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Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper

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I was turned on to this book by a friend and when I next saw him, he asked me, refering to the author Laurel Leff's revelations, "did you know that?" I answered that I didn't know that the Times had basically hidden the news of the holocaust but, on the other hand, finding this out didn't surprise me. Sulzberger was an assimilated Jew, the descendent of Rabbi Steven Wise, a renowned Reform Rabbi whose theology was very assimilationist. Thus, despite his Jewishness, the Times rarely ran a major story about what was going on in the concentration camps and the stories that were written were not positioned in a prominent place. If they made the front page, it would not be postioned as the lead story.

Incredibly, the coverage of the holocaust did not mention "Jews" specifically. By reading the Times, you would not have known the extent of the genocide nor would you have known that Jews were the major target of the Nazi extermination efforts. It is important to note that there was never a "smoking gun" uncovered, i.e., a memo or written directive from Sulzberger ordering the staff of the Times to soft pedal the events in the concentration camps. What is beyond dispute is that the Sulzberger family was secular and did not view Jews as a people. What is further beyond dispute is that the coverage by the Times was scant. Thus, whether by directive or not, the Times failed miserably in its role as "journal of record," making a mockery of its motto "all the news that's fit to print. What is particularly reprehensible is that members of the Sulzberger family were being rescued while the details of the holocaust were being quashed.

The Times, could have been influential but, tragically, it failed to exercise it's influence. Roosevelt basically looked the other way and, in sadness, we can only wonder whether he could have withstood the pressure and continued to do little if the Times had fully covered the events. Back then the Times obviously had an agenda and today, it still does. There was daily coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses with one breathless headline after another. That was the more recent Times' agenda, specifically, to discredit the efforts in Iraq, particularly in an election year when the events there might have been a campaign issue. Tragically, there were no such breathless headlines during the darkest hours of the holocaust.

Laurel Leff has provided not only an exhaustively researched account of the New York Times' coverage of the Holocaust, but also a nuanced account of how newspapers make decisions on the placement of news items. She shows how the failure of the nation's most important newspaper to recognize the importance of the Holocaust while it was occurring was in part traceable to the fact that those making the decisions on Page One play were lower-level editors without much clout. So they simply did what had always been done, and downplayed the importance of the Jews' suffering. Her portrayal of Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger's anti-Zionist leanings and connections also breaks new ground. This book is must reading for anyone interested in the history of America in the 1940s and for any student, professional or amateur, of American journalism. This goes far beyond the usual, cliched critique of the Times or other papers as being "biased" in one way or another. Leff also has a fine sense of style and tremendous command of her material.

This is a very good book about how the New York Times family owners purposefully avoided dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe, and particularly Nazi Germany, while at the same time the Sulzberger family did everything it could to get its relatives out before the deluge. Laurel Leff has done a masterful job of showing how the Sulzberger clan became complicit in one of the darkest chapters in human history by not using the power of the paper to expose the real nature of the evil that Nazism was. Of course she does address the fact that anti-Semitism was not just a German issue, but from my perspective she does not go into enough detail about the extent of anti-Semitism in the US, and particularly major movers and shakers such as Joseph Kennedy who hated Jews so much that he always referred to them as "kikes" and opposed any action by the Roosevelt administration to educate the American public about the threat to Western civilization, even though he was ambassador to the Court of St. James at the time.
But the problem with this book is that it focuses on the Times as if it somehow committed this sin for the first time in misleading the American public. I agree with her thesis that the Times has been hoisted as the most influential paper in the world among lazy elites, including those who have reviewed her book, but that is rapidly changing now, primarily due to the fact that the paper has failed so miserably in many areas, including the latest diversions of small change like Jason Blair. But the biggest holocaust of the last century did not occur in the ovens built by the Nazis, it was committed in the Ukraine when Stalin's forced collectivization starved far more Ukrainians to death than Hitler killed with his Zyklon-B. And the Times had a reporter, Walter Duranty, in Moscow at the time who won a Pulitzer Prize for mis-reporting this horror. Duranty was "Stalin's apologist" in many ways, dismissing honest reporters who covered the biggest holocaust as "overwrought" when they filed stories about the millions murdered by Stalin, filing stories about the "show trials" of Stalin as if they were legitimate trials that led to the deaths of millions more, and many other atrocities. Most serious scholars now have to acknowledge that the starvation of 8 million Ukrainians was not just an "unintentional consequence" of collectivization, and it really remains the NY Times most outrageous attack on the truth, the Nazi death camps notwithstanding. There are many stories in the NY Times that reveal the lie that is it's masthead of "All the news that's fit to print." The Times fought mightily to keep Duranty's prize last year when serious reporters wanted to take it away because it was gained by fraudulent means. Of course the paper has done a great job of condemning the awarding of Olympic medals by drug-enhanced athletes, but can't see the hypocrisy of its own efforts to keep Duranty's decades of duplicity being rewarded with a Pulitzer.
I recommend this book because it shows the hypocrisy of the Sulzberger clan in dealing with Hitler's "final solution" but it is not the biggest sin committed by this paper in miseducating the people it supposedly serves.

One reviewer on Amazon criticized Laurel Leff for the tone of outrage which informs this work. But how is it possible not to be outraged when one considers that the Times, and its chief during the Second World War Arthur Sulzberger may well have been responsible ,through their downplaying of the story of the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews, for not preventing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Stories from the 'Times ' pointing out the evil of the Nazi plan might have for interested induced the Allies to bomb the rail- lines leading to Auschwitz. And that ' small action' might have saved thousands upon thousands of lives.
Moreover Leff does not simply rage out of thin air, but very carefully documents the whole story of the Times action. And she puts especial emphasis on the bias of the then publisher Sulzberger .His anti- Zionism, his desire to dissociate himself from any national Jewish connection, his fear of having the Times be labeled as a 'Jewish newspaper' all these were part of the formulating of a top- down policy in which the story of what would later come to be known as the 'Holocaust' was downplayed.
One feels the author has done a long- due and necessary job.

Obviously, the New York Times did a horrible job of reporting the slaughter of millions of Jews by Germans and others during World War Two. And Laurel Leff has done us all a service by explaining this in detail.

Did this betrayal of journalistic standards harm anyone? Of course it did. Still, it happened decades ago, so why worry about it now? Well, there are good reasons for worrying about it now. For one thing, the New York Times hasn't improved much, judging by its biased coverage of Israel. And while it is too late to save those who died in World War Two, there is still time to help those who are threatened today.

Leff explains that the Times managed to ensure that fewer people would hear the last screams of those murdered in World War Two. Now, why did the Times do such a thing? The author analyzes this in some detail. And part of the reason was that Sulzberger did not want his paper to appear too "Jewish."

I think there is a moral here, namely that journalists need to report honestly, even when honesty might appear to make their group look good or bad.

We humans do not make good choices when the information we need is omitted or reported inaccurately. It does no one any good if we lie on the grounds that truth might seem to be self-serving! And I think this case shows us why.

Laurel Leff has given us a nicely detailed description of how the New York Times, then as now the most eminent newspaper in the country, failed to appreciate the historical significance of the Holocaust while it was under way in Europe.

This was not a matter of suppression of news. Whatever news was available was published in the Times, but it was buried in back pages. The Nazis' systematic killings of Jews, when news of them reached the West, were not accorded the front-page status that, in hindsight, these events warranted. And here lies the fundamental weakness of the book as I see it. The author's vision is ahistorical, anachronistic; it applies what we know now to a judgement of what was done then.

Nevertheless, Leff's book cannot help but be of importance to anyone interested in the period. Her strongest point is the role of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the Times from 1935 to 1945. Scion of a wealthy family of German Jews, living in a period in which Jews were still excluded from many positions of influence and were strictly limited in the prestige universities, Sulzberger felt uneasy about his Jewish identify. He was, in the language of those days, an assimilationist. He was very much worried that the public might consider him a Jew before it recognized him as a newspaper man. Leff's description of his role in the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism is most enlightening. But, as Leff also points out, the Reform Judaism of his day was also largely anti-Zionist. Sulzberger was not the only, nor the most rabid of the anti-Zionists among prominent American Jews. In any case, as Leff indicates, he was also basically fair-minded and was not given to suppressing news.

The extent to which Sulzberger's personal values may have influenced the Times's coverage of the Holocaust is not clear. This question, as well as the larger question of how unique the Times was in its Holocaust treatment, can only be explored by a comparative treatment. How did the Times compare with other news outlets ? How much better could it have done, given the limitations in the world's understanding of the significance of the Holocaust while it was in progress ? Leff suggests that the Times was not unique, but she gives no particulars. She is not interested in making comparisons with other papers, either here or abroad.

The New York Yiddish press of those days was still very important and very vibrant. There were several Yiddish dailies, with the Morning Journal and the Forward probably the most important. There was also the Tug (Day), and the Freiheit, the Communist Yiddish daily. Leff takes scant interest in any of these. She certainly does not do what would be required to understand the Times's treatment of the Holocaust, viz. a detailed comparative analysis of the Yiddish press accounts in relationship to those of the Times.

We are left with a description of what happened at the Times only, and this description is both enlightening and thorough. But we are not told whether, with all of Sulberger's qualms and other institutional peculiarities of the Times, that newspaper could have given us a sustained, balanced, meaningful treatment of the Holocaust as it was unfolding, given the fact that the world simply could not grasp the horror and the novelty of the Nazi crime.

I was a newspaper reader in those days, not only of the Times, but also of a variety of Jewish sources (but not of the Yiddish press). I read all the little facts. But I had no inkling of what was really happening, of the magnitude of the Holocaust. That came to me, as it did to the rest of the world, only some years after the war.

Is it not peculiar that the New York Times burries its head in the sand about the fate of Jews during WW2? Not only during WW2 did it hide the news about their extermination, on the inside pages, but it continues even today to stay away from reporting how the organizations, the lawyers and the establishment is depriving the survivors of their due compensation. For example, of the recent Swiss bank settment of $1.25 billion only 4% is "earmarked" for Jews in the US.
This is so, even though it was their money that the Swiss banks stole. The Time's reporters refuse to publish the facts of this tainted affair.

The same goes for the "German Settlement", where a lawyer, Burt Newborne, representing the 2nd Federal District Court in Brooklyn has accepted $5 billion in fees from the German Government to taylor the agreement in such a manner that it protects the German companies from further claims and for this they pay the victims "peanuts" (to quote Judge Judah Gribitz). It is shameful for a person, like Neuborne, who works for a court, and is supposed to be impartial, goes ahead and gets a fee from the defendants. This is especially true of Neuborne, a law professor, a former member of the ACLU and the principle lawyer for the Brennan Foundation, a victim protection agency.

The Times, just like during WW2, hears nothing, sees nothing, and writes nothing about these attrocious treatments of the Jews who are victimized today. Why? Ask Mr. Sulzberger!

This is why this book is such a well written documentary and a must read.

This is the story of the failure of the New York Times to adequately report on the Holocaust during World War II. It makes for very good reading not only to learn what was happening, but to understand what makes stories newsworthy.

At one point Edward R. Murrow went to visit Belsen camp. He did not write a story about, he said, "I am an American reporter for the American public, and I cannot go north to talk about the British occupying a camp." One of the things that journalists are taught is to provide what their readers want to read. Murrow's readers wanted to read about what the American Army, their sons were doing." That says "talk about the Bataan Death March, not the Holocaust."

This book causes me to think a lot about the situation at the time and about publishing in general. Right now the respect of the average American for the press is pretty low, probably right down there with respect for Congress.

This book has a story to tell. But it's telling the story in retrospect. We now have access to a lot of facts that were collected one at a time over years. Now we can see the big picture that allows us to pull out those facts that may have been invisible at the time. This is not unlike the facts that should have warned us in advance about Pearl Harbour.

The book certainly makes for interesting reading. And the anti-liberal media people will have a blast with it.

Leff provides a necessary look at how the most influential newspaper in America dealt with the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War.

It seems to me that given the very important strength of anti-semitism in America during the first half of the 20th Century, the amazing thing is that the American Jews were not persecuted and interned on some pretext, that the US supported the creation of the State of Israel -- and just barely did so despite the opposition of the State Department -- and that American Jews have reached a position unequaled anywhere. It all might have been different and in the days of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindburgh and Joseph Kennedy it certainly looked like it would be different.

Ms. Leff has meant well and has made a contribution. Moral outrage in this case is less useful than a calm assessment of the real forces at work in America concerning the Jews and how best to prosecute the war.

The real outrage should be saved for the role of Christianity for fifteen hundred years or more in victimizing the Jews -- to the extent that only a small percentage of Christians could avoid the ever-present temptation of Jew hatred.

This is not a book about The New York Times and its miserable
coverage (never on the front page) of the War Against the Jews. It is
a book about a self-hating man, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to whom the
very word "Jews" was anathema. No, we are Americans who happen to be
Jews. There is no such thing as a Jewish people, no such thing as a
Jewish nation; those are Hitlerite concepts.
And that explains why Sulzberger kept a Nazi as head of his Berlin
Bureau and allowed his nephew Cyrus to cover the Babi Yar massacre by
not mentioning that the victims were Jews.
And the people who revolted in Warsaw's ghetto were not Jews, either.
Wherever possible, the victims of the Germans were either part of a
larger group, including all the massacred Norwegians, Belgians, and
Luxembourgers, or simply "refugees."
Leff, whom I would not hire as a prospective reporter, lays it all
out -- and then some. She adds the superfluous detail wherever
possible and then pads out her book with a mish-mash of stuff that
she simply gets wrong, like the well-known sinking of the "Sturma"
(sic). She just has it sink without saying why. That sort of writing
gets wearisome after a while, but she just loves to throw in "sic"
when she catches a misspelling or a typo.
Not wanting to go on with superfluous details of my own, all I can
say is that this would have been a fitting subject for someone who
could discipline her writing. Leff did not.