Bill Lawrence: Six Presidents, Too Many Wars Bill Lawrence, who began his career as a newspaper reporter and later worked for United Press, was chief correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow during 1943 and 1944. In that post he visited, upon their liberation, the massacre site at Babi Yar near Kiev, where approximately 100,000 Jews, Roma, and Soviets were killed; Katyn Forest near Smolensk, where more than four thousand Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets in 1940; and the extermination camp of Majdanek near Lublin, Poland. In the following excerpts, Bill Lawrence describes how those visits affected his attitude toward the Germans.

Reprinted from Bill Lawrence, Six Presidents, Too Many Wars (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 83-84, 87, 90–91, 95, and 101–3.

There were perhaps thirty American correspondents in Moscow, most of them quartered in the Metropole Hotel, which was about a block from the Kremlin, a block from the Bolshoi Theater, and a couple of blocks from the U.S. Embassy chancery. We were perhaps a mile from the British Embassy across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel), befriended the correspondents, supplying them with a little news and Scotch. Both were in short supply in Moscow. He was "Archie" to all of us and we shared many more secrets with him than we did with the American Ambassador.

At the Metropole I settled down in a spacious suite, numbered 373, and person by person acquired a small staff to look after my needs.

The routine was a deadly boring one.

Outside the press office of the foreign department, we had access to few Soviet officials. Occasionally, I could see Maxim Litvinov, who was on the skids but remained an Assistant Foreign Minister. He had had a brilliant career first as Soviet Foreign Minister and later as the first Ambassador to the United States. But even to see Litvinov, I had to go through a side door of the Soviet Foreign Office. His comments were always guarded but they were invaluable to me because I was talking to one who had been part of the Soviet power structure.

Among U.S. officials the most helpful was Harriman's deputy, George Kennan, the best-informed American about the Soviet Union, the history of Russia, and its culture. He had an absolutely charming wife, Annalisa.

Most rank-and-file Russians avoided any contacts with us, unless they were encouraged to seek us out by the Soviet secret police.

My work day began at 10 A.M. and lasted until well after midnight. It began when the secretary came to my Metropole suite to translate Pravda, the Communist party organ, and Izvestia, the government newspaper. Pravda

means "truth" and Izvestia means "news." An old saying in Moscow was: There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia. But both were our principal sources of news during my long stay in Russia, except when we were taken on carefully conducted tours of the fighting front, well behind the advancing Red Army.

Most people probably thought that the Moscow correspondents, like war correspondents everywhere else, covered the actual fighting with some risk to life and limb, but I never heard a gun fired in battle during my tour of duty in Russia.

Besides my English-speaking secretary-and there was a succession of these of indifferent abilities-my other regular employee was a tall, thin widow named Lydia who served as my courier, trudging through the snowy or sunbaked streets of Moscow to carry messages to be censored at the Foreign Office and thence to the Central Telegraph Office where they were transmitted to the Times.

At midnight, I made the trip to the Foreign Office in the darkness of the wartime blackout to listen to the daily war communiqué on the radio. I would write my story there, wait for it to be censored, and then walk to the Central Telegraph Office to file the dispatch. Because we were six or seven hours ahead of New York, depending on the season, I could usually rely on a telegram leaving Moscow by 1 A.M. reaching New York for publication in the newspapers of the same morning.

In Russia, of course, we continued to cover the war by communiqué and by lifting some of the more graphic descriptions of battle from the dispatches of the Soviet correspondents. Night after night we watched the flares announce a new Soviet victory, and day after day we petitioned the Soviet Foreign Office to allow us to go to the front. They never said no, but they never said yes, either. When we did travel to any liberated city it was at least several days after the Nazi armies had retreated.

I grew up in the generation between the two great world wars-a generation which had a natural skepticism and inherent disbelief of all wartime atrocity stories. In our most formative years, we had found out that the propagandists for the Western Allies, including our own government, had fabricated some of the most lurid tales of German behavior to arouse their people to wartime fervor. It was not true, as I had been led to believe, that goose-stepping Germans sliced off the breasts of Catholic nuns in Belgium or tossed small babies into the air so they could be caught and killed on the points of bayonets.

So by the time I headed off to war in 1943, I was unsure just what to believe of all the stories I had heard and read coming out of Europe about Hitler, his SS troops, and

the Nazi armies as they marched east across Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and into the Soviet Union.

I had no doubt that Hitler had treated the Jews badly, forcing many of them to flee to the sanctuaries of the West, including the United States. But I was not prepared for, and my mind did not at first accept, the systematic extermination campaign that Hitler and his minions had conducted.

I could not believe that the Hitler regime, employing many thousands of Germans, had participated in the murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, political opponents, and those who might be mentally retarded. Hitler's boast that he would create a purely Aryan “master race” was as factual in intent as were his other aggressive aims set forth in Mein Kampf.

In Russia and in liberated Poland, I found out that the Germans had committed all the violent deeds and unspeakable atrocities with which they had been charged. There were no limits to the brutality and bestiality of the Germans, and I do not distinguish necessarily between those who were members of the Nazi party and those who claim they were not. Unlike so many who, in 1972, can find excuses for the vast majority of the German people, including some who lived within a few miles of the death camps, I do not believe many of the protestations of innocence. I do not believe the wind always blows in one direction and that the stench of death was not to be sniffed in the air.

Unlike my government, I have not made peace with the Germans, whether they live in the East or West. In my opinion, they have not atoned yet for all their sins.

I heard my first World War II atrocity story on my initial trip inside Russia, standing in the bleak deep ravine known as Babi Yar, which is northwest of Kiev.

My next experience, in early 1944, was at Katyn Forest near Smolensk, where the bodies of 11,000 Polish officers and men were in the process of being taken from mass graves. This experience moved me several steps nearer to a belief that the Germans were guilty of the atrocities charged against them.

The scene at the Majdanek camp near Lublin had been a shocking one in every horrible detail. Here for the first time I saw the shower-bath execution chambers into which the Germans poured a gas-producing chemical bearing the German-language label "Zyklon B." I saw used and unused cans of this gas. Nearby were the furnaces where the bodies were cremated. Built of brick, this huge crematorium looked and was operated not unlike a small blast furnace for a steel mill. The coal fuel was fanned by an electrically operated blower. Each furnace held five bodies at a time, and there were five openings on each side-on one side the bodies were placed inside the furnace and the ashes were removed from another side, to be used as fertilizer on the

cabbage patch below. We were told that it took fifteen minutes to fill each furnace and about ten to twelve minutes for the bodies to burn. It was estimated that the battery of furnaces had a capacity of 1,000 bodies a day.

Near the furnaces we saw a large number of skeletons, including more than a score that we were told represented persons who had been killed by the Germans just before the Russian and Polish armies smashed into the Lublin area. They had lacked the time to burn these bodies before the prison camp was overrun.

We saw a concrete table near the furnaces and asked its purpose. We were told the Germans placed the bodies of their victims there just before cremation and searched their teeth for gold fillings and bridgework. No body would be accepted for placement in the furnace, we were told, unless it bore a stamp saying the mouth had been searched for gold.

This death camp had such a high production rate that it was not possible to burn all of the victims' bodies. Many were in mass graves nearby. I saw three of the ten mass graves that had been opened, and counted myself 368 corpses in states of partial and nearly complete decomposition.

I called this a "River Rouge" of death because it reminded me of the great highly mechanized Ford plant near Detroit on the Rouge River which had become a symbol of American mass production. Death was highly mechanized by the Germans, and they looted their victims before and after killing them.

At the camp, I visited a wooden warehouse perhaps 150 feet long, forty feet wide and thirty feet high. There I walked on literally tens of thousands of shoes of men, women, and children spread across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator of my native Nebraska. There were shoes for children of one year or less, and there were shoes for adults and older people. They were all sizes, shapes, and colors, and one pair at least had come from the United States for it bore the stamp "Goodyear welt."

In downtown Lublin, in a warehouse, the clothing and personal effects of those killed at Majdanek had been sorted and prepared for shipments to Germany. The Red Army had captured a German officer, Herman Vogel, of Millheim, and he admitted to us that as head of the clothing warehouse he had shipped in one two-month period alone eighteen freight-car loads of clothing to Germany. He admitted that he knew that these articles came from the people killed at Majdanek. Vogel was one of six persons captured by the Red Army and being held for trial for their part in the death camp who were questioned on that August day by the visiting British and American correspondents.

According to several witnesses, the peak death-production day for Majdanek was November 2, 1943, when for some reason not made clear the Germans executed a total of 18,000 to 20,000 prisoners by a variety of means, including shooting, hanging, and gassing.

We were told that Jews, Poles, Russians, and others from a total of twenty-two countries had entered Majdanek to die, and I believed the story I heard, backed up as it was by the evidence I could see.

Much of what I reported from Poland that day met skeptical eyes and minds in the United States, people who were not convinced of the German guilt because they had not seen the evidence personally as I had seen it. Evidently The New York Times felt it necessary to reassure its readers that my account could be accepted at face value. In an editorial a few days after my dispatch from Lublin had been published, the Times stated that I was "employed by this newspaper because he is known to be a thorough and accurate correspondent." Never before or since have I seen the Times so describe one of its reporters.

The Readers Digest reprinted my account from Lublin under the heading "Lest We Forget." But in the angry postwar quarreling over the political aim of the Communist. government of Russia, I think we did forget that it was the Germans who committed these crimes against humanity.

After Majdanek, I no longer entertained doubts of any kind about German atrocities and the complicity in these atrocities of literally many thousands of Germans. Gone was all the skepticism built up by my generation during the post-war years. I can still see those bodies lying on stone slabs waiting to have their teeth examined for the gold they might contain, and I can still remember those piles of shoes, of clothing, and other possessions ready for shipment back to Germany.

Once after the war, a U.S. military policeman inquired if I was a German because I was dressed in civilian clothes and traveling in an Army jeep in Germany. My face went red with anger and I barely restrained myself from smashing him in the face. I whipped out my passport, and demanded an apology from the somewhat astounded soldier. I was not a German.

Soviet Report on Majdanek

After the liberation of the Majdanek camp on 24 July 1944, the Soviets established a special commision to investigate the crimes committed there. The findings of the commission are outlined and described in the following report. Detailed are the torture and massacres that took place in Majdanek, the use of the gas chamber, and the evidence that the Germans tried to hide their crimes by utilizing crematoria and bonfires. In November 1944 German members of the Majdanek camp staff were put on trial in Lublin.

Reprinted from "Statement of Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission," Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Information Bulletin (Washington, D.C.), Vol. 3, no. 111 17 October 1944).

Crimes committed by the Germans in Lublin have been investigated by a Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the investigation of crimes committed by the Germans in the town of Lublin, consisting of: (Poland)-the Vice President of the Polish Committee of National Liberation Witos (Chairman of the Commission); Prelate of Lublin Catholic Cathedral, the Priest Doctor Kruszinski; Doctor Sommerstein, member of the Polish Committee of National Liberation; the President of the Lublin Red Cross, the lawyer Christians; Professor Bialkowski of Lublin Catholic University; Professor Poplawski of Lublin University; the prosecutor of the Lublin Court of Appeal, Balcezak; the President of the Lublin District Court, Szczepanski; (U.S.S.R.)-Kudryavtsev (Assistant Chairman of the Commission); Professor Prozorovsky; and Professor Grashchenkov.

The Hitlerites set up an extensive system of concentration camps on the territory of Poland: in Lublin, Demblin, Oświęcim, Chelm, Sobibor, Biala Podliaska, Tremblyanka and other places. To those camps they brought for extermination hundreds of thousands of people from the occupied

Soviet troops examine a mass grave found at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. The photograph was taken after 24 July 1944.

Source: Central Armed Forces Museum of the Russian Federation, Moscow. Photograph print courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.