Born in 1874 (or thereabouts), Emma Messing grew up in Indianapolis, where her father was the rabbi of a prominent Reform synagogue and a highly regarded figure in Jewish and Gentile circles. Messing, whose doings were noted in the society pages from her youth onward, started performing vaudeville with her sister at age thirty-one, had a romance with the colorful non-Jewish real-estate developer who built Miami Beach, and pursued a brief career as an actress in New York. In 1921—having realized that she would not achieve Broadway stardom—she got herself a job with the State Department as an aide at the embassy in Berlin. Mark Lasswell writes:
With Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Messing was reassigned to the U.S. legation in Stockholm. As the war in Europe widened, she resigned her position and in December 1940, at age sixty-seven, she returned to America and set out to tell anyone who would listen about Hitler and the Nazi threat. . . .
At an Indianapolis auditorium in March 1941, an overflow crowd turned out to hear Messing’s speech about what she had seen in Germany. She gave the talk again a few nights later, at the World War Memorial Shrine, for those who couldn’t get in. A long article in the Indianapolis Star about the first night quoted extensively from the speech. Messing described Hitler’s rise in the 1920s, his demonization of Jews, his vilification of all religion so he could “substitute the worship of this anti-Christ, this pagan Hitler.” She noted that “he spoke the language of the masses. He spoke to the people who were ready to believe anything.”
She talked about the creeping terror of life in Germany after Hitler came to power, and about meeting concentration-camp prisoners who had miraculously gained release by promising to leave the country or through the intercession of an influential friend. The camps, she said, were “hell holes of mental and physical tortures, where hundreds of thousands have been incarcerated, not criminals, but men of the highest intellect and standing. These splendid men have been and are subjected to unheard of cruelties by the worst sadists of the modern world.”
Messing later wrote that a few days before the speech, “I was approached by several women who asked me not to ‘exaggerate the atrocities because the newspapers had been doing this right along.’ My answer was, if you multiply what you have been reading a hundred times you will still not have the whole truth.”
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-emma-messing-story/