When the Facts Didn't Speak for Themselves

Abstract

Conventional wisdom assumes that Americans did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening. However, over the last two decades, scholars have demonstrated not only that credible reports reached the Allied governments throughout the war about the persecution and ultimately the extermination of the Jews, but also that much of that information appeared in the Jewish press and in daily newspapers. My own research reveals that during the war a story on what was happening to the Jews appeared on average every other day in the New York Times. The question then becomes, if all this information was available, why do we think we did not know? This article argues that the placement of news about the Holocaust almost uniformly on inside pages, as well as the failure to highlight it in editorials or in summaries of important events, made it difficult for most Americans to find the facts and to understand their importance. The article concludes that despite the detailed, credible information that was available, the American public actually did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening because mainstream American newspapers never presented the story of the extermination of the Jews in a way that highlighted its importance.