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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
June 27, 2005
Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post
Dear editor:
Herman Obermayer, who was an American observer at the Nuremberg trials, told your interviewer (June 23) that during the first years following World War II, the New York Times "didn't see [the Holocaust] as a bigger story because most of these facts they had known."
In fact, there were other reasons for the Times's attitude. In an article that will appear in the next issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Prof. Laurel Leff describes how the Times, in its coverage of the Allied liberation of the Nazi death camps, consistently failed to acknowledge that the primary victims were Jews. For example, in a typical story about the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp in April 1945, the Times referred to the survivors as "Polish, Russian, French, Belgian, Netherland and Czechoslovak inhabitants." Prof. Leff found that "throughout 1945, not a single story" in the Times "told the tale of a Jewish survivor. Not one article followed someone from his or her pre-war life, through tribulations in ghetto or labor camps, to extermination centers ..."
The Times' postwar coverage of the survivors was sadly consistent with its coverage of the Holocaust itself, which has been amply documented in Prof. Leff's new book, Buried by The Times. She found that during 1941-1945, the Times downplayed news of the Nazi genocide and the Jewish identity of the victims because publisher Arthur Sulzberger, an assimilated Jew of German descent, feared he would be accused of engaging in 'special pleading.' News that put too much emphasis on Jewish suffering was not considered 'fit to print.'
Cordially,
Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA
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