Original subtitles

[Birds calling]

[Horn honks]

[Laughing]

Daniel Mendelsohn: When I was a small child,

5, 6, 7, 8,

we would visit my grandpa and his wife

down in Miami Beach.

My grandfather was one of 7 siblings.

5 immigrated to the States in the early twenties.

They would gather together their old pals,

and some of them would get very emotional

when they saw me because they said I bore

an uncanny resemblance to my great uncle Shmiel Jaeger.

A'

I felt haunted by this guy because people looked at me

and they thought of him.

A'

We had pictures of Shmiel and Ester, his wife,

and these girls as they grew up in a provincial town

in Eastern Poland

because all through the 1920s they were sending pictures

as the girls were growing up.

So we had pictures of them,

and on the back of every picture,

my grandfather always wrote,

"Uncle Shmiel killed by the Nazis,"

or, "Aunt Ester killed by the Nazis."

A'

So I always wondered, "Why are there no stories

about these people?"

A'

A'

[Adolf Hitler speaking German]

[Cheering]

A'

Narrator: In open defiance of the Versailles Treaty,

Hitler had built a mighty military machine,

then sent his forces to seize the Rhineland, Austria,

and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

A'

The Nazis had relentlessly persecuted

German and Austrian Jews,

reducing their rights, expropriating their property,

choking off their livelihoods,

declaring them parasites, not citizens...

A'

And on the evening of November 9, 1938...

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass...

Hitler unleashed Nazi mobs on Jews in cities and towns

all over the newly expanded Germany,

beating, burning, raping, killing,

hoping to drive them all out of their country.

A'

Hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews

were now desperate to escape the Nazis.

They knew their only hope lay in flight

into friendly European countries or across the ocean

to the United States.

A'

A'

[Ship horn blows]

Glllnther Stern: I was getting ready, coming down the stairs,

and the newspaper boy of the "St. Louis Star-Times"

came along, and he was shouting,

"Synagogues burning in Germany.

Read all about it,"

and, I... |... |... |... | didn't get it at first,

and then I... | knew what it meant,

and, I... it... it shattered another past...

Another part of my past,

and that was the first inkling I got

of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Peter Hayes: At every American consulate in Germany,

there were Jews seeking refuge because their houses

had been pillaged overnight and so forth,

and this was reported in American newspapers.

The "Chicago Tribune," which was an isolationist newspaper

in the middle of North America,

had pictures of burning synagogues

in early November 1938.

Deborah Lipstadt: It's on the front pages

of American newspapers.

Some major newspapers have it

on the front page day after day after day.

People are shocked.

A'

In America, there is a tremendous response,

even from those who don't want Jews coming

and even from antisemitic sources

because while being an antisemite is one thing,

but this is a civilized country

seemingly going crazy,

seemingly completely out of control,

and there is tremendous criticism.

A'

This is not merely a Jewish question,

a Catholic question, a Protestant question,

a political question or a labor question.

It is one, however, that goes to the foundation

upon which we have erected the America that has stood

all during our political life for the preservation

of worldwide civilization.

Any attack on a minority group

in any country is an attack on democracy itself.

Sheen: We might almost say that Nazi savagery

against the Jew is the straw that broke

the camel's back.

[Applause]

A'

Narrator: At President Roosevelt's

weekly press conference, he said he could

"scarcely believe that such a thing could occur

in a 20th century civilization"

and withdrew his ambassador from Berlin,

the only world leader to do so.

Lipstadt: Because of this public response,

the Germans make a strategic decision.

There will be... things will only get worse from here,

but it's not going to be on the front pages

of the newspaper.

Hayes: FDR, who was normally very cautious

about his policy, did the one thing in that interval

that he could do by executive action.

He said every Jew in America from Germany

who was here on a tourist visa could now stay.

Narrator: "It would be a cruel and inhumane thing

to compel them to leave," Roosevelt told the press.

"L cannot in any decent humanity throw them out."

But when a reporter asked if there were plans

for a "relaxation of our immigration restriction,"

the president answered only, "That is not in contemplation.

We have the quota system."

A'

Roosevelt had no executive power to change

that system.

Only Congress could alter it.

Mae Ngai: The people who thought that immigrants

from Eastern and Southern Europe should be highly restricted,

they were some of the worst white supremacists

in the Congress,

and they had deep-seated antisemitism,

so they were at the forefront of making sure

that as little would be done as possible

for Jewish refugees.

Man: This country belongs to the people of this country.

I am not willing myself, while hundreds of thousands

in this country are hungry, perhaps millions

of children underfed,

and hordes of young boys and girls

coming into active life seeking jobs

without ability to get them, to let down the bars.

Senator William Borah.

A'

Narrator: In the midterm elections,

Republicans had increased their numbers

in both the House and Senate.

The president found himself more dependent than ever

on conservative Southern Democratic committee chairmen,

all opposed to allowing more refugees.

The public remained overwhelmingly

against any change.

The "Christian Century" editorialized that

admitting more Jews would just exacerbate

what it called, "America's Jewish problem."

Daniel Greene: Two weeks after Kristallnacht,

Americans are asked two questions.

"Do you disapprove of this?"

And 94% of Americans say,

"Yes, we disapprove of this."

And then they're asked, "So should we let in

Jewish exiles from Germany?"

And more than 7 out of 10 say no.

A'

Narrator: In Germany, even some rank-and-file

Nazi party members thought the brutality

of Kristallnacht had been excessive,

but Nazi leaders were more impressed by the fact

that no one had lifted a hand in Germany to stop it,

and they were unmoved by the outcry overseas.

A'

They decided to make life still more impossible

for the hundreds of thousands of Jews

still in harm's way.

As what the Nazis called "atonement" for the murder

of the German diplomat in Paris that had been

the pretext for Kristallnacht, the Jewish community was

fined one billion Reichsmarks.

They were made to clean up the rubble of their own houses

and businesses and places of worship

and pay for it all themselves.

The regime confiscated their radios,

canceled their newspaper subscriptions.

It expelled Jewish children from state schools,

barred their parents from driving or owning a car,

banned Jews from parks, cinemas, theaters, concert halls,

and from those few professions that still

had been open to them.

Finally, Jewish Germans were banned from running businesses

or buying or selling goods of any kind.

A'

Even getting out of the Reich now meant dropping

into destitution.

Emigrants were permitted to take with them

just 10 Reichsmarks.

A'

Fully 5% of the fast-growing Reich budget

would be funded by property looted from Jews.

A'

By the end of 1938, half of all the Jews remaining

in Germany had applied for visas to the United States.

Raymond Geist, the senior American diplomat

still left at Berlin, feared he knew what was coming next.

"The Germans have embarked on a program of annihilation

of the Jews," he wrote to a colleague.

"We shall be allowed to save the remnants if we choose."

A'

On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary

of his taking power, the Fuhrer stood

before the Reichstag and seemed to confirm

Raymond Geist's prediction.

[Cheering]

Lipstadt: The time to stop a genocide is

before it happens,

and whether you're talking about World War ll

or you're talking about Turkey and the Armenians,

the time to stop it is before it happens.

So that when Hitler is speaking out and saying

these horrendous things and Germany is

disenfranchising Jews and conducting things

like Kristallnacht, that's the time to take action.

[Horns honking]

Susan Hilsenrath: My father had a cousin who lived

in the Bronx, and they had a pickle factory,

and they figured that maybe they would help them come

to the United States,

but it was almost impossible

because the United States had a quota,

and I guess our family didn't fit into this quota.

So my father had to think of some kind of way

to get his children into a safe place.

Joseph Hilsenrath: Our parents told us

that we had to get out,

leave, and that they would follow us

and that we would go to, to France,

where people would take children out of the country for money.

Susan: My father had heard of this lady,

a French lady, who smuggled children

across the border into France,

and I understand that he

gave her all of the money

to take my brother and me

across the border.

I was almost 10 years old by then,

and my brother was 8,

and...

A'

I remember it vaguely because the horror of being

separated from my parents, I have pushed it

way in the back of my mind.

I can't remember how we got to the train station

and how we said good-bye to them,

but all I know now is, I mean, I'm a mother

and I'm a grandmother, and the idea

of... of sending my children away

is... is... is... is un... Is unbelievably horrible.

I can't even imagine doing that.

A'

[Artie Shaw and Billie Holiday's "Any Old Time" playing]

[Cheering and applause]

A'

Stern: There were, I guess, 3 elements that were

my pathway to America.

One was baseball,

and secondly, it was music.

I'd never heard jazz before...

A'

And the third entrance was through a girlfriend.

A'

We walked arm in arm, and those

beautiful American songs,

they were washing over us,

and we were singing and feeling good

at the few moments I had of that relaxing moment

when I became somewhat more American.

A'

Holiday: ♪ Any old time you want me J"

J " I am yours J"

♪ For just the asking, darling ♪

IAny old time... ♪

Narrator: Glllnther Stern's girlfriend Ida Mae Schwartzberg

had trouble pronouncing his name.

Stern: My name, at school, was still Glllnther.

My girlfriend said, "I can't pronounce it.

"That's a tongue twister.

"I'll leave you the first two letters of your name

"and add a 'y', and that's what

I will call you... Guy."

Hem

Man: Dear GUnther, We have been waiting for a letter

from you for so long.

It is comforting to hear from you,

even if you have yet to accomplish anything for us.

Please pull out all the stops, dear GUnther,

so we can all be reunited.

Narrator: Every few months, Guy received a letter

from his parents back in Hildesheim, Germany,

sometimes including photographs of his family.

Stern: It really shows that one person

is missing in there.

Where the hell am I?

I belong there.

Narrator: Guy tried again and again to find someone

willing to put up a guarantee of as much

as $5,000 to sponsor his family's coming

to the United States... More than 3 times

the average annual income of an American worker.

He had no luck.

Stern: And then, a miracle happened.

Narrator: One Friday, hitchhiking to work,

he was picked up by a man in a fancy car,

who after hearing his story offered to help.

Guy immediately set up an appointment for them

to meet with a lawyer who had helped other families

obtain affidavits of support.

A'

Stern: We went there on a Saturday morning,

and the lawyer, a pompous, supercilious man, said,

"And what's your occupation?"

And he said, "I'm a gambler."

And the lawyer said,

"We can stop right here.

"It says in the law, the person furnishing

"the affidavit has to be a well-established,

highly reputed person of the community."

And I said, "Well, couldn't we say something

like, 'businessman'?"

This lawyer rose to his full height.

"And deceive the U.S. Government?"

And he added something else that was insulting.

The man took his hat and walked out.

My great chance...

rested on one damned lawyer.

A'

Here, a Jewish lawyer who saw all the niceties

of the law and not the dilemma of life and death,

which I had spread out.

A'

[Laughter]

Newsreel announcer: 200 boys and girls wave a greeting

to England, land of the free.

They are between the ages 5 and 17.

The advance guard of the first 5,000 Jewish

and non-Aryan child refugees from Germany have been provided

with a temporary home here while arrangements

are made for them to emigrate.

Narrator: After Kristallnacht, Britain

had allowed 10,000 children... But not their parents...

To escape Nazism in what was called the Kindertransport.

Newsreel announcer: And the youngsters tuck in

as if they hadn't a care in the world.

Narrator: In February 1939,

Democratic Senator Robert Wagner of New York

and Republican Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers

of Massachusetts introduced a new bill.

Greene: The bill says, "Let's let in 10,0000 kids

between the age of 5 and 14 per year,"

1939 and 1940, and, "Let's not count them

against the immigration quota system."

Narrator: The First Lady backed the bill.

Her husband privately offered advice

on how it might be passed but said nothing in public,

but the American Legion,

the Daughters of the American Revolution,

and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies

were all opposed.

They had favored some of the 6O bills that had

recently been introduced to reduce immigration quotas.

Nell Irvin Painter: It's a xenophobic refusal.

I can't explain it because it seems so cruel to me,

especially given a country as big as the United States

with plenty of space.

I do understand it in terms of antisemitism.

I don't want to understand that antisemitism

could be so deep and so cruel.

Father Coughlin: If I know the American public

who fought the League of Nations propagandists...

Narrator: Father Coughlin called for the creation

of a national "Christian Front" to combat

the influence of what he called "Communistic Jews"

and claimed to his vast radio audience

that Jewish businessmen were firing their Christian employees

to make room for Jewish refugees.

Coughlin: There is still the United States Senate

with whom these forces must contend...

Lipstadt: The restrictionists... The people

who want to restrict immigration...

The isolationists, the antisemites

come out of the woodwork.

Democrats, Republicans, people say things like,

"Well, 10,000 ugly children will grow into 10,000 ugly adults."

A'

Woman as Eleanor Roosevelt: What has happened to us

in this country?

We have always been ready to receive the unfortunates

from other countries, and though this may seem

a generous gesture on our part, we have profited

a thousand-fold by what they have brought us.

Eleanor Roosevelt.

A'

Narrator: No group was more adamantly opposed

to admitting Jewish refugees than the German American Bund.

[Drums tapping]

20,000 members would fill Madison Square Garden

on Washington's Birthday.

They were led by Fritz Kuhn, a German immigrant

who fancied himself the "American Fuhrer."

[Applause]

[Applause]

[Louder applause]

Narrator: Other speakers railed

against the president "Frank D. R0senfeld"

and his "Jew Deal."

Kunze: We only call upon our leaders to awake

to the fact that the Jew is as alien in body, mind,

and soul as any other non-Aryan

and that he is a thousand times more dangerous to us

than all the others by reason of his parasitic nature.

[Cheering and applause]

A'

[Audience members chanting, "Heil Hitler!"]

A'

Great floods of tears for a few hundred thousand

job-taking so-called poor Jewish refugees,

who incidentally in general...

[Boeing]

Have more of this world's goods than you or I will ever possess.

[Applause]

A'

Narrator: A "Fortune" magazine poll found

that only 1 in 10 respondents

favored increasing quotas

or making exemptions for refugees,

and 4 out of 10 believed Jews had

"too much power in the United States."

A'

It further found that 85% of American Protestants

and 84% of Catholics opposed

offering sanctuary to European refugees.

So did more than a quarter of Jewish Americans.

A'

During hearings on the bill to admit some refugee children,

a witness said that it should be passed

because it was true to the American tradition

of providing sanctuary for religious

and political refugees.

New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein

gently corrected him.

"This is the form of our government,

"but as a matter of fact we have never done the things we preach.

We talked about it."

Hayes: The advocates of that bill, the people

who submitted it, withdrew it, and they withdrew it

because they thought if it comes to the floor

it will open the way to other proposals

to utterly stop all immigration into the United States.

In 1939 for FDR, the most important political challenge

he faced was getting the Congress

to revoke the neutrality acts,

the acts that restricted our ability to supply

other countries if they became involved in a war

with Nazi Germany.

The relaxing of the immigration quotas

was less important to him than that.

To us looking back, we tend to think that

the most important thing was the humanitarian crisis

of the time, but of course if FDR

had not succeeded in repealing the neutrality acts

in 1939 and 1940, we might think otherwise.

Mendelsohn: My grandfather, Abraham Jaeger,

he emigrated with his older sister

from this small town in Poland.

My grandfather always, you know, prided himself

once he got his citizenship on being an American.

He celebrated everything,

the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving.

He loved it.

A'

Narrator: Abraham Jaeger's older brother Shmiel

had not loved America.

He had arrived in New York back in 1912,

quickly saw that the teeming streets

of the Lower East Side were not paved with gold.

Woman: Shmiel saw the pushcarts on Delancey Street.

The Jews who lived down in those Jewish areas

was not his style.

He was a gentleman,

and he says, "At home, I have vineyards

"and orchards and a beautiful house.

What do I need America?"

[Dog barking]

Narrator: After less than a year, Shmiel Jaeger decided

to return to his hometown Bolechow in eastern Poland.

Eventually he married his sweetheart Ester,

became a successful butcher, and had 4 daughters...

Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia.

A'

Marlene: Shmiel was the oldest brother,

and there was respect and reverence.

They called him the mayor of the town.

He was exceedingly handsome,

and then they had all those darling children.

A'

Mendelsohn: My grandfather used to say with a sigh,

you know, "My older brother wanted to be a big fish

"in a small pond, so he went back to Bolechow,

and he was a big fish in a small pond."

And that was the right decision for him,

as strange as that sounds, knowing what later happened.

Narrator: In the late 1930s,

antisemitism intensified in Poland.

The Catholic Church and the right-wing government

promoted boycotts of Jewish businesses.

Politicians pressured Poland's Jews

to leave the country.

Gangs attacked their Jewish neighbors.

Thugs threatened Shmiel on the street.

Hanging over everything was the growing possibility

of a German invasion, which would surely make life

far more harsh.

Man: From reading the papers, you know a little about what

the Jews are going through here, but what you know

is just one one-hundredth of it.

When you go out into the street or drive on the road,

you're barely 10% sure that you'll come back

with a whole head or your legs in one piece.

Shmiel.

Narrator: "I know that in America life

doesn't shine on everyone," he wrote to his relatives

back in the United States.

"Still, at least they aren't gripped

by constant terror."

[Crowd cheering]

On March 15, 1939, German troops marched into Prague,

the capital of what remained of Czechoslovakia.

100,000 more Jews now fell into Hitler's hands.

Hitler's promise of peace to Britain and France

at Munich had lasted less than 6 months.

"In a fortnight," he said, "no one will give it

any thought."

It was clear that Poland would be his next target.

Hitler was sure that France and Britain would not dare

intervene there either.

"Our enemies are little worms," Hitler said.

"L saw them at Munich."

This time, Hitler was wrong.

Britain and France finally saw

the folly of trying to

appease him further.

If he attacked Poland,

this time they would fight back.

[Train whistle blowing]

With war more likely than ever, more and more Jews

were desperate to get off the continent.

Sol Messinger: It was very difficult to get a visa

to the United States,

so our family decided that we would try to go to Cuba,

mainly, I guess, because it was close

to the United States.

Narrator: The Cuban government was now selling

refugees tourist visas that allowed them to land

on the island and stay until their turn came

to emigrate to the United States.

Messinger: My mother finally managed to get a Cuban visa

and tickets to go on the St. Louis,

but then the problem was my father was still in Poland.

He had been deported back.

My mother wrote him. She said she had the visas,

but she wasn't going to leave unless he could join us,

and he wrote back, "Leave unless you want

your son's blood on your hands."

The day before we were supposed to leave for Hamburg,

there was a knock on the door, and my mother screamed

because she recognized my father's knock.

Ran to the door, opened the door,

and my father was there.

He had gotten permission from the German government

to come back to Germany for two days

so we could leave together.

A'

So the next day, we went to Hamburg,

and we got on the ship, the St. Louis.

Narrator: The St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939,

one of many ships carrying passengers anxious

to escape the coming storm.

A'

More refugees got on at Cherbourg.

Almost all of the 937 passengers were Jewish,

most from Germany, some from Eastern Europe,

and still others, like the Messingers,

now officially "stateless."

Messinger: We all were standing at the railing,

looking at Germany getting a little and farther

and farther away, and my father started crying,

and my mother looked at him, and she says,

"What are you crying about?

We're finally together, you're... we're leaving Germany,"

and he said, "Well, of course, you're right,

"but I'm crying because we're leaving

"so many of our relatives here, and God only knows

when we'll see them again."

A'

Narrator: They traveled in comfort, dining, dancing,

sunbathing, swimming in the ship's pool.

The liner's captain Gustave Schréder

was an anti-Nazi.

He saw to it that a portrait of Hitler

was taken down during Friday night prayers

and insisted that his crew treat his passengers

with a kind of courtesy no Jewish person was afforded

then anywhere under Hitler's control...

A'

[Ship horn blowing]

But when the ship reached Havana,

it was clear that something was wrong.

A'

Only 28 passengers were allowed to come ashore.

All the rest, over 900 people who had paid

a corrupt Cuban official back in Germany

thousands of dollars for their tourist visas,

were ordered to stay on board.

Messinger: The next day, it turned out that we were told

that Cuba had invalidated our visas.

We had paid for them, we had gotten them,

we had gotten to Cuba only to find out that

they had invalidated our visas.

Narrator: Things had changed in Cuba

since the St. Louis set sail.

Antisemitism had always been strong on the island,

and some 4,000 mostly Jewish refugees

had settled there in recent months.

5 days before the St. Louis sailed, 40,000 Cubans

had gathered in Havana to protest their presence.

Nazi agents encouraged rumors that the refugees

would take Cuban jobs.

The largest Cuban newspaper's headline

demanded "Out with the Jews!"

Under the pressure, the Cuban government reneged.

A'

For 6 days, friends and relatives who had come

to Cuba earlier circled the ship in small boats,

passing up fresh food and shouting

what encouragement they could.

A'

Finally, the Cuban government ordered the St. Louis

out of Havana Harbor.

For 4 days, the ship steamed aimlessly

along the Florida coast, her stunned passengers

unsure where they were now to go.

Messinger: I remember it was dusk,

and my father and I were standing at the railing,

and I saw some lights in the distance,

and I said to my father, "What are those lights?"

And he said, "Oh, that's a city in the United States

called Miami."

So I’ve... I’ve been in Miami since then,

and whenever I walk along the beach

and look out at the water,

I get this very strange feeling because now

I'm where I was dying to be in the... in 1939.

Narrator: Some on board the ship wired an appeal

to President Roosevelt, begging him to intervene.

They did not receive a reply.

Instead, the State Department insisted

that the passengers would have to "Wait their turns

"on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain

"immigration visas before they may be admissible

into the United States."

That could take years.

Canada wouldn't take them either.

The St. Louis turned back toward Europe.

Man: The "New York Times."

The saddest ship afloat today,

the Hamburg-American liner St. Louis,

with 900 Jewish refugees aboard,

steaming back toward Germany after a tragic week

of frustration.

No plague ship ever received a sorrier welcome.

At Havana, the St. Louis' decks became a stage for human misery.

There seems to be no help for them now.

The St. Louis will soon be home with her cargo of despair.

A'

Narrator: A Nazi journal gloated.

"We say openly that we do not want the Jews

"while the democracies keep on claiming that they are

"willing to receive them and then leave the guests

out in the cold!"

"The resolve of most of the people aboard,"

one passenger wrote, "is to die rather

than to see Hamburg again."

Captain Schroder considered running his ship aground

somewhere off England or France,

anything to keep the passengers

from having to return to Germany.

A'

A private relief organization called

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,

along with The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees,

negotiated furiously with European governments,

trying to get them to accept the passengers.

A'

They managed to scrape together the enormous sum

of $500,000 and finally convinced England, France,

Belgium, and the Netherlands to take them all in.

"Our gratitude is as immense as the ocean

on which we are now floating," the passengers

cabled to those who had arranged their rescue.

A'

The St. Louis would dock in Belgium, not Germany.

A'

Messinger: We got word that 4 countries in Europe

had agreed to split the passengers up among them,

and we ended up in Belgium.

Narrator: No one aboard the St. Louis was returned

to Germany, but 254 of the passengers

would be murdered after the Nazis overran

the countries that had given them sanctuary.

Nearly 3/4 of the passengers would survive.

A'

[Newsreel announcer speaking Russian]

Narrator: On August 23, 9 weeks after the St. Louis

returned to Europe, the world was stunned

by an announcement from Moscow...

The Nazi and Soviet governments...

Sworn enemies for years...

Had signed a 10-year non-aggression pact

that would let Hitler and Stalin destroy Poland

and divide its territory between them.

Poland was home to 3,300,000 Jews.

[Air raid siren]

[People shouting]

On September 1, 1939, Hitler launched

his "Blitzkrieg," his "lightning war," on Poland.

[Explosion]

The Second World War had begun.

"It's come at last," President Roosevelt said

when he was awakened with the news.

"God help us all."

As German warplanes attacked Warsaw that evening,

Chaim Kaplan, the director of a Jewish school

in that city, made a note in his diary.

"We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in the history

of the world," he wrote.

"This war will indeed bring destruction

"upon human civilization.

"As for the Jews, their danger is 7 times greater.

"Wherever Hitler treads, there is no hope

for the Jewish people."

A'

Roosevelt: This nation will remain a neutral nation,

but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral

in thought, as well.

Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts.

Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind

or to close his conscience.

A'

Narrator: The president and most of his fellow citizens

sympathized with the Nazis' victims,

and some wanted to help France and England as they went

to war against Germany,

but a far larger number was still opposed

to any American involvement overseas for fear

the Allies would pull the United States

into another war.

Roosevelt: And that I hate war...

Narrator: Roosevelt was careful not to get too far

ahead of public opinion.

Roosevelt: I hope the United States

will keep out of this war.

I believe that it will,

and I give you assurance and reassurance

that every effort of your government

will be directed toward that end.

A'

Narrator: The United States was poorly prepared

for conflict in any case.

The segregated army was smaller than that of Bulgaria,

fewer than 190,000 men in uniform,

fitted outwith tin hats and leggings issued

during the Great War and carrying rifles

designed in 1903.

Meanwhile, the president believed the best way

to avoid having to enter the war was to do all he could

to aid France and England.

He called Congress into special session and asked

it to end the embargo on the sale of arms

to belligerents so that the Allies would be

better prepared for whatever Hitler did next.

Isolationists flooded Washington with antiwar messages.

A'

After 6 weeks of sometimes bitter debate,

Congress did lift the embargo

but only if buyers paid cash.

That same month, a "Fortune" magazine poll

found that only 20% of Americans favored aiding

the European democracies

while 54% of the country were happy

for the United States to trade with Nazis

and democratic governments alike.

"What worries me," FDR wrote to a friend,

"is that public opinion over here is patting itself

"on the back every morning thanking God

for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."

A'

[Radio stations changing]

Charles Lindbergh: I speak tonight to those people

in the United States of America who feel that

the destiny of this country does not call

for our involvement in European wars.

Narrator: There was another voice on the radio now, too,

the voice of the only American whose fame

approached Roosevelt's,

the celebrated aviator Charles A. Lindbergh.

His message was very different.

Lindbergh: These wars in Europe are not wars

in which our civilization is defending itself

against some Asiatic intruder.

This is not a question of banding together to defend

the white race against foreign invasion.

A'

We must not permit our sentiment, our pity,

or our personal feelings of sympathy

to obscure the issue,

to affect our children's lives.

We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife.

A'

Narrator: Lindbergh had first visited Germany

in 1936 at the invitation of the American military attache

in Berlin, who was eager to glean

information about the fast-growing Luftwaffe.

He returned two more times.

The Nazis did everything they could to impress him,

awarding him the Service Cross of the German Eagle...

A'

And Lindbergh was impressed.

He admired the regime's virility and emphasis on order.

His wife Anne thought Hitler "a very great man"

maligned by what she called "Jewish propaganda."

The couple had even considered moving

to the leafy Berlin suburb of Wannsee

until Kristallnacht made them rethink.

"My admiration for the Germans is constantly being

dashed against some such rock as this,"

Lindbergh wrote privately.

"L do not understand these riots.

"It seems contrary to their sense of order and intelligence.

"They have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem,

but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?"

On his voyage home from Europe in 1938,

Lindbergh had been irritated by the number of Jewish refugees

among his fellow passengers.

"Imagine the United States taking these Jews

in addition to those we already have,"

he'd written in his diary.

"There are too many places like New York already.

"A few Jews add strength and character to a country,

"but too many create chaos,

"and we are getting too many.

This present immigration will have its reaction."

Lindbergh: Our bond with Europe is a bond of race

and not of political ideology.

It is the European race we must preserve.

Political progress will follow.

Racial strength is vital, politics, a luxury.

If the white race is ever seriously threatened,

it may then be time for us to take our part

in its protection, to fight side by side with English,

French, and Germans, but not with one

against the other for our mutual destruction.

A'

Narrator: "If I should die tomorrow,

I want you to know this," the president told a friend.

"L am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi."

A'

For the next 27 months, Franklin Roosevelt

and Charles Lindbergh would engage in a bitter struggle

over whose vision of the country would prevail

and about the future of Western civilization itself.

[Bombs whistling]

A'

[Explosion]

A'

"Every war costs blood," Hitler had told

his commanders just before sending them

into western Poland, "and the smell of blood arouses

"in man all the instincts which have lain within us

"since the beginning of the world.

A'

A humane war exists only in bloodless brains."

There was nothing bloodless, nothing humane,

about the German assault.

In the wake of the Panzer divisions that pierced

Poland's defenses, thousands of SS troops

and German infantrymen fanned out

across the countryside.

Their goal was to destroy the Polish state and reduce

the Polish people to a leaderless population

of peasants and workers.

A'

Told that anyone who dared resist the advancing

master race was guilty of "insolence,"

within 5 weeks they had killed

some 3,000 Polish prisoners of war,

destroyed more than 530 villages,

burned or blown up synagogues,

and murdered at least 45,000 unarmed Poles...

Priests, professors, political leaders,

anyone thought capable of mounting resistance,

as well as Jews,

and while the Germans imposed their rule

on western Poland, the Soviet Union

swallowed up its eastern half.

150,000 Poles were drafted into the Red Army.

The Soviets shipped 200,000 civilians deemed

dangerous to Kazakhstan and Siberia,

where tens of thousands froze or starved to death.

They also secretly shot 22,000 Polish officers

and intellectuals and buried their corpses

in mass graves in and around the Katyn Forest.

A'

Hitler's goal was always a racially "pure,"

steadily expanding Greater Germany,

but as it expanded, it inevitably encompassed

more and more Jews.

Before the invasion, Poland had the highest proportion

of Jews in Europe.

Nearly two million of them lived in the region

Germany had seized.

Most were people without means and access

to diplomats or consulates or well-connected

family members abroad or anyone else

who could help them escape.

More Jews lived in Warsaw than remained in Germany.

More lived in the city of Lodz than in Berlin

and Vienna combined.

Nazi officials hatched several schemes to rid

the region of its Jews.

The first would have confined them

to a "reservation" located in a remote underpopulated area

near Lublin,

but that quickly proved impractical.

The Nazis offered two million of them to Stalin,

who did not want them.

A'

In the meantime, the Germans were driving

Polish Jews into scores of squalid, congested,

fenced-off neighborhoods... Ghettos... whose residents,

robbed of their possessions and forced to wear

a yellow star or a white armband with the Star of David,

were shot if they strayed outside.

A'

The largest ghetto was in Warsaw,

where more than 400,000 men, women, and children struggled

to survive in an area initially measuring

less than two square miles.

The ghettos served two purposes for the Nazis.

They provided reliable pools of slave labor

for the German war machine, and they acted

as holding pens for Jews, now including many deported

from what had been Austria and Czechoslovakia,

until the Nazi regime decided where they were

finally to be sent.

More than 80,000 people would die in the Warsaw ghetto alone

of random shootings by their German guards,

typhoid, deliberate starvation, and despair.

A'

In Bolechow, in eastern Poland, Shmiel Jaeger heard

about the German obliteration of western Poland.

Terrified of what might happen next,

he wrote again to his relatives in America.

Man as Shmiel: My darling sister and brother-in-law,

This is my mission:

it's now the case that many families can go

and have already emigrated to America provided that

their families there put down a $5,000 deposit,

after which they can get their brother and his wife

and children out,

and then they can get the deposit back.

Perhaps you could manage to advance me the deposit.

The idea is that with the money in custody I won't,

once I'm in America, be a burden to anyone.

You should make inquiries, you should write

that I'm the only one in your family still in Europe

and that I have training as an auto mechanic

and that I've already been in America from 1912 to 1913.

For my part, I am going to post a letter,

written in English, to Washington,

addressed to President Roosevelt

and will write that all my siblings

and my entire family are in America

and that my parents are even buried there.

Perhaps that will work,

as I really want to get away from this Gehenim

with my dear wife and such darling 4 children.

Shmiel.

Narrator: Shmiel had no way of knowing

that there were more than 100,000 other Poles ahead

of him on the waiting list.

With the current quota system,

it would be more than 12 years before his family

would be eligible for a visa.

Marlene: We knew, we... we all understood

that there was big trouble.

It was very sad.

My mother would send clothing or whatever

they would need for the winter,

and all of the family was involved because they were

all here and all feeling guilty that Shmiel

had not come.

They were all trying to get money together to send.

They met, they talked to the richer members

of the family,

and everyone was concerned,

but no one could do anything.

A'

Mendelsohn: My grandfather was a foreman

in a braids and trimmings factory.

I'm sure if he had $5,000 he would have done anything,

but I think it's also an important part

of this story, this sort of guilt,

the huge amount of guilt in the American Jewish community

after because then, of course, you say,

"Oh, I should have done more,"

but, again, that's not fair.

People really had a hard time imagining

what was actually going to unfold.

A'

Narrator: As soon as German troops had occupied Vienna

in 1938, Eva Geiringer's father Erich had resolved

to find his wife Fritzi, his son Heinz,

and daughter Eva a new home out from under the Nazi threat.

By early 1940, he had managed to get them

to Amsterdam.

Eva Geiringer: The Dutch were quite different

from the Austrians... Very welcoming.

Everybody wanted to be my best friend.

I was blonde and blue-eyed, and so everybody said,

"You look like a Dutch little girl."

So we settled in, and we thought, "Well, that is it.

We'll be here together as a family,"

and we were actually quite happy.

Narrator: The Geiringers found themselves living

in the same apartment block as Otto Frank,

his wife Edith, and their two daughters

Margot and Annelies.

The Franks had fled Germany 6 years earlier.

Geiringer: All the children came to play after school

on this big open area,

and then, one day, a little girl came to me,

realized I was new there,

and she introduced herself and said her name

is "Anna Frank."

Narrator: Both Eva Geiringer and Anne Frank

were 10 years old that winter

and both attended the same Montessori School.

Geiringer: She was very, very much outspoken,

very sure of herself.

She was definitely already more intellectual than I was.

She was a big chatterbox.

In school, she was called "Mrs. Quack-Quack."

She had to stay behind very often to write

hundreds of lines that she's not going to talk

so much in class.

She was already interested in boys.

When I told her I had an older brother,

her eyes grew very big, and she said,

"When can I come and meet him?"

Narrator: Anne Frank's father tried to stay

optimistic about the future, reminding everyone

that the Netherlands had been able to remain neutral

during World War I

and should be able to do so again,

but he could not hide his underlying anxiety

from a cousin, who was now living safely in London,

writing her that he worried most about his daughters

but didn't dare confide his concern to their mother.

His cousin offered to care for them in England.

He thanked her for her kindness but was sure

neither he nor his wife could bear to part

with their girls.

Otto Frank was still waiting for his family's visa application

to the United States to come up for review.

More than 300,000 other people were waiting, too.

A'

A 7-month lull followed the invasion of Poland.

To American isolationists, it seemed to be proof

that events in Europe were nothing to worry about.

Republican Senator William Borah of Idaho

called it the "Phony War"...

[Bicycle bell rings]

[Airplanes flying]

But on April 9, 1940,

the Phony War became real again.

40,000 German troops surged across the Danish border.

Denmark surrendered by nightfall.

German paratroopers filled the skies over Norway,

driving its government into exile.

Then, on May 10, 10 Panzer divisions,

2,500 aircraft,

and 31/3 million German ground troops

stormed into France and the Low Countries...

Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

We heard guns shooting and the drones of airplane,

and we all got up,

and we had a little Bakelite radio.

Newscaster: The German army invaded Holland and Belgium...

Geiringer: Listened to that, and the newscaster said,

"Very bad news.

"The Germans are trying to invade our country,

but we are going to defend ourselves."

Narrator: At Otto Frank's office,

his employees remembered, his face turned white as reports

of the attack continued to come in over the radio.

The Germans threatened to bomb the port of Rotterdam

unless the Dutch surrendered.

They tried to surrender...

and the Luftwaffe bombed the city anyway.

Over 900 people were killed

and more than 85,000 left homeless.

The United States consulate was burned, too,

and with it, Otto Frank's application for visas

to bring his family to America.

Every port the Germans overran closed off

yet another avenue of escape for refugees.

France was next.

Its supposedly invincible 5-million-man army

would collapse in just a few weeks.

[Gunfire]

[Man shouting in German]

Roosevelt: Tonight over the once peaceful roads

of Belgium and France, millions are now moving,

running from their homes to escape bombs and shells

and fire and machine-gunning, without shelter,

and almost wholly without food.

They stumble on, knowing not where the end

of the road will be.

A'

Narrator: "These are ominous days,"

Roosevelt told Congress on May 16,

"days whose swift and shocking developments force

every neutral nation to look to its defenses."

He called for an increase in aircraft production

from 2,100 planes a year to 50,000.

To isolationists like Charles Lindbergh,

the president and other unseen forces were taking

another step toward U.S. involvement in the war.

Lindbergh: The only reason that we are in danger

of becoming involved in this war is because

there are powerful elements in America who desire

us to take part.

They represent a small minority of the American people,

but they control much of the machinery

of influence and propaganda.

They seize every opportunity to push us

closer to the edge.

It is time for the underlying character

of this country to rise and assert itself,

to strike down these elements of personal profit

and foreign interest.

A'

Narrator: A week later, battered British

and Belgian troops, along with what little was left

of French forces, began fleeing

across the English Channel from Dunkirk,

leaving behind tons of arms and materiel.

A'

The United Kingdom now stood alone.

Many on both sides of the Atlantic agreed

with the assessment of Roosevelt's

ambassador in London Joseph P. Kennedy.

"Britain," he said, "is doomed."

A'

Susan: My brother and I, we were in one of the crowds

when the Germans came marching in,

and all I knew is we had to hurry up and get away.

Narrator: Susan and Joseph Hilsenrath's parents

had arranged for them to be smuggled out of Germany

into France, where the children had endured

a precarious sanctuary for 8 months.

They hoped their parents had also gotten out of Germany.

In fact, they had managed to get visas

and make it to America,

first the father and then their mother

and baby brother several months later,

but Susan and Joseph weren't sure where they were

or how they would be reunited.

They had lived with a young cousin in Paris,

then with a series of foster families

until June 14 when the Germans had entered the city.

[Marching footsteps]

Susan: Everybody was going on the bus, on bicycles

and cars and walking, trying to get out,

to get to Versailles.

A'

All of these people marched to the...

To the palace, and the mayor of the town,

he got the idea of giving everybody a burlap sack.

They have these beautiful gardens in the back

of the palace, and way in the corner,

they had a big haystack,

and so all of the people took their burlap sack

and filled it up with hay.

Then we had a mattress.

We took our mattress, and we all walked

into the palace, and there's this beautiful room

called the Hall of Mirrors,

and we slept in the palace.

For a few days, we were there, and everything

seemed to be fine,

but then we heard that same sound of the marching.

We heard tanks, and we saw people going

on motorcycles,

and there was a one car at the head of this caravan,

and out came a German officer,

and he wanted to talk to the mayor of the town,

and he did not know how to speak any French,

and the mayor of the town did not know how

to speak any German.

So somebody in the crowd says, "Oh, there's

"this girl who's in the palace, and she knows

how to speak German."

I was standing there, and I looked at this...

At this German officer.

He was as tall as the ceiling,

and... and... and... And I was so afraid,

but at the end of the conversation,

the Nazi officer bent down to me,

and he said, "Little girl,

how come you know how to speak German so well?"

And I said to him, "The French schools

"are really very good, and I learned

how to speak German in the French schools."

And so he clicked his heels, and he shook my hand,

and he walked away.

Narrator: With Hitler's conquest of Poland

and western Europe, President Roosevelt

had understood that the ongoing refugee crisis

was sure to turn into a catastrophe.

"It is not enough to indulge in horrified humanitarianism,

empty resolutions, and pious words," he said.

Safe havens had to be found quickly

for these "desperate people."

Before war broke out, he had been unwilling

to go against public opinion and call

for American immigration quotas to be expanded,

in part because he knew if he did so Congress

might well close them off altogether.

A'

Behind the scenes, he had pressured

Latin American countries into accepting

some 40,000 Jews in flight from Hitler,

but no other nations had proved any more welcoming

to refugees than they had been

before the Second World War began,

and now, Roosevelt and much of the American public

had begun to view would-be immigrants differently,

not as victims but as potential threats

to the security of the United States.

Man: You'd think from the number of spies

they've been sending over here that

we're at war with Germany.

It looks more as if Germany were

at war with us.

Narrator: "Confessions of a Nazi Spy,"

made by Warner Bros., the only movie company

to have pulled out of Germany

rather than do business with Hitler's regime,

was the first overtly anti-Nazi film made

by a major Hollywood studio.

The movie was based loosely on the story

of a real German spy ring broken up by the FBI,

and it captured a growing sense of public panic.

The sudden terrifying swiftness

with which the Western European democracies collapsed

under Hitler's assault led many to assume

he must have had help from within.

The American ambassador to France claimed the collapse

of that country had been in part the work

of native Communists and Nazi agents,

some of whom, he alleged,

had entered the country as Jewish refugees.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the bureau

was now receiving 3,000 tips

about possible espionage every day,

and hired 150 more agents to seek out Nazi spies,

who were called Fifth Columnists.

A'

Martyn: And the government alleged just conspired

to provide secret information to an unnamed foreign government.

Lipstadt: A country can be attacked from 4 sides,

but there's actually a fifth side

from which it can be attacked, and that's from within,

if you have spies in your midst.

There's a great fear that the Germans are sending over spies,

and they were.

There were spies for Germany.

But the fear of spies intersects with the antisemitism.

The fear of spies intersects with the anti-immigration,

anti-refugee sentiment.

Narrator: The "New York Herald Tribune,"

one of the most respected newspapers in America,

claimed that 42 Nazi agents had supposedly

been recruited from among German "half" Jews

and "quarter" Jews.

The "Saturday Evening Post" charged that Nazi spies

passing as refugees had infiltrated Europe and America.

Less than 3% of Americans befieved

Washington was doing enough to combat subversion.

In the summer of 1940,

an Alien Registration Act sailed through Congress,

requiring non-citizens over the age of 14

to be registered and fingerprinted

and sharply curtailing their rights to free speech

and political participation.

"Something curious is happening to us in this country,"

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her column,

"and I think it is time we stopped

"and took stock of ourselves.

"Are we going to be swept away from our traditional attitude

toward civil liberty by hysteria about 'Fifth Columnists'?"

A'

But the president told the press

that he had been told that in several countries

Jewish refugees had become spies for the Germans,

involuntary spies, he explained,

because if they didn't agree to spy,

the Nazi government back home had told them,

"We are frightfully sorry,

"but your old father and old mother

"will be taken out and shot.

Of course," the President continued,

"it applies to a very, very small percentage

of refugees coming out of Germany."

Lipstadt: Of course, a refugee would be

the worst person to be a spy.

A refugee doesn't speak the language,

speaksthelanguage with an accent.

A refugee doesn't know the ways to work their self

into the woodwork and not be noticeable.

But nonetheless, there is this irrational fear.

No one says a nation should let people in

that is going to harm it or weaken it,

but the evidence was nonexistent.

Narrator: Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long

and many of his colleagues thought, without evidence,

that Jewish refugees were especially dangerous.

A wealthy contributor to Roosevelt's first presidential campaign,

Long had served for 3 years as FDR's ambassador to Italy

and was semi-retired when Roosevelt called him back

to government service to run the Visa Division.

Hundreds of thousands of desperate people,

most of them Jews, were already on the waiting list

for American visas,

and more were lining up every day.

Long was unmoved.

To him, every train or ship carrying Jews

out of Nazi Europe represented what he called,

"a perfect opening for Germany to load the United States

with Nazi agents."

Long's goal, he confided to his diary,

was "practically stopping immigration."

Lipstadt: Breckinridge Long is working every which way

to prevent Jews from coming into this country.

When people are desperate to get out,

he is amongst those helping to create the barriers.

Narrator: Long especially loathed Rabbi Stephen Wise,

whom he found sanctimonious,

because he spoke so often of the courage of men and women

fleeing from torture by dictators.

"Only an infinitesimal fraction are of that category,"

Long noted in his diary.

Greene: One of the lessons of this history

is something else was always more important

for the Americans than aiding Jews.

But we see some Americans who don't respond that way.

Woman: If I'd been a man, I would have joined the Navy

and seen the world, but since I was a woman,

I joined the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Laura Margolis.

Narrator: While official American policy

remained rigid and restricted,

individual women and men working

for dozens of Jewish organizations,

including the National Refugee Service

and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,

did all they could,

wherever in the world they could, to help.

They would coordinate loans, legal counsel,

ocean liner tickets, and jobs for newcomers.

Without their help, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees

would never have made it to America.

They worked alongside other committed Americans

from the YMCA, the Unitarian Service Committee,

and the American Friends Service Committee.

By the summer of 1940,

the focus of their relief and rescue operations

was in southern France.

A'

Germany occupied only the western

and northern regions of France.

The south was left in the hands of a collaborationist

French government with headquarters at Vichy.

Some 50,000 refugees from 42 countries were interned

in 93 squalid, overcrowded camps.

Tens of thousands more remained free,

trying to keep one step ahead of the French police,

who were required to hand over

any refugees the Germans demanded.

Scores of eminent artists and intellectuals

were thought to be in immediate danger.

A'

To help, a group of prominent writers in New York

formed the Emergency Rescue Committee.

Eleanor Roosevelt talked her husband into asking

the reluctant State Department to issue a limited number

of emergency visitor's visas.

Man: I remembered what I had seen in Germany.

I knew what would happen to the refugees

if the Gestapo got hold of them.

I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all

of saving even a few of its intended victims.

It was my duty to help them.

Varian Fry.

A'

Narrator: Varian Fry, a 32-year-old writer

and member of the Emergency Rescue Committee,

volunteered to go to France and try to get the refugees out.

He was every inch the Harvard-educated

intellectual he appeared to be,

but as a foreign correspondent visiting Germany 5 years earlier,

he'd witnessed attacks on Jews that left him

with a visceral loathing for the Nazis.

He arrived in Marseille on August 15, 1940,

with $3,000 in cash strapped to his leg

and a list of 200 distinguished women and men

thought to be somewhere in Vichy, France.

Man as Fry: It is the non-French refugees among whom

one finds the greatest misery.

They are being crushed in one of the most gigantic vises in history.

They have literally been condemned to death here,

or at best to confinement in detention camps,

a fate little better than death.

Narrator: He took room 307 at the Hotel Splendide

and went to work.

News quickly spread that an American

with visas had arrived.

Refugees knocked at his door at all hours,

filled the hallways, and lined the stairs.

25 letters a day turned up for him at the reception desk.

The telephone rarely stopped ringing.

[Telephone ringing]

A'

The American Vice Consul in Marseilles Hiram Bingham Jr.

And some of his colleagues

were happy to help whenever they could.

Bingham was the son of a senator from Connecticut.

His Groton classmates had called him "Righteous Bingham"

for his earnestness.

He, too, had seen Nazi brutality first-hand,

and he believed it his duty to obtain

"as many visas as I could for as many people,"

and was sometimes willing to break the rules.

He allowed the fugitive German Jewish novelist

Lion Feuchtwanger to hide in his villa

and then cooperated in smuggling him out of the country

with Reverend Waitstill Sharp,

a veteran rescue worker for the Unitarian Service Committee.

In order to emigrate to the United States from Vichy,

each refugee required an American immigration visa,

visas for neutral Portugal and Spain,

a steamship ticket from Lisbon,

and an exit visa from France.

Each took time to obtain

and each had an expiration date.

By the time the last document was procured,

another had often expired,

requiring the whole laborious process to begin all over again.

A'

To get around this system,

Varian Fry helped to smuggle refugees

across the Pyrenees into Spain.

He assembled a staff of 46 volunteers

that included refugees, young American men and women,

a French gendarme, and a Viennese cartoonist

who proved an adept forger

of documents and official stamps.

Fry worked closely with American Jewish organizations

that provided crucial financial support from Portugal

and with sympathetic diplomats from other countries...

Mexican, Brazilian, Siamese,

and an especially empathetic Chinese consul,

whose formal-looking documents in Mandarin

were rarely challenged at the border

because neither French nor German officials

could read them.

Man as Fry: It's stimulating to be outside the law.

The experiences of 10, 15, and even 20 years

have been pressed into one.

Sometimes I feel as if I had lived my whole life.

A'

Narrator: Reports of what Fry was up to

eventually reached Washington.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull himself cabled

the Marseille consulate that

"This Government cannot... Repeat cannot...

"countenance the activities of Mr. Fry and other persons,

however well-meaning their motives may be."

The State Department tried to force Fry out of France,

but he somehow managed to remain in Marseille

for another 7 months

until Vichy police escorted him out of the country.

A'

Together, Fry and Bingham, whom Fry remembered

as his "partner in the crime of saving lives,"

are thought to have rescued

at least 2,000 people from the Nazis.

A'

Some were the celebrated people Fry

had been sent to save,

including the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska,

the film director Max Ophuls,

the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz,

the philosopher Hannah Arendt,

and the artists Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp,

Piet Mondrian, and Marc Chagall.

But also among them were hundreds of men,

women, and children who were not well-known,

just human beings in need of help.

A'

[Air raid siren]

Murrow: Hello, America, this is Edward Murrow

speaking from London.

There were more German planes over the coast of Britain today

than at any time since the war began.

Anti-aircraft guns were...

Narrator: In the summer and fall of 1940,

as Britain was under relentless attack from German bombs,

President Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term.

He would have to persuade voters that,

while he opposed American entry into the war,

he also needed to provide aid to Britain,

as the last, best hope of defeating Hitler,

and to ready the United States

for conflict if it came, as well.

On September 16, 1940,

he signed into law the first peacetime draft

in the history of the country.

Roosevelt: To the 16 million young men

who will register today,

I say that democracy is your cause,

the cause of youth.

Narrator: The odds against the democracies

had lengthened further.

Germany was now allied with fascist Italy in Europe

and Imperial Japan in Asia... the Axis.

Roosevelt's Republican opponent Wendell Willkie,

nominated just a few days after France fell,

shared Roosevelt's belief that Britain had to be helped.

Now, so did nearly 3/4 of the American people.

Public opinion was slowly beginning to change.

But soon after Roosevelt agreed to provide Britain

with 50 old destroyers,

Charles Lindbergh became the chief spokesman

for a new isolationist organization

dedicated to keeping America out of the war...

The America First Committee.

Lindbergh: France has now been defeated,

and despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months,

it is now obvious that England is losing the war.

I believe...

[Cheering and applause]

And I have been forced to the conclusion

that we cannot win this war for England

regardless of how much assistance we send.

That is why the America First Committee has been formed.

Narrator: It was founded by a handful of students

at the Yale Law School

and run by a National Committee

that at various times included General Robert E. Wood,

chairman of the board of Sears Roebuck,

the head of the United States Olympic Committee

Avery Brundage,

the automobile magnate Henry Ford,

World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker,

Lillian Gish, the star of "Birth of a Nation,"

and Theodore Roosevelt's daughter

Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The Committee soon had some 800,000 members

in 450 chapters all across the country,

the largest anti-war organization

in the history of the United States.

A'

Despite the opposition,

FDR was reelected to a third term

and soon proposed a Lend-Lease bill,

allowing him to supply Britain with more

desperately-needed military and naval supplies.

Roosevelt: I ask this Congress for authority and for funds

sufficient to manufacture additional munitions

and war supplies of many kinds

to be turned over to those nations

which are now in actual war

with aggressor nations.

Narrator: The bill was designated HR 1776

in hope that voters would see its passage as patriotic.

Isolationists called it the dictator bill.

Charles Lindbergh testified against it.

He favored neither a British nor a German victory,

he said, and warned that U.S. entry into the war

would be "the greatest disaster this country

has ever gone through."

FDR denounced him as an appeaser.

Isolationist and antisemitic groups now flooded

the halls of the Capitol to oppose the new bill,

including black-clad members of a self-proclaimed

"Mothers' Movement" who cursed legislators

and insisted that Jews were behind

what they believed to be Roosevelt's rush toward war.

A'

Lipstadt: It's not just something that is hypothetical.

England can fall.

Hitler will take over all of the European continent.

And America First fails to see the danger

to the world at large.

Tyrants will go as far as you allow them to go.

They're always testing the waters.

Can I go further? Can I push stronger?

And the America First and the isolationists

refuse to acknowledge that.

Narrator: In the end, the Lend-Lease bill passed.

Newsreel announcer: Guns and munitions of all sorts

pour into Britain as almost hourly convoys

from the States bring their precious cargos.

The original $7 billion of lend-lease aid

has already been allocated.

Now Congress studies final passage of another 6 billion,

and Britain studies invading the continent

with arms made in the U.S.A.

Messinger: When the German invasion was over,

we were glad we were in Vichy, France,

not under the control of the Germans.

There was still an American embassy there.

My father could go there

and pursue our visa to the United States.

Narrator: Sol Messinger and his parents,

having been turned away from Cuba on the St. Louis,

had now managed to escape from Belgium

after the Germans invaded.

They made it to a small village in Vichy, France... Savignac.

But after a few months, they were arrested

and put in a French internment camp.

Messinger: My father found out that there was an underground,

which helped people to escape,

so we planned to escape.

My mother and I, it was Christmas Eve,

and the French soldiers were drunk,

and we simply walked past the French soldiers.

[Train whistle blows]

A'

We had decided we would go back to Savignac.

It's the only place that we knew in France.

So we got on a train.

Of course, you were not allowed

to be on a train without papers.

Fortunately, nobody asked us for our papers.

A'

But my father was still in the camp.

On New Year's Day, we were standing outside,

and in the distance we saw 4 men walking towards us,

one of whom was my father.

He had escaped,

so we were reunited again.

A'

It was just incredibly lucky.

[Trolley clangs]

Narrator: Otto Frank was ordinarily a cautious man,

content to keep a low profile and go about his business

in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

But one day, he made an uncharacteristically incautious remark

to a Gentile employee's husband whom he didn't know well.

When the man expressed confidence

that Germany would win the war soon,

Frank had disagreed.

The man turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer

who wrote a letter to the Gestapo denouncing Frank.

A member of the Dutch fascist party intercepted the letter

and demanded money to keep quiet about it.

Now, subject to blackmail and fearful

that the Germans would come for him

and his family at any time,

Otto Frank stepped up his efforts to try to get to the United States,

despite the fact that his visa application

had been destroyed in the bombing of Rotterdam.

In desperation, Frank turned to an old friend... Charley Straus.

Straus knew the Roosevelts,

was the administrator of the Federal Housing Authority,

and his father had been a co-owner

of Macy's department store.

A'

Man: April 30, 1941.

Perhaps you remember that we have two girls.

It is for the sake of the children mainly

that we have to care for.

Our own fate is of less importance.

The consul asks a bank deposit of about $5,000 for us 4.

You are the only person I know that I can ask.

Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?

Who can tell if there is still a chance to leave Europe

by the time this letter is going to arrive?

Lam still indebted to you, and I shall always be.

As ever, Yours, Otto.

A'

Narrator: Straus and his wife agreed to put up the money,

but by that time the State Department had changed its rules.

Consulates had been ordered to deny a visa

to anyone with close relatives in Germany

or any of the countries it had annexed or occupied

out of fear of foreign agents.

Greene: In 1941, you see a series of rule changes

that are designed to make it even harder

for refugees to get in.

It's not only that it's complicated

to line up the paperwork,

the State Department is moving the bar on them.

Man: If I had my way, I would today build a wall

about the United States so high and so secure

that not a single alien or foreign refugee

from any country upon the face of this earth

could possibly scale or ascend it.

Senator Robert Reynolds.

Narrator: Senator Robert Reynolds

of North Carolina,

chairman of the powerful Military Affairs Committee

charged that Jews were "systematically building

a Jewish empire in this country"

and called for still more obstacles to immigration.

He also organized a group called the Vindicators

to hunt down illegal immigrants.

A'

Meanwhile, in response to President Roosevelt's decision

to freeze German and Italian assets in the United States,

Germany and Italy ordered American consulates

to close in their countries

and all the countries they occupied, as well.

Now, for anyone waiting in those countries,

there would be no American visas.

A'

Woman: American Friends Service Committee, Rome.

All immigration to the U.S. stopped,

thereby robbing many people of their hopes.

They could not understand what difference one day should make

and are naturally unable to reconcile themselves

to the arbitrariness of laws

that affect their whole futures so disastrously.

Another thing that discourages us somewhat

is the general attitude of Americans

toward the problems with which we have been working.

Really I am so tired of having well-meaning

and opinionated people tell me about the Jews

and sounding off to the effect of,

"Why don't we use all this splendid zeal

and energy for some really American activity?"

Marjorie McClelland.

Man: This is not the Second World War.

This is the Great Racial War.

The meaning of this war,

and the reason we are fighting out there,

is to decide whether the German and Aryan will prevail

or if the Jew will rule the world.

Hermann Goering.

[Explosion]

Narrator: On June 22, 1941, without any warning

to his supposed ally Josef Stalin,

Hitler sent 3 vast army groups into the Soviet Union

along a thousand-mile front

with 3,550 tanks,

2,770 aircraft,

and 600,000 horses

to haul weapons and supplies across Russia's vast distances.

Hitler's goal was what it had always been,

to enslave or eliminate the peoples of Eastern Europe

and establish a continental Reich

meant to last a thousand years.

The Red Army fell back.

Nearly 6 million Soviet soldiers would fall

into German hands during the coming months.

Well over half of them died,

most of them worked to death or deliberately starved.

Snyder: Once Germany invades the Soviet Union

with the idea of destroying the Soviet Union,

mass murder can take place.

To Hitler, the Soviet Union is not a state.

The rule of law does not apply.

This is not even an occupation.

These are just wild territories inhabited by undefined peoples.

A'

When the Germans arrived, the Germans could say,

"You've had this terrible period of Soviet oppression.

"And you know who was at fault? You know who ran it?

It was the Jews."

Narrator: Everywhere, Jews were special targets.

Hayes: They're killing Jews in two ways.

First, they are starving Jews to death

in the ghettos that they have established in occupied Poland.

Then they also decide that when they invade the Soviet Union,

they're going to shoot people.

Narrator: Specialists were enlisted to follow

the advancing army and hunt down and kill Jewish men

and partisans who dared wage guerrilla war

against the invaders,

along with other groups deemed to be hostile,

inferior, or loyal to the Soviet regime.

3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen, Operations Groups,

were in overall charge,

but they were soon reinforced by other killing units...

20,000 SS men, 30,000 German Order Police,

and ordinary soldiers from the German Army.

At first, the Einsatzgruppen encouraged pogroms,

sometimes standing by while Latvians, Lithuanians,

Poles, and Ukrainians

rounded up and murdered their Jewish neighbors.

A'

In scores of cities and towns,

Gentiles acting independently

also slaughtered thousands of Jews.

A'

A'

But the Germans soon took over most

of the killing themselves.

They shot only Jewish men in the beginning,

then started killing women and children

who, their officers told them,

acted as the partisans' eyes and ears.

Hayes: And they're basically going to round them up

as the German armies advance,

and they're going to shoot them into ditches,

liquidate them in forests, wipe them out.

A'

Narrator: They shot 24,000 Jews at Kamenets-Podolski,

28,000 at Vinnytsia,

nearly 34,000 at Babi Yar outside Kiev.

A'

It was all meant to be secret,

but many German soldiers carried cameras

so that they could send snapshots and home movies

to show their families what their husbands and sons

and fathers were doing as they moved east.

"Up here in what was Latvia things are pretty Jewified,"

one soldier told his family,

"and in this case no quarter is given."

Snyder: Every photograph we have has to stand in

for many, many, many, many other,

hundreds of other shooting pits,

which are not actually recorded.

These images are taken for purposes,

which broaden our sense of horror.

A'

Because it's not just that the event took place

and has been recorded.

It's that this is a trophy photo.

And they're horrible in yet another way.

This is typical and not exceptional.

A'

Narrator: One Einsatzgruppen commander

remembered the routine.

There were 15-man firing squads.

One bullet per Jew.

One firing squad of 15 executed 15 Jews at a time.

He thought he and his men had killed

somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000.

They'd lost count.

A'

Mendelsohn: Two million Eastern European Jews were killed

just in what they now call the Shoah by bullets.

A'

I'll never forget a survivor that I interviewed.

He said, "You know, as it was happening to us,

"we couldn't believe it,

so how was anybody else gonna believe it?"

If they to whom it was happening could scarcely believe

the savagery and the sadism and the depravity

of what was happening, how are the relatives in America

even possibly going to imagine?

A'

Narrator: The Einsatzgruppen eventually

reached Bolechow in eastern Poland.

It was home to some 3,000 Jews,

including Shmiel Jaeger, his wife, and 4 daughters.

Mendelsohn: These people are now statistics,

particularly now, as their individual stories recede,

but they were not statistics to themselves.

Every one of them died in a different way.

The third daughter, Ruchele, was taken by herself.

The first roundup in the town happened in the autumn of 1941.

There was a roundup of about 1,000 people.

That was the first action.

And she just happened to be

in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She was out of the house.

She was walking through the town.

She got caught in this roundup.

These people were held in a local

Catholic community center,

and people were raped and tortured

over about 24 hours.

A'

And then they were taken to a site just outside of the town

where there was an old salt mine,

and they were all shot.

A'

Man: Vilna, Lithuania. March 2,1941.

Elsa, today I'm sending you a postcard.

I want to make sure that maybe you will receive

a last postal item from me.

If something happens,

I would want there to be somebody who would remember

that someone named David Berger had once lived.

This will make things easier for me

in the difficult moments.

A'

Farewell.

Narrator: For many months, British intelligence

had been decoding top-secret

German communications from the front.

In August, the messages were filled with mysterious numbers,

which they only gradually realized

were evidence of the systematic murder

of all the Jews living in every town and village

the Nazis overran on the Eastern Front.

Hayes: During the summer of 1941 when the Germans

were invading the Soviet Union

and liquidating Jews in their path,

Winston Churchill got an intercept of the reports

that the shooting units were sending back to Berlin.

"Yesterday we shot X number of people."

Then the reports were broken down as time passed

to men, women, children,

Jews, Communists, so forth.

Narrator: The intelligence continued to come in.

367 shot on one day.

468 two days later.

1,625 the next day.

3,0005 days after that.

6 days later more than 5,000.

So many dead so regularly recorded

that the intelligence service concluded that,

"The fact that the German police are killing all Jews

"that fall into their hands should by now

"be sufficiently well appreciated.

"It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting

these butcheries specially, unless so requested."

The numbers would no longer be included

in the Prime Minister's intelligence briefings.

His problem was that if he announced to the world

that he had these reports,

the Germans would know they were being intercepted.

He couldn't do anything about the shooting,

and he couldn't do anything to alert the wider world

to how extensive the shooting was.

A'

Erbelding: I would argue that Nazi Germany

believes that it's fighting two wars.

It's fighting a military war,

and it's fighting a genocidal war.

The military war, obviously,

begins when Nazi Germany invades Poland.

The genocidal war begins two years later

when the Nazis abandon any idea

that the Jews are going to emigrate and decide,

instead, to round them up and to murder them en masse.

Narrator: The Nazis had assumed

Britain could not hold out for long,

and back in the summer of 1940, Adolf Eichmann,

the SS officer in charge of forced Jewish emigration,

was ordered to draw up plans to use captured British ships

to transport all the Jews of Europe to Madagascar,

a French island in the Indian Ocean,

where they would die of exposure and starvation.

A'

But Britain had not surrendered.

And so, if the Jews of Europe were to be eliminated,

SS commander Heinrich Himmler concluded

they would have to be eliminated on the European continent.

A'

On July 31,1941, Hermann Goering would ask

the SS second-in-command Reinhard Heydrich

to come up with what he called "an overall solution

to the Jewish question in the German sphere."

Heydrich's plan had to be "noiseless,"

SS planners said,

and therefore easily kept secret,

and it had to be "humane," they insisted,

not in order to ease the deaths of victims,

but to spare the feelings of those murdering them.

[Bells clanging]

[Susan speaking German]

A'

Narrator: After the Germans occupied northern France,

Susan Hilsenrath and her brother Joseph

had managed to make their way from Versailles to Vichy

and the Chateau des Morelles,

a group home for Jewish children

who had been separated from their parents,

financed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Susan: They wanted to send us to school,

to the public school in France.

But the people in the village wouldn't let

those children from the Chateau Morelles

mix with their children.

We kept writing to our parents all the time.

Narrator: Their father had managed to get himself,

his wife, and youngest boy to the United States,

and was now feverishly trying to gather Susan

and Joseph to them as well.

Joseph: He made a pest of himself

at the State Department.

He wrote them letters, begged.

A'

I have to be so thankful.

Without him, we would never have made it.

Susan: One day the director of the children's home,

she called me to her office, and I was really scared

because only when you had problems

did you go to that director's office.

And she was sitting behind her desk,

and she said to me, "Suzie!

You are going to go to the United States."

A'

Our parents had found us.

Narrator: Susan and Joseph's passage had been arranged

and paid for by the New York-based

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Susan: My brother and I went to Marseilles on the train,

and there we met, like, 50 children

that were all going to go on the Serpa Pinto from Lisbon

to come to the United States.

A'

They put all of the 50 children in the bottom

on the lowest deck of the ship

and in the front of the ship,

and we were all in one room.

And we had these double-decker

and triple-decker beds.

And they told us we weren't allowed to mingle

with the crowd.

A'

Finally, it was time to get to the United States,

and they told all the children that the next morning at 6:00

we were going to pass the Statue of Liberty.

Of course we had learned

what the Statue of Liberty was all about.

So they told us to be on deck to see it.

A'

At exactly 6:00, that fog went up like this,

like the curtain at an opera or at a concert

or at a play went up like that,

and right there just as it was going up

was the Statue of Liberty.

Joseph: The fog lifted.

A'

And there it was.

A'

After all this...

A'

It's even worse now.

After all these years,

to taste freedom, do you...

A'

It was just remarkable.

And, and the effects, apparently,

has never left me.

I realized that I didn't have to worry about getting killed,

which is... was part of your being,

and that you're going to be able to live and grow old...

and have a life.

A'

Newsreel announcer: A cargo of innocents from embattled Europe.

Arriving in New York aboard the Portuguese liner Serpa Pinto,

these youngest refugees are originally from Germany, Poland,

Czechoslovakia, and Spain,

but the war has made them Wanderers.

A'

Susan: So we had to go to Ellis Island,

and there we found out everything

that we needed to know about the United States.

We learned about food,

and we learned that they had this white bread.

We could squash it up and push it

and make a little ball out of it.

You could bite into it, and it was so good.

And then they told us it was called Wonder Bread,

and we were so happy to be eating it.

A'

The next thing we learned is that the children in the United States

had candy that you could eat all day long.

And you... it was just stayed in your mouth all day long.

And then we, of course, learned that it was chewing gum.

It's just so exciting

because we knew we had come to the place

where we were going to be reunited with our parents.

A'

Narrator: Susan and Joseph's father had been

at the pier in lower Manhattan to welcome them to America.

But their mother was not with him.

They did not see her until they arrived

at the family's new home in Washington, D.C.

Joseph: When we arrived,

I expected some emotional response.

But she just lay there

and barely even smiled.

My father explained to me that she was mentally ill.

Susan: I don't talk about it.

I couldn't understand

that there was nothing between us.

I just couldn't, "Hey, I'm your child, and I'm back,"

and she just didn't understand.

Eventually, she ended up in the hospital.

Joseph: We don't know what happened to her.

While my father was here in the United States,

she was in Germany with my younger brother.

They were alone for about 4 to 6 months.

A'

When I left her, she was perfectly normal.

A'

And I really don't know what happened.

I asked frequently if she was beaten

or traumatized, but I never got an answer.

Not from her, certainly,

and my father just didn't want to talk about it.

A'

And she never recovered.

A'

Roosevelt: America has been attacked.

The United States Ship Kearny is not just a Navy ship.

She belongs to every man, woman,

and child in this nation.

Narrator: On September 11, 1941, after a German submarine

engaged with the U.S. destroyer Kearny,

President Roosevelt ordered the Navy to attack on sight

any German or Italian vessels operating

in American defensive waters,

which he had expanded halfway across the Atlantic.

U.S. entry into the war now seemed very close.

Roosevelt: When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike,

you do not wait until he has struck

before you crush him.

These Nazi submarines and raiders

are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic...

Narrator: That same evening, Charles Lindbergh

spoke at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

In the strongest language he had ever used,

he charged that there were 3 groups

pressing the country toward war...

The British, the Roosevelt administration,

and the Jews.

"Instead of agitating for war,

"the Jewish groups in this country

should be opposing it in every way," he warned,

"for they will be among the first

"to feel its consequences.

"Tolerance is a virtue that depends

"upon peace and strength.

History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation."

And he went still further.

"Large Jewish ownership andinfluence

"in our motion pictures, our press, our radio,

and our government," he charged,

"constituted a great danger to our country."

This time, the press exploded.

A'

"Liberty" magazine called Lindbergh

"The most dangerous man in America."

The "New York Herald Tribune" accused him of antisemitism

and appealing to the "dark forces of prejudice

and intolerance."

Republican Wendell Willkie called his speech

"The most un-American talk made in my time

by any person of national reputation."

"The voice is Lindbergh's," said the "San Francisco Chronicle."

"The words were the words of Hitler and Goebbels."

Greene: The reaction in the press

to Lindbergh's speech is resoundingly negative.

People start to ask, "ls Lindbergh a Nazi?"

The "Des Moines Register" runs a front-page editorial cartoon

with Lindbergh up on the podium

and Hitler down below applauding him.

But I also wonder, is it fair to say

that Lindbergh is saying out loud

what a lot of Americans think privately?

And I think he is.

A'

Narrator: Lindbergh was unrepentant,

but America First never recovered

from the damage his speech had done.

Fritz Kuhn, the self-styled Fuhrer

of the German American Bund,

was already in Sing Sing for tax fraud and embezzlement

and would eventually be deported

as the agent of a foreign power.

And the National Association of Broadcasters

had already banned Father Coughlin,

the antisemitic radio priest, from the airwaves.

But mostly Catholic anti-Jewish gangs

affiliated with his Christian Front continued

to terrorize Jewish neighborhoods in New York and Boston,

desecrating synagogues, smashing Jewish storefronts,

and beating Jewish children

while Irish-American police officers

often looked the other way.

A'

Meanwhile, American newspapers had reported

that Jews were being deported to ghettos in Poland

and labor camps in the German-occupied Soviet Union.

But their readers had no way of knowing

that the Nazis had already begun the mass-murder of Jews,

that they were actually determined to eliminate

all the Jews of Europe,

and that they had found a new,

more efficient method of doing it...

98s.

At Hitler's direct order, Nazi doctors in 6 locations

had been using commercially-produced carbon monoxide

as one of the methods by which to kill tens of thousands

of men, women, and children,

mental patients, disabled people,

infants with birth defects.

The Nazis called them all "useless eaters."

It was eugenics carried to its most grotesque extreme.

The demand for commercial carbon monoxide grew so large

it threatened to outstrip production.

Then, the Germans realized

that the exhaust produced by a motorized van,

piped into an airtight compartment at the back,

could kill groups of people at a time.

The Einsatzgruppen ordered up some 30 of them for use

in the occupied Soviet Union.

In October, SS chief Heinrich Himmler

ordered his men and the Gestapo

to officially end all emigration of Jews from Germany

or any of the lands it had conquered.

From then on, occupied Europe

was to be a vast prison for Jews

from which there was to be no escape but death.

All that remained was to set up a coordinated,

continent-wide system to feed Jews

into the Nazi killing machine.

In late November, the high-ranking SS officer

Reinhard Heydrich invited representatives

of all the Nazi ministries that would have to be involved

to a secret meeting to be held on December 9.

A'

That meeting would have to be postponed.

Hitler was in his headquarters

on Sunday evening, December 7,

when an aide brought him the news

that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Fuhrer claimed to be surprised but delighted.

Now he couldn't lose the war, he said,

because in Japan, "We have an ally which has never

been conquered in 3,000 years."

And with the United States now presumably forced

to focus its attention on the Pacific,

it would no longer be able to aid Britain

or the Soviet Union.

In any case, he believed America had become

"a decayed country.

Half-Judaized," he said,

"and the other half Negrified,

where everything is built on the dollar."

On December 11, Germany and Italy, Japan's allies,

declared war on the United States.

Congressional opposition to fighting fascism vanished overnight.

The United States was now at war around the world.

The following evening,

Hitler gathered the administrators

of all the districts in his expanding Reich.

The killing of Jews, he informed them,

was already underway

and now was to be undertaken everywhere

"without sentimentality."

All of them were expected to participate.

On January 20, 1942, in a lakeside villa in Wannsee,

the German suburb where the Lindberghs

had once hoped to live,

Reinhard Heydrich's delayed meeting of the Nazi bureaucrats

who would be responsible for the extermination of the Jews

finally convened in secret.

Heydrich began by revealing the sheer scale

of the job at hand.

There were 11 million Jews living in Europe, he claimed,

a total he had reached in part by including those currently

out of German reach in Spain, England and Ireland,

Switzerland, Portugal, and Sweden.

For the time being, the Germans would accelerate

the deportation of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps

in Nazi-occupied Poland,

then put them to work at hard labor wherever they were needed.

He was confident that most would die

of what he called "natural causes"...

Starvation, exposure, exhaustion.

But those who did survive,

as well as those declared unfit for labor in the first place,

were to be killed,

a fate Heydrich referred to as "special treatment."

Jews were to die because of who they were.

A'

The Nazis would also kill millions of non-Jews-

Soviet POWs, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Poles,

Russians, and Roma and Sinti peoples.

They also locked away gay men and Jehovah's Witnesses

because their faith forbade them from serving in any army

or saluting any flag, including Hitler's.

A'

Hayes: One of the things people can easily forget about the Holocaust

is that the core of it occurred

in a fierce and short period of time.

3/4 of the victims of the Holocaust

died in only 20 months.

A'

Narrator: The Nazis created 4 killing centers,

dedicated solely to murder,

all hidden away in the heart of what had once been Poland...

A'

Chelmno, where Nazi records list the murders

of at least 145,000 people

during its first 12 months alone.

Belzec, where an average of 2,000 Jews

would die every day for 10 months...

600,000 human beings.

Sobibor,

where somewhere between 167,000

and 200,000 would be murdered.

And Treblinka, where 925,000 would die,

280,000 of them in a single month in the summer of 1942.

A'

Chelmno did all its killing in gas vans.

The other 3 relied on permanent gas chambers

for which carbon monoxide was provided by the engines

of captured Soviet tanks.

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The Jewish victims of these killing centers

were overwhelmingly Polish,

but they came from everywhere the Nazis

could lay their hands on them.

The killing centers were supervised by the SS,

but guarded mostly by Eastern European support troops,

usually Soviet prisoners of war

who were recruited to serve the Reich.

Some Jews were forced into guiding victims to their deaths

and disposing of their bodies

in return for being allowed to live at least a little longer.

These 4 centers alone would be responsible for the death

of more than 1.5 million human beings.

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6 days after the Wannsee meeting,

Himmler ordered that two prisoner of war camps

in occupied Poland, Majdanek and Auschwitz,

be transformed into additional killing centers,

where 1,400,000 more

innocent men, women, and children would be murdered.

A'

Stern: The Navy had a placard,

"If you have language skills,

"understanding of the 3 enemies, their psychology,

come to our recruiting quarters."

Narrator: Soon after Pearl Harbor,

along with tens of thousands of other young men,

Guy Stern volunteered to join the armed forces.

Stern: I was received by a Navy ensign.

And he asked me about my skills.

I told him I was very good in German writing

and that in talking and so forth

and understood Germany.

And he said, "Yeah, that's good.

But I hear an accent."

Well, so, I said, "Well, yes."

And he said, "Were you born here in the U.S.?"

I said, "No."

He said, "Well, can't use you."

Narrator: A few months later,

Stern was drafted into the Army

and assigned to the intelligence branch.

A'

His parents, younger brother, and sister

remained trapped in Hildesheim, Germany,

and occasionally managed to get a letter out

to Guy's uncle and aunt.

Man: My dearest, Benno and Ethel,

We have grown quite despondent,

for if you cannot help us, nothing can be done.

No doubt Glllnther is going to great trouble to help us.

Please support him by word and deed.

Help him cope with disappointments

and lighten his burdens.

You write that Glllnther has grown strong.

If only I could see him again.

Write us often.

For now, I send my heartfelt greetings.

Yours, Julius.

A'

Stern: I studied these letters for the high sign.

There was one substitution.

There's a Hebrew-Yiddish word, "enmishova,"

it means I'm lying, or I am saying the contrary.

So I knew when they substituted that,

that was bad news, indeed,

because everything they said now,

"We are comfortable," means they had horrible circumstances.

A'

Until I got one letter that spoke of deportation,

and my anxieties were overriding.

Narrator: In March 1942, all the Jews in Hildesheim

were ordered to assemble in the town square.

Government cameramen were on hand to record

the supposedly humane way in which they,

including Guy Stern's family,

were being deported to "the East."

A'

Later, Stern's parents managed to smuggle a letter to him

from inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

A'

Stern: It had a sense of finality about it

and was crushing.

A'

The despair was in every word.

I don't think you could be in the Warsaw Ghetto,

and even my father's unsuppressable optimism,

there was even a straw of a hope.

A'

So I was fighting my war,

as well as the American War.

If there was a glimmer of a hope,

I was trying to keep it alive to shorten this outrage,

this horror as best I personally could.

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Announcer: Funding for "The U.S. And the Holocaust"

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