On Disbelieving Atrocities
We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot…
Arthur Koestler’s “On Disbelieving Atrocities” was first published on January 9, 1944 in The New York Times Magazine under the title “The Nightmare That Is a Reality.” Koestler wrote his article in London, noting that his gruesome evidence about the ongoing Holocaust was backed up by photographs that had been smuggled out of Poland. He maintained that when ordinary people confront horrors of such magnitude, their psychological defense mechanism is denial. The public’s skeptical response to the article validated Koestler’s assertion that the vast majority of Americans dismissed the realities of Nazi massacres as mere propaganda. In 1945, Koestler retitled the essay “On Disbelieving Atrocities” and included it in his volume The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays.
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