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Hearst and the Holocaust

In a May 27 review of a new biography of William Randolph Hearst ("A Vietnam war hero, a publisher," Books), John and Priscilla Taylor note that Hearst said "kind words about Hitler." While it is sadly true that Hearst made positive statements about Hitler and some of his policies during the 1930s, it should be noted that at the same time, Hearst did criticize the Nazi leaders persecution of the Jews, especially in the wake of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.

Moreover, Hearst played an important role in the 1943 campaign to bring about American intervention to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. He was a sponsor of that years Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and he repeatedly directed all 34 of his newspapers to publish front-page editorials calling for rescue. When the organizers of that Emergency Conference, known as the Bergson Group, initiated a congressional resolution urging creation of a U.S. government rescue agency, Hearst directed his newspaper chain to promote the resolution and he personally authored signed editorials endorsing it. (One declared: "Remember, Americans, this is not a Jewish problem. It is a human problem.")

Both David S. Wyman, in "The Abandonment of the Jews," and Deborah Lipstadt, in "Beyond Belief," found that in an era when the New York Times and other newspapers routinely buried Holocaust news in the back pages, the Hearst newspapers gave prominent coverage to the Nazi mass murders and the need for U.S. rescue action.

Contrast Hearst with, for example, Charles Lindbergh, who in an infamous 1941 speech accused American Jews of conspiring to drag the United States into Europes war. Even after personally confronted with evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Jews, Lindbergh found ways to minimize German culpability. Visiting the site of the Dora-Mittelbau slave labor camp in Germany shortly after the war, Lindbergh came face to face with emaciated prisoners, piles of dead bodies, and mounds of bones and ash in recently-used crematoria. Yet he wrote in his journal that the United States was "doing the same thing in our treatment of the Jap ... It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation."

RAFAEL MEDOFF

Director

The David S. Wyman Institute for

Holocaust Studies