Editors at the New York Times first learned that 7,000 Jews from Baden and other western provinces of Germany had been sent to France not from the Times' three reporters in Berlin. Nor did the news come from the Times' three reporters in France. It came from Arthur Sulzberger's cousin.

By the summer of 1940, Fritz Sulzberger, who had sought Arthur's help in immigrating to America, had settled in Southbridge, a small town in Massachusetts, and was again practicing medicine. His wife and two children were with him, but he had left his 68-year-old mother, Bertha, in Karlsruhe in the province of Baden. In October 1940, Fritz read in another newspaper that all the Jews in Baden had been deported to France. “As my mother is living in Baden you can imagine how worried I am,” he wrote his cousin Arthur, whom he then asked to help obtain more information. Arthur responded that he was not sure he could help. “Some time ago, when we asked our office to make inquiries, we got word back that the government frowned on our using our bureau for any reason other than for legitimate news purposes,” he wrote Fritz. “However, I shall see what can be done. If we cannot reach your mother specifically it's possible that we can find out if the Baden story is true.”

Throughout 1943, the New York Times continued to run stories about the extermination of the Jews inside the paper. Stories about the end of individual ghettos appeared on pages 10 and 5. Stories about the end of entire Jewish communities appeared on pages 2 and 6. Stories that tallied the mounting death toll appeared on pages 9 and 7. Stories that told of the extension of the murderous campaign to Italy and Bulgaria appeared on pages 8, 35, 4, and 6. A story on the precise methods used at the Treblinka extermination camp appeared on page 11. Stories that contained eyewitness testimony from the just-liberated areas of the Soviet Union appeared on pages 3, 10, and 19. Even the stirring accounts of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the rescue of Danish Jews were told almost exclusively inside the newspaper. The breakthrough that World Jewish Congress leaders assumed had occurred when the United Nations confirmed Germany's extermination campaign had not happened. The plight of the Jews still was not considered important enough for the front page.

Although one man, the assistant night managing editor, essentially made the day-to-day decisions that kept the extermination campaign off the New York Times' front page, his actions were the product of the newspaper's tangled corporate culture.

In August 1945, a harrowing document landed on Arthur Sulzberger's desk. It described the wartime experiences of Elsbet Midas Gerst, a cousin of Erich Midas from Furth. The publisher had helped Erich, his wife Thea (Iphigene's cousin), and their young daughter immigrate to the United States 7 years earlier. The letter from Gerst to her parents and sisters had circulated among the Ochs relatives and someone had made sure Erich Midas' carefully translated version found its way to the New York Times.

Gerst and her husband had left Furth the same year as the Midases, escaping to the Netherlands – or so they thought. In July 1943, after the Gersts had spent 3 years living under harsh Nazi occupation, eight Gestapo men stormed their hiding place and Elsbet's excruciating odyssey began. After 3 weeks in a German prison, she was sent to Westerbork, a transit camp. A month later, Gerst, along with hundreds of others, was loaded into a cattle car, with one barrel for drinking water, and another as a toilet. It was August 24, 1943, her twenty-seventh birthday. The following night, the train arrived at Auschwitz.

One of 40 women to survive the selection process, Gerst was stripped, shaved, tattooed, dressed in dirty, torn clothes, and dumped in barracks with three tiers of beds. During her time in Auschwitz, Gerst underwent medical experiments and witnessed even worse conducted on others.

The War Refugee Board's (WRB's) ability to save Jews and the Times' willingness to trumpet it were quickly tested. On March 20, 1944, 2 months after the WRB's founding, the Germans marched into Hungary. Until then, the 800,000 Jews who lived in Hungary or had found shelter there, had been relatively secure. The fascist Horthy government had allied itself with the Germans, enacted anti-Semitic laws, forced Jews into work battalions, and pushed thousands of them into Nazi territory in Eastern Poland. But the Hungarians had not deported hundreds of thousands to their deaths in Poland. With the German occupation, that was about to change.

In the month before the invasion, as WRB geared up its operation, the U.S. government seemed more willing to acknowledge the singular tragedy of European Jewry. In its initial announcement, the WRB had been careful to refer to “Jews and other victims of Nazi aggression,” and had continued to prefer the term “refugees,” as its very name indicated. The board's director, John Pehle, changed all references from “Jews” to “refugees” in a draft memorandum directed to State, for example, and removed a request for a breakdown between Jews and non-Jews. But internally WRB officials signaled that their mission was to save Jews, and it was important to emphasize that. “The Nazis are singling out these people for murder solely because they are Jews,” Josiah DuBois wrote in a February 22 memo. “We must make certain that we also single out our condemnation of this nefarious crime.”

During the decade that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had been Secretary of the Treasury and Arthur Sulzberger had been publisher of the New York Times, they had used their friendship in their professional roles only in the rarest circumstances. For Morgenthau, January 1944 was one of those times. After intense public pressure, and sustained private lobbying from the secretary and his staff, the president on January 22 had signed an executive order creating the War Refugee Board, a government agency charged with saving as many Jews as possible during what would turn out to be the war's last year and a half. The day after, the Times ran a story about the new agency on page 11. The newspaper's ho-hum response disappointed Morgenthau, who had waged bureaucratic warfare and risked political capital to see the refugee board established. On the morning of January 29, he made one of his infrequent phone calls to the Times publisher to complain.

“Well, you carried it on – on the back page, about 18 or 20; the Tribune carried it on the front page,” Morgenthau said in a phone conversation he recorded. (The secretary was mistaken about the page.) “A number of people have commented – they said, how funny that the Tribune should carry it on the front page, and the Times somewhere in the back.”

Jewish Organizations

American Council for Judaism: Anti-Zionist Reform rabbis organized the council in 1942 in response to what they perceived to be Reform's movement away from the Judaism-as-a-religion-only principles of Reform founder Isaac M. Wise. The council expanded to include laymen, such as Times publisher and Wise's grandson-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who helped write the group's founding statement and served briefly as a vice president. The group was stridently anti-Zionist and even after the Holocaust insisted that Jews remain in their countries of origin, including Poland and Germany. Sulzberger officially broke with the group in 1943, but continued to support it behind the scenes until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Among its religious leaders were founders, Rabbis Morris S. Lazaron and Louis Wolsey. Lessing Rosenwald, scion of the Sears Roebuck fortune, served as lay president.

American Jewish Committee: The committee was founded in 1906 by well-to-do American Jews, mostly of German background, including several of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger's relatives. Because its membership included men of wealth and social prestige, the committee had influence within the American government. It shunned public protests, preferring behind-the-scenes negotiation to affect U.S. policy. The group did not support the idea of a Jewish state and thus often found itself in conflict with other Jewish groups. Maurice Wertheim served as president at the beginning of World War II and was succeeded by lawyer Joseph Proskauer in 1943.

During 1942, as the Times published accounts of the millions already dead in Eastern Europe and the millions more in imminent danger, Arthur Sulzberger issued a written order to his staff about how to handle the unfolding events. A five-paragraph story on a speech by William Green, American Federation of Labor president, condemning “the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe by the Nazi butchers,” caught Sulzberger's attention. But it was not the condemnation or who was issuing it that interested Sulzberger. “I have been trying to instruct the people around here on the subject of the word ‘Jews’, i.e., that they are neither a race nor a people, etc.,” Sulzberger wrote to his Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Krock at the end of December. The person who wrote the story's main headline (“A.F.L. Head Condemns Nazi Killing of Jews”) “had learned his lesson,” Sulzberger wrote. So had Green, who referred to “Jews.” “But the fellow in the Washington Bureau who wrote the lead turned what Green said into ‘the Jewish people.’ Will you caution him?” Krock did, asking his deputy to “please issue the necessary instructions.”

For Sulzberger, the drive against Jewish nationalism – against conceiving of Jews as a people, against a Jewish homeland in Palestine, against the leaders who advocated those stances – overshadowed every other issue, even Hitler's plan to make Jewish nationalism an irrelevancy.

March 2, 1944 was a typical news day – that is, if any day could be considered typical in the midst of a world war. The pivotal battles of Britain, El Alamein, and Stalingrad were in the past, the Normandy invasion was 3 months in the future. On the New York Times' front page, the Allies were holding off a German drive near Anzio in Italy, while the Red Army was making steady progress retaking parts of the Soviet Union seized at the war's outset. On the inside pages of the newspaper, the War Manpower Commission was establishing veteran information and service centers in New York State. West Point was continuing its unbeaten streak in basketball, clobbering Maryland 85 to 22. The stock market was regaining ground it had lost in the previous session. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” was starting a run at the Capitol Theater. Hungarian hot slaw with leeks and cabbage was the featured recipe.

On page four, amid 13 other stories, appeared a five-paragraph item with a London dateline. The first two paragraphs described the House of Commons' decision to appropriate 50,000 pounds to help fund the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees.

Key Individuals

Sitting in his office on 43rd Street in November 1939, New York Times Managing Editor Edwin L. James knew that the letter on his desk raised a charged but peripheral issue. A reader had written wanting to know why the Times had not carried a particular report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), a wire service for Jewish news. The JTA had reported from newly occupied Poland that the Germans were demanding that a Jewish council in Lodz provide its soldiers with “100 young Jewish girls, the object being to quench their desires.” James understood Europe as well as anyone at the Times, having covered what would now be called the First World War and having remained on the continent for the following 13 years. So he knew the report was not important in terms of the almost 3-month-old world war: the Germans had easily subdued Poland weeks ago. It was not even central to the emerging picture of what was happening to the Jews there. The main story, as the Times reported it, was the deportation of thousands of Jews from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany to a “reservation” near Lublin. But given the subject and knowing his boss, James believed he had better run the JTA report past him.

James' boss was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the Times' publisher and representative of the family that had owned the newspaper for four decades.

In 1941, Eliahu Elath was in Ankara on a mission for the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, the quasiofficial body representing the Jews living in British-held Palestine. Elath, who had learned much about the perilous position of Jews in occupied Europe, wanted to relay the news to the American Jewish Congress in New York, but feared he could not rely on the usual channels. Strict British military and political censorship might block its transmission, and the Turkish censor could strike such information in mail from Ankara to the United States. Elath decided to turn to the New York Times for help.

Knowing that each evening the Times transmitted the daily news over state radio to the Times offices in New York, Elath believed he could devise a code that would enable him to relay information embedded in the regular broadcast. He would need the help of a Times reporter. He had two choices: Ray Brock, the Times regular Ankara correspondent and a non-Jew whom Elath barely knew, or Cyrus Sulzberger, the Times roving foreign correspondent, nephew of the publisher, and a Jew whom he knew fairly well. Elath chose Brock rather than ask for help “from an assimilated and anti-Zionist Jew, who was a member of the paper's establishment as well.” Brock agreed to use Elath's code during his broadcasts. “All this was done without [Brock's] superiors in New York knowing about the arrangement between us,” Elath recalled years later. “He realized the importance of the matter for our cause and decided to chance all the risks involved.”