Once I even had my shots and my uniforms each time Luce, over my dead body, prevailed on me to stay to help handle the journalistic problems at TIME,” Olson recalled in an April 1950 letter to the journalist George Frazier. Three months later, Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II, and Olson spent almost every day that followed begging Luce to send him abroad to cover the war. In July 1939, TIME co-founder Henry Luce had hired Olson, a college dropout from Salt Lake City who had worked his way up to become the Washington Post’s then-youngest city editor, to be a contributing national affairs editor. Sidney Olson’s career on the politics beat was booming, but as the 1930s came to an end, he longed to be elsewhere. It’s a document that sheds light not only on the history of World War II and the Holocaust, but on the role of American war correspondents and how their observations informed public opinion about the conflict.Īs the upcoming 75th anniversary of that liberation prompts the world to once again promise never to forget what happened then, the correspondent’s family hopes that what Olson saw will never be forgotten either. Typed copies of the first-person account were tucked away with Olson’s belongings, largely untouched until after his death in 1995. And yet, even in a story that leaves readers with no doubt about the cruelty of the Nazi regime, editors left some of the goriest details of Olson’s cabled account on the cutting room floor.īut the cable itself survived. In the resulting report from Dachau that ran in the following week’s issue - the one that proclaimed the impending Allied victory with an image of Adolf Hitler’s face crossed out - the magazine relayed Olson’s descriptions of box-cars of bodies, the eerie death chambers, the joy of the survivors. The day before, the Nazis’ infamous first concentration camp had been liberated. Olson cabled those words back to news bureau chief David Hulburd.

on April 30, 1945, TIME war correspondent Sidney A. I will tell you about it chronologically with no attempt to embellish so that you may judge for yourselves.”Īt 3:00 a.m. “I have been in Dachau today from the time the first American troops entered until the place was cleared.

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