Championing Humanity, Overlooking Atrocity: Edward R. Murrow and the Holocaust

Abstract

What distinguished Edward R. Murrow’s April 1945 concentration camp broadcast was the people of Buchenwald. While other journalists focused on the dead as “dumps of unburied corpses” and the living as “wretched remnants,” Murrow described the inmates as people who had lives before their internment. Murrow’s work a decade earlier with Jewish professors fired by the Nazi regime helped him sense humanity when others perceived nothing but carnage. Yet, like other correspondents covering the liberation, Murrow never mentioned Jews in his broadcast. Nor had he done much on the plight of Europe’s Jews while they were being murdered, broadcasting a single story. Despite his displaced scholars work and his London base, Murrow never fully recognized the extermination of European Jewry as an important news story.

Notes

1 Laurel Leff, Buried by The Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 314–5.

2 Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 276, ranked the Buchenwald broadcast, along with “Orchestrated Hell,” his December 1943 broadcast on flying with a RAF crew as they dropped bombs on Berlin, as Murrow’s best radio broadcasts.

3 See Leff, Buried by The Times, 296–307; Laurel Leff, “‘Liberated by the Yanks’: The Holocaust as An American Story in Postwar News Articles,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40 (Fall 2003): 407–30.

4 Initial assumptions that the American press reported little about the Holocaust and that what it did report were rumors have been discredited. Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Fress Press, 1986); and Leff, Buried by The Times, established that American newspapers published many credible stories about what was happening to Europe’s Jews during World War II, from the first deportations to ghettos in Poland, to the liquidation of the last intact Jewish community in Hungary. The Times published 1,186 stories between September 1, 1939 and May 8, 1945, or about one every other day; all but twenty-six, however, appeared inside the newspaper. Joyce Fine, “American Radio Coverage of the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal/Center Annual 5 (1988): 145–65, found a similar pattern in radio coverage: “radio broadcast news reported about the murder of the European Jews only occasionally and unsystematically.” These assumptions, however, seem hard to shake.

5 See “Edward R. Murrow, Broadcaster and Ex-Chief of U.S.I.A. Dies,” New York Times, April 28, 1965; “Edward R. Murrow: This Reporter,” PBS, February 2, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/edward-r-murrow/this-reporter/513/; “Edward R. Murrow,” U-S-History, http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3889.html; “Edward R. Murrow,” TV Guide Biography, http://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/edward-r-murrow/bio/214899; “Edward R. Murrow,” Los Angeles Times, http://projects.latimes.com/hollywood/star-walk/edward-r-murrow/; “Edward R. Murrow,” NCpedia, http://ncpedia.org/biography/murrow-edward; “Edward R. Murrow, American Journalist,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-R-Murrow; “Edward R. Murrow,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_R._Murrow; “Edward R. Murrow Biography,” Biography, https://www.biography.com/people/edward-r-murrow-9419104; “Edward R. Murrow,” Edward R. Murrow Broadcast Journalist, http://www.edwardmurrow.c=]]]]om/search/label/edward%20r%20murrow%20bio; Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996), 21.

6 Mark Bernstein, “Edward R. Murrow: Inventing Broadcast Journalism,” American History Magazine, June 2005, http://www.historynet.com/edward-r-murrow-inventing-broadcast-journalism.htm; Nicholas Lemman, “The Murrow Doctrine,” New Yorker, January 23, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/01/23/the-murrow-doctrine. Norman H. Finkelstein, With Heroic Truth: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (Lincoln, NE: An Authors Guild Backinrpint.com, 2005), 44–5, got a number of things wrong, including the committee’s relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation, its role in placing scholars and the number of scholars assisted.

7 Kendrick, Prime Time, 116–27, 132–4; A.M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), 51–78. The biography contains several errors in describing the committee’s operation. The most glaring: the committee was “a kind of visiting professor program, attendant on the cooling of revolutionary fervor in Germany” (52–53) and the committee became a “semiofficial body … with ties to the State Department” (72). Mark Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi, World War II on the Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts that Riveted a Nation (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Inc., 2003), 224; Bob Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2004), 20–23. Joseph Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 227–28, make the connection to the ultimate fate of the Jews, but like many of the biographers he gets things about the committee wrong, such as the claim that “Ed would shop the list of available scholars around to American campuses,” (78) and that the Emergency Committee had run its course when Murrow left (70). The committee continued for another decade making grants to more than twice as many scholars as it did during Murrow’s tenure.

8 Cloud and Olson, The Murrow Boys, 134, wrote: “Between 1941 and 1945 Murrow and the Boys, like most of their journalistic colleagues, provided little coverage of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews. For one thing, once the United States entered the war, details of the Holocaust were not readily available.” Details of the Holocaust were available and London, the seat of the exile governments, was a prime source of the information. See Michael Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Olson’s understanding of the information available on the Holocaust had not improved twenty-one years later. In Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour (New York: Random House, 2017), 355–6, Olson concluded that “Murrow and his CBS team” publicized “reports about the Nazis’ mass slaughter of Jews” early in the war, but then they and other “journalists from Allied countries provided little further coverage,” largely because “its full extent was not known until after the conflict was ended.” U.S. press coverage, including that of CBS, remained virtually the same throughout the war, occasional stories on ongoing events. Although everything about the Holocaust wasn’t known during the war, the fact that the Germans planned to exterminate all European Jews and were killing millions of them, was known and confirmed twenty-eight months before the war ended. Nadine Epstein, “Edward R. Murrow,” As Good As It Gets,” Moment Magazine, February 2006, writes about Murrow’s work with the refugee scholars committee but her article is marred by mistakes small (the wrong address of the IIE’s office) to relatively large (describing a majority of committees grantees as non-Jews, without recognizing the all-important category of “non-Aryans”). Most important, Epstein credits Murrow with “passionately confronting the story of Jewish extermination in Europe,” but fails to ask the question of why that confrontation resulted in just one story in 1942 while the killing went on for another two-and-a-half years.

9 Sperber, Murrow, 45.

10 Murrow to Brewster, January 29, 1933, Box 1, Folder 1, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933-September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

11 Murrow to Brewster, March 8, 1933, Box 1, Folder 2, Ibid.

12 Murrow to Brewster, April 17, 1933, Ibid.

13 Karen J. Greenberg, “Academic Neutrality: Nicholas Murray Butler, James B. Conant and Nazi Germany, 1933–1938,” Annals of Scholarship 3 (1984): 63–76, 72.

14 Murrow to Brewster, May 9, 1933. Box 1, Folder 2, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933–September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

15 Murrow to Brewster, July 17, 1933, Box 1, Folder 4, Ibid.

16 Murrow to Brewster, September 15, 1933, Box 1, Folder 6, Ibid. The institute debated whether to end its German exchange programs because of concerns about German students and faculty engaging in propaganda in the United States and American students receiving a Nazi education in Germany. “It is quite impossible to tell from this distance, despite the rather complete data available as a result of the Emergency Committee work, just what disciplines continue to be staffed by able men in German universities,” Murrow wrote Duggan. “It would be very helpful if we could have some light on this subject as a result of your visit to Germany.” Murrow to Duggan, February 13, 1934, Box 199, Folder 6, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York. The institute kept running the exchanges until 1939. Sperber. Murrow, 55–58.

17 Murrow to Brewster, June 12, 1933, Box 1, Folder 3, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933-September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

18 Murrow to Brewster, June 29, 1933, Ibid.

19 Murrow to Duggan, January 23, 1934, Box 199, Folder 6, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York.

20 Joseph Mitchell, “Orphans of the World Storm; Nazis Force Germany’s ‘Best Minds’ to Scatter Over the World,” New York World-Telegram, September 29, 1933, 1, Box 1, Folder 7, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933–September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections. “A description of the life in the United States of the exiled German professors was obtained from Edward R. Murrow, assistant director of the Institute of International Education, at 2 W. Forty-fifth Street, which, working with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, has aided virtually all the professors who came here, except those of the New School.”

21 Murrow to Brewster, July 12, 1933, Box 1, Folder 4, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933–September 1934. Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

22 Murrow to Brewster, January 4, 1934, Box 1, Folder 8, Ibid.

23 Murrow to Brewster, January 9, 1934, Ibid.

24 Murrow to Brewster, October 17, 1933, Box 1, Folder 6, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933–September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

25 Murrow to Brewster, January 23, 1934, Box 1, Folder 8, Ibid.

26 Harvard University’s interest in maintaining ties with German universities under Nazi control has received scholarly attention, most particularly Stephen H. Norwood’s The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

27 Throughout the summer, Murrow and Duggan contacted sympathetic Harvard professors who advised them to wait. Zinsser to Edsall, May 15, 1933, Edsall to Lowell, May 17, 1933, Edsall to Zinsser, June 16, 1933, Zinsser to Edsall, June 19, 1933, Box 30, Folder 20:1356, Office of the Dean Subject Files, 1899-1954, RG N-DE01, Harvard Medical School, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston; Murrow to Shapley, July 23, 1933, Shapely to Murrow, July 31, 1933, Shapely to Murrow, August 2, 1933, Box 10, Folder 2, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931–1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections. Duggan to Frankfurter, July 18, 1933, Box 172, Folder 4, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York.

28 Duggan to Shapley, September 8, 1933, Box 10, Folder 2, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931-1944-1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

29 Shapley to Duggan, September 11, 1933, Shapley to Duggan, September 15, 1933, Shapley to Duggan, September 20, 1933, Shapley to Duggan, September 27, 1933, Box 10, Folder 2, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931–1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

30 See Laurel Leff, Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

31 Letter, Assistant Director to Duggan, January 31, 1934, Box 186, Folder 4, Letter, Murrow to Friedrich, February 1, 1934, Box 178, Folder 9, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars Papers, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL; Letter, Seligman to Stein, January 31, 1934, Letter, Murrow to Seligman, February 5, 1934, Box 178, Folder 7, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars Papers, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL; Letter, Murrow to Duggan, February 7, 1934, Letter, Murrow to Conant, February 7, 1934, Box 199, Folder 6, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars Papers, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYP; Letter, Conant to Murrow, February 12, 1934, Box 191, Folder 4, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars Papers, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL; Letter, Duggan to Murrow, February 12, 1934, Box 199, Folder 6, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars Papers, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL.

32 Murrow to Brewster, December 12, 1933, Box 1, Folder 7, E. R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, January 1933–September 1934, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

33 Murrow to Brewster, June 20, 1934, Box 1, Folder 10, Ibid.

34 Sperber, Murrow, 53–54.

35 Murrow to Cohn, August 10, 1934, Box 186, Folder 7, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York.

36 Murrow to Brewster, July 16, 1934, July 6, 1934, Box 1, Folder 10, Ibid.

37 Paul K. Hoch, “The Reception of Central European Refugee Physicists of the 1930s: U.S.S.R., U.K., U.S.A.,” Annals of Science 40 (1983): 217–46, 241.

38 Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, 22; Box 191 Folder 4, Executive Committee, A. Correspondence, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, MSSCOL 922, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York.

39 Murrow to Drury, July 23, 1935, Box 191 Folder 4, Ibid.

40 Murrow to Brewster, December 12, 1933, Box 1, Folder 7, Ibid.; Kendrick, Prime Time, 133–34.

41 Sperber, Murrow, 72–73.

42 Edward R. Murrow, Outline Script Murrow’s Career, December 18, 1953, Tufts Archive Exhibit, http://dca.lib.tufts.edu/features/murrow/exhibit/iie.html; See also, Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, 20–23.

43 Murrow to Duggan, April 12, 1937, Box 191, Folder 6, Ibid.

44 Whyte to Murrow, March 23, 1937, Box 191, Folder 4, Executive Committee, A. Correspondence, Ibid.

45 December 5, 1939 [sic. 1938] Minutes, Box 6, Folder 21, RU Alfred Cohn 450 C661-U, Rockefeller Center Archive. See also, February 21, 1939, Minutes, Box 6, Folder 22, RU Alfred Cohn 450 C661-U, Rockefeller Center Archive.

46 “This I Remember” April 1, 1942, sent to Charles Ferguson, Reader’s Digest, Box 10, Folder 3, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931–1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

47 Sperber, Murrow, 120–2.

48 Ernie Pyle, “Ed Murrow,” Washington Daily News, Monday, March 31, 1941, 31.

49 See Cohn to Murrow, May 22, 1940, Box 2, Folder 4, Cohn to Murrow, September 11, 1940, Box 2, Folder 6, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, October 1934-March 1942, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

50 Duggan to Murrow, June 21, 1940, Box 2, Folder 4, Ibid.

51 Murrow to Duggan, January 23, 1941, Box 2, Folder 6, Ibid.

52 Murrow to Cohn, April 8, 1942, Box 10, Folder 3, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931–1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

53 Stein to Murrow, September 18, 1942, Box 3, Folder 6, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, April 1942-December 1943, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

54 Cohn to Murrow, April 18, 1942, Box 3, Folder 1, Stein to Murrow, September 18, 1942, Box 3, Folder 6, Ibid.

55 Box 10, Folder 3, E.R. Murrow Papers, Subject Files, 1931–1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

56 Gimbel to Murrow July 23, 1940, Box 2, Folder 4, Murrow to Marshall, July 17, 1940, Box 2, Folder 5, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, October 1934–March 1942, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections; Marshall to Murrow, February 14, 1941, Box 2, Folder 9, Ibid.

57 Edward R. Murrow, “We Must Plan Now for Peace,” Southern Churchman, March 16, 1942, vol. 108, no. 15, April 11, 1942, Box 8, Folder 5, E.R. Murrow Papers, Writings, Broadcasts etc., 1944–1933–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

58 C.B.S. London, Sunday, September 15, 1942, Ibid. See also Edward Bliss Jr., ed., In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow 1938–1961 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 55; and Cloud and Olson, The Murrow Boys, 158–63.

59 Cohn to Murrow, September 15, 1942, Box 3, Folder 8, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, April 1942–December 1943, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

60 Murrow to Cohn, September 18, 1942, Ibid.

61 Thirty-one years after its publication, Fine’s “American Radio Coverage of the Holocaust,” is the only study of U.S. radio news and the Holocaust. David Weinstein, “Why Sarnoff Slept: NBC and the Holocaust,” 98–116, in Michelle Hilmes, ed., NBC: American Network (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), deals exclusively with NBC’s entertainment programming that had different pressures and imperatives than those of its news division. Except for two dramatic programs on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Weinstein found only indirect references to the persecution of the Jews in religious programs and regular shows such as The Goldbergs. A full scale examination of U.S. radio’s handling of the Holocaust, including news and entertainment programs, is warranted.

62 In 1940, for example, CBS reported in January that German Jews were being expelled and denied ration cards for clothes, and Polish Jews were put into forced labor; in February, that 300 Prague Jews had been arrested and that Italy had curbed Jews’ rights; in June, that anti-Nazi Germans were being rounded up in occupied countries, particularly France; in July that French Jews could no longer participate in public service; in August that Rumania Jews were facing serious problems, including the disbarment of Jewish lawyers; and in October that Rumanian Jews were having their property confiscated. Tapes 1130, 1130b, 1162, 916, 207, 1404, 1453, 1500, 1505, Milo Ryan KIRO-CBS Radio News Phonoarchive, 1935–1978, University of Washington, Libraries Media Archive, Seattle. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv09838/op=fstyle.aspx?t=i&q=waseumc#scopecontentID. Fine, “American Radio Coverage of the Holocaust,” which also focuses on CBS’ reports, provides more information on these individual stories.

63 Tapes 1654, 1656, 258, Ibid.

64 Tapes 1907 and 1933 (oddly the summary referred to “Jewish churches” rather than synagogues), Ibid.

65 Broadcast, February 6, 1942, Box 8, Folder 4, E.R. Murrow Papers, Writings, Broadcasts etc., 1944–1933–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

66 “The World Today,” June 29, 1942, Tape 2234, Milo Ryan KIRO-CBS Radio News Phonoarchive, 1935–1978, University of Washington, Libraries Media Archive, Seattle. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv09838/op=fstyle.aspx?t=i&q=waseumc#scopecontentID.

67 “The World Today,” July 17, 1942, Tape 2253, “The World Today,” July 28, 1942, Tape 2266, Ibid.

68 Kendrick, Prime Time, 186. Tapes 1385, Tape 2569, Milo Ryan KIRO-CBS Radio News Phonoarchive, 1935-1978, University of Washington, Libraries Media Archive, Seattle. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv09838/op=fstyle.aspx?t=i&q=waseumc#scopecontentID.

69 The Polish newspaper Dziennik Polski published a transcript of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk’s CBS broadcast on September 7, 1942. I am grateful to British historian Michael Fleming, professor at the Polish University Abroad in London, for providing this information.

70 Murrow to Sheean, December 26, 1940, Box 2, Folder 7, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, October 1934–March 1942, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections. See also, J. Murrow to Family, May 31, 1937, J. Murrow to Families, June 9, 1937, J. Murrow to Families, September 6, 1937, Box 13, Folder 2, Janet Murrow Papers, Correspondence 1920-1941, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections; In July 1943, Laski wrote to Winston Churchill, apparently criticizing a speech in which the prime minister referred to “Nazi atrocities” without mentioning Jews. Churchill to Laski, July 5, 1943, http://www.churchillarchiveforschools.com/themes/the-themes/key-events-and-developments-in-world-history/could-britain-have-done-more-to-help-the-jews-in-the-second-world-war/the-sources/source-2.

71 Persico’s Edward R. Murrow, 227, quoted one lengthy paragraph from the broadcast and then mischaracterized it as “one of the first fragmentary reports of what had befallen Jews in Poland who did not escape the Nazis.” These were not “the first fragmentary reports.” Reports on the extermination campaign had been appearing for more than six months, and Murrow in the broadcast pulled the information together.

72 Holocaust scholars agree that there was no more doubt about the existence of a systematic, German extermination campaign directed against the Jews after this declaration was issued. See, for example, David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 15.

73 “The World Today,” December 17, 1942, Tape 2417, Milo Ryan KIRO-CBS Radio News Phonoarchive, 1935-1978, University of Washington, Libraries Media Archive, Seattle, http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv09838/op=fstyle.aspx?t=i&q=waseumc#scopecontentID.

74 December 23, 1942, Tape 2424, December 25, 1942, Tape 2427, December 29, 1942, Tape 2432, December 31, 1942, Tape 2434, Ibid.

75 Cloud and Olson, The Murrow Boys, 191–92, quoting Harrison Salisbury, head of UP’s London bureau in 1944 and later a New York Times reporter and columnist.

76 Bernstein and Lubertozzi, World War II on the Air, 222.

77 Cloud and Olson, The Murrow Boys, 134, assert that “certainly, there is no evidence that CBS deliberately avoided the story” of the extermination campaign. But by not pursuing information they had, which was abundant, CBS journalists did indeed avoid the story.

78 Tapes 2528, 2588, 2748, 2752, Milo Ryan KIRO-CBS Radio News Phonoarchive, 1935-1978, University of Washington, Libraries Media Archive, Seattle, http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv09838/op=fstyle.aspx?t=i&q=waseumc#scopecontentID.

79 Tapes 2877, 3067, Ibid.

80 Joan Peterson, “Iterations of Babi Yar,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 46, no. 4 (September 22, 2011). See also, Leff, Buried by The Times, 172.

81 Murrow biographer A.M. Sperber, who was herself an archivist at Tufts University, relied on other, scattered collections for information on the war years. See Sperber, Murrow, 707–08. Letters from Murrow on this topic may yet emerge and lead to different conclusions about his motives.

82 The best evidence that the U.S. government did not censor news stories about the Holocaust is the number of stories that did in fact appear. The government’s voluntary censorship system, established two weeks after Pearl Harbor, did not include the treatment of Jews in occupied Europe as the type of information the media should not publish. In general, the U.S. government through its propaganda arm, the Office of War Information, determined that confirmed atrocity stories should be used strategically to further the nation’s war aims. Publicity about the murder of the Jews, however, did not fit those goals and therefore the government tended to downplay, but not suppress, the information. See Leff, Buried by The Times, 236–64.

83 Some historians have assumed that World War II journalists were skeptical of the reports of mass murder because World War I journalists had been duped by fake atrocity stories. Some news accounts reflect such skepticism. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 2–9, 17, 137, 188, 240. But far more stories do not cast doubt about the information presented (consider Murrow’s December 13 broadcast) and, in fact, use the previous war’s fake reports to reinforce the truth of what journalists were reporting contemporaneously. In addition, the Allied government officially confirmed the extermination campaign in December 1942. Had doubts about the accuracy of the information been what kept the news from being reported more prominently, the coverage should have changed. It did not. See Leff, Buried by The Times, 330–58.

84 Murrow to Duggan, September 3, 1943, Box 3, Folder 13, Murrow to Fisher, n.d, 1944, Marshall to Murrow, January 19, 1944, Box 4, Folder 1, Murrow to Duggan, July 24, 1944, Box 4, Folder 5, Marshall to Murrow, September 11, 1944, Willets to Murrow, September 22, 1944, Murrow to Marshall, September 26, 1944, Box 4, Folder 6, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944-1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

85 Murrow to Cohn, December 8, 1943, Ruth Cohn, Alfred Cohn to Murrow, December 5, 1943, Box 3, Folder 15, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, April 1942–December 1943, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

86 Fisher to Murrow, April 2, 1945, Box 4, Folder 10, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, April 1942-December 1943, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

87 In recent years a freelance journalist, Mark Schulte, has accused Murrow of airing a “fraudulent broadcast,” and “a despicable fabrication,” based on Schulte’s claim that Murrow did not tour Buchenwald on April 12, 1945 as he claimed. Schulte does not make a compelling case in articles that appeared on a right-wing website and as a blog on an Israeli website. “CBS’s Buchenwald Liberation Lies: 1945-1995,” Daily Caller, April 11, 2017, https://dailycaller.com/2017/04/11/cbss-buchenwald-liberation-lies-1945-1995/. “Buchenwald liberation myths: 1945–2013,” April 11, 2013, Times of Israel Blogs, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/buchenwald-liberation-myths-1945-2013/.

88 Murrow’s description of Buchenwald in this paragraph and the subsequent one is drawn from his broadcast, as well as an edited version that appeared in the London Evening Standard on April 16, 1945. Gunn to Murrow, April 16, 1945, Box 4, Folder 10, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections. The handwritten notes Murrow took at the time track his account closely. They can be found in Box 8, Folder 7, E.R. Murrow Papers, Writings, Broadcasts etc., 1944–1933–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

89 Paul Heller, January 31, 1981 oral history, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, acquired from Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco.

90 Sperber, Murrow, 250. Richet arrived in Buchenwald in June 1943 at the age of 60. In 1956, Richet and Antonin Mans wrote a book, Pathologie de la Deportation. Richet died in 1966.

91 “Richard Dimbleby Describes Belsen,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/5115.shtml. About 40 percent of Bergen-Belsen inmates were Jewish at the time of liberation, which raises questions about the BBC’s decision to leave that information out of the broadcast. Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (London: Yale University Press, 2016), 82–83, writes that the phrase “‘thousands of … Jews’” was in Dimbleby’s written report, but not the broadcast.

92 “Unspeakable Prisoner-of-War Camps Liberated,” CBC digital archives, https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1945-unspeakable-prisoner-of-war-camps-liberated.

93 Sarah Coates, “Belsen, Dachau, 1945: Newspapers and the First Draft of History,” (PhD diss., Deakin University, March 2016), 210–11, 182, 181, 173, 202.

94 Jeffrey Shandler, “Testimony of Images: The Allied Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps in American Newsreels,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, edited by Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2003), 109–25, 118–19.

95 Sperber, Murrow, 250–51.

96 J. Murrow to Mother and Dad, April 22, 1945, Box 14, Folder 3, Janet Murrow Papers, Correspondence 1920–1941, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

97 Interestingly, another journalist who had worked for the Emergency Committee also produced a particularly powerful account of the liberation. Percy Knauth, who the Emergency Committee employed in 1938 and 1939 to tour American universities to assess their willingness to hire refugee scholars, went to Buchenwald for Time and Life magazines. Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps, 74–76, credits Knauth with “perhaps the most moving of all the descriptions,” and “among the most polished and insightful of the immediate post-liberation descriptions.”

98 Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, 89. See also, Bernstein and Lubertozzi, World War II on the Air, 203: “His years with the Emergency Committee, helping to place European scholars in American universities, was no doubt on his mind. Three hundred thirty-five men he and the committee had been able to save—out of more than six thousand who had been seeking refuge.”

99 Campbell to Murrow, April 16, 19, Box 4, Folder 10, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

100 Campbell to Murrow, April 17, 1945, Ibid. Murrow heard directly from frantic relatives as well. See, for example, Murrow to Birnbaum, May 4, 1945, Harten to Murrow, May 10, 1945, Murrow to Harten, May 11, 1945, Ibid.

101 Caroline Heller, Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts (New York: The Dial Press, 2015), 171. Heller, who wrote the memoir about the lives of her father, Paul, and uncle, Erich, described Erich’s reaction upon hearing Murrow utter his brother’s name. He “collapsed into a chair, letting out a low penetrating sound like that of an animal, a shocked sound of joy.”

102 E. Heller to J. Murrow, April 21, 1945, Box 14, Folder 3, Janet Murrow Papers, Correspondence 1920–1941, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

103 Laski to Murrow April 20, 1945, Box 4, Folder 10, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

104 Kendrick, Prime Time, 278, 275; Sperber, Murrow, 253.

105 J. Murrow to Mother, Dad, April 29, 1945, Box 14, Folder 3, Janet Murrow Papers, Correspondence 1920–1941, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

106 Murrow to Duggan, May 3, 1945, Box 4, Folder 10, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

107 Adams to Murrow, September 9, 1948, Murrow to Adams, September 13, 1948, Box 33, Series I, Special People, BR-Ei, General Correspondence, MS025/001.007 Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927–1965, Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives, Medford, MA.

108 Murrow to Cohn, October 26, 1945, Box 4, Folder 14, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

109 Lewis to Murrow May 12, 1947, Murrow to Lewis, May 15, 1947, Box 34, Series I, Special People, Er-He, General Correspondence, MS025/001.007 Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927–1965, Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives, Medford, MA.

110 Heller to Murrow, November 25, 1948, Ibid.

111 Murrow to Heller, December 7, 1948, Ibid.

112 Heller to Murrow, November 29, 1949, Murrow to Heller, December 2, 1949, Heller to Murrow, December 5, 1949, Heller to Murrow, April 17, 1950, Murrow to Heller, April 23, 1950, Heller to Murrow, September 25, 1950, Murrow to Heller, October 9, 1950, Ibid.

113 Lips to Murrow, August 9, 1945, Murrow to Lips, August 21, 1945, Lips to Murrow, October 9, 1945, Murrow to Lips, October 26, 1945, Box 4, Folder 13, E.R. Murrow Papers, Correspondence, 1944–1945, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections.

114 Murrow to Paley, December 24, 1948, Murrow to Altschul, December 28, 1948, Duggan to Murrow, January 1, 1949, Berle to Duggan, December 31, 1948, Box 33, Series I, Special People, BR-Ei, General Correspondence, Ibid.

115 Decrypted Soviet telegrams made public in the 1990s indicate that Soviet intelligence had tried to recruit Duggan throughout the 1930s and that he likely provided secret information to the Soviet Union during World War II when the Soviet Union was an American ally. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Kiehr, Verona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 201–04.

116 P. Heller to Murrow, December 12, 1954, Box 34, Series I, Special People, Er-He, General Correspondence, MS025/001.007 Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927–1965, Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives, Medford, MA.

117 Murrow to P. Heller, December 22, 1954, Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurel Leff

Laurel Leff is a Professor in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. She is the author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 2019).