Few are as aware that the news is the first draft of history as is the team behind a recently opened exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). To put together Americans and the Holocaust, they combed through the German news column in more than a decade’s worth of issues of TIME magazine — and parallel sections from many other magazines and newspapers — and what they found refuted a persistent, though oft-debunked, myth about World War II and the Holocaust: the idea that, as the museum puts it, “Americans lacked access to information about the persecution of Jews as it was happening.”
Looking at the news that publications like TIME ran in the 1930s and ’40s shows that, in fact, Americans had lots of access to news about what was happening to Europe’s Jewish population and others targeted by the Nazi regime. But it also highlights a central truth about this period — and human beings in general. Reading or hearing something is not the same as understanding what it truly means, curator Daniel Greene tells TIME, and there’s a wide “gap between information and understanding.”
Case in point: Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, on the cover of the July 10, 1933, issue of TIME Magazine, from 85 years ago this Tuesday.
Though TIME’s 1933 article, about Hitler’s new cabinet, didn’t yet treat Hitler with complete seriousness — he was referred to as a “Vegetarian Superman” — it didn’t pull punches on the ideas behind his ascent. The article presented as fact that the consolidation of Nazi rule had lifted the spirit of the German people, even as the world watched warily, and explained that one tactic above all was helping Hitler and Goebbels with that uplift: “explaining away all Germany’s defeats and trials in terms of the Jew.”
It would have been impossible to read the story and miss the danger Hitler presented to his country’s Jewish citizens:
True Germans were not defeated in the War, so runs the Nazi tale for grown-up children. They were betrayed by Jewish pacifists. Marx was a Jew! In the welter of German revolution the Jews fomented a German Republic essentially Marxist. Under inflation “which only the Jews understood,” they bled true Germans white by their scheming speculation. Somehow or other they had something to do with the mountain of debt the Allies piled on Germany. All these “facts” are profoundly important in the Germany of today. They are at the root of national resurgence. By blaming everything on their Jewish fellow men, other Germans are escaping from their mental prison of inferiority. Louder and louder the Minister of Propaganda dins with clenched and pounding fists the exhortation he has thundered from half the platforms and over all the radios in Germany: “Never forget it, comrades, and repeat it a hundred times so you will say it in your dreams—”THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME!”