdanek, and the investigation was conducted so the special court at Lublin could try them.124 The captured men included four non-commissioned officers - Herman Vogel, Anthon Ternes, Wilhelm Hartenmeier and Theodor Schallen - that were “accused of murdering, torturing, beating and tormenting prisoners of war and civilians,”125 and two others - Heinz Stahl and Edmund Pohlman - “charged with having violated workmen brought to the Maidanek camp.”126 The death of Pohlman was covered on December 3, in a report from London. Pohlman, who “was accused personally of killing thousands,” hanged himself in his cell after the trial concluded its third day on December 2.127 On December 4, the verdict was reached for the other five German executioners at Majdanek. The report came from London, and was about the men from the November 28 story. The special court in Lublin passed a death penalty on the men, and they would be hanged in public.128 According to officials from Moscow, the prosecutor “charged that mass extermination of European people had been carried out by Germany under a previously prepared plan and that in Poland alone the Germans had exterminated 6,000,000 to 7,000,000 peaceful people.”129 Only one day later, December 5, a report from London declared that the five men who worked at the

123 “Events in the World of Music,” 5.

124 “Lublin to Try 6 in SS: Elite Guardsmen Accused as War Criminals in Poland,” New York Times, November 28, 1944, 18.

125 “Lublin to Try 6 in SS,” 18.

126 Ibid.

127 “Nazi Death Camp Chief a Suicide,” New York Times, December 3, 1944, 5.

128 “5 Germans to Hang for Polish Murders,” New York Times, December 4, 1944, 3.

129 “5 Germans to Hang for Polish Murders,” 3. 35

“notorious Maidanek concentration camp” had been hanged in public before 20,000 people.130 On December 16, 1944, a photo of the six Germans tried was released, and it showed the men sitting despondent with their heads down. Meanwhile, the men standing behind them looked at them with contempt, or looked straight ahead with no empathy for the accused.131 And thus, the NYT reports ended with a photo of men that had been executed eleven days prior.

The London Times on Majdanek On January 28, 1943 The Times published its first piece on Majdanek. It was primarily an article focused on deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto, with a paragraph on how Poles were treated. It detailed who conducted the deportations, and who was deported - included were those with employment cards. On Majdanek, it said, “A large number of persons were sent to the new concentration camps at Majdanek, near Lublin, which can accommodate 80,000 persons.”132 The second article, produced on April 19, 1943, focused on German atrocities committed against both Polish officers, and Jews. The report was submitted by the Polish Government-in- Exile, and they listed out the crimes one-by-one. It was in this list that Majdanek was mentioned. It stated that 80,000 people had been imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in Majdanek and Treblinka (spelt Tremblinka in the article). This fact came after they mentioned that at least 1.5 million people had been killed to date.133 On May 29, an article about resistance against the Nazis by the Polish Underground was published. The report came from SWIT, a secret Polish radio station, and it said:

that on May 20, a unit of the Underground Forces held up a train at Celestynow station, on the Warsaw-Lublin line. It was packed with the victims of the latest man-hunts in the streets of Warsaw. During the fighting which ensued the armed Poles killed four Gestapo

130 “Nazi Killers Hanged in Lublin,” New York Times, December 5, 1944, 10.

131 “Germans on Trial for Their Crimes in Poland,” New York Times, December 16, 1944, 8.

132 “35,000 Arrests in Warsaw: Children Torn From Their Parents,” The Times, January 28, 1943, 3.

133 “Polish Cabinet and Missing Officers: German Hypocrisy,” The Times, April 19, 1943, 3. 36

men and wounded some 15 to 20 others for the loss of two of their own men. Forty-five political prisoners, who were bound for the notorious concentration camp at Majdanek were released.134

Further, the underground went ahead and passed death sentences on Nazis that worked in prisons and treated Poles harshly; rather noticeably, the treatment of Jews was not mentioned.135 Denial of the unique persecution Jews faced continued in a July 27 article. The report came from Wladyslaw Banaczyk, of the Polish Government, who stated that Poles were being massacred by Germans. On Majdanek his report said: “Children up to the age of 13, women, and all over 50 are deported to the Majdanek death camp, where they are slaughtered in masses. On July 2 and 5 two trains of 30 trucks each, 100 persons to a truck, arrived there. Within a few hours, on each of those days, more than 3,000 people were murdered in the gas chambers.”136 Noticeably, the minister did not mention that these victims were more than likely Polish Jews, not just Poles as the article suggested. More than a year later, on August 12, 1944, the next article was produced. It came from Moscow, and appeared to use Konstantin Simonov’s writing, but it did not say he was the source. It referred to Majdanek as “Lublin Vernichtungs Lager - ‘the camp of annihilation.’”137 The account gave a chronology of the camp - from its inception (1940) and reception of victims (1942), until the correspondent’s own visit. This article provided the views of a journalist that went and inspected the camp. The writer found that almost every European country had an internee in Majdanek.138 It also told the world that the camp was not only meant for labor, but also for death. As the article stated, “The barracks were cleared just as fast as the prisoners could be killed, though always there were some 20,000 kept alive to work on extensions to the camp…

134 “Polish Underground Resistance: Death Sentences Passed on Aggressors,” The Times, May 29, 1943, 3.

135 “Polish Underground Resistance,” 3.

136 “Massacre in Poland: Statement by Home Minister,” The Times, July 27, 1943, 3.

137 “The Horrors of Lublin: Mass Murder by the Germans, Many Victims Gassed,” The Times, August 12, 1944, 3.

138 “The Horrors of Lublin,” 3. 37

The favorite method of killing them was by gas. There were both mobile and permanent gas chambers, and the captured many containers of the gas used.”139 The next section of the article explicitly mentioned Majdanek, and said that former guards had been captured. It also mentioned crude jokes made by the Nazis (i.e. see you in the stove soon, and you are in heaven, heaven has Nazis). It ended with a comment that justice should be served.140 October 3, 1944 saw the publication of an article that discussed Majdanek in passing. The article was heavily focused on the Polish and its internal problems. The only mention of Majdanek was made about the arrest of three Polish generals (Halka, Darowa, and Marcin) and a government official (Cholewa). They were briefly detained at Majdanek, before being sent east with members of the Polish Home Army.141 The final article, from October 27, 1944, published a statement made by Ambassador Averill Harriman, ambassador to Russia. Harriman stated that the atrocities committed in “have not been and cannot be exaggerated.”142 The work then compared atrocities in Western and Eastern Europe, and suggested that what happened in the east was more harsh and repeated; especially for Jewish victims. Harriman found that the Russians were “tremendously interested in what was to be done with war criminals.”143 Harriman also quoted Lublin reports that “estimated that as many as 1,500,000 people were killed in a slaughter-house operated by the Germans at Maidanek.”144

Conclusions From 1940 to 1944, fifty-five articles were published by the three news sources. Statistically, the JTA produced 55% of the articles on Majdanek, the NYT 33%, and The Times

139 “The Horrors of Lublin,” 3.

140 Ibid.

141 “Polish Forces’ Command: Reply to Critics in Lublin, Gen. Zymierski Accused,” The Times, October 3, 1944, 3.

142 “Mr. Harriman on German Atrocities: Reports not Exaggerated,” The Times, October 27, 1944, 3.

143 “Mr. Harriman on German Atrocities,” 3.

144 Ibid. 38 only 12%.145 Most articles were produced in 1944 with thirty-six articles published. That was followed by thirteen articles in 1943, two in 1942, and zero in 1940 and 1941.146 It was no surprise that no articles were published in 1940 or 1941, as the camp was being built then, and the Nazis were secretive about it. As for 1942, the reports both referred to Lublin and prisoners being held in the area, so not a lot of substance was produced. But again, the gas chambers were built in October 1942, and that project would have also been kept top secret.147 The 1943 reports showed the evolution of Majdanek from a city with barracks, to a notorious concentration camp. Rather impressively, a JTA article discussed the liquidation of Majdanek, and it was fairly accurate with the facts about Operation Golden Harvest. In 1944, articles covered the numbers of deported Jews to the camps, death tolls, life after the Holocaust, transitional justice topics (i.e. trials and hangings), and camp visits by correspondents. It was also noteworthy that the reports suggested that 1.5 million people were killed in Majdanek, a number now deemed inaccurate by contemporary research. Finally, it was peculiar that The Times produced only seven articles, even though the majority of the reports from the JTA came from London. This particularity will be discussed more thoroughly in the conclusion of the thesis, when the three main primary sources will be compared. These were some of the most notable aspects that stood out when the articles were read and grouped together. Also, Majdanek was usually reported on by itself, meaning that the Operation Reinhard camps were not often mentioned in conjunction with Majdanek, a fact that became apparent in the next chapters.

145 See Appendix 2.

146 See Appendix 3.

147 “Timeline of Events: Liberation of Lublin-Majdanek.” 39

2 Belzec

A Historical Overview The first Operation Reinhard camp to be operational was Belzec in March 1942. As , an Israeli historian, put it “Up to that time, no death camp operated in Nazi Germany or in the occupied countries and there was therefore no model on which the Operation Reinhard planners could base their plain.”148 In fact, the only suggestions made were to place the camps near railways, in desolate regions - for secrecy, and to be close to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. In addition, methods for mass killing were not fully developed yet, which made Belzec not only the first of the Operation Reinhard camps to be constructed, but the veritable test camp for the Nazis to base the construction and function of other death camps upon.149 Belzec was located in the Lublin district, which became critical when the Nazis annexed East Galicia, making Belzec a center for Jews from Lublin, Cracow, and Lvov.150 According to Friedlander, the camp’s construction began on November 1, 1941, and it officially opened on March 17, 1942, a date now ascribed as being the start of Operation Reinhard.151 The opening of Belzec occurred shortly after the gas chambers were built and tested in February of 1942.152 According to Snyder, Belzec was first envisioned as a slave labor camp, but that idea was abandoned when the work force was limited to 30,000 Jews, which caused its functions to change. After Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, met with Heinrich Himmler, he realized Belzec could be used as an extermination site.153 As Snyder said:

148 Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Kindle edition.

149 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

150 Ibid.

151 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 298, and Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

152 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

153 Snyder, Bloodlands, 254. 40

Belzec was not to be a camp. People spend the night at camps. Belzec was to be a death factory, where Jews would be killed upon arrival…Once the Jews reached Belzec, they were doomed. They arrived unarmed to a closed and guarded facility, with little chance of understanding their situation, let alone resisting the Germans and armed .154

This was reflected by the early gassings, “within four weeks some 75,000 Jews had been murdered in this first of the three ‘Aktion Reinhard’ camps; by the end of 1942 about 434,000 Jews would be exterminated in Belzec alone. Two survived the war.”155 This reflected the goals that , the first commandant of Belzec, had set for the camp. For Wirth, it was imperative that the camp: ran efficiently, deceived its victims, and killed internees quickly. Efficiency was at stake in the middle of June 1942, when it became clear that the original three gas chambers were not enough, and that new ones needed to be built. In June 1942, Belzec temporarily halted operations as its original three gas chambers were torn down, and replaced by six larger gas chambers capable of holding 2,000 people at a time.156 However, these new gas chambers only functioned for a short time, as Belzec soon stopped operating altogether. The USHMM stated that Belzec’s operations ended in December of 1942, with approximately 434,500 Jews killed at the camp.157 It also said that the camp was fully dismantled in June 1943, when dead bodies were exhumed and burnt in order to destroy any evidence of the Nazi crimes committed there.158 Meanwhile Bergen wrote that, “some six hundred thousand Jews had been murdered there, along with perhaps several thousand Gypsies.”159 As the

154 Snyder, Bloodlands, 256.

155 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 298.

156 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

157 “Belzec: Chronology,” last modified June 20, 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php? ModuleId=10007206.

158 “Belzec,” last modified June 20, 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191.

159 Bergen, War and Genocide, 185-187. 41

Holocaust has proved time and again, disparities exist to this day, much like they did when the Holocaust occurred.

Belzec: The Article Collection During the intra-war years, the JTA published eight works on Belzec, spanning from July 10, 1942 to February 24, 1944. In that same period, the NYT presented ten articles on Belzec, between February 2, 1940 and July 23, 1944. Lastly, The Times carried only one article that mentioned Belzec, on July 10, 1942. It should be noted that the 1940 pieces dealt with railway agreements, not the camp. However, as the railways provided a useful tool for Nazi deportations of Jewish victims, they will be analyzed along with the other articles. Overall then, Belzec was mentioned in nineteen articles from 1940 to 1944.

The JTA on Belzec The first JTA report on Belzec appeared on July 10, 1942, and it came from London. The mention of Belzec was brief, at the end of an article. The writing said, “The suffocating of the 26,000 Polish Jews by poison gas took place in the two “Jewish” concentration camps which the Nazis have established at Belzec and Trawniki.”160 Yet, this report was important because it was on the first page of the daily news bulletin, it established that Jews were being killed by poison gas, and it labelled Belzec as a Jewish concentration camp. On November 25, 1942, an item from London focused on the Operation Reinhard camps. The bulletin ascribed the plan for extermination to Heinrich Himmler, and said he wanted the Polish Jewish population halved by the end of the year.161 It stated that the Nazis had claimed the lives of at least one million victims, and that deportations from the Warsaw ghetto had increased. The deportation of the Jews included being stuffed into overcrowded freight cars that were lined with lime. Any survivors of deportations made it to the Operation Reinhard camps, where they

160 “Nazis Slaughter 30,000 German Jews, Exterminate 36,000 Polish Jews by Gas and Guns,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 10, 1942, 1.

161 “Unprecedented Mass-Extermination of Polish Jews; Only 40,000 Left in Warsaw Ghetto,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 25, 1942, 1. 42 were often killed.162 As the bulletin stated, “The survivors were taken to special ‘extermination camps’ near the townships of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobidor where they were murdered in wholesale massacres(sic).”163 The third report, again from London, was published on December 8, 1942, and described the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Belzec. Much like the second publication, it stated that the Jews were rounded up, forced onto freight cars, and sent to an “extermination camp.”164 Upon arrival many of them, it was estimated that the group included 6,000 Jews, were killed by machine guns. The specific number was not stated; however, those who were not shot were left in the train and suffocated to death.165 On April 8, 1943 the JTA published a work about Nazi camps, and it came from ‘somewhere in Europe.’ The article mentioned the establishment of three new labor camps: Lublin (Majdanek), Auschwitz - which they spelled as Auscchwitz, and Birkenau. The report went on to say that deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Belzec continued.166 April 16, saw a more substantive report, from London. No more than 350,000 of the original 3.5 million Jews that made up the Polish population before the war were still alive, it said. It called for action to be taken against the Nazis because of the annihilation of Polish Jewry.167 The bulletin included reports that mentioned 15,000 Jews from Sanok had been killed in Belzec. They were first sent to Zaslaw concentration camp, and then “10,000 were taken to Belzec where they were shot or burned alive. The other 5,000 were also gradually shifted to

162 “Unprecedented Mass-Extermination of Polish Jews,” 1.

163 Ibid.

164 “Details of Massacre of 6,000 Warsaw Jews Reported by Eye-Witness,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 8, 1942, 1.

165 “Details of Massacre of 6,000 Warsaw Jews Reported by Eye-Witness,” 1.

166 “Three Large Camps for Jews in Poland; Gestapo Starts Manhunt on All Frontiers,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 8, 1943, 1.

167 “‘Optimistic Estimates’ Indicate only 350,000 Jews Still Remain Alive in Poland,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 16, 1943, 1. 43

Belzec where they met the same fate.”168 This story showed the grim reality European Jews faced. On July 23, 1943, London provided a report on the liquidation of Polish ghettos. The liquidation of Sandomierz included 1,000 Jews sent to Belzec. The deportation included freight cars lined with lime and left on the tracks for sixteen hours.169 When the trains arrived in Belzec, “where a central ghetto had been established, only 300 of the several thousand deportees were still alive.”170 An item from Stockholm appeared in the February 24, 1944 bulletin. The article began with a short paragraph on Danish Jews, and the Danes defiance of Nazi orders to publish a “Who’s Who” list without Jewish names.171 With no transition, the article turned to the story of a Belzec escapee. The Jewish escapee described “how the Gestapo executed hundreds of Jews daily in an ancient subterranean fortification near Belzec.”172 The escapee also said, “The Germans established a large crematorium there. Every day, since May 1942, ten trains packed with Jews were brought to the execution place near the crematorium. Each train had 50 cars with many Jews packed into each car. The Jews were executed on the day they arrived.”173 Almost a year later, on December 8, 1944, the final report made by the JTA came from Bucharest. The subject of the bulletin dealt with a plan to deport Romanian Jews. The plan came from , was dated September 28, 1942, and suggested that deportations be conducted similarly to “how 600,000 Polish Jews were deported to the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor

168 “‘Optimistic Estimates’ Indicate only 350,000 Jews Still Remain Alive in Poland,” 1.

169 “Polish Government Paper Publishes Eye-Witness Accounts of Liquidation of Ghettos,” 3.

170 Ibid.

171 “Danes Refuse to Publish Danish “Who’s Who” When Nazis Demand Omission of Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 24, 1944, 1.

172 “Danes Refuse to Publish Danish ‘Who’s Who’ When Nazis Demand Omission of Jews,” 1.

173 Ibid. 44 and Belzec.”174 Though Premier approved of this plan, it was thwarted by an unnamed Romanian official.175

The New York Times on Belzec From 1940 to 1944, the NYT published ten pieces that mentioned Belzec. Of those ten articles, seven were news items, two were display ads, and one was a book review. The first two articles were published in February of 1940, and they came from Berlin. As previously mentioned, Belzec was not constructed or in operation until March 1942. However, the two articles brought up rail agreements between Russia and the Third Reich, as railways were integral to the deportation of Jews to various camps. The NYT published the works on February 2 and 4 1940, and they emphasized that the Germans and Russians had agreed upon rail transports between their borders. The agreement called for inspections by each country’s customs officials whenever war goods were transported across borders.176 It also included two rail-lines that ran through towns that later held Nazi death camps, one was Belzec, and the other was Chelm. The articles made it clear that each line would be split between the border towns in Poland and Russia; thus, the Germans had full control of the line set up between Belzec and Rawa-Ruska.177 November to December 1942 saw the publication of three important articles in Holocaust journalism. These works were: “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews” on November 25, 1942 - from London, “Poland in Appeal on Nazi Outrages” on November 28, also from London, and “Allies Describe Outrages on Jews” on December 20, 1942. According to David S. Wyman, a scholar on US reactions to the Holocaust, the November articles were critical. He said, “November 1942 was also crucial in the American

174 “Gestapo Plan for Deportation of Jews from Rumania to Poland Thwarted in Bucharest,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 8, 1944, 2.

175 “Gestapo Plan for Deportation of Jews from Rumania to Poland Thwarted in Bucharest,” 2.

176 “Russia and Reich Improve Rail Link: Nine Stations Prepared for Reloading Freight Because of Difference in Gauges, Rumanian Line Untouched, Soviet Facilitates Shipments of Oil to Germany - Only Thin Traffic Expected,” New York Times, February 2, 1940, 4.

177 “Reich Says Russia is Now Shipping Oil: Reports Two Rail Junctions in Operation, 7 More Planned,” New York Times, February 9, 1940, 2. 45 response to the Holocaust. The month closed with Rabbi Wise’s shattering announcement of confirmed reports that the Nazis were carrying out a plan to annihilate all Jews under their control.”178 Rabbi Wise’s announcement comprised the November 25, 1942 publication, which was published in several newspapers.179 Wyman stated the critical nature of this work:

The emerging picture of the Jewish catastrophe was not well defined in its particulars. It could not be. Reports that filtered out were at times confusing and contradictory. Only after the war did a definite understanding of the six killing centers and their operations crystallize. Even Auschwitz was not widely recognized as the pivotal installation that it was until 1944. But after November 24, 1942, it was evident that the reports were basically correct. A hideous and unprecedented mass murder program was in progress.180

The November 25, 1942 article discussed the killings of Polish Jews, and established Heinrich Himmler as the man that planned them. According to James MacDonald, the reporter, Himmler wanted at least half of Poland’s Jews killed by the end of the year. The report described deportations, the and their killings, and the death camps. MacDonald referred to the Operation Reinhard camps, as “special camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor [in Southeast Poland]. Once there the so-called settlers are mass-murdered.”181 The report went on to state that only the young, and strong survived as laborers. MacDonald iterated that, “Thus under the guise of resettlement in the east, the mass murder of the Jewish population is taking place.”182 Three days later, on November 28, the British Parliament hosted Polish officials who protested the killings in Poland. The report came from London, and corroborated the November

178 David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: The New Press, 2007), 55.

179 Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 48-53.

180 Ibid., 53.

181 James MacDonald, “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews: Slaughter of 250,000 in Plan to Wipe Out Half in Country This Year is Reported, Regime in London Acts, Officials of Poland Publish Data - Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department,” New York Times, November 25, 1942, 10.

182 MacDonald, “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews,” 10. 46

25 article. The basis of the article came from multiple reports that Vice Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk received from the Polish underground. This information confirmed “that the Germans plan to wipe out the Jews in Poland and have been killing thousands daily.”183 The reports from the underground also denied that the Poles felt gratitude about Jews being killed, and it said the Poles would be killed next. The Jewish Council Members that heard these reports hoped for the Germans to be defeated before the Jews were completely killed. The Allied governments stressed that punishment would follow victory in the war.184 The report then discussed Nazi camps. It referred to the extermination camps as “‘human slaughter houses,’ where the Germans put to death by ‘technical means’ not only Jews but those of other faiths, including women and children.”185 The facts came from Dr. Henryk Strasburger of the Polish Government-in-Exile, and he suggested that at least 1,000,000 Polish Jews had been killed since 1939. With 400,000+ Poles being executed and starved as well.186 According to Strasburger, the first slaughter house was in Kaunas, . But, “Another was functioning at Belzec, about sixty miles from Lwow in Poland, where electrocution and lethal gas chambers were being used.”187 That concluded the coverage on the killings in this report. The last report from 1942 came from the United Nations Information Office. The article stated that the extermination of Jews was taking place on a massive scale. It said that the details of what had happened were often “shrouded in death itself.”188 The Allied Governments again promised severe punishment for these crimes. The writing then turned to the methods of killing

183 “Poland in Appeal on Nazi Outrages: Her Parliamentary Council at London Calls to the World Against Massacres, Underground Aids Jews, Finance Minister Strasburger, on Visit Here, Says Germans’ Killings Total 1,400,000,” New York Times, November 28, 1942, 7.

184 “Poland in Appeal on Nazi Outrages,” 7.

185 Ibid.

186 Ibid.

187 Ibid.

188 “Allies Describe Outrages on Jews: United Nations Office Here Releases Report on Fate of 5,000,000 in Europe, Extermination is Feared, Situation in Each Country Held by Germans is Analyzed in Summarized Form,” New York Times, December 20, 1942, 23. 47 and situation in each country. The article said, “Novel methods of mass execution by shooting and lethal gas are cited in the main body of the report, which states that this destruction of the Jews is not isolated in the one country, but is continent-wide…the number of Jewish victims deported and ‘perished’ since 1939 in Axis-controlled Europe now reached the appalling figure of 2,000,000 and that 5,000,000 were in danger of extermination(sic).”189 These killings took place at camps such as Chelmno and Belzec, the only death camps mentioned by the report. It concluded that the Germans had “transformed Poland into one vast center for murdering Jews.”190 These important reports were followed by two ads, an editorial, a book review, and a report on Russian operations in the war. The display ad from February 8, 1943 used the December 20, 1942 report to discuss the killing centers in Poland. It quoted, almost verbatim, the words written about Kaunas and Belzec. The ad only contributed some originality when it described the process of killing at Belzec: “The victims are ordered to strip naked ‘to have a bath.’ They are then led to a barrack with a metal floor. The door is locked and an electric current is turned on. They die in agony.”191 The ad utilized past newspaper articles to call for the creation of a Jewish Army to combat the Germans. The NYT did not release another piece that discussed Belzec for almost a full year. The work to break that silence was an editorial written by the British writer Arthur Koestler. In his piece, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” Koestler was stunned by the lack of a response to the killings of the Jews. He stated that American citizens shook off the horrible information presented to them. Koestler, who was emotive throughout his piece, said:

We, the screamers have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic Van de Lubbe put fire to the German Parliament; we said, if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were

189 “Allies Describe Outrages on Jew,” 23.

190 Ibid.

191 “Display Ad 9,” New York Times, February 8, 1943, 8. 48

maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while…[S]ome recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it!192

In reference to Belzec, Koestler stated that he had given lectures to American soldiers that had “never heard of Lidice, Treblinka, or Belzec.”193 His editorial went on to look at the psychological reasons behind this disbelief, and he found that people closed out the knowledge through disintegration and disassociation. He believed it was not those who pleaded for help that were maniacs, but those who looked on, learned, and shook off the news before they returned to normalcy.194 The ad of October 6, 1944 was for Collier’s Magazine. It included a list of three headlines, one of which was about Jan Karski and his eye-witness account of a death camp. It stated that Karski had entered Belzec, feigned being a guard at the camp, and submitted a report about it to the Polish Government-in-Exile.195 This ad was followed by a book review of Jan Karski’s Story of A Secret State, produced on December 3, 1944. The reviewer, Edward Whiting Fox of Harvard, only mentioned Karski’s time in Belzec once. Fox said the book should not be seen as propaganda, but as the truth that we must come to understand.196 The last article from the

192 Arthur Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” New York Times, January 9, 1944, 5.

193 Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” 5.

194 Ibid., 30.

195 “Display Ad 34,” New York Times, October 6, 1944, 36.

196 Edward Whiting Fox, “Spine-Curling Saga of the Polish Underground: Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski,” New York Times, December 3, 1944, 5, 20, and 22. 49 war years brought us back to where we started: railways. It was an article about Russian advances, strategy, and successes in the war. In regards to Belzec, it stated that Red Army troops had captured both the town and its railway station.197

The London Times on Belzec On July 10, 1942, three months after Belzec began operation, The Times published its only article that mentioned the camp. The report said, “In the Lublin district, on the night of March 23 to 24, the Jewish population were simply driven out of their homes. Altogether in that night 2,500 people were massacred, and the remaining 26,000 Jews of Lublin removed to the concentration camps at Belzec and Trawniki…”198 This quote was placed at the end of the article that came from the Polish Government-in-Exile. Polish Deputy Prime Minister Mikolajczyk, and British Minister of Information Bracken discussed German brutalities that had occurred in Poland, and Bracken promised justice would come. Mikolaczyk informed the public of the rapid increase of the killings in Poland - from 80,000 to 400,000 in over a year’s time.199 This rise was attributed to mistreatment of the Poles, and the “beginning of the wholesale extermination of the Jews.”200 On the Jewish victims, it mentioned the realities of disease and death in the Warsaw ghetto, the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, and public executions of Jews. Even though the report brought up the wholesale killings of the Jews, it seemed to brush over the topic and focus more on Polish victims.

Conclusions During the war years, Belzec received the attention of nineteen articles between the JTA, NYT, and The Times. Appendix 4 of the thesis showed that approximately 53% of the reports came from the NYT, 42% from the JTA, and 5% The Times. As illustrated above, quantity does

197 “Russian,” New York Times, July 23, 1944, 2.

198 “German Record in Poland: Torture and Murder; British Pledge of Retribution,” The Times, July 10, 1942, 3.

199 “German Record in Poland,” 3.

200 Ibid. 50 not always mean quality. The bulletins assessed from the JTA tended to be laden with facts, while the NYT added both emotional and bizarre works. Emotion and passion were abundant in Arthur Koestler’s NYT editorial about the Holocaust going on, and few Americans believing it. While an odd piece was the mention of Jan Karski and Belzec in a promotional add for a magazine. A yearly breakdown in Appendix 5 showed that 1942 and 1944 were the years with the most reports written - seven and six respectively. Meanwhile, four articles were released in 1943, two in 1940, and none in 1941. This matched up with the fact that the camp was not in operation until 1942. As suggested in the Majdanek chapter, the construction and purpose of the Belzec camp would have been kept secret. Overall, a plethora of facets stood out in the reporting on Belzec. First and foremost, Belzec was almost never mentioned singularly. In other words, anytime Belzec was mentioned so was another Operation Reinhard camp, or other death camp. Second, the discussions on Belzec were often at the end of articles or hidden in between other details about the Holocaust. Third, with the exclusion of the JTA, reports related to Belzec never appeared on front pages of The Times or the NYT. Fourth, Belzec was only mentioned in one article by The Times during this particular period. This was strange because most of the JTA articles about Belzec came from London. This oddity, and potential reasons behind it will be discussed at length in the conclusion of this work. Finally, unlike Sobibor and Treblinka, the end of Belzec operations was not covered. Recurrent topics included: deportations and how they were conducted, and death estimations. Most notably, Belzec included three of the most important articles from Holocaust journalism; however, they were not prominently displayed. To conclude, the articles on Belzec from 1940 to 1944 followed much of what the scholarly world has said about Holocaust journalism. Laurel Leff, professor of journalism at Northeastern, put it well in her chapter for Moses Shapiro’s Why Didn’t the Press Shout?. She said:

The main problem was not that the stories were too few in number. It was not that the stories presented the information in a way that cast doubt upon its credibility. It was not that the individual stories made it easy to grasp isolated events but hard to detect an 51

overall pattern. The story of the Holocaust emerges from these stories. The problem was that the New York Times did not inform its readers, through placement, through headlines, through editorials, through retrospectives, that what was happening to the Jews was something they needed to understand. As a result, despite the thousand stories that were printed and specificity of the information that was available, most Americans may not have known about the Holocaust. The facts of the Holocaust were available to the public, but the facts, no matter how wrenching and revealing, did not speak for themselves.201

Ron Hollander, an English professor with a focus on journalism, seemed to disagree. He put it bluntly, “But from 1942 on, we knew that the Germans were systematically exterminating specifically the Jews using gas chambers and crematoria. Nor was it just President Franklin Roosevelt and State Department officials with access to secret cables who knew. The American public itself read in its morning and evening papers that the Jews were being wiped out.”202 This chapter showed that the world received some information about the Holocaust through reports, even when they were not prominently displayed, which proved both scholars to be partially correct. This particular aspect was also seen in the publications about Sobibor and Treblinka.

201 Laurel Leff, “When the Facts Didn’t Speak for Themselves: The Holocaust in the New York Times, 1939-1945,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Jersey City: Yeshiva University Press, 2003): 73-74.

202 Ron Hollander, “WE KNEW: America’s Newspapers Report the Holocaust,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Jersey City: Yeshiva University Press, 2003): 41-42. 52

3 Sobibor

A Historical Overview Sobibor began to operate as a death camp in April 1942, only one month after construction had been completed, and Belzec had begun exterminating victims.203 Additionally, “the structure of Sobibor was similar to that of Belzec and was based on the experience that had been gained there,”204 these influences included conducting gassing experiments in April 1942. These experiments were important because “The camp at Sobibor was constructed solely for the purpose of killing,”205 and they established how the gassings should be run. After the experimental killings were successfully conducted, mass extermination began in May. By June 1942, Jewish prisoners knew that extermination was occurring within the camp, and within three months Sobibor had already claimed the lives of 90,000 to 100,000 Jews.206 , a Holocaust survivor and Dutch historian, showed that the killings were multinational when he wrote, “Approximately 170,000 Jews from Germany, France, the , , Poland, Slovakia, the Soviet Union and Czech territory were sent there to be gassed by carbon monoxide.”207 One of the unique events that occurred at Sobibor was the revolt. As Schelvis put it, “Without the uprising, there would have been no survivors, no one to testify to what happened at Sobibor.”208 Friedlander suggested that the revolt stemmed from the decrease in deportees, which suggested that the inmates would be killed soon. The plan to revolt originated in 1943, and

203 Bergen, War and Genocide, 187, Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 299, and Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

204 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

205 Bergen, War and Genocide, 187.

206 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

207 Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), Kindle edition.

208 Schelvis, Sobibor. 53 picked up steam when Alexander Petsjerski, a Jewish Red Army lieutenant, arrived at Sobibor on September 22. His military training included teaching combat and overcoming adversity. He joined the original planners of the revolt, members of the Arbeitshäftlinge (Jewish workers), and within three weeks he prepared and helped execute a revolt.209 October 14 was the proposed date for the revolt, and it included two main phases. In the first phase, Jewish prisoners called guards to their workshops only to kill them upon their arrival. This part of the plan worked; however, the second stage was chaotic. In it, the Jews were supposed to go through the main gates as a ‘collective.’ Instead they fled sporadically, and more than 300 made it to the forests.210 Bergen made an important addition when she said, “It is not clear whether the revolt hastened the camp’s closure, but by the time Sobibor stopped operations, most of the Jews in the territories from which it had drawn its victims were already dead.”211 This point was made because the camp no longer functioned after the revolt transpired.212 While Sobibor was in operation, anywhere from 170,000 to 250,000 Jews were killed in the camp.213 According to Snyder, Sobibor achieved a mortality rate of 99.99%, and only had forty survivors. However, Schelvis, who was briefly interned at Sobibor, found forty seven survivors - not including himself.214 Snyder’s work also found that 150,000 victims were Polish Jews, which seemed to be a large figure for a camp with a highly emphasized Dutch connection.215 For instance, in his chapter on deportees, Schelvis found that between January 1 and October 14, 1943, 34,313 Dutch Jews were deported to Sobibor; and of that number, only eighteen survived and returned to the Netherlands. Comparatively, he used estimates from

209 Schelvis, Sobibor.

210 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 377.

211 Bergen, War and Genocide, 187.

212 Schelvis, Sobibor.

213 For 170,000 see: “Sobibor: Chronology,” last modified June 20, 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php? ModuleId=10007258. For 180,000 see: Snyder, Bloodlands, 261. For 250,000 see: Bergen, War and Genocide, 187.

214 Schelvis, Sobibor.

215 Snyder, Bloodlands, 261 and 275. 54

Yitzhak Arad and Adalbert Rückerl to come to a median estimate of 14,900 Jews transported to Sobibor from the , within the same time frame. That being said, the General Government figure remains contested; additionally, the fact that 101,370 victims were deported to Sobibor up to December 31, 1942 adds more confusion into where exactly the victims came from. Regardless, if several scholars have agreed that 53,895 victims were deported to Sobibor from outside Poland, and that roughly 170,000 Jews died in the camp, then it becomes an overestimate to say that 150,000 of the victims were Polish Jews.216 Some of these aspects, like the revolt and deportations, found their way into the reports analyzed within the remainder of the chapter.

Sobibor: The Article Collection From 1940 to 1944, the JTA wrote seven reports on Sobibor. The first bulletin, which dealt with all of the other camps evaluated, was dated December 6, 1943. The last work, which also discussed Belzec, was from December 8, 1944. The NYT published four articles on Sobibor; whereas, The Times produced no articles whatsoever. All four of the articles from the NYT discussed other camps written about in this thesis. The first article was from November 25, 1942, and the last appeared on September 4, 1944.

The JTA on Sobibor It was late in the war, on December 6, 1943, when the JTA published its first bulletin that named Sobibor as a camp. The report, from London, said that nine Jewish-only camps had been established.217 This work was previously discussed in the Majdanek chapter. As a reminder, camps were built in “Belezec, Starogard, Pozulice, Sobibor, Kosow-Podlaski, Treblinka, Trawniki, Poniechowek and also one between Chelo and Wlodawa(sic).”218 The report concluded that 100 concentration camps existed in Poland, and they served nine functions: “segregation

216 Schelvis, Sobibor.

217 “Germans Have Established Nine Separate Concentration Camps for Polish Jews,” 4.

218 Ibid. 55 camps, concentration camps proper, forced labor camps, camps for priests, camps for women (non-Jewish), camps for Jews, ‘racial improvement’ camps, corrective camps for young Poles, and children’s camps.”219 Four days later, on December 10, London produced a piece on liquidations. The main liquidation covered was that of Wlodawa, and its 4,000 Jews. The group was split between 3,000 deported, and 1,000 killed on the spot during the liquidation.220 Treblinka was also mentioned in this report, as the Jews of Wengrow were executed on the spot (400), or sent to Treblinka and gassed (300). Finally, the work mentioned the first connection between Dutch Jewry and Sobibor. According to the report, Dutch Jews first arrived at Trawniki, and the “children, women, and aged men were sent to the Sobibor camp, while able-bodied men were placed in workshops manufacturing clothes for the German army.”221 In all likelihood, the Dutch Jews sent to Sobibor were killed. The third bulletin came from Geneva, and was published on December 19, 1943. It discussed the dissolution of the Polish Jewish council in Cracow, and their deportation to camps. Included in the report was the experience of a Jewish male who managed to flee Poland. The escapee told Jewish councils in Switzerland that Jews were being held in camps around Lublin, and he “estimated that hundreds of thousands of Jews were executed in the Sobibor camp which, he said, was constructed under the supervision of an engineer named Moser, who was the head of the Public Works Department in Cracow.”222 He named Franz Holheimer as the conductor of executions in Sobibor, before he provided names of other camp supervisors in the Lublin district.223

219 “Germans Have Established Nine Separate Concentration Camps for Polish Jews,” 4.

220 “Further Reports of Liquidation of Polish Ghettos Reach London; Poles Praised,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 10, 1943, 3.

221 “Further Reports of Liquidation of Polish Ghettos Reach London,” 3.

222 “Nazis Liquidate Jewish Community Council in Cracow; Deport All Jewish Leaders,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 19, 1943, 1.

223 “Nazis Liquidate Jewish Community Council in Cracow,” 1. 56

The fourth bulletin came from Jerusalem on January 6, 1944, and it provided an estimate on Polish Jews sent to death camps. This article was previously discussed in the Majdanek chapter. As a reminder, the report stated, “Official statistics of the German Railways operating in occupied Poland reveal that 1,071,600 doomed Jews were transported to Treblinka, Belzetz and other ‘extermination camps’ during the year beginning April 1, 1942 and ending March 31, 1943…(sic)”224 According to the man who submitted the data, Dr. Isaac Gruenbaum of the Jewish Agency, these numbers did not include Sobibor, Majdanek, and Malkinia. Gruenbaum then charged the Allied governments with failure to act and prevent the killings, and said the invasion of Europe would only instigate Nazis to attack the Jews more.225 The next bulletin came from London on February 8, 1944. It was unique to Sobibor because it covered its revolt. According to the report, the revolt was organized with the help of the Polish underground, and it claimed the lives of more than 200 German and Ukrainian guards. It was called the second largest uprising, behind the . The revolt began in the penal area, where Jews were subjected to punishment and torture for their alleged misdoings in the camp. This area was attacked, and the incarcerated Jews were released and they joined the aggressors. The aid of the underground movement spurned on the killing of 200 guards; however, several Jews also died.226 The destruction of the camp came from within, and was discussed in the sixth article. The sixth bulletin came from Moscow on August 17, 1944. It was also discussed in the Majdanek chapter. The report was about Nazi efforts to destroy evidence of their crimes, and it mainly dealt with Treblinka being razed to the ground; however, it did mention Sobibor. Sobibor and Majdanek were also destroyed by their former operators, and were now in Red Army hands. The Russians found survivors that testified about their camp experiences, thus the destruction of evidence was not completed.227

224 “German Data Reveals 1,071,600 Polish Jews Transported to Extermination Camps,” 3.

225 Ibid.

226 “200 Gestapo Men Killed by Jews During Battle in Polish ‘Extermination Camp,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 6, 1944, 1.

227 “Germans Raze all Traces of the ‘Jewish Extermination Camps’ Before Leaving Poland,” 1. 57

The final bulletin was from Bucharest on December 8, 1944. It was previously mentioned in the Belzec chapter. In the bulletin, the Germans suggested that Romania follow the example set by the deportation of Polish Jews. The plan was thwarted by an unnamed official.228

The New York Times on Sobibor The four articles published by the NYT that mentioned Sobibor all included other camps covered in the thesis. In other words, no NYT article focused solely on Sobibor. The first article was the famous November 25, 1942 article previously covered in its entirety in the Belzec chapter; thus, it will be reduced to a brief review here. As mentioned, the survivors of deportations arrived at any of the three Operation Reinhard camps, and they were killed there. Their deaths were the plan of Heinrich Himmler, and very few Jews escaped immediate deaths.229 The second article written about Sobibor was sent as a “Letter to the Times,” and was printed on May 1, 1944. It was in response to a piece about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The author, Jacob Pat of the Jewish Labor Committee, mentioned a report from the Jewish labor underground in Poland. That report was from November 15, 1943, and mentioned rebellions and revolts throughout Poland: Bialystok, Tremblinka (Treblinka), Sobibor, Tarnov, Bedin, Czenstchow, Borislaw, and Lodz.230 His letter characterized the Sobibor revolt as heroic, and said, “In Sobibor, too, hundreds of Jews were murdered. The revolt, which occurred in October, 1943, culminated in the successful escape of a large number of Jews from that camp.”231 The third article was about the Red Army’s advancement into the railway station at Sobibor. This article was previously mentioned in the Belzec chapter. As stated earlier, its entire

228 “Gestapo Plan for Deportation of Jews from Rumania to Poland Thwarted in Bucharest,” 2.

229 MacDonald, “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews,” 10.

230 Jacob Pat, “Letters to the Times: Other Ghetto Battles: Underground Here Receives News of Jewish Resistance in Poland,” New York Times, May 1, 1944, 14.

231 Pat, “Letters to the Times: Other Ghetto Battles,” 14. 58 focus was on Russian advances and successes in the war. On Sobibor, the First White Russian troops fought their way to the Sobibor train station on July 22, 1944.232 The final article published by the NYT was mentioned briefly in the Majdanek chapter. The story came from Moscow on September 4, 1944, and was about an escapee from Sobibor - spelt Sobibur in the article. It compared the camp to Majdanek in terms of size, location, and methods of killing. The Polish youth, W.B. Feinberg, relayed that the camp was made up of multiple sections: two for laborers, and one for executions. He witnessed cruelty in killings: from dogs being set on prisoners to severed appendages.233 His knowledge about the death section was second-hand because prisoners were not allowed in it. However, “its features were well known to all prisoners.”234 It was in this section that Feinberg said that Sobibor was capable of killing 1,800 people at a time. The deceased were then buried in a mass grave, before being burnt on pyres in 1943. To conclude his statements, which were reported in Komsolskaya Pravda, he described the revolt. The action took place on October 14, 1943, and approximately four hundred people escaped Sobibor after German guards and officials were killed. Those who escaped were followed by the Germans, and most were killed. Feinberg’s statements suggested that only fifty survived.235 This eyewitness report ended the NYT’s coverage on Sobibor.

Conclusions During the war years, only eleven articles mentioned Sobibor, many of which included information about other camps discussed in this thesis. A statistical breakdown showed that of those articles, the JTA produced 64%, and the NYT 36%.236 As for yearly trends, 1944 was the

232 “Russian,” 2.

233 “Young Pole’s Tale Bares Death Camp,” 9.

234 Ibid.

235 Ibid.

236 See Appendix 6. 59 year in which Sobibor was mentioned the most with seven total articles, followed by three in 1943, one in 1942, and zero in both 1940 and 1941.237 The most noticeable items covered were the revolt, and the Dutch connection. On the revolt, reports stated a death total of guards - not seen in secondary literature - and credited the Polish underground for their assistance. They made nothing of the POWs that helped structure and organize the revolt, likely because that knowledge would only come with survivors. One of those survivors provided an estimate that 50 escapees may have survived, an important opinion overlooked by Friedlander. Interestingly enough, the Dutch connection to Sobibor was only mentioned in one report. For a camp that received many Dutch Jews, it was odd to see such a scant amount of reports about that connection. These unique aspects made the articles on Sobibor stand out. That being said, many of the articles that discussed Sobibor also mentioned Belzec, and more often, Treblinka. In other words, Sobibor’s unique identity was often overshadowed because the reports also mentioned other Operation Reinhard camps. Also, very few of the articles made the front pages. As the Belzec chapter concluded as well, the facts were out, but their presentation was less than adequate. Finally, the fact that The Times produced zero articles during this period should be noted here, and will be discussed at length in the conclusion of this work.

237 See Appendix 7. 60

4 Treblinka

A Historical Overview The construction of Treblinka began on June 1, 1942, and it was completed on July 11, 1942. It was the last of the Operation Reinhard camps to be built, thus, “The expertise gained in the building and in the killing operations in the other two camps were applied in the planning and construction of Treblinka. It became the most ‘perfected’ death camp of Operation Reinhard.”238 On July 19, 1942, Himmler ordered that the General Government’s Jewish population be resettled. Due to its proximity to Warsaw, Treblinka received many of the General Government’s Jews - most of whom came from the Warsaw ghetto.239 The camp, built for the sole purpose of killing, opened its gates and received its first victims from Warsaw on July 22. Killings began the next day.240 The camp was split between a lower camp, and an upper camp. The lower camp was where the internees were collected and undressed, and it was also home to workshops and barracks. The upper camp was shrouded from view by fences and trees, which hid the gas chambers.241 The camp’s first operations were chaotic as Dr. Imfried Eberl, the first commandant, wanted Treblinka’s death rates to exceed the other camps, thus proving his own worth. The chaos led to bodies being piled up and burnt in pyres, and trains being held at the stations, which led to some escapes, and the spread of knowledge about the camp. Ultimately, Eberl was replaced with , the former commandant at Sobibor. Stangl cleaned up the mess that Eberl made after he stopped the camp’s operations in August 1942, and reopened

238 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

239 Snyder, Bloodlands, 261 and 263.

240 Bergen, War and Genocide, 187, Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 332, and Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

241 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 332-333. 61

Treblinka in September.242 As Arad wrote, “The pause taken for the reorganization in Treblinka was short. The continuation of the liquidation of the largest ghetto in Europe - the Warsaw ghetto - could not be postponed long.”243 On September 21, 1942, the last deportation of Jews from Warsaw arrived at Treblinka carrying only 2,200 people. From the opening of Treblinka to September 21, 1942, it has been estimated that approximately 254,000 Jews were not only deported from Warsaw to the camp; but also, killed within it.244 By May 1943, deportations to Treblinka had started to decline. The prisoners noticed this, and because they knew what the function of the camp was, they believed that they would be the next to die. As a result, they began to plan a revolt in July 1943. The revolt was supposed to occur on August 2 at 4:30 PM. However, the plan ran into complications, and the revolt started half an hour early. This caused communication and coordination between the various teams to break down, which led to chaos. While the camp burnt around them, hundreds of inmates tried to escape. Friedlander noted that 850 tried to escape: 100 were immediately caught, 350-400 died in the revolt, 400 were caught as they fled, and 100 of the last 200 escaped. Unfortunately, the number that survived remains unknown.245 After the revolt, Treblinka operated until November 17, 1943, and was completely liquidated by the end of the month.246 The estimated death totals vary by source: Snyder wrote that about 780,863 people died at Treblinka, and he estimated that 700,000 of them were Polish Jews.247 Meanwhile the USHMM has suggested that the total of victims ran between 870,00 and 925,000.248 Chris Webb and Michal Chocolatý encapsulated both of these estimates when they

242 Snyder, Bloodlands, 267-268.

243 Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

244 Ibid.

245 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 376-377.

246 Chris Webb and Michal Chocolatý, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance, (: ibidem Press, 2014), 118.

247 Snyder, Bloodlands, 273 and 275.

248 “Treblinka: Chronology,” last modified June 20, 2014, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php? ModuleId=10007257. 62 said, “at least 700,000 and perhaps as many as 885,000 Jews were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.”249 As previously stated, the Holocaust has remained a complex mystery to this day; thus, we should rid ourselves of hindsight bias. It was undoubtedly far more complex to those who witnessed and experienced it, and all reports produced were valiantly made efforts to get the news to the public.

Treblinka: The Article Collection During the war years, the JTA produced twenty-seven bulletins about Treblinka. The JTA’s first mention of Treblinka came on November 25, 1942, and the last was on December 8, 1944. The NYT produced seven articles on Treblinka, two of which were also included in articles about Belzec and Sobibor. The first of the NYT articles on Treblinka was dated November 25, 1942, and the last was from January 30, 1944. Finally, The Times produced zero articles on Treblinka.

The JTA on Treblinka The first publications that mentioned Treblinka were written on November 25, 1942, and they came from London. The first article was discussed in the Belzec chapter. It was about the Nazis execution of Jews, and was similar to the NYT piece from the same day. It said that one million Jews had died already, and that Himmler ordered the killing of half of Poland’s Jews by the end of 1942.250 The report, which came from the Polish Government-in-Exile, then stated that the Nazis had conducted multiple deportations from the Warsaw ghetto. The deportations included overloaded freight cars with chlorinated water and lime mixed on the floor, which often led to death by suffocation. Those who survived the harsh conditions were “taken to special ‘exterminating camps’ near the townships of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobidor where they were murdered in wholesale massacres(sic).”251

249 Webb and Chocolatý, The Treblinka Death Camp, 193.

250 “Unprecedented Mass-Extermination of Polish Jews; Only 40,000 Left in Warsaw Ghetto,” 1.

251 Ibid. 63

According to the second report from November 25, methods of killing included electrocutions. The electrocutions were conducted similarly to gassings, in that victims removed their clothes and were herded into a small room together. The chief difference was the fact that the floors were metal and the cells were electrified.252 Meanwhile in Treblinka, “the Nazis used excavating machines to dig mass graves for the massacred Jews. In a number of cases Poles were forced to witness the executions.”253 The article that followed gave more attention to the use of gas in killings. It came from London, and it was included in the May 23, 1943 bulletin. The report stated that Jews deported to ‘unknown locations’ were being killed in mass by suffocation. The “special ‘steam chambers’ erected in several concentration camps”254 killed Jews in “groups of 500.”255 On Treblinka, the report “reveals that in the notorious Treblinka concentration camp ‘installations have been set up to enable the suffocation of 5,000 Jews daily.’ These installations are now being enlarged, the report adds.”256 The fourth work from London appeared on May 31. The Polish Government submitted statistics on deportations from the Warsaw ghetto. They gathered the information from German sources, such as Nazi newspapers and government reports.257 The deportations were conducted in July of 1942, and by the end of the month “56,089 Jews had been sent to the Treblinka ‘death camp’ where it is assumed most of them were executed. In August, 135,120 were sent to Treblinka, while from September 1 to September 12 another 51,969 were taken to the execution

252 “Many Jews Electrocuted; Excavating Machine Digs Mass Graves,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 25, 1942, 1.

253 “Many Jews Electrocuted,” 1.

254 “Nazis Suffocate Jews in Groups of 500 in Special ‘Steam Chambers,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 23, 1943, 2.

255 “Nazis Suffocate Jews in Groups of 500 in Special ‘Steam Chambers,’” 2.

256 Ibid.

257 “Quarter of a Million Jews Sent from Warsaw Ghetto to Execution Camp in Two Months,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 31, 1943, 1. 64 center.”258 That being said, deports to Treblinka not only originated in Warsaw, but also from other European countries. The subject of the June 6 report from London was deportations from Bulgaria. The work made the bulletin under the “Last Minute News” section, and it called attention to the European- wide intentions the Nazis displayed. The report came from Polish radio SWIT, which said that deports from Bulgaria had reached Poland. Further, the trains were in route to “the notorious ‘Jewish concentration camp’ at Treblinka where the Nazis have recently installed special ‘death chambers’ in which 700 Jews can be gassed in 45 minutes.”259 SWIT also said that hundreds of Polish Jews were being killed daily at Treblinka after their heads were shaved so that the hair could be sent to Germany as a resource.260 On June 8, a report from London returned to the topic of deportations from Warsaw. The report mentioned that the deportation took place before the uprising, and that “most of the Warsaw Jews were deported from the ghetto to the notorious Treblinka camp where the Nazis are using ‘gas chambers’ for mass executions.”261 During the deportations, 60 Jews committed suicide and 2,648 were shot because they resisted.262 The Polish Government-in-Exile, based out of London, released a report on June 16 about German scientists that worked with lethal gasses. The government said they were “compiling ‘blacklists’ of German scientists who are experimenting with new lethal gasses on Jews and Poles interned in concentration camps in occupied Poland. The lists of those conducting experiments in the death chambers of the Oswiecim and Treblinka camps will be made public soon, the announcement said.”263 Interestingly, the report then turned to a German

258 “Quarter of a Million Jews Sent from Warsaw Ghetto to Execution Camp in Two Months,” 1.

259 “Last Minute News: Trainloads of Jews Deported from Bulgaria Reach Poland; Sent to ‘Death Camp,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 6, 1943, 4.

260 “Last Minute News: Trainloads of Jews Deported from Bulgaria Reach Poland,” 4.

261 “Warsaw Jews Were Transported to Treblinka Camp, Polish Government Learns,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 8, 1943, 2.

262 “Warsaw Jews Were Transported to Treblinka Camp,” 2.

263 “Polish Government Compiles ‘Blacklists’ of Nazi Scientists Gassing Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 16, 1943, 1. 65 politician, , who told Nazis in Vienna that actions against Jews needed to be intensified and continued until no Jews were left alive in Europe.264 On June 29, 1943, an article that established a Dutch connection to Treblinka came from London. It stated that thousands of Dutch Jews had been sent to Treblinka, where they were killed in the improved gas chambers. The report then said that Dutch Jews were being massacred in various Polish towns, and their arrival in Eastern Europe was precipitated by the dissolution of camps in the Netherlands.265 August 24 saw the publication of a London report that showed Nazis had started to destroy evidence of their crimes. Out of fear of punishment via the United Nations, the Nazis worked to expunge any and all evidence of their crimes. The Nazis were said to be “exhuming the bodies of Jews and Poles murdered at Lublin, Warsaw and Treblinka and cremating the corpses.”266 This route was taken because the destruction of physical corpses was thought to nullify any evidence the United Nations could bring to trials against Nazis.267 As history has shown, the efforts were futile because survivors have voiced their own experiences. The three reports that followed discussed the destruction of Treblinka after the camp’s revolt. The first of the three revolt pieces came from London, and appeared in the September 23, 1943 publication of the JTA. According to the report, the revolt occurred in August when prisoners set fire to the barracks, buildings, and gas chambers. The information then turned to what the underground knew about Treblinka. First and foremost, they believed it evolved into “the chief execution center for the Jews in Poland.”268 Their evidence for this came from the many deportations to Treblinka, which were the subjects of multiple articles previously discussed. Finally, they believed that Treblinka was the chief camp because, “According to one

264 “Polish Government Compiles ‘Blacklists’ of Nazi Scientists Gassing Jews,” 1.

265 “Extermination of Dutch Jews in Polish Concentration Camps Reported,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 29, 1943, 1.

266 “Nazis Exhuming Bodies and Cremating them to Hide Crimes from United Nations,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 24, 1943, 1.

267 “Nazis Exhuming Bodies and Cremating them to Hide Crimes from United Nations,” 1.

268 “Jews in ‘Death Camp’ Revolt, Set Fire to Execution Chambers and Barracks,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 23, 1943, 1. 66 report it is the most modern and efficient execution center erected by the Nazis, with facilities, the Germans have boasted, for murdering 5,000 persons a day in the gas and steam chambers.”269 On September 26, another report from London discussed the revolt. In it, the news reiterated that the camp had been burnt down by the Jewish prisoners. The only new information provided was related to escapees who “utilized the confusion” to escape Treblinka.270 The last article on the revolt was produced on October 31, 1943, and it also came from London. This report was still general, but it produced new information on the revolt. It stayed general when it reminded the readers that the camp had been set on fire. However, the new information showed that outside help was provided. According to the report, the revolt occurred because “an underground organization of young Jewish men and women within the camp succeeded in establishing contact with a band of Polish guerrillas who supplied some arms and ammunition…”271 Other new details included the fact that death vans were brought to the camp and Jews were ordered to enter them; however, they refused and flung hidden grenades at the Nazis. This signaled other prisoners to attack the Germans from three sides. Once that firefight started, the guerrillas joined as well. Both sides suffered casualties, and many Jews fled after the death vans were destroyed. The escape caused the Germans to offer rewards that led to prisoners being recaptured, and likely led to Judenjagds (hunts for the Jews).272 Finally, “the story of the Treblinka revolt has spread all over occupied Poland where it is considered as daring as the battle in the Warsaw ghetto.”273 Treblinka was mentioned again in a report based out of London on November 24, 1943. The article dealt with the pursuit of war criminals, and how the Polish government had made a list of ten German war criminals to be punished. The list was given in a press conference by the

269 “Jews in ‘Death Camp’ Revolt,” 1.

270 “Polish ‘Death Camp’ Burnt Down by Revolting Jews, Many Flee, Underground Reports,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 26, 1943, 2.

271 “Agreement with Guerrillas Paved Way for Jewish Revolt in Polish Death Camp,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 31, 1943, 3.

272 “Agreement with Guerrillas Paved Way for Jewish Revolt in Polish Death Camp,” 3.

273 Ibid. 67

Polish National Council; specifically, Ignacy Schwarzbart. The criminals included eight Nazis that worked in Warsaw, and two that worked in killing squads.274 One of the accused Nazis was Dr. Tebenow, who was “chief of the Deportation Office, directly responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and for deporting thousands of its residents to the Treblinka ‘death camp’…”275 The article failed to state what the possible punishment would be, but it was made clear that Polish Jews wanted the men to be punished. Following that article were two pieces from London on December 6. One discussed the types of concentration camps, and the other established an estimated total of Jewish deaths. The first article discussed and named the types of camps in Poland. It was previously analyzed in the Majdanek chapter, and it stated that Jews were being held in multiple concentration camps throughout Poland. The camps were “located at Belezec, Starogard, Potulice, Sobibor, Kosow- Podlaski, Treblinka, Trawniki, Poniechowek an also one between Chelo and Wlodawa.”276 On Treblinka it stated, “Of these, Treblinka, Trawniki and Poniechowek are ‘death camps’ to which the Jews are sent to be executed. It is known that Treblinka has extensive execution facilities, such as gas and steam chambers.”277 Overall, these camps were part of a vast network that included 100 camps with nine different functions as previously discussed in the Majdanek chapter. The second article was about an early commemoration of the United Nations Declaration on Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe from December 17, 1942. Since the release of the declaration and the beginning of World War II, three million European Jews had been killed.278 This figure was spread by a BBC broadcaster, who also said that Poland was the “execution

274 “Polish Jews Indict War Criminals Responsible for Mass Murders,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 24, 1943, 2.

275 “Polish Jews Indict War Criminals Responsible for mass Murders,” 2.

276 “Germans Have Established Nine Separate Concentration Camps for Polish Jews,” 4.

277 Ibid.

278 “BBC Special Broadcast Estimates 3,000,000 European Jews Killed by Germans,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 6, 1943, 4. 68 center for the Jews of Europe.”279 The broadcast also stated that Jews all over Europe had been deported, and few remained. It ended with information about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Treblinka’s gas chambers. Unfortunately, whatever was said about the gas chambers was not included in the article.280 Four days later, London reported on the liquidation of Polish ghettos. This article was previously discussed in the Sobibor chapter. As a short review, it was a report from Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart on the liquidation of various Polish ghettos. It mentioned Treblinka when it discussed the fate of the Wengrow ghetto Jews. The report stated that 700 Jews lived there: 400 were executed within the ghetto, and the other 300 “were gassed in the Treblinka death camp.”281 Another report from London appeared on December 12, and it was previously analyzed in the Majdanek chapter. The report came from the Polish underground, and it discussed problems with Majdanek’s incinerator. As for Treblinka, the article discussed how Nazis duped Western European Jews about what they would do in the East. As the report stated, “A group of French Jews, passing through Warsaw, are reported to have asked persons at the station: ‘Where is the town of Treblinka, to which we are being sent for work?’ It is only when they arrive at their destination that the deportees discover that Treblinka is an execution center rather than a labor camp.”282 These deportees were likely included in official statistics, as the next article suggested to readers. A publication on the number of Jews deported to camps came from Jerusalem, and was part of the January 6, 1944 JTA bulletin. The report was already discussed in the Majdanek and Sobibor chapters. It stated that “1,071,600 doomed Jews were transported to Treblinka, Belzetz and other ‘extermination camps’ during the year beginning April 1, 1942 and ending March 31, 1943.”283 Unfortunately statistics for Sobibor and Majdanek were not known, and thus a

279 “BBC Special Broadcast Estimates 3,000,000 European Jews Killed by Germans,” 4.

280 Ibid.

281 “Further Reports of Liquidation of Polish Ghettos Reach London,” 3.

282 “Germans Build Huge Funeral Pyre to Incinerate Polish Jews,” 3.

283 “German Data Reveals 1,071,600 Polish Jews Transported to Extermination Camps,” 3. 69 complete estimate was not reached. Furthermore, one million plus sent to two camps and other unnamed camps was very vague - but it reflected what was known at that point in time. Two original reports from New York were displayed in the March 16, 1944 bulletin. The first report was a comprehensive work from the Jewish underground that described revolts in Warsaw, other ghettos, and Treblinka and Sobibor (spelt Solibor in the article).284 The fighters put aside their ideological beliefs because “They were bound by ties of death, not of life; they fought side by side for the honor and the glory of the Jewish people. Through the Jewish Fighting Organization, we exerted ourselves in the organization and strengthening of the fight.”285 The report then turned somber, as it established that the Nazis continued to kill even when defeat was eminent. However, the second work from March 16, showed that the Jews remained resilient, and they knew that “you have done everything possible to save us.”286 It then elaborated on the martyrs of Bialystok, Sobibor (spelt as Solibor) and Treblinka. On the death camp revolts, the underground praised how the Jews in both camps organized themselves and attacked their guards. Their efficiency was seen as “they disarmed and killed the majority of them, burned down the gas-chambers and the ‘living-crematoria’ and after having accomplished this, escaped to the neighboring forests.”287 On August 17th the liquidation of Bialystok began, and in three days “seven transports of victims were taken to the death-camp at Treblinka.”288 Another Treblinka focused report was released on March 26, 1944, and it came from London. The article was a veritable cornucopia of information. First it discussed a request made by the Polish Jewish underground to both Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt asking for a body to be created to stop the killings of Jews. Second was a report from an underground paper that said Poles tried to help Jews, and some died because of that. An example

284 “Jewish Underground Movement in Poland Sends First-Hand Report to Jews of America,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 16, 1944, 1.

285 “Jewish Underground Movement in Poland Sends First-Hand Report to Jews of America,” 1.

286 “We Regard Our Merciless Doom With Sober Eyes, Report Says,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 16, 1944, 1.

287 “We Regard Our Merciless Doom With Sober Eyes,” 1.

288 Ibid. 70 of a martyr, Father Ulatowski, was cited in the report. Ulatowski was deported to a camp because he provided false documents that stated Jewish women were Catholics.289 Finally, Jewish groups in London had received more news about the Treblinka revolt. According to the new report, “200 Jews and 50 Germans were killed during the outbreak.”290 This was the first report to provide numerical estimates of the death tolls of the revolt. A Geneva based report that mentioned Treblinka was present in the May 8 JTA bulletin. It was about that attacked a train, and freed its Jewish deportees. The deportees decided to hide in the woods, and they were able to do so because the partisans killed the guards that escorted the train. Furthermore, a group had established itself in the forests and had received food from the Gentile population in the Carpathian region (where the train was stopped).291 In that region only a few thousand Jews were left because most had been deported to either labor camps or “the ‘annihilation camp’ in Treblinka, Belzec and in the Lublin district.”292 A previously discussed article from Zurich was part of the May 29, 1944 publication. It was part of the Majdanek chapter, and discussed the destruction of evidence of Nazi crimes. Berlin tasked the camps with exhuming bodies from mass graves and burning them, so as to leave nothing behind of their crimes.293 The report then turned to the Treblinka revolt, which provided a different look at destruction. According to the information, “no less than 10,000 Jews perished in the revolt which started when the Nazis ordered the ‘complete liquidation’ of all Jewish internees in the camp.”294 The theme in reports then changed to the issue of property restoration, and the return of Jewish victims to their homes.

289 “Polish-Jewish Underground Asks Roosevelt, Churchill to Set Up Inter-Allied Rescue Body,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 26, 1944, 4.

290 “Polish-Jewish Underground Asks Roosevelt, Churchill to Set Up Inter-Allied Rescue Body,” 4.

291 “Jewish Partisans in Hungary Attack Gestapo Train; Liberate Deported Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 8, 1944, 1.

292 “Jewish Partisans in Hungary Attack Gestapo Train,” 1.

293 “Germans Eradicate Traces of Their Mass-Executions of Jews in Poland,” 1.

294 Ibid. 71

The article on property restoration appeared on July 25, 1944, and it came from London. It was previously discussed in the Majdanek chapter. The Polish Committee of National Liberation promised Polish Jews that their property would be restored, and they would receive their legal rights upon return. Their declaration promoted freedom and equality to all Polish citizens, regardless of their backgrounds. It also called for Poles to act and take revenge for the atrocities committed at Majdanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and the ghettos.295 The work about Jews that returned home and rebuilt them appeared on July 31, 1944, and it came from Moscow. The returnees were partisans from Polish and Belorussian areas, and they returned to “begin rebuilding their homes and factories which were destroyed by the Germans.”296 They were survivors from Belorussia, and informed the reporter that Pinsk and Slonim had been killing centers. The report concluded when it said that “Pinsk was the headquarters of a Elite Guards captain named Zaver who later commanded the Treblinka death camp.”297 Another article from Moscow was presented on August 17, 1944, and it returned to the discussions on destruction of criminal evidence. It was previously discussed in both the Majdanek and Sobibor chapters. The report was an example of correspondents that travelled to Poland and saw the various camps. They reported that “the Germans have razed to the ground all buildings in the extermination camp of Treblinka, including the gas chambers where tens of thousands of Jews were suffocated to death. The Moscow papers, however, assert that there are people who survived the massacres in Treblinka and who testify in details as to the mass-murder which the Germans carried out systematically on Jews brought from all parts of occupied Europe.”298 Other death camps met similar ends. The last publication came from Bucharest, and was published on December 8, 1944. It was also discussed in the Belzec and Sobibor chapters. To briefly summarize, it was about a plan

295 “Restoration of Looted Property, Full Rights, Promised Polish Jews by New Committee,” 1.

296 “Jewish Partisans Returning From Byelorussian Forests to Rebuild Destroyed Homes,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 31, 1944, 2.

297 “Jewish Partisans Returning From Byelorussian Forests to Rebuild Destroyed Homes,” 2.

298 “Germans Raze all Traces of the ‘Jewish Extermination Camps’ Before Leaving Poland,” 1. 72 to deport Romanian Jews inspired by the way 600,000 Polish Jews had been deported to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. The plan, approved by Antonescu, was stopped by an unnamed Romanian official.299 This concluded the JTA’s reports on Treblinka during the war.

The New York Times on Treblinka Publications of articles that included Treblinka began with the previously evaluated November 25, 1942 article. This article was covered in the Belzec chapter. As a brief reminder, it mentioned that survivors of deportations arrived at any of the Operation Reinhard camps, where they were subsequently killed.300 On June 5, 1943, a London based report about gas chambers was released. The article stated that the expansion of death camps had sped up the executions of Jews. It established that chambers in camps were “equipped to end the lives of 700 persons at a time.”301 SWIT, a Polish radio station, claimed that “Germany has killed off 90 per cent of the Jews of Poland.”302 The article then turned to Treblinka, which had gas chambers that were capable of 7,000 executions a day.303 On June 29 a report from London discussed Dutch Jewry. The article stated that Dutch Jews deported to Poland were executed by machine gun fire. According to the report, “340 Netherland Jews were machine gunned, and 100 women and children were slain near Potok in the Bilgoraj district. They were among the thousands of Jews who had been transported from the Netherlands to the notorious Treblinka concentration camp.”304 Further, the Germans had

299 “Gestapo Plan for Deportation of Jews from Rumania to Poland Thwarted in Bucharest,” 2.

300 MacDonald, “Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews,” 10.

301 “Nazis Speed Massacres of Jews,” New York Times, June 5, 1943, 4.

302 “Nazis Speed Massacres of Jews,” 4.

303 Ibid.

304 “Nazis Execute 150 Jews: Netherlanders Taken to Poland Reported Machine Gunned,” New York Times, June 29, 1943, 6. 73 deported 120,000 Jews from the Netherlands earlier in June, some of whom were rounded up in Amsterdam.305 The next article came from London on August 8, and resembled Konstantin Simonov’s piece on Majdanek; however, it came from the Polish Labor Fights newspaper. The report detailed the steps taken to get Jews into the camp, its gas chambers, and deceased. The story noted that Treblinka had already killed 2 million people. It then described the text blocks placed within the camp to ease the minds of prisoners. The most important notice said to remain calm as they would be sent east to work, but first one must be cleaned. After they disrobed, the Jews were whipped and urged to move faster towards the chambers. Screams permeated the camp, and the inmates were said to know their fate because of this. Once inside, steam filtered in and the victims died within fifteen minutes from suffocation. The floor then went out and victims fell in a mass to the gravedigger, who separated and buried the dead.306 The process repeated itself as children and women were separated from the men. Some victims “can see and hear all that takes place, but are so numbed in their senses that there is no sign of the instinct of self- preservation.”307 The next article showed that self-preservation came through uprisings. The item was published on October 28, and it covered the Warsaw ghetto and its 500,000 Polish-Jewish inhabitants. The ghetto was ordered to be liquidated in 1942, and within months “about 400,000 persons were deported, and there is evidence to support the charge that great numbers of them were foully put to death by the Germans at concentration camps maintained at Treblinka.”308 The Jews that remained in the Warsaw ghetto mounted an uprising against the Germans before it was leveled. The article that followed, also discussed in the chapter on Belzec, was Koestler’s January 9, 1944 publication. It was an emotional work about American oversight to the plight of

305 “Nazis Execute 150 Jews,” 6.

306 “2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged: Polish Paper in London Says Jews are Exterminated in Treblinksa Death House, Groups Slain in Cells, Steam is Reported Used to Kill Men, Women and Children at Place in Woods,” New York Times, August 8, 1943, 11.

307 “2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged,” 11.

308 “Supermen at Warsaw,” New York Times, October 28, 1943, 22. 74

European Jewry. In it, he stated that US soldiers had not heard of Treblinka. Furthermore, he believed that Americans shook off everything they were being told.309 The last article on January 30, 1944 was a review by Walter Bara of The Black Book of Polish Jewry. It referred to multiple concentration camps as, “those hells-on-earth, the monstrous concentration camps of Oswiecim, Lublin, Treblinka and nameless others.”310 Bara also said, “The grand-scale methodical design to crush the spirit and body of the Jew defies any parallel in the entire history of mankind. According to a report made a year ago, 1,500,000 of the 1,800,000 Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans had been methodically and cold-bloodedly slaughtered.”311 Bara said the book presented the facts as they were, and used ample evidence to depict the horrors of the Holocaust. He referred to the killings as, “probably the greatest catastrophe of modern times.”312 Thus, Bara’s review summarized the Holocaust reports published by the NYT.

Conclusions The war period saw the production of thirty four articles that mentioned Treblinka, many of which had been previously discussed in other chapters. Statistically, the JTA produced 79% of the articles, and the NYT 21%.313 The Times produced no articles, and the possible reasons why will be discussed in the final conclusion. As for yearly depictions, 1943 topped the list with nineteen articles. It was followed by twelve written in 1944, three in 1942, and zero in 1940 and 1941.314 For Treblinka the overlapping of reports between the sources, and camp, was highly noticeable. Often times, the articles written on Treblinka also mentioned Sobibor, Belzec, or

309 Koestler, “The Nightmare That is A Reality,” 5.

310 Walter Bara, “Chapter and Verse on the Nazi Pogrom: The Black Book of Polish Jewry,” New York Times, January 30, 1944, 21.

311 Bara, “Chapter and Verse on the Nazi Pogrom,” 21.

312 Ibid.

313 See Appendix 8.

314 See Appendix 9. 75

Majdanek. This suggested that Treblinka was not viewed entirely on its own, and, contrary to Majdanek, did not have its own identity. That being said, the reports on Treblinka were somewhat accurate historically. For instance, the reports on Jews from Warsaw being deported to the camp re-emphasized that the camp was inhabited - briefly - by Polish Jews. Reports on the Dutch Jewish inhabitants of Treblinka were noteworthy because they documented an unexpected find. Traditionally, Sobibor has been associated more with Dutch Jewry, but more reports about them at Treblinka were produced. Articles that covered the revolt were abundant, and the first one established that Treblinka was the main killing site for Jews in Poland. It also covered the chaotic nature of the revolt fairly accurately, and added to it the idea of outside help - which was not covered by the sources that made up the historical overview. There were also multiple reports that discussed the destruction of evidence, and lists of criminals. The early steps toward justice were being made, which was also seen in the other chapters. Finally, a unique piece from the NYT that evoked similarities with Konstantin Simonov’s piece was another notable find. Unfortunately, the piece overestimated that two million people had died at Treblinka. The possibility remains that the correspondent was overwhelmed by what he or she saw. Overall, the reports on Treblinka really showed how interwoven the Operation Reinhard camps were back then. This is remarkable because the camps were supposed to be secret.

76

Conclusion

The Numbers From 1940 to 1944, 119 bulletins and articles mentioned Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps. The JTA published 61% of these works, the NYT 33% of them, and The Times only managed a meager 6%.315 These percentages showed that the JTA was more inclined to publish articles about the camps, the NYT was more hesitant, and The Times was focused on other news. The reasons behind this will be discussed in the upcoming section that compares the sources. Another numerical value was reached when the publications by year were combined. In 1944, 65 bulletins and articles were produced, while 39 reports were published in 1943. In 1942, only 13 items were produced, followed by only two published in 1940. Finally, no relevant reports were written in 1941.316 These numbers can be explained by the fact that the camps were not fully operational until 1942, that two experienced revolts in 1943, and that they were all liberated in 1944.

Comparing the Sources

In this section, the JTA, NYT, and The Times article output will be compared using both the collected articles, and secondary literature. Then a new stance about the sources, based on these findings, will be produced. The first source to be addressed will be the JTA, which produced the vast majority of the articles.317 The secondary literature produced very little on the JTA, but what it iterated was reflected by this thesis’s findings. On the high level of publications, David S. Wyman said, “Of course, Jewish magazines and weekly newspapers and the Yiddish daily press provided thorough coverage of the

315 See Appendix 10.

316 See Appendix 11.

317 See Appendix 1. 77 catastrophe.”318 In other words, it made perfect sense for a Jewish or Yiddish run newspaper to pay significant attention to stories about atrocities perpetrated against Jewish victims. It was also made just as clear by Yehuda Bauer in the introduction of the thesis, that information about the Holocaust was readily available to anyone that read the JTA’s daily publications. Additionally, an examination of the JTA’s “About Us” page explained their history, and their goals. It said, “Since its founding in 1917, JTA has earned its reputation for journalistic integrity, outstanding reporting and insightful analysis. Over the years, the Jewish community has come to rely on JTA as the single most credible source of news and analysis available about events and issues of Jewish interest anywhere in the world.”319 In line with these opinions and quotes, this thesis found that, of the primary sources, the JTA was the most significant contributor of information about Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps. As a result, it is highly recommended that further research on Holocaust journalism use this under-valued source. In stark contrast, the NYT, which produced the second most articles, has been a more controversial source. A seminal work that discussed potential reasons why articles were hidden, underproduced, and disbelieved was David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews. The first reason Wyman gave was skepticism. As he put it, “many people simply could not believe them. They refused to accept the fact that civilized people would commit such barbaric acts.”320 This skepticism was shown in the report by Arthur Koestler, who called out American disbelief in a strong manner. The root of this disbelief lay not in the facts themselves; rather, it came from (WWI). As WWI raged on, propagandists produced extraordinary pieces about atrocities committed by the Germans, many of which were false. The public found out about these lies: “During the late 1920s and the historians had laid bare the falsity of Britain’s World War I atrocity propaganda. By the late 1930s, these exposures had worked their way into the popular mind, and atrocity stories in the first stages of World War II consequently met with

318 Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 28.

319 “About Us,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, accessed May 31, 2015, http://www.jta.org/about-us.

320 Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 27. 78 much skepticism.”321 The US also faced other issues when it came to Holocaust journalism, even though skepticism remained throughout the Holocaust.

The second problem area, according to Wyman, was the dispensation of information: only a meager amount of information about the killings reached public consumers through newspapers, radio, and magazines. As he noted, “Newspapers printed comparatively little of the available knowledge and commonly buried it in inner pages.”322 The third obstacle to prominent coverage was reports about World War II. During the war, atrocities committed by the Nazis were constantly in the news. Most of them dealt with the civilian population, or “were related to the Nazi tactic of terror to control population and to counter sabotage and assassinations. Several times, disclosures of Nazi mass killing of Jews appeared within stories of the more general German crimes against civilian populations.”323 To Wyman, these three reasons were paramount to why the US press struggled with news about the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt and Laurel Leff also mentioned these three factors, and added other points to his argument. Lipstadt added that the secret nature of the Nazis murder campaign, the US hope for neutrality, and the power of the news editor all contributed greatly to reports being hidden within the NYT, or not being published at all. As Lipstadt noted, verification was pivotal to the editors because of high levels of skepticism within the US.324 Leff’s work added more substance to this. She wrote that the NYT was owned by a Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, which put the NYT in a difficult situation. On the one hand, they were not going to miss many of the stories about the persecuted Jews, and they were even sensitive to these articles because of family ties in Germany. Conversely, isolationism caused politicians to think that American Jewry would cause the US to join the war - and this would come from the spread of atrocity knowledge. In addition,

321 Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 27.

322 Ibid., 28.

323 Ibid.

324 Lipstadt, Beyond Belief. 79

Sulzberger himself did not agree to a tightly-bound brotherhood of Jewry. In other words, he did not think that Jews should help other Jews.325 Leff emphasized the failure of the press and journalists, when she said:

The press’ responsibility was not necessarily to affect government policy. Rather, the press’ responsibility was to harness the flood of information it received about the war - about battles, about strategy, about industrial capacities, and about civilian casualties - and to channel the most critical news to the public…The journalist’s job was to determine what the public needed to know - even if the information lurked beneath the surface and the government preferred it to remain there - and then to ensure the information reached newspaper readers in a way they could absorb. If the systematic campaign to annihilate European Jewry was a critical story, it should have been on the front page, regardless of whether Jews could have been rescued as a result.326

This quote ends the detailed look at what obstacles the US press; specifically, the NYT faced when it came to Holocaust reporting. The factors that this thesis corroborated were the power of the editor; vast war news coverage; and especially, the burial of the articles within the NYT. Since this work only dealt with very specific camps, the impact of WWI’s false news and isolationist policies could not be ascertained. The research did show that, with the exception of one front page article, every item produced by the NYT was hidden on the inside pages. However, going so far as to say the NYT “failed” as a newspaper and did not let the facts speak for themselves, is a view mired in hindsight bias. While this research has shown that facts were buried, that does not equate to hiding or ignoring them. In fact, the only way to prove that the facts did not reach the readers, would be to conduct a study that evaluated past readers of the NYT through opinion polls or interviews. Undertaking such a study, and finding conclusive evidence that the readers knew nothing of the Holocaust - or

325 Leff, Buried by The Times.

326 Ibid. 80 in this case, the death camps, might, or might not bolster Leff’s claims. My conclusion here is that the facts were out there; one merely had to dive deeper into the paper to find them. Lastly, The London Times, which has not faced the same intensive scrutiny that the NYT has, published the least amount of reports. The publication of only eight relevant articles is baffling because London was well-known for Fleet Street.327 Several reasons likely influenced The Times low amount of publications. First was the impact of the false World War I reports. The memory of these false articles made the public, journalists, and editors skeptical, and it also made verifying the truth an absolute necessity. This explanation was even more pertinent to the British press, as they had been the ones to publish the false news items.328 A second reason was the news coverage of World War II. It is likely that The Times mainly focused on the war, and the British war efforts. Finally, the archives of The Times could have been partially destroyed during WWII, or they may not be fully digitized. Of these explanations, the impact of WWI and extensive coverage on WWII have both been mentioned in the secondary literature. That source also suggested other pertinent reasons behind The Times lack of Holocaust coverage.

According to Colin Shindler, professor of studies at the University of London, the lack of reports was due to a plethora of reasons. The first was that, “During the 1930s, the Times distanced itself from the openly anti-Nazi approach of other sections of the British press, in particular, that of the liberal Manchester Guardian. Yet this did not mean that its senior figures were uninformed about developments inside Germany.”329 This was not the only reason that articles were not produced. In fact, as abhorrent as this may seem, the second reason was even more disturbing. One of the editors in that period was Robin Barrington-Ward, and he “believed that the printed word in the pages of the Times was avidly dissected by the Nazi hierarchy. He therefore felt that the influence of the Times in the ruling circles in Hitler’s Germany would be

327 See: Dennis Griffiths, Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press, (London: The British Library, 2006) for a tome-like treatise on all things British Press.

328 Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 27.

329 Colin Shindler, “The “Thunderer” and the Coming of the Shoah: The Times of London, 1933-1942,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout?, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro. (Jersey City: Yeshiva University Press, 2003), 152. 81 severely diminished if he spoke out passionately and loudly.”330 In other words, the image of The Times in Germany was more important to the editors than presenting the news, at least for a time. Shindlers’s third explanation was the impact WWI had on the editors. He wrote, “the carnage during World War I had conditioned Barrington-Ward to exhibit a total hatred of war and he was thus loath to use his position to advocate too strong a policy against Germany for fear of antagonizing the Nazi leadership and thereby facilitating the movement towards war.”331 It was unclear if Shindler meant the general carnage of war, or the consequences of false reporting. Either way, WWI clearly left a lasting mark on The Times. As for the journalists, they faced their own unique problem. Shindler wrote, “Following the outbreak of war, journalists found themselves in the difficult position of being an integral part of the war effort. The contradiction of both being outside and inside, of marrying the call of their profession with their patriotic duty to ensure the downfall of Nazi Germany, confronted journalists on many occasions.”332 In addition, The Times struggled with its own identity during the war. Shindler said, “The root of the problem was that the role of the Times in the 1940s was undefined. It was unsure whether it should be an unofficial organ of government, a faithful servant of a wider establishment or simply a quality newspaper of independent views and essential information. In reality, it was all of these with considerable blurring at the joins.”333 Eventually, the amount of reports received by The Times became too great to not publish anything. Yet, The Times still focused mostly on war coverage because, “The Shoah was a minor, marginalised, amorphous item underpinned by a modicum of genuine disbelief and selective indifference. Journalists often and easily dismissed the incredibility of Jewish claims because the enormity of this tragedy was quite unimaginable(sic).”334 All of these reasons explain why, as

330 Shindler, “The “Thunderer” and the Coming of the Shoah,” 152.

331 Ibid.

332 Ibid., 159.

333 Ibid., 169.

334 Ibid. 82 this thesis has shown, the British newspaper published so few articles on Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard Camps. The finding that so very few articles appeared in The Times shows the need for historians to evaluate and use multiple sources. It is all the more remarkable because the vast majority of the JTA’s reports, and some of the NYT’s writings, also came from London. Therefore, it would be interesting to conduct further research on what The Times reported on the Holocaust. Comparisons between the three sources shows several things. One, the JTA presented the most information to its readers, and would have been the most important source to learn about Majdanek and the Operation Reinhard camps from. Second, the NYT, while flawed, appears to be heavily judged by hindsight bias. It is true that the articles were hidden within the paper, but that does not mean that they were not there, and that readers were not capable of finding them. Finally, The Times struggled with its image, purpose, and skepticism, which pushed the newspaper to avoid anti-Nazi rhetoric, and to focus on WWII. Due to this, The Times did not effectively address the atrocities being committed at the death camps. Further research of this source should be conducted by those interested in Holocaust journalism, in order to clarify how much of the other aspects of the Holocaust they covered.

Comparing the Themes The reports encompassed showed a variety of trends. The most recurrent themes in reports on Majdanek in the three sources under study in this thesis dealt with: justice, death estimates, and the atrocities perpetrated within the camps. Examples of justice reports were items on Nazi guards that were captured and tried for their crimes. On death estimates, it is remarkable that almost all of the reports vastly overestimated the total victims of the camp, which could be attributed to incomplete data, or shock. Atrocity pieces looked at the cruelty inherent in the camp, be it starvation, disease, or killings. Items that were unique to Majdanek included works on Operation Harvest Festival, and on the ground reports by W.H. Lawrence, and a report that seemingly employed Konstantin Simonov’s writings. It was this camp that was discussed the most on its own, and a few reasons may explain why. 83

One possible explanation was the amount of on the scene reports about Majdanek. As the first liberated camp, which also allowed journalists to visit, Majdanek established this trend. It may be possible that by the time the other camps were liberated the trend had run its course. A second potential reason was that correspondents wrote these pieces from their personal experiences, as opposed to being based on government documents, speeches, or other sources. As this thesis has shown, important government speeches and documents presented in many of the reports quickly became redundant. Finally, the Majdanek reports on justice were not general in nature; instead, they included detailed writings on individual criminals, trials, and suicides. The fact that justice articles were produced mostly in 1943 and 1944, when Majdanek was covered most, adds substance to this explanation. These explanations were based on the articles and secondary material; however, they only represent my interpretations as to why Majdanek was often mentioned on its own. Thus, they should not be accepted as facts, as more research should be conducted on this particular finding. Meanwhile, Belzec provided a completely different set of themes. Here, the most recurrent themes dealt with deportations, methods of killing, and death estimates. Deportation articles discussed the routines conducted by the Nazis, and estimates on total deportees. Items that reported on killing methods emphasized the use of gas within the camp, and also mentioned alternative methods (i.e. shootings). Death estimates were general, meaning they were not made for the camp; rather, they looked at the decimation of Polish and other European Jews. Unique publications that mentioned Belzec were display ads, one of which called for the creation of a Jewish army, while the other promoted a magazine that included an article on Jan Karski. When it came to reports on Belzec, nearly every other camp studied was mentioned in the reports, a trend that carried over to Sobibor and Treblinka. Several topics were recurrent in the eleven articles dealing with Sobibor. The most remarkable finding was that nine of the eleven pieces about Sobibor also mentioned the other camps studied. These items tended to label the camps as either Jewish camps, or death camps, and focused mainly on the mass exterminations being perpetrated within the camps. Reports unique to Sobibor, which did not mention the other analyzed camps, discussed the camp’s revolt. One example was the article based on the testimony of an escapee, who described the revolt in 84 detail. That being said, two pieces on the revolt compared it to other uprisings. Finally, the Dutch Jewish connection was established by only one report. This facet stood out because it did not reflect the large amount of Dutch Jews that were deported to and killed within the camp, which has been the subject of many publications, and because Treblinka also included an item on Dutch Jews at that camp. In the case of Treblinka, a broad range of topics appeared in the reports: deportations (especially from Warsaw), death estimates, justice, and the revolt. That Treblinka was the location that Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were sent to appeared in several JTA reports. Writings on death estimates looked at both European-wide totals, and Treblinka’s own estimates. The European totals included: 1.5 million, 1.8 million, and 3 million. These numbers were reasonable because the 1.5 million and 1.8 million figures corroborate the USHMM’s suggestion of 1.7 million Jews killed by Operation Reinhard. However, these amounts were vast underestimates for Europe’s total death toll because the Holocaust claimed the lives of 5 to 6 million Jews. Conversely, the Treblinka figures were overestimates when they suggested that 1 to 2 million victims had died in that camp. These figures may have been miscalculated due to the Nazis destruction of evidence, a point repeatedly discussed in justice-related pieces. Finally, the revolt that occurred in the camp was the subject of multiple articles. These articles iterated facts about the fire that consumed parts of the camp, and the numbers of Jews and guards that died in the revolt. Finally, this thesis showed that these camps, meant to be kept secret, were often connected by common subjects. One example was the focus on justice, which appears in at least one article per camp. Thus, we find that the calls for justice, and punishment, started well before the . Other shared themes were deportations, and the number and manner of killings. Even though these reports were not always factually accurate, they were the subjects discussed most often, which shows that presenting these significant facts became routine.

Final Thoughts To conclude this thesis, it should again be noted that the facts produced in the articles were not always correct. But, we as researchers and scholars of the Holocaust, have continued to 85 be blinded by our own hindsight bias. Instead of readily acknowledging the fact that various newspapers covered the Holocaust, as it occurred and to the best of their ability, we have criticized these sources repeatedly. Researchers were so critical of the press because they were ashamed of the fact that the Western World was exposed to significant facts about the Holocaust, and yet, they did not use this information to help the Jews. Their criticism also came from their beliefs that we would have acted differently in the same situation, an ideal based purely on hindsight. While most people agree that it was tragic to not act, no one has proven that the press wrote nothing, and too few have given them any credit for what they did articulate. It may have been an era where the facts were not placed on page one, but it was not a fact-less era, as this thesis has shown. One quote from Stefan Ernst, a Jew hiding on the “Aryan” side of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, expresses this thought, and this work well:

The struggle to save myself is hopeless…But that’s not important. Because I am able to bring my account to its end and trust that it will see the light of day when the time is right…And people will know what happened…And they will ask, is this the truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth… Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.335

335 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 285. 86

Appendix 1: Article Collection Figures

-I) Belzec i. Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 8 Articles ii. The London Times: 1 Article. iii. The New York Times: 10 Articles. iv. Total: 19 Articles.

-II) Majdanek i. Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 30 Articles. ii. The London Times: 7 Articles. iii. The New York Times: 18 Articles. iv. Total: 55 Articles.

-III) Sobibor i. Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 7 Articles. ii. The London Times: 0 Articles. iii. The New York Times: 4 Articles. iv. Total: 11 Articles.

-IV) Treblinka i. Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 27 Articles. ii. The London Times: 0 Articles. iii. The New York Times: 7 Articles. iv. Total: 34 Articles.

-V) Totals by Source, and Grand Total i. Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 72 Articles. ii. The London Times: 8 Articles. iii. The New York Times: 39 Articles. iv. Grand Total: 119 Articles. 87

Appendix 2: Majdanek Pie Chart, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

33%

55%

12% 88

Appendix 3: Majdanek Yearly Pattern, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT 30

25

20

15

10

5

0 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 89

Appendix 4: Belzec Pie Chart, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

42%

53%

5% 90

Appendix 5: Belzec Yearly Pattern, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

4

3

2

1

0 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 91

Appendix 6: Sobibor Pie Chart, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

36%

64% 92

Appendix 7: Sobibor Yearly Pattern, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT 4

3

2

1

0 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 93

Appendix 8: Treblinka Pie Chart, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

21%

79% 94

Appendix 9: Treblinka Yearly Pattern, 1940-1944

JTA The Times NYT

16

15

14

13

12

11

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 95

Appendix 10: Grand Total Pie Chart

JTA The Times NYT

33%

61%

6% 96

Appendix 11: Grand Total Yearly Pattern, 1940-1944

Total 70

65

60

55

50

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 97

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