Original subtitles

A'

Daniel Mendelsohn: There are already people who think that

every Jew who died in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz,

died in a concentration camp, died in a gas chamber.

No. There's whole chapters of this story.

A'

Narrator: As hard as Shmiel Jaeger had tried,

he had been unable to get himself,

his wife Ester, and his 4 daughters

out of occupied Poland to America.

German troops had reached his hometown of Bolechow

in the summer of 1941.

Within weeks, his daughter Ruchele was murdered.

A'

That was only the beginning.

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Mendelsohn: There was another roundup, which was

the biggest roundup in my family's town,

2,500 people, and my great-aunt Ester

and the youngest girl, Bronia, who was 13 at the time.

They kept them, this huge group of people,

in the square outside of the city hall,

and there were a lot of atrocities that took place,

mostly against children.

There were some Soviet documents that had come to light,

including a report, and they listed

all the children who had been shot, and actually,

Bronia was the first child on the list.

This was in September of 1942.

You know, they were throwing children

off the balconies of the city hall,

really terrible stuff.

Whoever survived the couple of days of the roundup

were shipped to Belzec, and that's where

my great-aunt Ester died in the gas chambers.

A'

I was able to find out that Shmiel was hiding

with his second daughter, Frydka,

and that was because there was

a Catholic Polish boy, who was in love with her.

And he was helping to hide her in the home

of this local school teacher.

And that for some unknown amount of time,

they were being successfully hidden,

the father and the daughter,

in an underground dugout

until someone betrayed them.

A'

And they found them, and they took them,

and they shot them both,

and then they killed the school teacher, too.

A'

The oldest daughter Lorka joined a partisan group

that operated with some Polish partisans

in a nearby forest.

She was killed when the whole partisan group was wiped out.

A'

Except for my poor great-aunt Ester,

nobody was killed in a camp.

They were killed in all different ways,

in all different manners, and I think that already

is being erased,

the particularity of what happened.

A'

Woman: Here's the tragedy.

Millions of people could not be rescued.

They're in the hands of the Germans.

They're deep into Eastern Europe.

They're in Germany and Austria and France,

Belgium, Netherlands.

A'

But there were people who had gotten to Portugal.

Who had gotten to Spain.

There are people who eventually get to North Africa.

If you had taken more people from those places,

maybe more refugees could have come in.

Maybe more people escaping could have come in.

Are we talking of rescues of hundreds of thousands?

No. But if it's your family,

it doesn't matter if it's one.

A'

Narrator: Just before the United States entered the Second World War,

Germany had barred the emigration of Jews

from any country it had captured.

For them, occupied Europe had now become a prison

to which Adolf Hitler held the key.

A'

Americans were still in no mood to welcome immigrants.

The anxiety about alien subversion

that preceded Pearl Harbor

only intensified afterward.

FDR declared the West Coast a "military zone"

and forced 120,000 persons of Japanese descent

who lived there into internment camps.

Most of them were citizens.

A'

The Justice Department also interned thousands of

so-called "enemy aliens"... German and Italian immigrants

suspected of fascist sentiments.

A'

"This war can end in two ways,"

Hitler insisted in early 1942.

"Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples

or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe."

A'

Within a few months, the first reports reached the American public

that the Nazis had begun systematically murdering

every Jewish man, woman, and child on the continent.

A'

Jewish-Americans and their supporters pleaded that

somehow, something be done to stop the killing.

But President Roosevelt and his commanders were convinced

that only by crushing the Nazis

and winning the war as soon as possible

could the Allies put an end to it.

A'

Lipstadt: The mantra was,

we'll rescue these people by winning the war.

A'

The problem was, and many people knew this,

and certainly within government circles,

by the time the war would be won,

very few of these people would be alive.

[Sizzling]

But the dominant idea in the American government

is any act of rescue will be

a diversion from the war effort.

A'

Both could've been done at the same time.

But clearly nobody wanted these people.

A'

It's not one of the things that will go down

in the long annals of good things America did.

It goes in a different book.

A'

A'

A'

Girl: Writing in a diary is a really strange experience

for someone like me.

Not only because I've never written anything before,

but also because it seems to me that

later on neither I nor anyone else

will be interested in the musings of

a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

A'

Oh, well, it doesn't matter.

I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need

to get all kinds of things off my chest.

A'

Narrator: In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam,

Otto and Edith Frank struggled to provide

as normal a life as possible for their family.

June 12, 1942 was their younger daughter Anne's 13th birthday.

Among her gifts was a diary

that she was soon filling with profiles of

her classmates at the Jewish Lyceum

the Germans now required her to attend...

The girls she liked and those she didn't,

and the boys she liked

and those who seemed to like her.

A'

For the Franks and other Jewish families...

Including their neighbors, the Geiringers,

refugees from Austria...

Life under the Nazis was now anything but normal.

A'

Woman: The first few weeks, nothing had much changed.

And, so, we thought, "Oh, well,

perhaps they don't want to do anything in Holland."

The Dutch people were very typical, you know,

they said, "You are, you belong to us.

"We are going to protect you.

You don't have to worry about anything."

But they didn't really count on the measures

which the Germans were going to take gradually.

And the first year, it became a nuisance.

It interfered with our way of life,

but it was not dangerous.

We were not allowed on public transport, for instance.

But we all had bicycles.

But then you had to hand in your bicycle.

And then we had to wear the yellow star,

which means that people walk in the street

and are recognizable as Jews.

And that started to become really dangerous

because people just disappeared.

I didn't want to wear it.

I was stubborn. I said,

"Well, I know I'm a Jew,

why do I have to wear a star?"

But everybody had ID cards.

And on Jewish people ID card,

it did say you were a Jew,

or sometimes there was even a "J" stamped on it.

So, if you would have been stopped without wearing a star,

and they asked for your papers,

you would have been deported immediately.

A'

Girl as Anne Frank: July 5, 1942.

A'

A few days ago, as we were

taking a stroll around our neighborhood square,

Father began to talk about going into hiding.

A'

He sounded so serious

that I felt scared.

"Don't you worry. We'll take care of everything.

Just enjoy your carefree life while you can."

A'

That was it. Oh, may these somber words

not come true for as long as possible.

A'

Narrator: The Frank family was in constant danger,

and so, they had been slowly moving their belongings

to an annex in the warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht

in which Otto Frank's business was located.

A few trusted Gentile employees had agreed to help the Franks

survive in hiding when the time came.

"We'll leave of our own accord

and not wait to be hauled away," Frank said.

A'

But then a registered letter arrived.

Anne's older sister Margot... just 16...

Was to be included in the first group of

Jewish refugees in Holland to be sent

to work in a German labor camp.

The Franks went into hiding the next morning.

Since Jews were now forbidden to

ride on streetcars or own bicycles,

they were forced to carry their remaining household items

through the streets.

[Rain falling, thunder]

Girl as Anne Frank: So, there we were,

walking in the pouring rain,

each of us with a satchel and a shopping bag

filled to the brim with the most varied assortments of items.

The people on their way to work at that early hour

gave us sympathetic looks;

you could tell by their faces they were sorry

they couldn't offer us some kind of transport;

the conspicuous yellow star spoke for itself.

[Thunder]

Narrator: The two floors that Anne would call

their "Secret Annex" were accessible only by

a single door blocked by a bookcase

and cramped even before they were joined by

4 more Jews in need of a hiding place.

A'

The same week the Franks disappeared,

their friends the Geiringers did, too...

And for the same reason.

Eva Geiringer's older brother Heinz,

like Margot Frank, had been called up

for what the Nazis called "labor service."

A'

Geiringer: Heinz was 16,

and my father called us together one evening,

and he said,

"We are not going to send Heinz.

It's too dangerous."

A'

Narrator: Members of the Dutch Resistance had provided them

with false papers and places to hide.

But the constant dread of raids by the Gestapo

forced the Geiringers to temporarily split up.

Eva was to hide with her mother,

Heinz with their father.

A'

Geiringer: I started to cry. I didn't want to be separated

'cause I was very much attached to my brother and father.

And my father explained, "If we're in two different places,

"the chance that two of us will survive is bigger.

So, survive." So, that was really,

you know, the first time that I really realized

it's a matter of life and death.

A'

And that's quite scary

when you are 13 years old.

I said, "What do you mean? Will we be killed?"

[Soldiers marching]

About once a week, in the night, there was a knock on the door

and people had to open up and let them search their homes.

A story had been going around that

in another house, the beds were still warm.

They felt the beds.

So, they demolished the whole apartment

till they found the people.

And, of course, hosts were taken away as well.

So, of course, when you hear stories like that,

people said, "You know, we can't take this tension any longer.

You have to move." So, we moved about 7 times,

my mother and me, to different places.

My mother, she used to be in Austria as a lamb,

but suddenly, she became like a tiger, protecting her children.

My father, when we went into hiding, he said,

"Don't worry. It won't be long.

By Christmas, the war will be finished,"

end of '42. But, of course, it wasn't.

Girl as Anne Frank: It's the silence that makes me so nervous

during the evenings and nights,

and I'd give anything to have

one of our helpers sleep here.

I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered

and that we'll be shot.

That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect.

A'

Lipstadt: The "Chicago Tribune" in late June of '42

reports the mass killing of Jews.

A'

Like many other newspapers, the "Tribune"

puts it on page 6 or 7 in a tiny, little article.

You either missed it, or if you saw it,

you would say the editors don't think this is true.

If they thought this was true,

this would be on the front pages.

Narrator: Some papers did put the story on the front page,

including the "Pittsburgh Courier,"

an African American newspaper, which said,

"the Nazis could teach even southern whites a few lessons."

A'

3 years after their

aborted voyage to Cuba

aboard the "St. Louis,"

Sol Messinger and his parents

finally made it to America in June of 1942,

aboard the "Serpa Pinto," the same ship

that had brought Susie and Joe Hilsenrath 10 months earlier.

A'

Messinger: Our sponsor was a man in Buffalo

who had a furniture store.

And he was a relative of a relative

whom we knew in Berlin.

He was the one who sponsored us.

It was great to be in the United States,

not to be afraid of, you know, policemen.

To be with relatives whom I never knew,

but who obviously loved us.

And you could feel or see how people

were more or less relaxed, you know,

they weren't worried about being

picked up by the police and so on.

It just was amazing.

Narrator: As he settled into life in Buffalo,

Sol worried about Leon Silber,

a friend he had made aboard the "St. Louis"

whose family had fled to the same village

he had escaped to in the south of France.

Messinger: 6 weeks after we had left,

his parents must have heard that

something was about to happen.

They went to the teacher and they asked her

to hide Leon and she did.

And the next day, the police came

and they took the parents away.

Then the second day that he was hidden in the school,

he decided he wanted to join his parents.

He left the school and went to the police

and said who he was,

and he wanted to join his parents.

And he did. He was killed in Auschwitz.

[Sigh]

He was one of one and a half million kids

who were killed by the Germans.

Including all my cousins.

Narrator: On July 29, 1942...

A little over 3 weeks after

the Frank and Geiringer families went into hiding in Amsterdam...

A well-connected German businessman named Eduard Schulte

boarded a train for Zurich in neutral Switzerland.

He had told his staff he would be away on business.

But he had another, secret goal in mind.

From the first, Schulte had seen the Nazis

as "a band of criminals;"

their war would end only in disaster for Germany,

and he had already made this dangerous trip several times

to speak with Polish and Swiss agents

about likely German troop movements.

Now he had learned from an employee with Nazi contacts

that 12 days earlier, Heinrich Himmler had made

a formal visit to the concentration camp

in occupied Poland now called Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Himmler had spent two days there,

had watched the first trainload

of 2,000 Jews from Holland arrive,

observed the selection of those deemed fit for labor,

and looked on impassively as 447 people

deemed unfit were immediately put to death,

using a new method of which Rudolf Hoess, the commandant,

was especially proud.

Instead of relying on carbon monoxide produced by

internal combustion engines that frequently broke down,

the SS at Auschwitz had begun using

commercially available pellets of Zyklon,

a powerful vaporizing cyanide-based pesticide

that reduced the cost of killing

to roughly one U.S. penny per victim.

The same method would be adopted at Majdanek,

one of the 6 killing centers in occupied Poland.

Lipstadt: Gas chambers serve one purpose and one purpose only:

to murder as many people as you can

as efficiently as you can.

A'

Narrator: Himmler was so impressed

he promoted Hoess to Lieutenant Colonel

and urged him to enlarge the camp as fast as he could.

The "program of extermination will continue," he said,

"and will be accelerated every month."

[Train's horn blows]

Schulte was determined to get the explosive information

to Jewish leaders in Britain and the United States,

hoping that they could persuade their governments

to do something before it was too late.

In Zurich, Schulte told what he knew

to a Jewish banker friend who eventually

passed his story on to a 30-year-old representative

of the World Jewish Congress,

a refugee named Gerhart Riegner.

Woman: Riegner hears third-hand that the Nazis

have a plan to gather the Jews together

in the East and murder them before the end of the year.

He obsesses over this. This keeps him up at night.

And, finally, on August 8th, 1942,

he decides that he is going to spread this to the world.

He is going to get the Allies to do something about this.

So, he goes to the U.S. Consulate in Geneva

and explains what he's learned to the Vice Consul there.

Narrator: Riegner was "a serious and balanced individual,"

the vice consul wrote in his memorandum.

But his boss was dismissive and added a covering note

before sending it on to Washington,

warning that Riegner's story had

all the "earmarks of a war rumor."

That the Nazis persecuted the Jews was undeniable,

but the notion that the Nazis were now

preparing to kill them all was simply impossible for

many in the State Department to believe.

A'

Erbelding: State Department officials decide that

this is not good information,

and this is crucial, they say,

"Even if this were true, there's

nothing that we could do about it."

They believe that they are doing

all they canto assist the Jews

and that any sort of rally or petition or protest

asking them to do more would be

diverting resources from the war effort.

Many of these people were also

racist and antisemitic and nativist.

And, so, you have to wonder whether some of their concern,

some of their annoyances have to do with the fact

that they're being asked to help Jews.

Narrator: But Riegner had also told his story

to a British consular official,

who passed it on to a Jewish member of Parliament,

who passed it on to Stephen Wise,

the best-known rabbi in the United States.

A'

Wise took it to Under Secretary of State

Sumner Welles,

who asked him to say nothing

until he could find out

how much truth there was in it.

Wise was nearing 70,

exhausted from overwork and in declining health.

He told a friend that these were

the unhappiest days of his life.

They have "left me without sleep," he wrote,

and "I am almost demented over my people's grief."

Over the next two months, reports from the Vatican,

the Red Cross, and from other witnesses supplied by Riegner

suggested that the horror he described was real.

Welles summoned Wise back to Washington again

and gravely told him that the evidence

justified his "worst fears."

A'

Wise called the Associated Press.

There could be no doubt now.

Two million Jews were already dead,

he told reporters, which would eventually turn out

to have been a gross underestimate...

4 million had already been killed...

And the Nazis intended to go on killing Jews

as long as there were Jews to kill.

A'

The story finally made the front page

of the "New York Herald-Tribune,"

where it appeared with another story,

credited to the Polish government-in-exile in London,

which described Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto

being loaded into freight cars and transported

to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor,

where, it said, they were being "mass-murdered."

A'

Erbelding: Riegner's message, when it finally reaches

the American people in November, 1942,

is the first information that the American people

really have verified that the Nazis have a plan

to murder all of the Jews of Europe.

A'

Narrator: The news was widely circulated by the Associated Press,

though its impact was lessened by reports

about the fighting in North Africa,

where American troops had just landed,

and from Stalingrad, where the Soviets

had finally broken the German siege.

A'

CBS Radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow,

perhaps the country's most respected reporter,

was unsparing in his broadcast.

"What is happening is this," he said.

"Millions of human beings, most of them Jews,

"are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency

and murdered."

A'

Jewish organizations worldwide declared December 2, 1942

a "Day of Mourning."

On December 8th, Stephen Wise and 3 other Jewish leaders

met with the president.

"Unless action is taken immediately,

the Jews of Europe are doomed," they told him.

Roosevelt said he was aware of the Nazi "horrors"

but had no remedy at hand.

"We are dealing with an insane man," he said.

"Hitler and the group that surrounds him are psychopathic.

That is why we cannot act toward them by normal means."

Roosevelt: The first is freedom of speech...

Narrator: Even before the United States entered the war,

Roosevelt had made one of his over-arching goals

the "freedom of every person

"to worship God in his own way,

everywhere in the world."

Roosevelt: in the world.

Narrator: And he had repeatedly

denounced Nazi crimes

and promised that those who committed them

would be punished once victory was won.

But he had always been careful to maintain

that Hitler's victims included all sorts of people,

not specifically Jews.

Erbelding: The War Department does not want American soldiers

to even know very much about the persecution of Jews

because they feel like the soldiers won't fight hard

if they think that they are secretly being sent

to save the Jews.

And Jewish organizations are obviously very sensitive to this.

They don't want to have Americans perceive this

as a war for the Jews.

[Explosion]

Narrator: Still, 9 days after Roosevelt met with Rabbi Wise,

the United States joined in an Allied declaration

issued simultaneously in Washington, London, and Moscow.

The statement condemned "in the strongest possible terms

this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination,"

and reaffirmed the Allies' "solemn resolution to ensure

"that those responsible for these crimes

"shall not escape retribution,

and to press on with necessary practical measures to this end."

But no specific practical measures were recommended

other than victory on the battlefield.

Man on newsreel: Through town after Tunisian town,

the 8th army triumphantly marches, pushing the retreating...

Man: What does that declaration say?

It says, "We're going to punish the perpetrators.

Full punishment of the perpetrators."

We do rally, as a nation, to defeat fascism.

We just don't rally, as a nation,

to rescue the victims of fascism.

Man on newsreel: And now Allied commanders look

eagerly across the Mediterranean

to the shores of Hitler's fortress Europe.

A'

Man: Three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust are dead

before any American soldier is in continental Europe.

90% of the victims of the Holocaust

die in the northeast quadrant of the European continent:

Poland, Lithuania, and today, Belarus, Ukraine,

but then the Soviet Union.

They are all out of reach of

American aircraft in Great Britain.

There is no way American aircraft

could have flown to any of those death camps

and impeded the killing process

while it was at its most intense

in 1942 and in January of 1943.

A'

I think the only thing they could have done

was to publicize what was happening more

and to organize behind the scenes resistance.

But they were always inhibited about this because remember,

Nazi propaganda was that Roosevelt and Churchill

were the tools of the Jews.

They were fighting the war for the Jews.

And the Nazis used this propaganda to great effect.

And anything the Allies did that seemed to be

explicitly defending Jews ran the risk of

playing into the hands of that propaganda.

A'

Narrator: Despite the front-page coverage,

despite the Allies' declaration,

a Gallup poll taken early in January, 1943

showed that fewer than half of its respondents

could bring themselves to believe that the Nazis

could possibly have killed as many as

two million Jews, let alone 4 million.

A'

Woman: Druja, Poland, Tuesday, 4 A.M., June 16, 1942.

A'

My dear ones! I am writing this letter before my death,

but I don't know the exact day that I and all my relatives

will be killed, just because we are Jews.

A'

We are all hiding in one dugout.

My hand trembles and it's hard for me

to finish writing.

A'

Farewell. In the name of everybody:

Father, Mother, Sima, Sonia,

Zusia, Rasia, Yehezkel.

And in the name of Zeldaleh the toddler,

who doesn't understand anything yet.

Fanya Barbakow.

Man on newsreel: The Volga, where the great counteroffensive

by the Soviet army is commanded by General Zhukov.

He directs the strategy of Russian victories.

On the Stalingrad front, we see the kind of fighting tactics

that first stopped the Germans

and now is hurling them back,

trapping huge numbers of them.

Narrator: In early 1943, the tide of battle

turned against the Nazis.

At Stalingrad, the Soviets,

armed and supplied with American trucks

and tanks and aircraft,

had destroyed the entire German 6th Army.

In North Africa, British forces had captured

250,000 German and Italian prisoners...

And saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews

who had lived or sought sanctuary there.

A'

Meanwhile, the pace of the Nazi slaughter of Jews slowed,

largely because so few survived to be killed.

Those who did survive were needed for slave labor

or lived mostly in Romania and Hungary,

countries that were allied with

but not controlled by the Nazis.

A'

In America, agitation for action against the killing accelerated.

Rabbi Wise and the heads of several other

well-known Jewish organizations continued

to offer advice to the Roosevelt administration,

but that advice had been discussed

and either rejected or ignored before.

And they were soon faced with a rival group

more militant than theirs.

Its name kept changing but its philosophy remained the same.

Its founder was Peter Bergson,

a recent arrival from Palestine

and a member of the “gun,

a Zionist paramilitary group,

who would dismiss Rabbi Wise and most of his Jewish allies

as timorous "Americans of Hebrew descent,"

not authentic members of "the Hebrew Nation."

A'

Rescue now became Bergson's cause.

With help from the screenwriter Ben Hecht,

he produced an avalanche of newspaper advertisements

charging the administration with ignoring

the plight of Europe's Jews.

[Men chanting Mourner's Kaddish]

Narrator: On March 9, 1943, he filled Madison Square Garden twice

with an elaborate pageant called "We Will Never Die!"

Told largely from the viewpoint of the dead,

it featured 200 rabbis and cantors and an all-star cast

that included Edward G. Robinson,

John Garfield, and Paul Muni.

And this is not a Jewish problem.

It is a problem that belongs to humanity,

and it is a challenge to the soul of man.

Narrator: The show would go on to Boston, Philadelphia,

Washington, Chicago, and the Hollywood Bowl.

Its composer, Kurt Weill,

himself a refugee from the Nazis,

was pleased by the big crowds it drew

but felt the pageant didn't achieve much.

"All we have done is make a lot of Jews cry,"

he said, "which is not a unique accomplishment."

But it did impress the First Lady

and scores of congressmen.

[Applause]

While the show was still touring,

word came that some of the 70,000 Jews

still alive in the Warsaw Ghetto

had risen up against the Nazis

rather than be deported to Treblinka.

A'

They had already buried artwork, diaries, poetry,

and final notes in steel milk cans in the ground.

A'

One teenager wrote that he hoped to

"alert the world to what happened in the 20th century.

May history attest for us."

A'

The uprising was the largest Jewish rebellion of the war.

It would take the Germans more than a month to crush it,

level the ghetto, and send the survivors to their deaths.

A'

Woman: Freda Kirchwey, "The Nation" Magazine.

In this country, you and I and the President

and the Congress and the State Department

are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt.

A'

If we had behaved like humane and generous people

instead of complacent, cowardly, guilty ones,

the Jews lying today in the earth of Poland

and Hitler's other crowded graveyards

would be alive and safe.

And other millions yet to die would have found sanctuary.

We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people

and we did not lift a hand to do it...

A'

Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that

we lifted just one cautious hand,

encased in a tight-fitting glove of quotas and visas

and affidavits and a thick layer of prejudice.

A'

[Telegraph key tapping]

Narrator: Gerhart Riegner... Whose report from Switzerland

had alerted America to the ongoing

Nazi policy of extermination...

Sent Washington another desperate message.

Tens of thousands of Jews deported by the Nazis

were now trapped in northern Romania

without warm clothing.

They had just endured another harsh winter.

With help from the International Red Cross,

Riegner thought he could keep them alive.

He also believed he could help Jewish children

still hiding in France escape across

the Swiss and Spanish borders.

Erbelding: Riegner had many connections with

underground organizations and partisan organizations

in these different countries.

And so, his idea was if he could get the money,

he could funnel that money into France,

into Romania, to people who could buy clothing and food,

or who could buy fake documents,

or pay off border guards to allow

children to escape over the border.

Narrator: Riegnefls organization, the World Jewish Congress,

could supply the money,

but Riegner would need a special license

from the Treasury Department, which routinely prohibited

all "financial or commercial arrangements

within enemy territory."

On June 23, 1943, Wagner's request

reached the desk of 34-year-old John Pehle,

who ran the Foreign Funds Control department at Treasury.

Pehle: The State Department was quite negative.

It worried about the possibility of funds

falling in the hands of the Germans.

However, we went back and decided that

we could put safeguards in the procedures,

so that no foreign exchange would come to the Germans.

Narrator: Pehle granted the license and sent it along

to the State Department for transmission to Switzerland,

assuming it would reach Riegner quickly.

But the staff of Assistant Secretary of State

Breckinridge Long, who had been adamantly opposed

to helping Jewish refugees from the beginning,

quietly shelved it.

A'

By the beginning of September 1943,

when American and British troops landed in Italy

and finally gained their first foothold in Europe,

John Pehle insisted that the United States government

should take an active role in trying to rescue

Europe's surviving Jews...

And he would do everything he could to help.

A'

Erbelding: John Pehle was the child of a German immigrant;

his father had come when he was a teenager from Germany,

and his mother was the child of Swedish immigrants.

He grew up in Omaha.

He went to college there

and then ended up at Yale.

But came from a family that did not always have a lot of money

and was an immigrant family.

A'

And, so, I think that made him

a little more sympathetic

to the plight of people who

did not come from wealth or privilege.

A'

Pehle also thinks that the United States

is a force of good for the world.

And a force of good for mankind.

A'

And that comes through

a lot of his decisions.

A'

The United States cannot be isolationist,

that we are part of a global community

and that we need to treat everyone

as a fellow citizen of the world.

Narrator: On July 28, 1943,

the ambassador of the Polish government-in-exile

had brought a man named Jan Karski

to the White House for a meeting with President Roosevelt.

Karski was a Catholic courier for the Polish underground

who had survived Gestapo torture,

managed to smuggle himself in and out of

the Warsaw Ghetto and a transit camp

that exported Jews to the killing center at Belzec.

Roosevelt questioned him closely about

the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Narrator: Before he left, Karski asked FDR

what message he had for the Polish people.

"You will tell them that we will win this war," Roosevelt said.

"You will tell them that the guilty will be punished.

"Justice and freedom will prevail.

"You will tell your nation that they have

a friend in this house."

A'

FDR also tells Karski

to meet with Felix Frankfurter,

who's on the Supreme Court at the time.

Frankfurter is Jewish. Karski tells Frankfurter

what he's seen in Warsaw and other parts of Occupied Poland.

A'

Lipstadt: The Soviets bring a group of reporters to Babi Yar,

where there's been one of the early mass killings of Jews.

And they're walked through by two people

who the Soviets say are survivors of this massacre.

And they walk them through the fields

where these killings have taken place,

and there are bits of bones and broken eyeglasses and teeth

and all sorts of things that... That indicate what has happened.

A'

There were American reporters who were present

in this tour of Babi Yar,

and one of them wrote a report

that was so riddled with doubts...

A'

So riddled with questions.

A'

If I were a person reading that

and I harbored the least bit of skepticism

about the veracity of what was going on,

I could dismiss this as war propaganda, as atrocity stories.

And atrocity stories are a shorthand for fake news.

I'm sitting at home in Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis, New York,

wherever it might be, and I'm reading those kind of reports,

I'm saying, "This can't be true.

This can't be true."

A'

Narrator: In early October 1943,

Heinrich Himmler addressed a meeting of his SS commanders.

By then, more than 4,500,000 Jews had been murdered.

[Himmler speaking German]

Narrator: Himmler was doing all he could

to keep that chapter from being written.

He ordered his men to dismantle and disguise

the sites of the killing centers at Sobibor,

Belzec, and Treblinka,

where more than one and a half million human beings

had been killed, and he insisted that

prisoners be forced to dig up the dead,

burn their corpses, and grind their bones to powder.

Then he had the prisoners who'd done the ghastly work shot

so that no one would ever tell what they had seen or done.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front,

special "Exhumation Squads" were now retreating

ahead of the advancing Red Army,

seeing to it that the mass graves

of the people whom the Einsatzgruppen

and their accomplices had murdered

back in 1941 and 1942

were emptied as well.

But in Nazi-occupied Poland, two killing centers

continued their daily, deadly work...

Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau...

While one that had been closed,

Chelmno, took it up again.

Mendelsohn: Interviewing survivors who could give

firsthand accounts, you know,

people who were young adults when this happened.

You know, you hear things that,

you... you think you've heard it all,

and you haven't heard it all.

Trust me. There are... there's no bottom,

as one of my survivors said,

to the things that people will do to one another.

The structures of what we think of as our civilized lives,

they fall apart very easily.

Surprisingly easily.

A'

Woman: I left behind me a few photos of my nearest ones

in the hope that somebody would find them

while digging and searching in the earth,

and that this person would be so kind as to transmit them

to one of my relatives or friends in America or Palestine,

if there will still be any of them left.

A'

My name is Frieda Niselevitch, born in Vaiguva.

A'

A'

Narrator: Two days after Himmler's secret speech

and 3 days before '(om Nppur,

the Jewish Day of Atonement,

Peter Bergson arranged for 400 mostly orthodox rabbis

to march to the Capitol.

For fear of encouraging antisemitism,

FDR's chief speech writer Sam Rosenman

and most of the handful of Jewish members of Congress

had opposed their coming.

The rabbis sang the "Star-Spangled Banner,"

recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead,

and met with Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

A'

Man: We pray an appeal to the Lord, blessed be he,

that our most gracious President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

consider and recognize this momentous hour of history

and the responsibility which the Divine Presence

has laid upon him, that he may save

the remnant of the people of the Book,

the people of Israel.

And we pray that the Lord may aid us

to gain complete and speedy victory

on all fronts against our enemies

and that we may be blessed with everlasting peace.

A'

Narrator: The president did not see the rabbis.

But they had an impact nonetheless.

Several senators and congressmen introduced a resolution

calling for a new commission tasked with somehow

saving "the surviving Jewish people of Europe."

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long

testified against it for 4 hours behind closed doors.

There was no need for such a commission, he said,

since the State Department had welcomed

580,000 "refugees" to America since 1933.

It was not true. The real refugee number

was one-third of that.

Lipstadt: Breckinridge Long, in his testimony,

clearly misrepresents, some would say lies,

but the best you can say is it's

a total misrepresentation of America's record.

He was crazed about preventing

any refugees from coming here.

Narrator: The resolution stalled in the House.

And when Long's testimony became public

a couple of weeks later,

Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler

called for his immediate resignation.

A'

Man as Celler: The tempest-tossed get little comfort

from men like Breckinridge Long.

If men of his temperament and philosophy

continue in control of immigration administration,

we may as well take down that plaque

from the Statue of Liberty and black out

the "lamp beside the golden door."

A'

Narrator: At the end of 1943,

Gerhart Riegner was still waiting for

the all-important license he needed

to help Jews in Romania and France,

which John Pehle had approved 5 months earlier.

Breckinridge Long and his staff continued to stall,

raising every possible potential barrier,

even though the president himself

was on record favoring it.

Pehle: The people who were handling visa matters,

and the policy of the State Department,

seemed to be such that instead of

facilitating the entry of refugees,

obstructions were thrown in the way.

It's as simple as that.

Narrator: Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Was the president's close friend and upstate neighbor,

as well as the only Jewish member of his cabinet.

All through the Hitler years, he had been careful

never to seem to be seeking

special treatment for his fellow Jews.

But this was too much.

He confronted Long and the Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

The license was finally issued,

but in the course of investigating

the reason for the lengthy delay,

Morgenthau's staff discovered that the State Department

had deliberately suppressed Riegner's

reports from Switzerland about the extermination of the Jews.

A'

Pehle: People in the State Department were saying,

"Don't send any more messages over

about what's happening to the Jews."

Erbelding: The State Department has been

deliberately obstructionist,

they have been delaying relief money

that could go to Jews in occupied Europe,

and lying about it, so that people would stop rallying,

they'd stop protesting, and they'd stop

asking the government to do more.

A'

Narrator: Morgenthau's outraged aides wrote an internal report

setting forth the evidence of the State Department's deceit.

A'

Man: It appears that certain responsible officials

of this government were so fearful that

this government might act to save the Jews of Europe

if the gruesome facts relating to Hitler's plans

to exterminate them became known,

that they attempted to suppress the facts.

A'

We leave it for your judgment whether this action

made such officials the accomplices of Hitler in this program

and whether or not these officials are not

war criminals in every sense of the term.

A'

Narrator: Treasury staff titled the document

"Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence

of this Government in the Murder of the Jews"...

A'

But Morgenthau, who understood

his boss better than most,

toned down the accusatory rhetoric

and renamed it simply

"Personal Report to the President."

A'

M0rgenthau's own father, who had been the ambassador

to what was then the Ottoman Empire

between 1915 and 1916,

had tried unsuccessfully to persuade

President Woodrow Wilson

to intervene on behalf of hundreds of thousands of

Armenian civilians who were being

systematically massacred by Ottoman troops.

A'

He had called it "race murder."

A'

Erbelding: Henry, Jr., went to Turkey,

went to Constantinople, now Istanbul,

to see his father as all of these events were unfolding.

He points to that directly to Roosevelt.

He says, "You remember what my father saw.

"You remember what I saw in Armenia.

We can't let this happen again."

To be the Secretary of the Treasury

and to be in a position to actually point his friend

to the past and to say,

"We have the chance to do it better this time."

A'

Narrator: After a meeting with

Morgenthau and Pehle,

Roosevelt issued an executive order on January 22nd, 1944,

establishing the War Refugee Board...

The only government agency created by any of the Allies

specifically to do what it could

for the Jews still under Nazi threat.

A'

Treasury was in charge

and John Pehle was made director,

determined to perform what he called

"a simple life-saving job."

A'

Pehle: The most important thing

about the War Refugee Board

was that it dramatically changed

the policy of the United States, overnight.

A'

Erbelding: 5 million Jews have already been killed in Europe.

But there are millions who are still there,

who are in hiding, who are in concentration camps,

who are still, they think, in relative safety,

who could get out, could be rescued, could cross borders,

could be kept alive long enough to be liberated.

A'

Narrator: The work undertaken by the Board's

representatives in Europe

was improvisational and clandestine.

Official U.S. policy forbade paying bribes.

Pehle's men paid little attention.

A'

Erbelding: The first thing that the War Refugee Board

does once it's created is to

streamline the license process,

meaning humanitarian aid organizations

can send money into Europe much easier.

By the end of the war, the War Refugee Board

has approved about $11 million in humanitarian aid

to go into Nazi Europe.

That money was used to buy guns for the underground;

it was used to pay off border guards.

A'

The plight of Jews varied,

depending on where you were in Europe.

If you were in France, you might be able to escape

to the border in Spain or Switzerland.

And, so, the United States puts pressure on

border guards in Spain and Switzerland.

A'

If you were in Romania or Bulgaria,

you might be able to board a ship

and make it to Turkey, and then by train to Palestine.

So, the War Refugee Board works with governments

to make that process easier.

A'

And if you're in Poland, you may need

food packages or documents

that would allow you to hide,

so, the War Refugee Board tries to help with that.

And, so, they had a whole host of different plans

that had real impact on the lives of the people

who managed to survive.

A'

Narrator: Much of the Board's most effective work

was focused on Hungary, which in early 1944

was still home to some 800,000 Jews,

the largest remaining population in Europe.

Its Regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy,

had been a Nazi ally since 1941,

when his troops joined the German invasion

of the Soviet Union.

[Gunfire, explosions]

But most of the Hungarian army

had been destroyed at Stalingrad.

Because Nazi defeat now seemed inevitable,

Horthy began secretly exploring whether

a separate peace with the Allies might be possible.

When Hitler got word of it,

he sent in troops to occupy the country

and insisted that Horthy cooperate in

ridding Hungary of its Jewish population.

A'

Between May and July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews

would be rounded up and deported.

A'

338,000 of them were killed immediately at Auschwitz...

So many that the 4 crematoria were not enough

and fire pits had to be dug and constantly tended

to dispose of all the corpses.

A'

Members of the Polish underground managed to smuggle

a camera into Auschwitz so that 5 courageous inmates

could document what was happening to

the Hungarians and other prisoners.

[Camera's shutter clicks] While 4 men kept watch,

a fifth snapped 4 pictures from the hip,

not daring to take the time to focus. [Camera's shutter clicks]

The film was smuggled out of the camp

inside a tube of toothpaste. [Camera's shutter clicks]

They remain the only photographs

of the killing process at Auschwitz.

[Camera's shutter clicks] ♪

Meanwhile, in Hungary, the War Refugee Board

helped orchestrate a massive international series of

threats and condemnations aimed at persuading Horthy

to stop cooperating in the killing.

Then, on July 2nd, U.S. bombers

hit oil refineries on the outskirts of Budapest

and dropped leaflets on the city

promising punishment for perpetrators.

5 days later, Horthy called a halt to the deportations.

Hungary's provinces had been emptied of Jews,

but some 230,000 still survived in Budapest itself,

subject to persecution, fearful that

the transports might resume at any time.

To protect them... and to glean firsthand accounts

of what was happening in Hungary...

The War Refugee Board called upon neutral nations,

including Switzerland, Portugal, and Sweden,

to expand their diplomatic presence in the country.

Their diplomats in Budapest began issuing so-called

"protective documents" to desperate Jews...

Sheets of paper emblazoned with coats of arms

and peppered with official-looking stamps,

intended to persuade Hungarian police and German officials

that the bearer was under international protection.

Man: It's no coincidence that the War Refugee Board

ends up making a difference in Hungary

because that's a, that's a country

which is a sovereign state, which still has diplomats,

where a diplomat can be sent in,

with briefcases full of money,

and issue documents and make a difference.

A'

Narrator: On July 9th, a 31-year-old Swedish businessman

named Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest

to accelerate that process.

Appointed a Swedish attache

but recruited and partially financed

by the War Refugee Board,

he saw his mission as carrying out

an "American program."

He established hospitals, nurseries, and a soup kitchen,

issued thousands of protective papers,

and rented 32 "safe-houses"

for those who carried them.

A'

Diplomats from other neutral countries

also participated in rescue operations,

most notably the Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz.

A'

Soon, some 37,000 Jews were living under

Swedish and Swiss protection

in what was called the "international ghetto."

A'

When Hitler replaced the Horthy government

with more ardent fascists,

who resumed the deportation of Jews,

Wallenberg intervened as often as he could

to win the release of those with

protective or forged papers.

A'

Of the nearly 150,000 Jews in Budapest

who would survive the war,

some 120,000 are thought to have

owed their lives to Raoul Wallenberg

and his fellow diplomats from neutral nations.

A'

It is impossible to tally

how many tens of thousands of lives

the War Refugee Board saved,

directly or indirectly.

A'

Erbelding: These were Americans

who were really trying to do good.

A'

And we have forgotten them, in part,

because we have this longer narrative and trajectory

in our memory of the United States not doing enough,

being indifferent, being deceitful,

not trying to save people.

There is a group of people in the U.S. government

who were trying and who saved tens of thousands of lives

by the end of World War ll.

A'

That is not insignificant.

A'

[Static]

Man on radio: This is the BBC Home service.

Communique number one, issued by

supreme headquarters allied expeditionary force.

[Static]

Dwight D. Eisenhower: People of western Europe,

a landing was made this morning

on the coast of France by troops of

the allied expeditionary force.

This landing is part of the concerted United Nations plan

for the liberation of Europe...

made in conjunction with our great Russian allies.

I have this message for all of you.

[Gunfire]

Although the initial assault may not have been

made in your own country,

the hour of your liberation is approaching.

Man: This concludes the broadcast from

supreme headquarters allied...

Girl as Anne Frank: Tuesday, 6 June, 1944.

"This is D-Day," the BBC announced at 12.

"This is the day." The invasion has begun!

A'

The best part about the invasion is that

I have the feeling that friends are on their way.

Those awful Germans have oppressed and threatened us

for so long that the thought of friends and salvation

means everything to us!

Narrator: Within 24 hours, the Allies had torn

a 45-mile gap in Hitler's Atlantic Wall in Normandy.

A'

More than 150,000 men were already ashore in France,

and more men and more equipment and supplies

were coming ashore every day.

Stern: And then I was suddenly on French soil.

And a voice from a few hundred yards away,

one of my buddies, was shouting,

"Stern, get the hell over here.

"We've got too many prisoners

and we've got to have you."

Narrator: Guy Stern, now a staff sergeant,

came ashore on D-Day plus three.

He was part of a special Army intelligence unit

that included many Jewish refugees trained

to interrogate enemy soldiers as they surrendered.

Stern: My own personal incentive was

if I help shorten the war,

let's say by an hour, I have a chance.

If my family somehow escaped

the same perils as the others,

I would be there still in the nick of time

to be their savior.

[Rumbling]

Narrator: Over the next 3 months,

nearly 50,000 Americans

would die in the struggle to liberate

western Europe from the Nazis.

[Explosion]

As the Allies fought their way inland,

Guy Stern and his comrades

would cross-examine hundreds of prisoners,

gleaning vital information about troop movements

and the location of industrial targets.

And they interrogated a Nazi doctor

who proudly boasted that he had overseen the killing

of thousands of disabled people

Hitler had called "unworthy of life."

Meanwhile, the Red Army,

which had suffered millions of casualties,

was moving westward into Poland.

[Film reel clicking]

As it did, it came upon the death camp at Majdanek,

where 18,000 Jews had been murdered in a single day in 1943

in an operation the SS called the "Harvest Festival."

The spectacle of hundreds of starving prisoners of war

the Germans had abandoned and the stark evidence

of the industrial scope of the Nazi slaughter

offered Allied correspondents

their first look at a German killing center.

Lipstadt: When Majdanek is liberated,

American reporters are there,

and they send back reports that are devoid of the doubts

that were shown when Babi Yar

was liberated a few months earlier.

Americans are beginning to get the picture.

Man: I am now prepared to believe any story

of German atrocities,

no matter how savage, cruel, and depraved.

William H. Lawrence.

A'

Man on newsreel: 20,000 wounded arriving in New York.

And there it is, the good old USA...

Narrator: On August 3, 1944, a 29-ship Navy convoy

steamed into New York harbor.

The troop transport "Henry Gibbins"

carried wounded soldiers and sailors,

but also aboard were 982 civilian refugees

belonging to 18 countries,

chosen from among thousands of refugees

who had managed to reach Allied territory in Italy.

Their destination was Fort Ontario, New York.

Ray Morgan: Under the supervision of the War Relocation Authority,

this train is bearing 982 refugees

from Hitler's total war.

Admitted to the United States...

Narrator: The rationale for their arrival had originated

with John Pehle and the War Refugee Board,

who proposed a trial program

going outside the quota system

to bring refugees to camps in the U.S.

until the war was over and they could return home.

A'

The White House commissioned a Gallup Poll

that showed 70% of Americans now supported the idea

of sheltering refugees from Europe temporarily.

918 of the refugees were Jewish.

The rest belonged to various Christian denominations,

included so that the public would not think

this was exclusively "a Jewish refugee project."

A'

To some refugees, it seemed all-too-reminiscent

of the concentration camps they had escaped...

Run-down barracks walled-in by chain-link fences

topped with barbed wire.

But most felt relief and gratitude.

"This is paradise," one said.

Another exulted that she now had "a villa on Lake Ontario."

"This is the first time I have been happy in 11 years,"

said a third.

A few local citizens resented the foreigners,

but most townspeople proved friendly.

Soon, they were passing food and milk, dolls,

and even bicycles over the barbed wire.

Refugee children were enrolled in public school,

the Boy Scouts, and the Brownies.

Their parents were given day-passes,

but forbidden to work outside the compound

so that they would not compete for American jobs.

The First Lady and Henry Morgenthau's wife visited the refugees.

Mrs. Roosevelt was moved by the "character"

which had brought them through so much, she said,

and privately thought it "perfectly silly"

that they were required to return home one day.

And after the war, she would be instrumental in seeing to it

that all who wished to remain in the United States

were allowed to do so.

But for the rest of the war,

no more refugees outside the limited quotas

would be offered even temporary shelter in the United States.

A'

Girl as Anne Frank: I still believe, in spite of everything,

that people are truly good at heart.

It is utterly impossible for me to build my life

on a foundation of chaos, suffering, and death.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness.

I hear the approaching thunder

that one day will destroy us, too.

A'

I feel the suffering of millions.

And yet, when I look up at the sky,

I somehow feel that everything will change for the better,

that this cruelty too will end,

that peace and tranquility will return once more.

In the meantime, I must hold onto my ideals.

Perhaps the day will come

when I'll be able to realize them.

A'

Narrator: The Frank family had managed to evade the Germans

in Amsterdam for two years and one month.

But on August 4, 1944, a Nazi officer

and several Dutch policemen arrested them

and the other residents of their secret annex.

They were sent to Westerbork,

a holding camp in the Netherlands for Jews

awaiting deportation to the East.

There, they were housed in Barrack 67

in the punishment block,

reserved for those who had been caught hiding.

Their heads shaved, with too little to eat,

they were put to work turning parts of downed Allied aircraft

into useful scrap.

Trains had been leaving the camp

for occupied Poland every Tuesday.

The Frank family was forced to board theirs

on September 3, 1944,

along with 1,015 other people.

A'

Theirs would be the last train from Westerbork.

A'

It would take them 3 days and two nights

to reach their destination...

Auschwitz.

A'

The Geiringer family had been rounded up

earlier by the Gestapo

and deported to Auschwitz as well.

Geiringer: The Nazis never told you anything.

So we had no idea where we were going,

what was going to happen to us.

And there were some work camps,

but we were lucky we were sent to Auschwitz

and not to Treblinka, for instance,

where the whole transport, no selection,

whole transport went into the gas chambers.

So then you had no chance, whatsoever.

At least, we had a chance.

A'

But the first terrible thing was

at arrival, men and women, to different sides.

That was the first command.

And you can imagine what scene that was

because people thought,

and it did happen, of course, many times,

that people never, ever saw each other.

So my mother and father embraced

and Heinz and my mother and my father and me.

And my father then did something

which I remember very clearly.

He took me by the hands and he said, "Evertje"...

That's a Dutch name for Eve,

"Evertje, God will protect you."

And that was amaz... | was amazed at that

because he was not really religious.

But, at that moment, he realized...

nobody else could do it.

But, if there is a God, he should... will look after me.

A'

Yeah. And, then, the men walked away.

My mother gave me this hat and coat.

And I didn't want to wear it. It was very hot.

But she said, "Well, perhaps, it might come in useful later."

And, then, the camp doctor appeared,

youngish man, very smart

with a little stick like a conductor.

And he looked you over, just a fraction of a second,

and he conducted you either right or left.

And because this rim of this hat was big,

he didn't see how young I was.

So that was the first miracle.

They told us with laughing

that the family you have been separated

were taken to a shower,

but it wasn't, of course, a shower, it was gas.

And within 15 minutes, they were all killed.

And then, everything was taken away.

Then we were registered.

We were all tattooed.

We were told, "You are not a human being.

"You're just like cattle, who gets... get a number.

"If ever we need you,

you're going to be called out by your number."

All of our hair was shaved and naked,

and then they told us,

"Now it's your turn to go in the shower."

Of course, we didn't want to go, but we were pushed into it.

But it was an actual shower.

We were herded into our barracks,

which were low, wooden barracks

with... and a sort of a chimney in the middle.

And both sides were bunks, 3 high, like cages.

A'

They told us, "That's where you will spend your night,

as long as you are alive."

A'

Narrator: In late October, John Pehle

received another horrific report from Switzerland.

It contained firsthand testimony from 3 men

who had managed to escape from Auschwitz

and provided meticulous details of what they had seen there.

Pehle: The Board seized upon this.

Now we had the eyewitness accounts.

A'

Narrator: Pehle said the report "ought to be required reading

for the people of the United States."

Erbelding: The release of the Auschwitz Report

is headline news throughout the country.

A'

These news reports explaining to the American people

what Auschwitz was and what happened there

are followed up by op-eds, by columns

about Auschwitz and what America has to do

in the wake of all of this information.

Lipstadt: And the fact that it's released

by the War Refugee Board.

It's not being released by a Jewish organization.

It's not being released, "Rabbi Stephen Wise says."

It's coming from a governmental source.

It's much harder to dismiss it.

A'

Greene: There's a poll in late 1944,

and the question is asked,

"Do you believe the Germans are murdering Jews

in concentration camps?"

It runs in the "Washington Post."

76% of Americans by that time believe that it's happening,

but then they're asked the numbers,

"How many Jews do you think have been killed?"

And Americans cannot grasp the scale

and the scope of the crime.

It's only one in 5 Americans befieve

that it's more than a million Jews who have been murdered.

And, by that point, it's more than 5 million.

A'

Geiringer: Within a day, we were already covered in lice.

Bedbugs were kind of like a nail, thumbnail,

little animals with... had legs,

and they'd cling to your skin and suck your blood.

And it became very infected and itchy and so on.

Once a week, we had a shower that was a delousing,

and you never knew was it gassing or a shower.

Nobody had any periods.

It was a blessing 'cause we couldn't cope with that.

I mean, the toilets were just cement sinks

with holes in the middle.

And you had to sit where, usually,

everything was already filthy from diarrhea.

And if you didn't sit,

because you tried to not sit on it,

you were beaten up to sit in that.

And the other thing was when you went to work outside, march,

if you wanted to escape,

there was no chance to escape.

The dogs were there, dogs tore you apart,

killed you, we saw that.

You were caught when you went out of your line,

and then you were taken back to the camp

and there... there was a camp center, a square sort of.

Each bit of the camp had that.

And then they erected gallows,

and we had to watch, we were all called,

and we had to watch this be...

Person being hanged there, slowly, you know,

with the tongue coming out of them.

Of course, you had to watch,

but, of course, we closed our eyes.

But even they'd check that you look.

A'

You know, there were people who just couldn't

tolerate it any longer

and they wanted to die.

And you couldn't even commit suicide, you know?

You had no string or... or you had no pills or anything.

You know? So the only thing was to throw yourself

against electrified barbed-wire,

and it was strong currents.

And then, we heard terrible screams,

and you saw people burning on this wire

because you're stuck on it, and you went up in flames.

A'

Narrator: Even before the report about Auschwitz was published,

Jewish organizations, hoping to save

the thousands of Hungarians still being sent there,

had called for the Allies to bomb the railroad tracks

leading to the camp,

and then for the bombing of Auschwitz itself.

Their appeal eventually reached the War Refugee Board.

Pehle: As a non-military people,

we were hesitant to press the War Department

to send bombers, which would otherwise be used

to bomb German cities, for this purpose.

We were concerned about the reaction

of the American people...

[Gunshot]

If troops died in this sort of expedition.

We went into this matter further and with much soul searching,

because we were very concerned

that going in we would kill a number of Jews.

A'

Narrator: But after reading The Auschwitz Report,

Pehle changed his mind.

Pehle: The time came where we felt

that the situation was so desperate

that we should ask the War Department to do it.

And we did.

And not only should the rail lines be bombed,

but the crematoria should be bombed, too.

We became capable of doing it

because Allied troops had advanced far enough

up the Italian boot

that we had acquired an old Italian airbase

at a place called Foggia.

And if you flew northeast from Foggia,

you could get a plane to Auschwitz and back

on a single tank of gas.

Narrator: But the Allies had already learned

that railroad tracks could easily be repaired overnight,

that rail traffic could only be halted permanently

by waves of airplanes hitting them day after day.

In the repeated raids that would have been required

to ensure the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria,

hundreds, if not thousands,

of the people imprisoned in the camps

would likely have been killed or wounded.

And Allied aircraft were otherwise engaged...

first in blasting a way forward for the Allied troops

through the Normandy hedgerows,

then destroying bridges to trap the retreating Germans

and taking out the fuel and armament plants

that powered the Nazi war machine,

all military objectives aimed at bringing about

the quickest possible end to the war.

Man: 3 planes, 9 o'clock, coming around.

Keep your eye on them, boys.

Narrator: More than 52,000 American airmen were killed

trying to achieve those Allied objectives.

[Gunfire]

Man 2: We have an engine on fire.

[Gunfire]

Man: Pull her up!

A'

Hayes: If it had become known in the American public in 1944

that planes and pilots

and crews had been lost

in bombing what was a non-military target,

that would have not been without repercussions.

Narrator: The U.S. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy

dismissed the idea of bombing Auschwitz as "impracticable."

The mission, he wrote, "would have had a most uncertain,

if not dangerous effect."

A'

Greene: The United States is bombing German munitions areas

4, 5 miles from Auschwitz.

A'

Would they have hit their target?

That's... that... that's another question.

Narrator: So-called "precision bombing"

during World War ll was spectacularly imprecise.

One study showed that just one bomber out of 5

hit within 5 miles of its intended target.

When Allied bombs intended for the l.G. Farben fuel

and rubber plant several miles away

accidentally hit inside Auschwitz, killing dozens,

one man, a Dutch physician,

testified to the "fear and agony"

he and his fellow prisoners had felt.

But others, including the future writer Elie Wiesel,

later remembered having been willing to be bombed

if it meant an end to the killing.

No contemporaneous evidence exists that FDR himself

was ever consulted about bombing Auschwitz,

but many years later, John McCloy claimed

he had spoken with him,

and that the president had rejected the idea out of hand.

"They'll only move it down the road a little way,"

he said he remembered the president saying.

"L won't have anything to do with it.

"We'll be accused of participating

in this horrible business."

A'

Lipstadt: I think they should have,

not because it would have rescued

a major portion of the 6 million,

but as a statement, as a message to the Germans,

"We know what you are doing.

"We cannot abide what you are doing.

This is our response to what you are doing."

Yes, it could have done that.

Erbelding: I don't think there's a right answer

in whether we should have bombed Auschwitz.

I don't think there's a right answer

because I don't think there's a way in which we look back

and think that we did the right thing.

I think it is one of those tragic questions

in which we are either the people who knew

that there was a concentration camp there

and did not try to bomb it,

or we knew there was a concentration camp there

and we bombed it.

We bombed prisoners,

we bombed people who might have otherwise survived.

And that is the tragic question of this is,

no matter what we did, I think we'd look back

and... and wonder what happened...

What would have happened had we done the other thing.

Narrator: In mid-January 1945,

the prisoners at Birkenau and Auschwitz

had begun to hear distant Russian artillery coming closer,

and then the sound of German vehicles

beginning to rumble away.

The last gassing of 1,700 Jews

had taken place at the end of October 1944.

Afterwards, the SS blew up and bulldozed all but one

of the gas chambers and crematoria,

burned records, and began marching prisoners on foot

through the snow back toward Germany.

Between 700,000 and 800,000 survivors from Auschwitz

and scores of other abandoned camps

were now staggering along the roads

or packed into open coal cars,

retreating ahead of the Soviets.

Around a quarter of a million would die

between the first of the year and the war's end,

exhausted or frozen,

shot or burned alive by their German guards.

Some 7,000 people remained at Auschwitz,

too frail to leave the camp.

When the marches started, Eva Geiringer's mother Fritzi

was too weak and ill to move.

Eva crawled into her mother's bunk,

and they huddled together against the cold.

Geiringer: Most people couldn't even leave their bunks anymore.

They said, "Everybody out. We are going to march.

"If you are staying, we are going to

lock up the barracks and burn everything down."

And my mother was so weak, and it was so cold.

And I said, "Let's just stay."

We fell asleep.

And they must have called out again, "Out,"

and we didn't hear that.

A'

When we woke up, there was no shouting, no dogs.

It was very, very empty.

And then I see out of the gate

a huge creature with icicles hanging down his face

and his... and all fur,

and from the distance, we thought it was a bear.

But it wasn't.

It was a Russian scout to investigate

if the army should fight or if they can just advance.

And he came in and looked at us,

and he said, well, he has to go back to report.

A'

And so, I decided I would go to the men's camp

to try to find my father and brother.

A'

It was very, very cold.

And the fighting was going on around us.

And I heard bullets going over.

It took me about 6 hours.

[Gunshots]

And I didn't really know where to go.

But I found it, eventually.

And I found two people who I had known in Amsterdam.

And one was... looked very familiar, and I said,

"I think... I think you... you look... I know you,"

but he looked very gaunt and ashen.

And it was Otto Frank.

Narrator: Barely able to walk after a fearful beating,

Otto Frank, too, had been left behind.

Nearly 6 feet tall, he now weighed just 114 pounds.

Geiringer: And the first question, of course,

"Have you seen my girls and my wife?"

And I hadn't seen them,

because, you know, they're all the different camps.

But he had seen my father and brother.

So, at that time, I thought,

"Oh, good. Well, I'm sure they'll be alive."

A'

A'

A'

Narrator: Otto Frank would later write

his mother in Switzerland

to tell her that he had survived.

A'

Man as Frank: Where Edith and the children are, I do not know.

We have been apart since September, 1944.

I merely heard that they had been transported to Germany.

One has to be hopeful to see them back well and healthy.

A'

Narrator: Frank would eventually learn

that he had been misinformed.

His wife had not been sent to Germany.

Instead, she had died at Birkenau,

just 3 weeks before the Soviet Army came.

To the end, Edith had kept bits of bread beneath her blanket

in case she somehow saw her husband and daughters again.

The Soviets transported Otto Frank and Eva Geiringer

and her mother by truck and train

to Odessa on the Black Sea.

Eva's brother and father were still missing.

The refugees were lodged in a crumbling palace

overlooking the beach

and told they would have to stay there until the war ended.

"Everybody is impatient,

in spite of daily chocolate and cigarettes,"

Frank wrote in his diary.

They just wanted to go home.

A'

As Allied armies converged on Germany in the spring of 1945,

one by one, they came upon the concentration camps

that the Reich had tried to keep secret.

The Soviets, driving westward,

had already over-run all 6 of the German killing centers

where more than 3 million human beings had been murdered...

Auschwitz, Belzec,

Majdanek, Sobibor,

Treblinka, Chelmno.

British and Canadian troops were about to capture

Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.

A'

And in early April,

soldiers of the U.S. 4th Armored Division

searching for a supposed German headquarters,

came upon Ohrdruf,

one of at least 130 satellite camps

surrounding a far larger one... Buchenwald.

A'

These camps inside Germany itself were not officially killing centers

like those in occupied Poland,

but they were places to which people were sent to die

after untold hours of forced labor, starvation,

exhaustion, disease, and hopelessness.

A'

Among the first Americans to enter Buchenwald

was an Army private, Benjamin Ferencz,

who had been assigned to a new unit

tasked with investigating German war crimes.

Ferencz: I jumped into my Jeep. I raced there.

I found the American tank officer

who had liberated the camp, had gotten there first.

I said, "I'm out here on orders

"carrying out a policy of the United States Government.

"L need 10 men, immediately, to surround the schreibstube,

the office where the records are kept."

The crematoria were going; smoke in the air,

the smell of burning bodies in the air.

In front of the crematoria, stacks of bones.

They were human beings.

And they were so thin that they just looked like bones.

And they were stacked up in front of the crematoria,

waiting to be burned.

A'

That was my introduction to Hitler's plan in action.

A'

I thought to myself, "It can't be real."

And it was unbelievable.

But, it was true, and I knew, of course, it was true.

A'

Narrator: Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower

flew in to see for himself.

A'

When a young GI nervously laughed,

Eisenhower glared at him,

"Still having trouble hating them?" he asked.

"We are told that the American soldier

does not know what he is fighting for," he said.

"Now at least he will know what he is fighting against."

A'

Lipstadt: When Eisenhower sees this,

he orders that a congressional delegation be brought there,

and that American editors be brought there.

And they are shocked.

And they describe in great detail what they see.

A'

I think it speaks to the lingering doubts

that this could be real.

A'

And it also speaks to

an inability to put your head around this.

And I don't say that critically.

I say that this is something that beggars the imagination.

This was a murder that was beyond belief.

And it takes that personal confrontation with the evidence,

with the remnants, for them to grasp that.

Narrator: To make sure Americans understood

the depths of Nazi depravity

and to make sure future generations

could never deny what had happened,

Eisenhower insisted that military personnel in the area

come and see for themselves what the Nazis had done.

Stern: We were actually stationed in Weimar,

and we had heard of the Buchenwald Camp.

I lagged behind Sergeant Hadley,

who was probably one of the toughest MP soldier

I had ever encountered...

A'

And people told me their stories.

But it was a skeleton you were talking to.

I looked at them, and I started...

I was a hardened soldier by then,

but I couldn't help myself.

So, I was crying.

I looked around and Sergeant Hadley,

from a Protestant family in Ohio,

he was bawling like a kid, as I was.

You couldn't take it.

A'

But they could.

The perpetrators who could do such a thing,

and the victims who had to endure it.

A'

Narrator: American troops would liberate Nordhausen,

Flossenberg, Mauthausen, and Dachau,

the very first of Hitler's concentration camps.

A'

A GI named Joseph A. Wyant

used his off-duty time to visit there,

and then wrote home to his father.

A'

Man as Wyant: This particular crime has been uncovered, Pop,

but a worse crime seems to me

to be the spreading of the thought

that leads to this type of thing.

A'

It has happened in mass proportions here in Germany,

but who knows how far the ideas have spread

or where else it may break out?

A'

I tell you, Pop, even more important

than the punishment of the criminals here

is the stamping out of their philosophy.

As I wrote you once before,

this is not a war between nations,

but humanity's struggle for the right to exist.

A'

If you see fit,

I wish you would show any of your friends this letter.

Your devoted son, Joe.

[Man chanting "Ki Mitzion" in Hebrew]

[All singing in Hebrew]

Eichhorn: Today, I come to you in a dual capacity...

As a soldier in the American army

and as a representative of the Jewish community of America.

As an American soldier,

I say to you that we are proud,

very proud to be here,

to know that we have had a share in the destruction

of the most cruel tyranny of all time.

As an American soldier,

I say to you that we are very, very proud

to be with you as comrades in arms,

to greet you, and to salute you

who have been the bravest of the brave.

Narrator: On April 12, the same day

that Eisenhower had toured Ohrdruf,

President Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia

with victory in the war,

for which he'd tried to prepare his countrymen,

still weeks away.

On May 8, 1945, the Germans finally surrendered.

Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker.

A'

Guy Stern was still in Germany.

Before going back to America, he returned to his hometown

to try to find out what happened to his family.

A'

Stern: I went to Hildesheim.

I first was overwhelmed by the ruins of many of the things

that I had looked at with my mother.

A'

This history was in rubbles.

A'

Narrator: His mother and father, his brother and sister

had been deported from the Warsaw Ghetto,

and Guy never heard from them again.

A'

Otto Frank and Eva and Fritzi Geiringer

were still in Odessa

when word came that the war in Europe was over.

Eva remembered that at the news

"the grounds of the palace broke out

"in unrestrained jubilation, dancing, singing,

laughing, and drunken declarations of love."

A'

A few days later, Eva, her mother,

and Otto Frank boarded a transport ship

bound for Marseille.

Eva's mother burst into tears

at the sight of the white tablecloths

and neatly laid-out silverware in the dining room.

The captain promised his passengers

that they needn't hoard food in their cabins;

they would have plenty to eat.

From Marseille, they traveled to Amsterdam

where they hoped to take up the lives they'd led

before the Gestapo came for them.

A'

That would prove impossible.

Geiringer: My mother got a letter from the Red Cross,

very cool.

"Your husband Erich Geiringer, with the birthdate,

"and your son Heinz, as well, with the date of his birth,

"died in Mauthausen several days before

the American Army came to liberate that camp."

A'

That was for us, and for me, the last straw

because I always say, I have survived

because I thought life will go back, eventually,

how it used to be.

But when I realized that can never, ever happen again,

I became very, very depressed.

That was harder than the camp,

because, in the camp, I had a purpose, to survive.

But then I thought, I don't really want to live anymore.

That was really, really hard for me to accept that.

Even till this day, I haven't really accepted it,

especially because my father was such a strong character

altogether, mentally and physically.

But I think, probably, Heinz died before him.

And that must have been for him terrible,

perhaps to see him die.

He thought his wife is dead.

He probably didn't think I could have survived.

And I don't think he wanted to live on his own.

I think he just gave up.

A'

Narrator: On July 18, 1945, Otto Frank finally discovered

what had happened to his daughters.

Both had still been alive when he, Eva,

and Fritzi Geiringer were liberated from Auschwitz.

But typhus had swept Bergen-Belsen,

the camp in northern Germany where they'd been sent.

A'

Both Margot and Anne are thought to have died in February,

two months before the camp was liberated.

Geiringer: Otto came to us one day.

He looked like a ghost.

And after he left, my mother then said,

"Well, we have at least each other,

but this poor man has nobody."

He was 56 or 57 at that time.

You know, what has he got to live for?

A'

Narrator: One of the Dutch Gentiles

who had hidden the Franks had kept Anne's diary,

planning to give it back to her when she returned.

Instead, she gave it to Anne's grieving father.

He could not bear to read more than a few pages at a time.

A'

Geiringer: It took him 3 weeks to read it.

He was so moved by it.

And he always used to say,

"I didn't really know my own child."

He was amazed about what she wrote in it.

He was so proud of it.

When he got it, he had no idea about publishing it,

but a history professor said

that it's such a valuable document

about this period, you have to publish it.

Lipstadt: It gets tremendous attention in this country.

It's presented on Broadway,

and then presented in a major Hollywood picture

as a triumph.

No one dies in this story. No one is murdered.

No gas chambers. No shootings.

No Nazis, till the last scene when they come in.

It's the story of triumph of a little girl.

A'

It's a wonderful story. It's a wonderful diary.

She writes some terrific things in it.

But it's not the story of the Holocaust.

It's not the story of the Shoah.

It's not the story of a genocide.

I still believe, in spite of everything,

that people are really good at heart.

Geiringer: When she said that she still believes

in the goodness of mankind, I said, "How can she?"

But she wrote it before.

If she would have written that after,

if she would have survived,

she would not have said that, I think.

I still think that she wouldn't have said that.

A'

Narrator: Eva Geiringer's mother Fritzi

would eventually marry Otto Frank.

"By the tragedy in both our lives," she remembered,

"together we found new happiness."

A'

[indistinct chatter]

Man on newsreel: These newsreel and Signal Corps pictures

were officially recorded for posterity.

6 furnaces, each holding 3 bodies,

were used in cremating the dead.

Don't turn away. Look.

Horror unbelievable, yet true.

The vile inhuman beasts took pride

in their concentration camp at Nordhausen.

Narrator: By the war's end,

Americans had seen for themselves

that the Nazi horrors many had dismissed

as wartime propaganda were all-too real.

Man on newsreel: No words can express the world's disgust

at Germany's organized carnage.

Mendelsohn: And I remember saying to my mother once,

I said, "What was it like after the war?"

A'

She said...

everyone sat around waiting for news.

A'

She said it was like a hush in the air.

A'

Finally, maybe 1946, maybe 1947,

she came home from school one day,

and her father was sitting at the kitchen table,

crying with a letter in his hand.

A'

And I think that is a scene

that probably repeated itself all over America.

Jaeger Mendelsohn: They had just gotten the final word

that Uncle Shmiel and his 4 daughters and his wife

had all been murdered.

And my father carried to the day he died

the letters that his brother Shmiel had sent...

because he felt so guilty

about not being able to get out Shmiel.

A'

Lipstadt: In many respects,

Nazi Germany accomplished its goal.

Didn't accomplish it totally.

But the Jews have never replaced themselves since then.

Woman: I have the feeling that we let our consciences

realize too late the need of standing up against something

that we knew was wrong.

We have therefore had to avenge it,

but we did nothing to prevent it.

A'

I hope that in the future,

we are going to remember that there can be no compromise

at any point with the things that we know are wrong.

Eleanor Roosevelt.

A'

Narrator: Tens of millions of human beings

were killed during the Second World War.

Some 6 million of them were Jews,

murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,

two-thirds of all the Jews who had lived in Europe.

A'

The war left millions of displaced persons,

including more than a quarter of a million Jewish refugees

confined to crowded camps in Germany,

Austria, and Italy between 1945 and 1952.

Most were unable or unwilling to return to homes

that had been destroyed or occupied

among people who were often openly hostile toward them.

A'

Lipstadt: It's easy to imagine

that after the opening of the camps

and the stories come out of what happened,

that people realize this is the legacy of antisemitism,

and they banish it.

That it's gone, it's over, it's finished.

But that's not what happens.

And nothing makes it clearer

than debates over allowing refugees in.

Narrator: When asked if their country should now allow

more refugees than it had before the war,

only 5% percent of Americans said yes,

and more than a third said the number should be fewer.

A'

Between the spring of 1945 and June of 1947,

because the United States

continued to enforce its quota system,

fewer than 15,000 Jewish refugees obtained visas.

Other countries were no more welcoming.

A'

And Britain continued to limit immigration

to Palestine until 1947

when it turned the region's fate over to the United Nations.

The UN partitioned it between Jews and Arabs

and legally and illegally as many as 200,000 European Jews

made it to the contested land

that in 1948 became the State of Israel.

A'

Congress eventually loosened its restrictions somewhat,

and by 1953 the United States

would accept some 80,000 Jewish survivors.

At the same time,

among the 170,000 Gentile refugees

also admitted were some former Nazis

and those who had collaborated with them,

welcomed during the new Cold War

because they were anti-Communists.

A'

Man on newsreel: Here, before a court

representing world civilization,

the Nazi hierarchy charged with conspiracy

against peace and crimes against humanity goes on trial.

Narrator: As the Allies had promised,

Nazi leaders were put on trial after the war,

the first international trial for war crimes in history.

Like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had killed themselves,

but some other high-ranking co-conspirators were charged.

Man on newsreel: In the courtroom, the dramatic entry

of the 8 judges and alternates

of the International Military Tribunal.

After 10 months, the longest criminal trial on record,

they're ready to deliver the verdict.

Death for 11, prison for 7.

Justice has caught up with the master criminals.

A'

The charges we have brought...

Narrator: There would be 11 more trials over the next 3 years.

Of having committed crimes against humanity.

Narrator: Benjamin Ferencz led the prosecution

of 22 commanders of the Einsatzgruppen,

using as evidence their own reports

of mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.

Ferencz: I had never tried a case in my life.

I had very seldom been in a courtroom.

I had the proof in my hands, a pile of documents.

And some of them were very specific.

"Babi Yar, we murdered"... I don't know...

"33,226 people in two days."

And they had it all, and I began to add them up.

And when I reached a million,

I said, "That's enough. That's enough."

Narrator: Before the war, there had been no word

for the crime Nazi Germany

would commit against the Jewish people.

Greene: So who gives it a name?

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee to the United States,

who loses 49 members of his own family.

Narrator: The legal scholar Raphael Lemkin argued

that a new legal framework, and a new word,

were needed to hold the Nazis accountable

for their pre-meditated

"destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group."

He labored for a long time

trying to find just the right word.

It combined "genos," the ancient Greek word

for "race or tribe,"

with the Latin word "cide," for killing.

Ferencz: Genocide, the extermination

of whole categories of human beings,

was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine.

I knew that genocide was not listed as a crime in our statutes.

But I felt in respect to my knowledge

of what Raphael Lemkin had been trying to do,

I deliberately put that in.

In a manner shocking...

I also in my concluding remarks,

I said, "These defendants

"wrote the blackest page in human history.

"Life was their toy and death was their tool.

"If these men be immune,

"then law has lost its meaning

and we must all live in fear."

A'

And I... "the Prosecution rests its case."

A'

Lipstadt: I think it takes many years for America really

to step back and fully understand

that this was a war unlike any other,

this kind of state-sponsored genocide

of such mega proportions.

That understanding really won't happen

until 1961 and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Narrator: SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann

had overseen the deportation of more than a million Jews

to ghettos and killing centers in occupied Poland.

Israeli agents had captured him

from his hiding place in Argentina

and brought him to Israel to stand trial in 1961.

[Speaking forelgn language]

Translator: And they took both of them

and the two others and all 4 were shot

in the back of their head.

And the bullets came out of their forehead.

Woman: I felt him take the child from my arms.

The child cried out and was shot immediately.

A'

Narrator: More than 100 survivors spoke.

Their testimony, candid, harrowing,

and televised around the world,

gave millions of Americans a deeper understanding

of the horror of what was now being called the "Holocaust."

And poured kerosene and petrol under those Jews

and set fire to all the Jews...

A'

While they were in their prayer shawls...

holding their prayer books,

in supplication to God.

[Ship's horn blows]

Lyndon B. Johnson: This bill that we will sign today

is not a revolutionary bill.

Yet it is still one of the most important acts

of this Congress and of this administration.

For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw

in the fabric of American justice.

It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong

in the conduct of the American Nation.

Narrator: In October 1965,

after more than 40 years of dogged effort

by New York Congressman Emanuel Celler,

Congress passed an immigration bill that finally abolished

the discriminatory quota system

based on "national" origins

that had denied sanctuary to so many desperate people

trying to flee Hitler in the years before the War.

But the bill imposed limits on people from the Americas,

who had gone back and forth

across the border for generations,

and it still made no provisions

for most of the world's refugees.

A'

The President of the United States

held the signing ceremony at the Statue of Liberty.

Johnson: This measure that we will sign today

will really make us truer to ourselves

both as a country and as a people.

It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.

And today we can all believe that the lamp

of this grand old lady is brighter today

and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly

in the light of an increased liberty

for the people from all countries of the globe.

[Applause]

A'

Irvin Painter: Americans are now coming to terms with our past.

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What we have over and over and over again

in American history is on the one hand,

this stream of white supremacy and antisemitism.

It's a big stream, and it's always there.

And sometimes it bubbles up and it shocks us,

and it gets slapped down, but the stream is always there,

and we should not be shocked,

we should not think, this is not America.

It is.

Snyder: This thing that people call white supremacy,

that's not some marginal thing.

You have to look back and say,

"How can we change so that we really can be a republic,

or really can be a democracy?"

If we're going to be a country in the future,

then we have to have a view of our own history,

which allows us to see what we were.

And we can become something different.

And then we have to become something different

if we're going to make it.

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Jeff Pegues: 2,400-word manifesto

is filled with hatred for Blacks, Hispanics, Jews...

Woman: He wanted to start a race war as you say...

Donald Trump: My first hour in office, those people are gone.

These cultures are changing us, we are not changing them.

Crowd chanting: You will not replace us!

Stephanie Ramos: Hundreds of white nationalists

storming the University of Virginia.

Ellison Barber: We now know one person has died

in addition to those 5 in critical condition.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: 11 Jewish worshippers have been killed

at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

A man has been charged with hate crimes

and could face the death penalty.

He was reportedly motivated by conspiracy theories

about Jewish leaders and immigration.

[Gunshots]

Chuck Todd: And we're trying to figure out

what's happening on the Senate floor.

Josh Letterman, tell us what's going on outside.

Letterman: We are watching a situation that has gotten

much and much more tense.

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Let's go!

[indistinct shouting]

[Crowd cheering]

Crowd: Treason! Treason!

Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason!

The institutions of our civilization

are under tremendous stress.

I'm not necessarily saying they're gonna go

in the same direction,

but they could go in the same direction,

because institutions are just conventions,

and as soon as somebody says... Flips a switch and says,

"Oh, it's OK to shoot grandmothers

"in a cemetery on Sun... You know, on a Saturday

and then go to church on Sunday."

The fragility of civilized behavior

is the one thing you really learn.

'Cause these people who we now see in these photographs,

these sepia photographs, and they're receding into time,

they're no different, no different from us.

You look at your neighbors, the people at the dry cleaners,

the waiters in the restaurant.

That's who these people were. Don't kid yourself.

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Stern: We have seen the nadir of human behavior,

and we have no guarantee that it won't recur.

If we can make that clear and graphic

and understandable, not as something to imitate,

but as a warning of what can happen to human beings,

then, perhaps, we have one shield against its recurrence.

[Bird squawks]

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

was provided by David M. Rubenstein,

invesfingin people and institutions

that help us understand the past

and look to the future;

by the Park Foundation;

the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation,

supporting those who remind us

about American history and the Holocaust;

by Gilbert S. Omenn and Martha A. Darling;

by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations,

investing in our common future;

and by these members of the Better Angels Society:

Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine;

Jan and Rick Cohen;

Allan and Shelley Holt;

the Koret Foundation;

David and Susan Kreisman;

Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder;

the Fullerton Family Charitable Fund;

the Blavatnik Family Foundation;

the Crown Family Philanthropies,

honoring members of the Crown and Goodman families;

and by these additional members.

By the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by viewers like you.

Corporate funding for "The U.S. and the Holocaust"

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