Words into the whirlwind

Varian Fry’s first career was as a journalist. At 27 he decided to go where the news was: In 1935, that was Berlin. Just appointed editor of The Living Age, a venerable political journal, he cabled what he saw and heard across the Atlantic and onto the prestigious pages of The New York Times. Fry’s account of the events of July 15, appearing July 17, was the first that Americans would read of Nazi brutality toward Jews.

Told that an anti-Jewish demonstration was being held in the Kurfürstendamm district, he hurried to the site. There, he wrote, a "crowd was stopping all cars in which Jewish-looking men or women were riding and dragging out the Jews and beating them up.

"I saw one man brutally kicked and spat upon as he lay on the sidewalk, a woman bleeding, a man whose head was covered with blood…."

The police did nothing to help the victims, Fry reported, but merely directed traffic.

Meanwhile, he wrote, "All along the Kurfürstendamm, the crowd raised the shout ‘Jude!’ whenever anyone sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew…. If he could not prove himself a good ‘Aryan’ he was insulted, spat upon, roughly handled, and sometimes knocked down, kicked, and beaten."

In a follow-up piece July 26, Fry was interviewed on his return from Germany. He said he’d been told by Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s chief press adviser, that the cause of the riot, the "hissing," ostensibly by Jews, at a screening of an anti-Semitic film was purposely done by storm troopers (also called Brown Shirts or S.A. men; the initials stand for Sturm Abteilung, meaning Storm Section). The hissing did what it was intended to do. It was excoriated in a popular newspaper, which urged its readers to "show the Jews a hard hand," Fry said.

He expanded on the brutality he saw — and heard — saying it had been directed by the Brown Shirts, singing the infamous Nazi song that begins "Wenn Judenblut vom Messer spritzt," "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife." Years later Fry would recall, "I heard them chanting their terrible song…."

But the most telling information Fry brought from Germany was not about the recent rioting but an intimation of the Holocaust to come. He said that Hanfstaengl told him that two anti-Semitic groups were vying for power, a relatively moderate one that wanted merely to segregate the Jews and a radical one that wanted to exterminate them. (In a short piece appearing the next day, Hanfstaengl said that Fry’s account of their conversation was "fiction and lies from start to finish.")

Fry later wrote in "The Massacre of the Jews" (The New Republic, Dec. 21, 1942), "One reason the Western world failed to rouse itself more promptly to the Nazi menace was surely this tendency to dismiss as impossible fantasy the many warnings the Nazis themselves gave us….

"According to a report to the President by leaders of American Jewish groups, nearly 2,000,000 European Jews have already been slain since the war began, and the remaining 5,000,000 now living under Nazi control are scheduled to be destroyed as soon as Hitler’s blond butchers can get around to them."

He provided devastating figures for Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands. And he described various killing techniques, in plain language that nevertheless sears the page: starvation, deportation, gassing, working to death, burning alive. "And there is the good old-fashioned system of standing the victims up, very often naked, and machine-gunning them, preferably beside the graves they themselves have been forced to dig. It saves time, labor, and transportation."

He quoted letters from people who knew they were doomed. He cited affidavits, cables, reports attesting to the "massacre of the Jews."

He wanted Roosevelt and Churchill to speak out; he wanted the churches to take a stand, the pope to threaten "with excommunication all Catholics who in any way participate in these frightful crimes…."

And finally, he wrote, "it is a little thing but at the same time a big thing, we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape from the Aryan paradise….

"Despite the fact that the urgency of the situation has never been greater, immigration into the United States in the year 1942 will have been less then ten percent of what it has been in ‘normal’ years before Hitler…. There have been bureaucratic delays … [that] have literally condemned to death many stalwart democrats….

"This is a challenge which we cannot, must not ignore."