Future discoveries proved to be even more ghastly. On April 18, 1945, the New York Times published a front-page story by Gene Currivan, who reported that twelve hundred German civilians were brought from the city of Weimar (long celebrated as a fount of high German culture) to see for themselves the horrors their countrymen had perpetrated at the infamous Buchenwald death camp. (One of the emaciated inmates photographed there was Elie Wiesel.) Currivan and the others saw lampshades made from human skin, shelves lined with jars containing shrunken human heads, and “human skeletons who had lost their likeness to anything human.”47 The evidence pointed to unspeakable depravity—crimes against humanity.
With Russian and American troops rapidly closing in, executives of the chemical giant IG Farben at their immense headquarters in Frankfurt frantically assembled and burned as many incriminating documents as they could, hoping to destroy the paper trail that might seal their fate. Farben officials would later say that they had destroyed tons of documents upon orders of the counterintelligence officers of the German army and the German police. But the industrialists were also motivated to remove evidence of their own crimes. Some of the important records and files that were destroyed on March 21, 1945, included the following:
Reports about visits to the United States and South America… all correspondence dealing with payments and deliveries of war materials to occupied, neutral, or allied countries… secret files containing information about certain individuals and visits of foreign guests to Farben plants… records, invoices, and information concerning sodium cyanide… all secret correspondence with Wehrmacht departments and government offices… records and plans for new chlorine cartel agreements to be made after the war… and circular letters from Reich Office Chemistry concerning supply and prices of chemicals in occupied countries.48
In short, some of the cartel’s most incriminating records were gone, although shards of other evidence kept turning up. In April 1945, a few days before Germany’s surrender, a Russian news film of the “Nazi death factory” at Majdanek was shown to horrified audiences at the packed Embassy Newsreel Theatre at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street in New York. Released through Artkino Pictures, the Soviet film distributors, the footage showed the gas chambers and furnaces in grim detail, leaving the moviegoers stunned and silent. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.49
Two days later, members of the American press captured additional graphic images of yet another death camp. The concentration camp Dachau, outside Munich, had officially opened on March 22, 1933, as a model prison for Communists and other political enemies. When American troops liberated it on April 29, 1945, they were shocked to find emaciated survivors as well as withered corpses stacked helterskelter near the ovens. Mountains of shoes and other clothing attested to those who had perished in the institution’s four gas chambers. Some visitors couldn’t smell the faint odor of bitter almonds that pervaded the cavernous, empty chambers, but the telltale piles of discarded canisters emblazoned with yellow-and-red “ZYKLON B… Giftgas!… DEGESCH” and “FARBEN INDUSTRIE” stickers suggested how the Germans had murdered millions of defenseless prisoners, using deadly cyanide gas that was purportedly manufactured as pesticide. The gas chamber was only one of the Nazis’ countless atrocities, but it furnished some of the most graphic proof of their commitment to carrying out mass murder and extermination.
The word went out—by wire, telephone, radio, newsreel, and print—about the immense scope of the genocide. Yet nobody noted that it had been the United States Army and American scientists, industrialists, and politicians who had invented the gas chamber in the first place. No American commentators acknowledged how close their own country may have come to realizing the dream of using the lethal chamber to “rid society of the unfit.” Writers seemed to have forgotten that philosophers, authors, and do-gooders on both sides of the Atlantic had been yearning for the lethal chamber for decades. Nobody stated the lamentable fact that the radical eugenicists and racial supremacists seemed to have gotten what they had wished for.
References to the American version of the gas chamber made people uneasy, as a piece of motion picture history illustrates. In 1944 the Hollywood director Billy Wilder, a German-born Jew, filmed one of the great noir movies of all time, Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray. However, in adapting Raymond Chandler’s story for the screen, Wilder decided at the last moment to leave out a final dramatic scene he had shot showing his star being executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber—perhaps because it struck too closely to a nerve and could have reminded viewers of matters too sensitive to ponder.
Immediately after the discovery of the German death camps, many American officers and GIs initially expressed outrage toward the Germans and sympathy for the survivors they had liberated. It didn’t take long, however, for some latent prejudices against Jews and Eastern Europeans to resurface. “About June of 1945, I began to feel and see a change in attitudes in the American military towards refugees and displaced persons, especially towards Jews,” one Jewish-American officer assigned to the occupation confided. Among the arriving Americans, many of whom came from the hinterlands of the South and Midwest, where white-supremacist views remained strong, Jews were sometimes viewed as “scum, dirty, filthy people, undisciplined, dangerous, troublesome scavengers,” whereas Germans were seen as “salt of the earth.” In the words of one United Nations truck driver, “Hitler should have killed all the Jews.” As historian Joseph W. Bendersky has pointed out, many U.S. military commanders of the period were also anti-Semitic.50
In fact, the concentration camps had been “liberated,” but their prisoners had not. Jewish former inmates of Dachau were kept confined to their barracks and sprayed with DDT to rid them of vermin.51 “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except we do not exterminate them,” Earl G. Harrison, the U.S. representative on the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, complained in a report to President Harry S. Truman in August 1945. “They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people… are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”52 Truman received Harrison’s report shortly after authorizing the plan that Harry Stimson, McCloy, and others had put forward for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities.
Exposure of the genocide in Europe raised concerns about race to a new level in the United States. Racism—particularly against Native Americans, blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and other people of color—was far from alien to the American ethos, but talk about racial problems was still relatively muted. And while American anti-Semitism had never been as virulent as the German strain, nor had America’s treatment of Jews been as vicious as its treatment of Indians and blacks, the reports from Europe nevertheless highlighted the fact that Jews were still discriminated against in certain spheres of American society. They were often excluded from membership in elite clubs and educational institutions, for example, and barred from living in certain neighborhoods.
In 1947 Hollywood released two major motion pictures dealing with American anti-Jewish prejudice, Crossfire, directed by Edward Dmytryk, and Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A few months later the journalist Carey McWilliams noted in A Mask for Privilege (1948), his classic study of American anti-Semitism, “The Jewish stereotype is to be sharply distinguished from the Negro stereotype in two respects. In the first place, the Jew is universally damned, not because he is lazy, but because he is too industrious; not because he is incapable of learning, but because he is too intelligent—that is, too knowing and cunning.”53