These reporters returned to the United States with additional details on the mass murders which had occurred in Poland and Russia. Their descriptions of events were explicit and graphic. Glen Stadler, UP correspondent in Germany, described what had happened to Jews in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania as an “open hunt.” Some of the reporters estimated that more than 400,000 had already been killed by Hitler’s “new order,” including “upward of 100,000 [Jews who] met death in Baltic states alone, and more than double that many [who] have been executed in Western Russia.”1 Joseph Grigg, also of UP, believed that the number of Jewish victims had reached 200,000. Thousands lie in unmarked graves, many in mass graves they were forced to dig before the firing squads of S.S. [Schützstaffel or Defense Corps] troops cut them down . . . . One of the biggest known mass slaughters occurred in Latvia in the summer of 1941 when, responsible Nazi sources admitted, 56,000 men, women and children were killed by S.S.
