Letters to the Editor

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Although in his opening paragraph Lawrence Baron mentions Deborah Lipstadt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Alan Mintz along with myself as those who have wrongly claimed that the Holocaust wasn't much talked about between 1945 and 1960, I seem to be his principal target—which moves me to reply to his article ["The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945-1960," HGS, Spring 2003]. My reply will be selective rather than comprehensive; because Baron's article deals with so many different matters, to address them all would require more space than did the original.

Baron's Arithmetic

Since evaluating the salience of postwar talk about the Holocaust is a largely (though not exclusively) quantitative issue, it is worthwhile to examine how Baron deals with quantitative evidence. Consider his treatment of wartime polls, in which he attempts to show that the Holocaust was becoming "an American memory" by 1945:

What began as a trickle of information in 1942 became a torrent in 1945 when Allied troops liberated the remaining survivors in German concentration and death camps. The WRB [War Refugee Board] had prepared the American public for news of the extent of German atrocities with its official statement in November 1944 that 1,765,000 Jews had been killed at Auschwitz and Birkenau alone. According to Lipstadt, "not since Kristallnacht had a story been so widely featured or prompted such extensive comment." A Gallup poll conducted at the time indicated that seventy-six percent of Americans believed that Germany had murdered many concentration camp inmates. This constituted a sharp increase in public awareness compared to the January 1943 poll in which only forty-seven percent believed claims that two million Jews had been killed by the Germans....By May 1945, eighty-four percent of Americans polled believed that Germany had slaughtered millions in its camps and in other operations.¹

Baron's account suggests (without quite saying so) that the 1944 Gallup poll results reflected the impact of the WRB announcement of the Auschwitz/Birkenau toll. But the poll was conducted on November 15, before reports of the WRB announcement appeared in the press—on November 26.² Baron's comparison of the January 1943 and November 1944 polls is meaningless because it compares apples and oranges. The January 1943 poll reported that 47% of those surveyed credited the claim that two million Jews had been murdered by the Germans. The November 1944 poll reported that 76% of respondents believed that "many people" had been murdered by the Germans. (Of all those surveyed, 39% estimated the number killed as one million or less, 12% as two million or more, and 25% would not venture an estimate.) There is no way to tell from these findings whether there was a rise or a fall in Americans' awareness that "many" had been murdered. Taken at face value (as Baron appears to) the polls show a sharp decrease in Americans' estimate of the number of those murdered: from 47% in January 1943 endorsing a figure of two million Jews killed, to only 12% in November 1944 estimating that two million or more "people" (Jews and gentiles) had been killed. This is Baron's "sharp increase in public awareness."³

What the polls actually show is that survey results are meaningless when they report respondents' fluctuating guesstimates on matters about which they know next to nothing. Finally, the last sentence of Baron's quoted above—in which he reports that in May 1945 84% of Americans believed that the Germans had "slaughtered millions"—cites David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews for this datum. But this is not what Wyman says on the page cited—or what the poll data revealed. Wyman reported, correctly, that the poll found that 84% of respondents thought it true that the Germans had killed "many people...