July 12, 2000, What did they know? American Jews and the Shoah, by Alex Grobman, Ph.D.

July 12, 2000, What did they know? American Jews and the Shoah, by Alex Grobman, Ph.D.

A number of books have been written about the response of the American Jewish community to the Shoah, but the question often asked is what did American Jews know about this catastrophe as it unfolded in Europe? Individual American Jewish leaders were privy to confidential organizational reports and sometimes to classified State Department documents, but for the average American Jew the primary source of news was the American, Yiddish, and Anglo-Jewish press. Many contemporary Jews assert they knew little or nothing about the Shoah because the press in the United States did not or could not provide information about the destruction of the Jews of Europe.

Why is it important for us to know the nature of the information American Jews had available and how they reacted to it? If we are to learn from our past, we need to know what they knew and how they interpreted and analyzed the data. Quite often there is significant evidence in the press about a particular event that affects us, yet we seem unable to analyze the information, assimilate it or comprehend its import. Part of the problem is a predilection on the part of some people not to accept what is unpleasant. For these individuals, denial becomes the response. Additionally, confronting the truth, especially when a situation concerns us deeply is difficult to acknowledge because it might require some form of action that could disrupt our lives.

We begin our inquiry on September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began and end on December 17, 1942 when the Allies condemned the Germans for murdering the Jews of Europe. A wide range of national, regional and organizational papers and periodicals were reviewed. Another major source of information is derived from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA), a bureau established in 1914 to gather and distribute news about Jews. The New York Times (Times) is included in the survey since it is the newspaper of record in the United States. The Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper. But this did not mean Jews did not see these articles. When reading a newspaper, Jews generally tend to look for items about to the Jewish community no matter where they are positioned in the paper.

Conquest of Poland

During the first several months of the war in Europe, the American press provided sporadic information about the plight of the Jews in Poland. The Yiddish press and the JTA were among the only sources providing daily accounts of Jewish suffering. Not all of the news was accurate or complete. Fragmentary and exaggerated dispatches made it difficult at times to determine the extent of the devastation. Yet the Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR), a bimonthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, stated in its November/December 1939 issue that “despite the paucity of reliable news from the invaded Polish areas, it is now possible to obtain a fairly accurate but general picture of the fate suffered by Polish Jewry during the first two months of the war.” (1)

First reports from Poland told of Nazi air raids on Polish cities where the Jewish sections were intentionally targeted. Mendel Mozes, chief of the Warsaw Bureau of the JTA, visited a number of these areas and found that many Jews had been killed and wounded with extensive damage to Jewish institutions. His eyewitness account of the destruction was broadcast throughout the United States. (2) Thousands of Jews from Warsaw and other Polish cities fled their homes in panic. Vilna and other cities soon became overwhelmed by the large influx of Jewish refugees. Jewish leaders in these cities appealed to Jews abroad for food, clothing and money. (3) Jews seeking refuge in Latvia and Lithuania were turned away at the borders. Strict security measures were enforced by the Latvian authorities to prevent these Jews from entering. Many Jews went to Romania, but were not permitted to stay for more than several months. (4)

Two of the most distressing reports from Poland during these early months appeared in the New York Times on September 13, 1939. Otto D. Tolischus, a member of the Berlin staff of the Times, had been allowed to observe German military units fighting in Poland. In the western Polish border town of Wieruszow, 50 Jews were shot for alleged sniping and resistance. So many Jews in other towns in western Poland were killed for the same alleged offense, that it appeared they were leading a guerilla war against the Germans instead of the Poles. (5) These murders were the work of the Police Einsatzgruppen (action groups) or mobile killing units that accompanied the frontline German army units into Poland. They remained in the rear of these units where they terrorized Jews and the Polish intelligentsia and clergy. Fifteen thousands Jews and Poles were killed in this operation which continued for approximately two months. Jews were a special target of the Einsatzgruppen.

The second dispatch from Berlin the “first intimations that “a solution of the Jewish problem” in Poland was on the German-Polish agenda.” This information was revealed in a “special report” from the German News Bureau dispatched from the occupied areas of Poland. The report indicated that: “Removal of the Polish Jewish population from the European domain would… in the long view, definitely bring a solution of the Jewish question in Europe nearer. For this is just the Jewry which, through its high birth rate and in spite of all existing differences between the two groups, has continually established the large numbers of Western Jewry, whose birth rate is small.” What the report did not explain the Times noted is ” how… the removal of Jews from Poland without their extermination can halt the alleged “strengthening” of Western Jewry…. (6)

Daily reports in the Jewish press told of wholesale executions, the complete obliteration of hundreds of towns, (7) and the confiscation of Jewish property of Jews who had fled.(8) The press also reported the “savage butchery” of Jews by Ukrainians,(9) the tens of thousands of homeless and starving refugees seeking refuge,(10) the large number of suicides in Warsaw(11) and the imposition of forced labor.(12)

On September 27, 1939 the Poles surrendered. On September 28, Germany and the Soviet Union signed an agreement seeding eastern Poland to the Soviets, which became part of Belorussia and Ukraine. This area had been seized by the Soviets when the Germans invaded Poland. The area consisted of 75,675 square miles with a population of four to five million Poles including a Jewish population of 1.2 million.

Eastern Europe Under Nazi Domination

As the Nazis extended their domination over the Jews of Eastern Europe, there were reports of widespread massacres and executions, (13) mass arrests and forced labor, (14) expulsions, (15) and depredations (16) in the Jewish press. Dr. Henryk Szoszkes, former vice-president of the Warsaw Jewish Community Council, escaped from Poland in November and reported that “the Nazis” aim was physical destruction in the shortest possible time as many Jews as possible.” (17)

The exact number of Jews who had been killed could not be ascertained at this point. Based on information obtained from the World Jewish Congress, the JTA reported on December 18, 1939 that in Nazi occupied Poland “about a quarter of a million Jews have been wiped out by military operations, executions, disease and starvation and that at least 80% of the remaining Jews had been reduced to complete beggary.” (18) On January 3,1940 the JTA reported that the Germans were executing “an average of 200 Jews every day since the war began.” “This,” the JTA concluded, “would bring the total executions in the four months of the war to approximately 24,000.” (19)

The Nisko-Lublin Plan

As the Germans increased their number of conquered territories, the total number of Jews under their control increased substantially. In addition to the approximately half million German, Austrian and Czech Jews under their control, they now had 2.1 million of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland. On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) met with the head of the Gestapo, Adolph Eichmann and other high level functionaries to decide how to remove all Jews living under German occupation by force. This was not the “Final Solution,” because the Nazis had not yet reached the conclusion to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.

At this point the Nazis were experimenting with a territorial solution to rid themselves of the Jews. Hitler approved of expelling these Jews to the Soviet Union, but he knew the process would require some time since they would need an agreement with the Soviets. In the meantime, Eichmann wanted to deport Jews from Vienna, the Czech Protectorate and western Poland to an area near the town of Nisko in southeast Poland in the Lublin district. From Nisko, they would be sent to the Soviet Union.

The American Jewish press initially reacted to reports of Hitler’s proposed “Jewish State” in Poland with considerable skepticism. (20) This changed on October 6, 1939 when Hitler hinted about at a plan for the solution of the Jewish problem in his speech to the Reichstag. The Associated Press reported from Berlin on the same day that an authorized source had asserted that Hitler had thought “about a Jewish reservation within the Polish State where not only Polish and German Jews could live, but Jews from other lands.” According to the New York Times of October 7, 1939 the reservation would be modeled after an American Indian reservation, but would be larger than Palestine and would have at least 3,000,000 inhabitants at the outset. (21)

The Jewish press was quite concerned about Hitler’s speech. On October 22, 1939, the Forward, a New York Yiddish daily with the largest circulation and an organ of Jewish labor, charged that the Nazis were not interested in founding a Jewish State, but a concentration camp, where Jews would be held under the poorest conditions and suffer great deprivation. (22) The American Jewish Committee declared that “If this fantastic plan is carried out, it would mean that 2,000,000 Jews now in Germany or in territories under German domination, would be confined in what would be a large concentration camp, where they would be doomed to degradation, misery and death.” (23)

The leadership of B’nai B’rith claimed that “if the plan is carried through, there is little doubt that hundreds of thousands—even millions—will simply die of starvation, disease, and suicide.” According to the Jewish Morning Journal, a Yiddish daily newspaper with a religious and politically conservative bent, the proposed reservation was only a new form of robbery designed to confiscate Jewish property and “squeeze ransom money out of their relatives abroad.”(24)

In an editorial entitled “The New Ghetto,” Der Tog (The Day), a liberal Yiddish daily known for its gifted columnists, asserted that there “was no limit to the insanity of Hitler and to his abnormal animosity and hatred for the Jews.” Unlike past persecutions, Jews were now in a “permanent ceaseless pogrom. They were unable to catch their breath between one pogrom and the other.” Der Tog concluded by asking, “what can Jews expect from a state, such as proposed by Hitler?” (25)

The London Times suggested an answer when it observed: ” To thrust 3,000,000 Jews, relatively few of whom are agriculturists, into the Lublin region and to force them to settle there would doom them to famine.” “That, perhaps is the intention,” the editorial opined. (26)

During the final months of 1939, the Jewish press continued its extensive coverage of the events surrounding the proposed Lublin reservation. Reports told of the mass deportations of Jews from all parts of the Reich to the Lublin region; (27) of the frightful sanitary and housing conditions there; (28) of the appalling shortage of food; of pneumonia, typhoid, and dysentery which had reached epidemic proportions (29) of Jewish girls being taken from their homes to satisfy the lusts of Nazi soldiers; and of the many suicides committed by those who had been driven to this act of desperation. (30) Many Jews sought asylum in other countries and requested help from Jews abroad. On November 5, 1939 the JTA reported that the Jewish residents of La Paz, Bolivia received more than 300 cables from their relatives in Germany appealing for help to save them from being sent to the Lublin Reservation. (31)

In March-April 1940, the Germans abandoned the Lublin reservation because Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of the area and Hermann Goering, the head of the four-year plan with almost unlimited powers in financial matters, opposed the reservation for economic reasons. From May 1940 until perhaps as long as the end of the year, the Nazis pursued the idea of sending the Jews to Madagascar, an island off the southeast coast of Africa. The impractical nature of transporting Jews on the high seas during wartime as long as the British Navy remained a potent threat put an end to this solution.

Atrocities Revealed In The American Press

In an editorial on January 24, 1940, the New York Times explained it had been reluctant to report atrocity stories coming out of Poland because “All we have heard until now have been unofficial accounts of such horrors that we chose to disbelieve them as exaggerated.”(32) But the Times acknowledged it could no longer ignore these accounts because the Vatican radio station had broadcast that it had been receiving almost daily reports from Warsaw, Krakow, Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia that told of “destitution, destruction and infamy of every description.” (33) The Vatican “has spoken with authority that cannot be questioned; and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which comes out of the Polish darkness,” the Times reported. (34) Jews and Poles were being moved into hermetically sealed ghettos that were inadequate to sustain the millions destined to live there. (35)

What the Times did not explain is why these unofficial reports and those supplied by the JTA could not have been independently investigated. Some Jews doubted the authenticity of these horror tales because they believed American newspapers rarely suppressed news. If anything, they considered the press to be “over sensational.” If these events actually occurred, they would have been reported in the American press. (36)

In The Terrible Secret, Walter Laquerer explains another reason for the reluctance to accept the news Poland. Many individuals remembered the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, when each side charged the other with wanton brutality. The Germans were accused of burning down villages, cutting off breasts and tongues, making soap from dead soldiers (a myth that found its way into the press during the Second World War as well only with Jewish bodies being used instead) and other unspeakable crimes. The press duly reported the atrocities, but at the end of the war it became clear they had been duped; many of the stories had either been made up or were greatly exaggerated. (37)

Reports from Poland were given further credibility when Congressman Samuel Dickstein (D., N.Y.) chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee read eleven dispatches of the JTA into the Congressional Record on January 24, 1940. (38) Three days later Howard Daniel, writing in The Nation (a liberal American weekly magazine), observed that if there were still individuals inclined to regard Jewish reports as exaggerated, an account in the Breslau Schlesische Zeitung should dispel their skepticism. Based on German police records in the Lodz district the information first appeared in the JTA of the January 3, 1940. It told of a hundred Jews of being executed for allegedly having resisted the Germans during a house-to-house search. In Lodz, hundreds of other Jews were shot for supposedly surrounding a synagogue in the city to prevent Germans from entering the premises. There were also reports of Jewish streets being sealed off and of a typhoid epidemic. In other cities in Poland, German soldiers were shooting, publicly flogging, and executing Jews. Some of their work had been simplified the report concluded because “in some houses many Jews had committed suicides.” (39)

Cardinal Hlond of Poland asserted in an interview with the Times on January 30, 1940 that conditions had become even worse since the Vatican report had been first been drawn up in late December. The Cardinal believed that Hitler was literally carrying out what he had written in Mein Kampf. (40) Although the Cardinal’s report did not mention the persecution of Jews, the American Jewish Congress and Der Tog hoped that public opinion in America would be more receptive to the horrible conditions of the Jews in the ghettos in Lodz, Warsaw, Lublin and other Polish cities. (41)

Further confirmation of Nazi barbarity came from Dr. Moshe Kleinbaum (Sneh), former president of the Polish Zionist Organization, in a report he brought to Geneva, Switzerland. He found that Jews escaping from Nazi Poland to Nazi territory often had an eye removed to prevent them from joining the Soviet military against the Germans. (42) Upon his return from Europe in early 1940, Morris C. Troper, European director of the American Jewish (Joint) Distribution Committee (JDC), declared that "Lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medical supplies is daily creating unparalleled misery, beggaring description. He described the attempt of German Jews to escape to other nations “as a race with death.” (43) Nahum Goldmann, of the World Jewish Congress, predicted that if the war in Europe continued for another year, “1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 Jews in Poland will be dead of starvation or be killed by Nazi persecutors.” Unless political intervention was attempted to save European Jewry “our generation will be burdened with the terrible responsibility before Jewish history,” he concluded. (44) Samuel Margoshes of Der Tog, and Oswald Villard, former editor of the Nation agreed that immediate political activity on behalf of the Jews of Europe had to be initiated. (45)

After the Nazi offensive in the West in May 1940, there were discussions about the possibility of a German victory and what it might mean for the Jews of Europe. Jacob Fishman, the editor of the Jewish Morning Journal, suggested that American Jews should develop a broader concept of time and space. Events should no longer be viewed within the context of an individual’s brief life span. Even if Hitler should win a momentary victory, it would mean very little in the course of history. (46) Salo Baron, professor of Jewish history at Columbia University, accepted the possibility of a German victory, but vainly tried to assure American Jewry that such a triumph did not necessarily mean that Germany would permanently dominate Europe. (47)

The nature of American Jewish response became an issue in some of the press. On August 2, 1940 The Jewish Advocate of Boston, the fourth largest Jewish weekly newspaper in the US, noted that as country after country came under Hitler’s domination, American Jewry became incapable of further expressions of pain. (48) Shlomo Katz, managing editor of the Jewish Frontier, the liberal and activist Labor Zionist monthly, spoke for many Labor Zionists when he attacked the “anemic Jewish reaction” and questioned the efficacy of their methods. (49) This theme of inadequate response prevailed throughout the war in the Jewish press.

Establishment of the Ghettos

News about the establishment of the ghettos in Poland were reported in the Times and the Jewish press in early 1940. In October, Alvin. I. Steinkopf, a staff member of the Associated Press in Berlin toured the Generalgouvernement area of Poland (Krakow, Warsaw, Radom and Lublin) with German health officials. On October 2,1940 Steinkopf reported from Warsaw that an eight foot high concrete wall surrounded one hundred or more city blocks of the central ghetto district in the city. The wall was “so tight, a cat couldn’rsquo;t get through it,” he observed. (50)

The American Jewish Congress took issue with the German official justification that the wall had been erected for health reasons. The Congress claimed the ghetto had been transformed into “sewer of pestilence to consume those who refuse to commit suicide.” (51). The American Jewish Committee saw the establishment of ghettos in other large cities in Poland where Jews were forced to live “under indescribably wretched conditions” as an indication “of Nazi plans for all Jews who come within their reach.” (52)

Life Under Nazi Rule: January-June 1941

Throughout 1941, the condition of European Jews continued to deteriorate. The Jewish press provided almost daily accounts of the confiscation of Jewish property, (53) expulsions, deportations,(54) mass arrests, forced labor, wanton executions (55) and brutal conditions in the Jewish ghettos. (56) When members of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist and antisemitic movement, attempted to overthrow General Ian Antonescu in Romania in January 1941, the Jewish press published a graphic eyewitness account of how Jews were brutalized and killed.(57) The Times, on January 26, 1941, published a report provided by the American Friends Service Committee about the horrible plight of the Jews in the Gurs, one the largest concentration camps in France.(58) Perhaps one of the most import revelations of the period appeared on [NR 5.5.41, p.627.] May 5, 1941 in The New Republic, a liberal weekly magazine, when it acknowledged that an unnamed dignitary of the Catholic Church revealed that “85,000 blind, incurably ill or aged Germans were put to death by the Gestapo in September, October and November of 1940.” (59) William Shirer, the American CBS radio correspondent described these killings in his book Berlin Diary. On July 18, the American Hebrew provided additional details about the “mercy killings” and quoted the report as having concluded, “these reports… bear further proof as to the menace Nazism constitutes to the entire world, including the followers of Nazism.” (60)

German Invasion of Russia—Beginning of the Final Solution

With the Nazi invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941 Germany began its first systematic efforts to exterminate the Jews. With territorial solutions having failed to rid the Germans of the Jews, the Nazis embarked on an all out assault to destroy every Jewish man, woman and child. Four Einsatzgruppen (A, B, C, and D action groups) followed frontline German army units to find and liquidate Jews, saboteurs, Communist political leaders and anyone deemed a threat to the Third Reich. From the outset of this campaign the Jewish press provided wide coverage and fairly accurate accounts of atrocities committed against the Jews. In July, the Jewish press reported that hundreds of Jews had been massacred by Nazi soldiers in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov, Prezemyl, and in almost every city in the area. Reports also told of how Nazi bombs and artillery had destroyed many Russian villages and cities, killing thousands of Jews. Tens of thousands of Jews fled the Nazi onslaught.

On August 11, a radio broadcast from Moscow described how the Germans had forced Jews to dig their own graves in the Nazi occupied Minsk region. On October 2, the Jewish press reported that Polish groups in London had received information from many areas in eastern Poland and Soviet Ukraine about massacres carried out by Nazi soldiers behind the front lines. Thousands of Jews who failed to escape were “simply mowed down by machine guns.” The Nazi soldiers were under orders to kill Jews because it would require too much effort to transport them to the ghettos. (61)

On October 23, the JTA reported Hungarian officers returning from the German-Soviet front had seen thousands of Jewish corpses floating on the Dniester River in Nazi occupied Ukraine. In the Kamenets-Podolski region alone, they estimated that ten thousand Jews had been killed. They predicted more of the same. (62) On November 16, an unimpeachable source had informed the Jewish press that “fifty-two thousand Jews (later revised to be an estimated amount only), men, women and children were systematically and methodically put to death in Kiev following the Nazi occupation of the Ukrainian capital….” The Jewish press emphasized that the “details available….establish that the victims did not lose their lives as a result of a mob pogrom, but by the systematic, merciless execution carried out in accordance with the cold blooded Nazi policy of Jewish extermination. Similar measures, though on a smaller scale, have been taken in other conquered towns.”(63) In December additional reports told of the shooting of hundreds of Jews in Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Austria, France, and Poland. (64)

Reports of Poison Gas Experiments

Throughout the first six months of 1942 reports of the systematic slaughter of the Jews on the Russian front continued to be widely reported in the Jewish press. There were many eyewitness accounts of mass executions from Russian, Jewish Polish and Hungarian sources as well as from neutral diplomats. (65) On March 25, a report by a Bavarian Catholic priest estimated the Nazis had gassed 10,000 Dutch Jews in poison gas experiments at the Mathausen concentration camp in Austria. On April 5 the Dutch Government-in-exile confirmed this report; on June 8, an American diplomat confirmed it. (66)

Other dispatches told of deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, to forced labor and to “unknown destinations,” (67) of the Berlin order to execute typhus-stricken Jews, (68) of appeals for help, (69) and of the thousands of Jews who had died of starvation and froze to death in the ghettos. (70) One of the most dramatic of these accounts came from S. Bertrand Jacobson, a JDC a representative in Eastern Europe who had returned to New York. He reported that “240,000 Jews who had been deported from Germany and all parts of Central Europe to the German-held Ukraine were murdered by the Gestapo, according to the testimony of Hungarian soldiers returning from the eastern front.” One Hungarian soldier said that at one great tract of land near Kiev, he saw the ground “move in waves.” The Germans had buried the Jews even before they were dead. Jacobson asserted that the Nazis had one solution to the Jewish question---extermination and destruction, which is being carried out in every country under German control. In Yugoslavia, the Jewish population had been reduced from 68,000 before the Nazi invasion on April 6, 1941 to a maximum of 25,000. The Jews in Belgrade were ” rounded up and taken in trucks, a hundred at a time, to nearby forests and executed.”(71)

The Jewish Frontier, a Labor Zionist monthly and the Congress Weekly, of the American Jewish Congress, did not doubt the veracity of the report. The Frontier rightly observed that “JDC representatives are not known to exaggerate any aspect of anti-Semitism.” ” “But the most telling evidence of the extent of German mass-murder of Jews,” the magazine concluded, was “the triumphant remark by a Nazi newspaper in the Nazi-occupied territory that the Jewish question has now been solved except for the five million Jews in the United States.” (72) The Congress Weekly noted that “No imagination could invent this conception of a field heaving like a sea with the breath of those buried alive. Only men who saw it with their own eyes could bring it back.” (73)

In June 1942, additional information continued to pour in about the systematic slaughter of the Jews of Europe. On June 17 the JTA reported that hundreds of Jewish and Russian prisoners of war had been killed in poison gas experiments at the Liebenau Monastery in Wurtemberg. On June 26 the JTA published a detailed report from the underground channels describing the massacre of 700,000 Polish Jews since the summer of 1941 in “the greatest slaughter in history.” The Nazis employed machine guns, hand grenades, and mobile gas chambers carried on trucks. There is simply no question the report concluded that all Jews were to be exterminated. The Times and the Jewish press published the report because two Jewish representatives on the Polish National Council in London and the Polish Government in exile had vouched for its authenticity. The British Broadcasting Service (BBC) also broadcast the report.(74)

Further confirmation came in a telegram on August 8, 1942 from Dr. Gerhard Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, to Rabbi Stephen Wise in the US and to Sidney Silverman, a member of the British Parliament confirming the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. (75)

Unable to deny the obvious, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the governments in exile condemned the extermination of the Jews on December 17,1942. (76)

Throughout the period under review, there had been abundant information about the persecution of the Jews of Europe. The Jewish press continually admonished American Jews for failing to adopt an aggressive response, but did not believe this weak reaction was based on ignorance of the facts. The average Jew in America had access to more information about the Shoah than is generally believed and should have been aware of what was happening even before the Allies affirmed the truth of these atrocity stories before December 17, 1942.

Footnotes

1. Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR). November-December, 1939.
2. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA). 9.18.39. p.2.
3. JTA 9.12.39. p.1.
4. JTA 9.13.39,p.1; NewYork Times (NYT) 9.13.39,p.5
5. NYT 9.13.39, p.11.
6. NYT 9.13.39, p.6; Forward (F) 9.16.30, p.3.
7. JTA 9.27.39, p.1; NYT 9.21.39, p13.
8. JTA 9.29.39, p.1.
9. NYT 9.22.39,p.7; F 9.25.39, p.1.
10. NYT 9.20.39, p.1; JTA 9.21.39, p.3.
11. F 10.2.39, p.1.
12. F 10.3.39, p.1; 10.27.39, p.1.
13. JTA 10.20.39, p1, 10.23.39, p.2, 10.31.39, p1, 11.4.39, p.2; Der Tog (DT) 11.17.39, p.1.
14. JTA 11.3.39, p.1, 11.6.39, p.6, 11.15.39, p.2.
15. JTA 11.11.39, p.5, 11.14.39, p.11, CJR March-April, 1940, pp.119-133.
16. Congress Bulletin (CB) 11.10.39, p.1; JTA 11.11.39, p.2, 11.18.39, p.1.
17. DT 12.8.39, p.1, NYT 12.10.39, p.56.
18. DT 12.19.39, p.1, CB 12.22.39, p.2, JTA 12.18.39, p.1.
19. JTA 1.3.40, p.1; 12.18.39, p.1, CB 12.22.39, p.2, DT 12.19.39, p.1.
20. DT 10.5.39, p.1, CB 10.4.39, p.2, Jewish Frontier (JF) November, 1939, p.5.
21. NYT 10.7.39, p.1.
22. F 10.22.39, p1.
23. American Jewish YearBook (AJY), Volume 42, p. 645.
24. National Jewish Monthly (NJM) December, 1939, p.99.
25. CJR November-December, 1939, pp.36-37; DT 10.14.39, p.6.26.
26. JTA 10.25.39, p.4.
27. NYT 10.31.39, p.3. The Nation(N) 12.30.39, p.735, DT 11.21.39, p.2, CB 11.20.39, pp.4- 5,11.25.39, p.5.
28. DT 11.28.39, p.1. The New Republic(NR) 12.26.39, p.180.
29. JTA 11.29.39, p.2, DT 11.17.39, p.3.
30. DT 11.29.39, p.1.
31. JTA 11. 6.39, p.3.
32. NYT 1.24.40, p2, 1.30.40,p.18.
33. NYT 1.23.40, pp.1, 5.
34. NYT 1.24.40, p2, 1.30.40,p.18.
35. NYT 1.23.40, pp.1, 5.
36. DT 1.28.40, p.1, 1.25.40, p.1, see also Jewish Advocate (JA Boston) 2.2.40,p.1.
37. Walter Laqueur. The Terrible Secret .Boston: Little Brown, 1980. P.8.
38. JTA 24.40, p.1.
39. N 1.27.40, JTA 1.3.40, p.1, 1.22.40, pp.3-4, CB 1.5.40, p.3, F 1.11.40, p.4, NYT 3.8.40, p.6, Jewish Spectator (JS) February, 1940, pp.36-37, CJR March-April, 1940, p.183.
40. NYT 1.30.40, p.1,10; 2.4.40 Sec.4 p.4e; 2.16.40, p.10.
41. CB 2.2.40, p.2; DT 1.31.40, pp.1, 4.
42. Der Tog 3.21.40, p.1.
43. NYT 3.15.40, p.10, 4.5.40, p.4. 7.11.40, p.13.
44. CB 2.16.40; p.7, 4.2.40, p.3.
45. NYT 1.6.40, 12.
46. DT 2.10.40, p.1.
47. CJR July-August, 1940, pp.355-356. See also NYT 6.23.40, p.13
48. JA 8.2.40, p.4.
49. JF September, 1940, p.16.
50. NYT 10.13.40, p33, JTA 10.14.40, pp.2-3, Opinion(O) November, 1940, p20. American Hebrew(AH) 4.26.40, p.4.
51. CB 12.6.40, p.4.
52. AJY, Volume 43, pp.233-235,718.
53. Jewish Social Studies (JSS) January, 1941, pp.57-80, F 1.16.41, p.4; 2.21.41, p.4, JTA 2.18.41, p.1.
54. F 2.18.41,p.1, JTA 2.18.41,p.1, NYT 9.9.41, p.4.
55. F 1.23.41, p.4, NR 3.3.41, p. 427, NYT 4.3.41, p.4, JTA 5.13.41, p.4.
56. F 1.3.41, p.4, 2.8.41, p.10, JE 5.2.41, p.4, CJR August, 1941, pp.357-366, NYT 9.16.41, p.9, CW 5.23.41, pp.5, 8, JTA 4.3.41, p.3.
57. JTA 1.30.41 p.1.; 1.31.41, pp.1-3; 2.2.41, pp.1-3; 3.3.41, pp.1-3; CW 1.31.41, p.16, NJM February, 1941, pp.181-183, JA 2.7.41, p.4, F 1.24.41; p.1; 1.25.41, p.1; 2.24,41, p.3,AJY, Vol.43, pp.268-270, CJR April, 1941, p.193, NYT 1.24.41, p.3.
58. NYT 1.26.41, p.24, F 1.20.41, p.4.
59. NR 5.5.41, p.627.
60. William Shirer, Berlin Diary. New York: 1941, p.458.
61. JTA 10.2.41, p.3, DT 10.2.41, p.3; 10.3.41, p.1, F 10.2.41, p.1, CJR December, 1941, p.650.
62. JTA 10.23.41, p.1, NYT 10.26.41, p.6, CJR December, 1941, p.669, DT 10.23.41, p.1, F 10.23.41, p.1, CW 10.23.41, p.3.
63. JTA 11.16.41, p.1, DT 11.16.41, p.1, F 11.16.41,p.1, CW 11.21.41, p.16.
64. JTA 7.30.41, p.3, 11.30.41.
65. CW 1.2.42, pp.8-10, 11-12; 1.16.42, p.3; 1.23.42, pp.5-6, DT 1.19.42, p.1, JE 4.22.42, p.4, JF April 1942, p.4, NYT 4.6. 42, p.2;6.14.42, p.1, CJR April , 1942, p.17; June, 1942, p.311, JTA 1.8.42, p.1.
66. JTA 3.25.42, p.3, 4.5.42, p.3, NYT 4. 24. 42, p.5.
67. JTA 1.5.42, p.3, F 4.12.42, p.3, CW 4.10.42, pp.7-10, CJR April, 1942, pp.190-192.
68. JTA 1.11.42, p.1, F 1.11.42, p.1, DT 1.11.42, p.1.
69. JTA 4.20.42, p.1, 6.1142, p.4, CW 5.1.42, pp.4-5, DT 4.21.42, p.1, Jewish Exponent (JE) 4.10.42, p.4.
70. JTA 1.6.42, p.2, JF March, 1942, pp. 4-5, May, 1942, pp. 13-15, JS May, 1942, pp.13-17, NYT 2.9.42, p.2, 3.1.42, p.28, CW 1.30.42, pp. 6-7, 2.27.42, p.5, F 1. 10.42, p.8, 1.15.42, p.3.
71. JTA 3.15.42, p.1, NYT 3. 14.42, p.7, F 3.20.42, p.3.
72. JF April, 1942, p.4.
73. CW 3.20.42, pp. 3-4.
74. JTA 6.26.42, pp.1-2, NYT 6.27.42, p.5, 7.9.42, p.8, DT 6.30.42, p.1, 7.8.42, p.1, Opinion (O) August, 1942, p.15, CJR August, 1942, p.422, Midstream, April, 1968, pp.52-58,American Hebrew(AH) 7.10.42, p.1.
75. Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p.143-163; Richard Breitman. Official Secrets: What The Nazis Planned, What The British and Americans Knew. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. pp.137-176; David S. Wyman. Abandonment of the Jews: America and The Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp.42-47, 49-51, 53-55, 74, 178-9, 362.
76. reitman, Official Secrets. pp.151-154.