Misreporting the liberation

Sixty years ago this month, the Allied armies dashing toward Berlin stumbled upon Germany's extensive network of concentration camps. But when America's newspapers, radio broadcasters and newsreel editors reported the liberation of the camps, they almost never mentioned their Jewish inmates.

In early April 1945, tiny, inside stories began appearing in the nation's newspapers describing what Allied soldiers had found first at several small camps and then climactically at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. They found: "ashes and arms and legs" at Ohrdruf; "3,000 living skeletons and 2,700 unburied bodies" at Nordhausen; and "typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, nakedness, starvation" at Belsen.

What they did not find, at least according to the news stories, were Jews.

Ohrdruf's inmates were "European captives," and Nordhausen's were "Allied and political prisoners." Belsen held "persons ... interned for political or 'criminal offense,'" whereas Langenstein had "Polish, Russian, French, Belgian, Netherland and Czechoslovak inhabitants."

By the middle of April, the news had migrated to the front page, yet Jews were featured no more prominently. The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The Washington Post, for example, ran 24 front-page stories about the camps' liberation, but only one, a May 1 Post story, referred to Jews on Page One. Similarly, all three newspapers ran many photographs of the liberated camps, but none of the captions mentioned Jews as among either the dead or living.

Even when Jews were mentioned, the reason they were imprisoned and murdered - because they were Jews - was not. As they had throughout the war, the Allied military authorities, who ran the camps once the Germans fled, preferred to universalize the tragedy rather than emphasize the more horrible fate of the Jews. So inmates were described as active opponents of the Nazi regime, rather than helpless men, women and children who had been persecuted solely because of their Jewishness.

The end-of-the-war press coverage did not awaken Americans to the Holocaust because the media did not tell the stories of individual Jewish survivors. The dead were presented as "dumps of unburied corpses in vast heaps," and the living as an undifferentiated, barely human mass of "living skeletons" and "wretched remnants." Almost no quotes, comments or life histories of the inmates were included that could have overcome such dehumanizing descriptions.

The failure of the press to recognize the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath affected public attitudes and American policies toward the survivors huddled in poorly run displaced persons camps, toward the war crime trials, including the one in Nuremberg that began later that year, and toward demands for a Jewish state in Palestine. It also helped delay for decades public discussion of one of the 20th-century's defining events, leading to claims that there was "a period of amnesia," in which the Holocaust became "virtually invisible."

Based on what the American public was told by the mainstream media about the liberation of the camps, the problem was not that the Holocaust was forgotten. The problem was that it was never really discovered.

Laurel Leff is associate professor of in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and author of "Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper," just published by Cambridge University Press.

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