So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews

by Robert W. Ross and Robert W. Ross

Book Overview

How much did American Protestants know about the Nazi persecution of European Jews before and during Word War II? Very little, many of them claimed in the postwar years. Robert W. Ross challenges that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816609489
• ISBN13: 9780816609482
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

This book "broke the silence" -- a must read!

How much did American Protestants know about the Nazi persecution of Jews during WWII? Up until this book was published in 1980, the usual answer was "very little." Then Dr. Robert Ross, Ph.D., asked his own Protestant denomination what they had done to help the Jews. He was told, "We didn't know about it." Ross wanted to find out if that was really true. From that personal question about the role of his own church, came this groundbreaking study that broke the silence about a moral failure of titanic proprotions. Yes, they certainly did know, but most did nothing about it. To conduct his study, Dr. Ross chose 50 national Protestant publications, ranging from the "Christian Century" (mainstream) to the "Arkansas Baptist" (fundamentalist). [A complete list of the publications used, with their denominational affiliations, is included in the book.] Then he and his graduate assistants went page-by-page through all the issues from 1933-1945. When I heard Dr. Ross speak in 1982, he told how, in some cases, the pages in the bound volumes were still uncut and stuck together. In all those years, NOBODY had gone through those library copies even once. Talk about denial! So, what did Ross's team find? Detailed articles, editorials, paid ads, missionary reports, appeals for money and help, letters to the editors -- all focused on the persecution of the Jews. Dr. Ross quotes extensively from all this material, making this work a valuable source book in Holocaust studies for both Jews and Christians. In the fall of 1933, Frederick Lynch, of "The Reformed Church Messenger," reviewed Adolf Hitler's book, "Mein Kampf", and noted that he "gives vent to his hatred of the Jews in many vitriolic passages" and duly notes his intention to rid Germany of them. Unfortunately, Lynch dismissed Hitler's hatred of Jews as a political ploy against communism, and felt that his antisemitism was "simply a part of his scheme to make a nation of only one blood, one race, one religion." The genocidal implications of such a Jew-free state seems to have escaped Mr. Lynch completely. In Dr. Ross's opinion, "Lynch had quite clearly succumbed to the Nazi propaganda that Hitler had saved Germany from communism and to the antisemitic slur that 'communist' meant 'Jew.'" (Ross, p. 19) Unfortunately, Lynch's review set the pattern for how many American Christians would view Hitler's persecution of the Jews throughout the coming war: as politicially justified anti-communist tactics. (Even into the in the 1960's in the USA, "Commie-Jew" was regarded as one word.) Others Protestant writers in the 1930s believed the stories of persecution, but saw in them a fulfillment of Bible prophecies and therefore concluded that it was "God's Will" for the Jews to suffer. Ross attributes much of the Christian complancency to a tendency to see Jews as pawns of prophecy instead of flesh-and-blood human beings. In the rural areas especially, many o