When the facts didn't speak for themselves - The Holocaust in the New YorkTimes, 1939-1945

Conventional wisdom assumes that Americans did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening. However, over the last two decades, scholars have demonstrated not only that credible reports reached the Allied governments throughout the war about the persecution and ultimately the extermination o f the Jews, but also that much of that information appeared in the Jewish p ress and in daily newspapers. My own research reveals that during the war a story on what was happening to the Jews appeared on average every other da y in the New York Times. The question then becomes, if all this information was available, why do we think we did not know! This article argues that t he placement of news about the Holocaust almost uniformly an inside pages, as well as the failure to highlight it in editorials or in summaries of imp ortant events, made it difficult for most Americans to find the facts and t o understand their importance. The article concludes that despite the detai led, credible information that was available, the American public actually did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening because mainstream American newspapers never presented the story of the extermination of the J ews in a way that highlighted its importance.