Libel and indifference - deception in the Public Broadcasting Service TVprogram 'America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference' that blames US policy for the death of European Jews - Editorial

ON PBS last week a meandering documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, advanced the offensive notion that America was an "accomplice" to the murder of Jews by Nazi Germany. By refusing to bring out refugees from Nazi-dominated lands and then refusing to bomb Auschwitz--says this line of revisionist thinking, articulated in a 1984 book by David Wyman--America, and President Roosevelt in particular, acquiesced in genocide.

Before embracing Mr. Wyman as his historical guru, writer-director Martin Ostrow should have read the work of the pre-eminent scholar of the Holocaust, the late Lucy Dawidowicz, and especially her devastating review of Mr. Wyman's book. In March 1943, a committee of desperate American Jews proposed that FDR appeal to Hitler to release some of the surviving Jews of Europe. But Mrs. Dawidowicz reminded us that "Hitler never abandoned his goal of destroying the European Jews, not even until his dying day. . . . Wyman still does not know that."

As for the scenario in which American bombers might have made runs over Auschwitz and the rail lines leading to it, she pointed out that rail lines can be rebuilt overnight, while the mission would have required diverting air power from other efforts more directly aimed at winning the war--such as D-Day. "How can one reconcile Wyman's charge," wrote Mrs. Davidowicz, "with the plain evidence . . . that the United States had mobilized all its industrial, military, and, yes, human resources to defeat and destroy National Socialist Germany?" One can't.

Meanwhile, as Paul Hollander points out in our cover story, there was a genocide in which many distinguished Americans, almost all on the Left, did acquiesce, some excusing it explicitly as the price of social progress, some denying the plain evidence of it, some simply ignoring it. That was the mass murder in the Soviet Union--which continues to be ignored. The discovery in recent years of mass graves, some containing as many as 200,000 corpses, has aroused almost no interest in the American media or, outside specialist circles, in academe. The news itself was not reported at all on some networks, and it has stimulated few powerful reflections on the op-ed pages.

In the media's appetite for the most far-fetched allegations of American involvement in Nazi genocide, and in its steadfast lack of interest in Communism's war against humanity, one can sense a repressed awareness of the moral complicity of the American Left, including "anti-anti-communist liberals," in great historic crimes. But one day liberalism will have to confront this aspect of its past.