The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Golden Door - full transcript

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♫ ♫

Narrator: On a sunny
March afternoon in 1933,

a German businessman
and his family

went for a stroll
in the center of Frankfurt.

Otto Frank snapped a picture
of his wife, Edith,

and their two daughters...

Margot, 7 years old,

and Annelies, just 3.

Otto's ancestors
had lived in Germany

since the 16th century.

Merchants and bankers,
they were not

particularly observant Jews.

Otto, a proud officer
in the Great War,

was a patriotic German.

But in January of 1933,
Adolf Hitler had come to power

and everything had begun
rapidly to change.

Jews, Hitler charged,

were "parasites," not Germans.

Nazi thugs roamed
the Frankfurt streets,

beating anyone they thought
was Jewish.

Most of the Franks'
Gentile friends fell away.

Their landlord insisted
they find other quarters.

Margot was made to sit apart
from her classmates in school.

Man as Frank: The world
around me had collapsed.

When most of the people
of my country

turned into hordes of
nationalistic, cruel,

antisemitic criminals,

I had to face the consequences,

and though this hurt me deeply,
I realized that

Germany was not the world,
and I left forever.

Narrator: By the time Otto
Frank photographed his family,

he and Edith were already
planning to move

to Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

By early 1934,
they would be living in

a spacious, sunny apartment
in the city's River Quarter,

alongside hundreds of other
Jewish families from Germany.

They would eventually try to seek
a safe haven in the United States,

only to find, like countless
others fleeing Nazism,

that most Americans
did not want to let them in.

♫ ♫

(gulls squawking)

(ship's horn blows)

Woman: Here at our sea-washed,
sunset gates shall stand

a mighty woman with
a torch, whose flame

is the imprisoned lightning,
and her name

Mother of Exiles.

From her beacon-hand
glows world-wide welcome;

her mild eyes command
the air-bridged harbor

that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands,
your storied pomp!"

cries she with silent lips.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

"your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,

"the wretched refuse
of your teeming shore.

"Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus.

Narrator: In 1883,
Emma Lazarus,

the descendant of
Portuguese Jews

who had fled the Inquisition

and found sanctuary in Manhattan
before the American Revolution,

had written a poem expressing

what the Statue of Liberty
meant to her.

But a few years later,

Thomas Bailey Aldrich,

a writer whose family had also

lived in America
since colonial times,

wrote another poem
warning of what he believed

would happen to his country if
the golden door remained open.

Man as Aldrich: Wide open
and unguarded stand our gates,

and through them presses
a wild, motley throng.

In street and alley what
strange tongues are these,

accents of menace
alien to our air,

voices that once
the Tower of Babel knew!

O Liberty, white Goddess!
Is it well

to leave the gates unguarded?

Man: I think Americans
have a very hard time deciding

what kind of country
they want to have.

We all tend to think
of the United States

as this country with
the Statue of Liberty poem,

"Give me your tired,
your poor."

But in fact, exclusion of
people and shutting them out

has been as American
as apple pie.

♫ ♫

Man: All of my grandparents are

immigrants from Eastern Europe

except one grandmother
was born here.

So, I sort of grew up
haunted by stories of,

as they used to say,
the old country.

Haunted by this story of

my grandfather's brother
and his family,

living in a provincial town
in Eastern Poland,

and then they disappeared.

All you think about is that
they had been consumed by this

conflagration that consumed
all of Europe.

♫ ♫

Narrator: When Nazi rule began
in 1933,

there were 9 million
Jews in Europe.

12 years later, when the
Second World War ended in 1945,

at least two out of every 3
of them had been murdered.

Mendelsohn: It's not so easy
to put the picture together,

the real scale of
what happened to people.

It is unbelievable.
It boggles the imagination.

You don't know what
6 million people looks like.

Narrator: As the catastrophe
of what would come to be called

the Holocaust unfolded,

Americans heard
about Nazi persecutions

of Jews and others on the radio,

read about it in
their newspapers and magazines,

and glimpsed it in newsreels.

Some Americans responded
by denouncing the Nazis,

marching in protest,
and boycotting German goods.

Individual Americans
performed heroic acts

to save individual Jews.

Some government officials

battled red tape and bigotry

to bring Jewish refugees
to America.

In the end,
the United States admitted

some 225,000 refugees
from Nazi terror,

more than any other
sovereign nation took in.

And by defeating Nazi Germany
on the battlefield,

the United States,
Great Britain,

the Soviet Union,
and their allies

stopped the killing of the
surviving Jewish people in Europe.

But during the years when
escape was still possible,

the American people and their
government proved unwilling

to welcome more than
a fraction of

the hundreds of thousands of
desperate people seeking refuge.

Woman: The Holocaust
disrupts any idea

that we have of good and evil,

of right and wrong.

This is a story in which

everyone is challenged
all the time.

We are challenged as Americans.

We're challenged as parents,
as children.

We're challenged
as neighbors and as friends

to think about what
we would have done,

what we could have done,
what we should have done,

and even though the Holocaust
physically took place in Europe,

it is a story that Americans
have to reckon with, too.

Man: We tell ourselves
stories as a nation.

One of the stories
we tell ourselves is that

we're a land of immigrants.

But in moments of crisis,
it becomes very hard for us

to live up to those stories.

I think the impetus
should not then be

to wag your finger
at people in the past

and think that we're
somehow superior to them,

but to struggle to understand
why that's such a tension

between having
a humanitarian ideal

and then living up to it
on the ground.

Woman: Part of our
national mythology is that

we are a good people,
we are a democracy,

and we are a democracy,
and in our better moments,

we are very good people.

But that's not all there is
to this story,

and I think if we're going to
congratulate ourselves

on our democracy,
which I think we should,

we also need to face up
to the other side.

Woman 2: In the past few years,
I've begun to wonder

how serious America's
commitment to looking at

some of the dark marks
in its history really is.

How can we learn from the past?

Where did we go wrong?

How can we not go wrong
the next time?

And I think while there is

much we can be proud of
of this country,

the episode of America
and the Holocaust

is not one that
redounds to our credit.

Man: How did America
treat its potential refugees?

The refugees,
they lost their lives

because those doors...

the golden door
was not wide open.

♫ ♫

(birds chirping)

(horse neighs)

Narrator: For centuries,
America had

mostly open borders.

Peoples from Europe
and the Far East were let in...

and at least tolerated...

As workers, farmers,
soldiers, and pioneers

needed to conquer a continent
and build a nation.

Irvin Painter: This is
the good side of us,

the open side of us.

We want
to welcome working people.

The other side of that is
Native American genocide,

Native Americans being pushed
out of their lands.

And then there's also
the involuntary immigrants,

the Africans who were
transported across the ocean

to become a workforce that
could be worked to death.

So, the idea of immigrants
at the top, it looks very good,

but that's not
all there is to us.

Narrator: Before the Civil War,
most immigrants had come from

northern Europe...
England, Scotland, Ireland,

Germany, Holland,
and Scandinavia.

Hayes: I'm named after
my ancestor who arrived

at the port of Boston in 1860.

He came from County Cork
in Ireland.

He didn't have to fill out
anything but a landing card

when he got here

in a time when immigration
was free and open.

It became more and more
restrictive later.

Narrator: In 1882,
Congress passed

the Chinese Exclusion Act,

the first time
the United States had barred

the immigration of
any people from anywhere.

But between 1870 and 1914,

nearly 25 million people
would arrive,

mostly from
Southern and Eastern Europe.

They spoke unfamiliar tongues,
followed other customs,

worshipped God
in different ways.

Their sheer numbers
inspired a backlash.

Man: We Americans must realize
that the altruistic ideals

which have controlled
our social development

during the past century,

and the maudlin sentimentalism

that has made America
"an asylum for the oppressed"

are sweeping the nation
toward a racial abyss.

This generation must
completely repudiate

the proud boasts of our fathers
that they acknowledged

no distinction in
"race, creed, or color"

or else turn the page of history

and write: "FINIS AMERICAE."

Madison Grant.

Daniel Okrent: They don't
speak our language.

They don't really look like us.

They don't have
the educations that we have.

And so, you find
somebody like Henry Adams

walking across Boston Common

and he describes in
his autobiography,

he sees this creature,
this furtive Yitzhak or Yakov

reeking of the ghettos,
snarling in a guttural Yiddish.

What was this thing?
It was utterly alien.

Narrator: Among the new
arrivals from Eastern Europe

were more than two million Jews,

most fleeing poverty,

and many escaping
antisemitic violence.

Some Jews, who had already been
in America for generations,

were also wary of the newcomers.

"We are Americans and they
are not," one rabbi said.

"They gnaw the bones
of past centuries."

By 1910, New York
would be home to

more than a million Jews,

more than a quarter
of the city's population,

far more than
any other city on earth.

Hayes: The anxieties
about urbanization,

about unlettered, untutored,
relatively uneducated peoples

coming in in large numbers,

the sense that disease
was a problem,

all of these worries were
amalgamated into a belief

that immigrants
cause these problems,

and thus immigration
should be held down.

Narrator: Many white Protestant
Americans came to fear

they were about to be
outnumbered and outbred

by the newcomers
and their offspring...

that they were being replaced.

They embraced a new
pseudo-science born in Britain

called eugenics, which falsely
claimed with no evidence

that everything from
poverty to prostitution,

disabilities to what
they called feeble-mindedness

could be eliminated if
the individuals they dismissed

as "socially defective"

could be stopped
from reproducing.

Man: I wish very much
that the wrong people

could be prevented entirely
from breeding;

and when the evil nature
of these people

is sufficiently flagrant,
this should be done.

Criminals should be sterilized,

and feeble-minded persons
forbidden to leave

offspring behind them.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Irvin Painter: The idea
was that the bad people

have to stop reproducing

and the good people
need to reproduce more.

Negative eugenics says
sterilize the wrong people,

snuff them out,
and that's the eugenics

that the Nazis would pick up on.

Narrator: Colleges and
universities taught eugenics.

Medical societies confirmed it.

Clergymen preached it.

John D. Rockefeller
and Andrew Carnegie funded it.

And some of the most prominent
people in America championed it...

Margaret Sanger,
Alexander Graham Bell,

even Helen Keller.

Woman as Keller: It seems to me that

the simplest, wisest thing to do

would be to submit cases
like that of

the malformed idiot baby to
a jury of expert physicians.

If the evidence
were presented openly

and the decisions made public
before the death of the child,

there would be little danger
of mistakes or abuses.

We must decide between
a fine humanity

and a cowardly sentimentalism.

Narrator: 33 of the 48 states

would eventually enact
eugenics laws

mandating the forced
sterilization of wards of the state

deemed physically or
mentally "unfit"...

People in prisons,
hospitals, and asylums.

More than 60,000 Americans

would be sterilized
without their consent

before the last
of these statutes was

removed from the books in 2014.

Eugenics also provided
a racist rationale

for those convinced
immigration needed to be

drastically curtailed.

Man as Grant: The man of the
old stock is being crowded out

of many country districts
by these foreigners

just as he is today being
literally driven off the streets

of New York City by
the swarms of Polish Jews.

These immigrants adopt
the language of the American,

they wear his clothes,
they steal his name,

and they are beginning
to take his women,

but they seldom adopt his
religion or understand his ideals.

And while he is being
elbowed out of his own home,

the American looks calmly abroad

and urges on others
the suicidal ethics

which are exterminating
his own race.

Madison Grant.

Narrator: Madison Grant was a

widely-admired conservationist...

a friend of presidents,
a founder of the Bronx Zoo,

responsible in part for saving
the California Redwoods

and preserving the buffalo,

and instrumental in creating
Glacier, Denali,

and Everglades National Parks.

Okrent: And he was also
a violent antisemite

and a violent anti-Italian,

and he really was horrified
by what he saw happening

on the streets of New York.

So, he publishes a book called
"The Passing of the Great Race,"

in which he puts forward
the idea that

nationalities have
eugenic characteristics.

He fills it with
all sorts of interesting

historical, so-called data,

which is mostly crazy,
but it's very persuasive

and it does give
the anti-immigration movement,

it suddenly gives them science.

"Science says if we let them in,

then they're going to destroy
the American gene pool."

Narrator: For Grant
and many others,

Jews were a distinct race,
not considered white,

dismissed as
"uncouth Asiatics."

Grant's supposedly
"scientific" claims about

a rigid hierarchy of races
was ludicrous...

the biological notion of
race itself is a fiction...

but his ideas caught the
imagination of those Americans

already opposed to immigration.

Hayes: People tended to
increasingly view nationalities

as if they were
breeds or species.

To liken nationalities to breeds

was a fundamental
categorical mistake.

The biological pool
of human beings

between Germans and French,
Dutch and English

is nothing like the biological
or genetic pool

between poodles
and German shepherds.

Narrator: American xenophobia
deepened when the U.S.

entered the Great War in 1917.

More than 116,000
American servicemen would die

in a war that was supposed
to end all wars...

and did nothing of the kind.

After the War,
the United States was convulsed

by white-on-black violence
in dozens of cities,

anarchist bombings, bloody
strikes, and a "Red Scare"

that saw the arrests of 10,000
suspected revolutionaries,

many of them immigrants,
some of them Jewish.

Irvin Painter: Anti-immigrant
sentiment and the Red Scare

came together, so,
by the early Twenties,

you have this boiling notion
that immigrants are stupid

and immigrants are bolshevists

and immigrants are
threatening America.

Hayes: And this justified
increasingly in the minds of

people like Madison Grant
and Henry Cabot Lodge,

the senator from Massachusetts,
who argued that

the way to master the problems
was to restrict the inflow

of these
destabilizing populations.

Narrator: Antisemitism intensified.

The automobile pioneer
Henry Ford blamed Jews

for everything from
Lincoln's assassination

to the change he thought
he detected

in the flavor of
his favorite candy bar.

He bought himself
a weekly newspaper,

the "Dearborn Independent,"
and used it to spread

his antisemitic propaganda.

In a series of
91 weekly articles

called "The International Jew,"

he promoted "The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion,"

a Russian hoax
that claimed there was

a global Jewish conspiracy
to take over the world.

The Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia

had only seemed
to confirm those fears.

The articles were eventually
reprinted in 4 volumes

and translated into 9 languages,
including German.

Ford's newspaper continued
printing its antisemitic bile

and had the second-highest
circulation in the country.

Jewish-Americans were already
denied membership in private clubs,

not hired by banks
or prestigious law firms.

"Restrictive covenants"
kept them out of

desirable neighborhoods.

Strict quotas limited
the number of Jewish students

enrolled in universities

and barred all but a handful of

Jewish teachers
from their faculties.

Hotels advertised
rooms only for "Gentiles."

Greene: One of the most,
I think, maddening things

about antisemitism
is an antisemite

will hold a contradictory belief

and it won't bother
the antisemite, right?

So, "Jews are capitalists,"
"Jews are Communists."

Or, "Jewish men are
weak and effeminate,"

or "Jewish men are
a sexual threat to...

To non-Jewish women."

These are contradictory beliefs
that are illogical,

that don't bother antisemites.

So, how do you fight back
against that with logic?

Lipstadt: What are
the stereotypes

associated with antisemitism?

Something to do with money,
something to do with smarts,

but not positive
or affirmatively,

conniving and a small cabal.

Jews are very few in number,

but they know how
to control things.

They are the puppet masters,
controlling the puppets.

Narrator: In the early 1920s,
support grew steadily

for congressional legislation

to permanently
restrict immigration,

designed to return to
the ethnic mix of America

as it had been before
the waves of newcomers

from Southern
and Eastern Europe.

A resurgent Ku Klux Klan,
now several million strong,

as anti-Catholic and antisemitic

as it was anti-Black,

favored restricting immigration.

So did many Protestant clergymen
and union leaders

convinced immigrants
drove wages down.

President Calvin Coolidge
supported it, too.

"America must be
kept American," he said.

Jewish and Catholic
organizations

were adamantly opposed.

A small band of congressmen...
Mostly from urban districts,

often immigrants themselves or
the children of immigrants...

tried to speak for the new
Americans they represented.

Man: I knew them.
I knew the Irish and the Jews

and the Italians and the Greeks.

I knew the women
in the Brooklyn tenements

who scrubbed their floors
again and again

in the helpless fight
against squalor.

I knew their richness
and their laughter

and the disappointing
heartbreak of

the struggle in America
to adjust.

I knew also their pride,

the unfulfilled dream
of independence

that had first
brought them here.

Emanuel Celler.

Narrator: Freshman Congressman
Emanuel Celler

was a third-generation
Jewish-American,

who represented
Brooklyn's 10th District.

It was one of the most
ethnically diverse in the nation,

and he liked to tell
his constituents that

his Catholic grandfather had
jumped into New York Harbor

to save his Jewish grandmother
from drowning

after the boat they had both
taken from Germany

began to sink.

When Celler came to Washington
in the winter of 1923,

he hurled himself
into the struggle against

the latest
anti-immigration bill,

even before he was
able to hire a staff.

He pored over books
in the Library of Congress

and brought in scientists
to testify against eugenics.

The work of Madison Grant
and his fellow eugenicists,

Celler said, was all
"bunk and balderdash."

"There is no such thing as
superior and inferior races.

One set of people is
as good as another."

Man as Celler: This is indeed
a new doctrine

for a democratic America,
founded on the declaration that

all men are created equal,

a slap in the face to our
immigrants who have assimilated

and who have become bone of
our bone, flesh of our flesh.

Narrator: But nothing
Celler or his allies said

could halt the rush
toward passage.

The new law,
the Johnson-Reed Act,

passed by overwhelming margins
in both the House and Senate.

On May 26, 1924,
Coolidge signed it into law.

It drastically limited
the total number of immigrants

admitted to the United States,

and it allotted quotas
to each country,

overwhelmingly favoring
immigrants from

Northern European countries.

Erbelding: The Johnson-Reed
Immigration Act of 1924

is really meant to define
who is going to be

an American in the future.

And 85% of it is for people
who are born in countries

that they decide in 1924
are white Protestant countries

that will send white Protestant
immigrants to the United States.

Narrator: The act did not limit
immigrants from the Americas...

Who were needed for farm labor...

but it now barred all Asians,
not just the Chinese.

One Japanese newspaper
labeled the law's passage

"the greatest
insult in our history,"

and a prominent
nationalist declared

it made "an eventual collision

between Japan
and America... inevitable."

For the first time, before
embarking for the United States,

potential immigrants
would have to obtain a visa

from American consulates
in their countries,

giving State Department
bureaucrats

unprecedented control

over who was and who was not
worthy of admission.

The new act also made
no exception for refugees...

those fleeing disaster,
war, or persecution.

In 1921, 805,000 immigrants
had come to America.

In 1925, under the new
quota system,

just under 150,000
were allowed in.

There was no explicit
quota for Jews,

and Jews were not
specifically named in the law.

But it was not an accident that

most recent Jewish immigrants
had come from

the Eastern European countries
that now had miniscule quotas.

Almost 120,000 Jews
had started new lives

in the United States in 1921.

5 years later, only
10,000 were able to do so.

"America has closed
the doors just in time

"to prevent our
Nordic population

from being overrun
by the lower races,"

said Madison Grant.

"The law's passage was one of
the greatest steps forward

in the history
of this country."

Man as Celler: To say that
a handful of men

forced through the Immigration
Act of 1924 is false.

The United States was drawing
her skirts about her in fear

lest she be contaminated
by the alien.

The temper of the Congress,
I discovered,

is the temper of the country.

Emanuel Celler.

Narrator: In 1924, in a prison
cell in Landsberg, Bavaria,

Adolf Hitler, the head of the National
Socialist German Workers Party...

the Nazis... learned of the new
American immigration law.

He had been imprisoned
for high treason

after leading a failed coup.

He was pleased that the
United States felt itself to be

what he called
a "Nordic-Germanic state,"

and had acted to preserve
its purity

by "excluding certain races."

Those ideas mirrored
Hitler's own beliefs,

and he was willing
to exploit the chaos

that gripped Germany after
its defeat in the Great War

to promote them.

At Versailles in 1919,

the victorious Allies
had imposed on the Germans

a treaty that required them to
give up 10% of their territory

as well as their colonies
in Africa,

pay massive reparations,

and disarm completely.

Hitler, who had been an
obscure army dispatch messenger

when the war ended,

was among those
who convinced themselves

Germany had not been
defeated on the battlefield,

that she had been
"stabbed in the back"

by socialists and Jews.

While behind bars,
Hitler worked on a book

entitled "Mein Kampf"...
"My Struggle."

History, he argued, was
an endless racial conflict

in which the superior
so-called "Aryan" race

was being undermined by Jews.

Hayes: The most dangerous
of other nationalities,

said the Nazis, were the Jews.

And the reason they were
was not only inherited,

that is, there had been
a Christian teaching

that these people are
corrupting and so forth.

The reason is also
they were the people

who brought the notion of
conscience, the golden rule,

fair play, international
cooperation into the world.

Man: What's particular
about the thing that

Hitler puts together is to say,

"The Jews are responsible
for every global idea,

"for every universal idea.

"Anything which allows us
to see each other as people,

rather than as members
of a race, that's the Jews."

Narrator: Germany's 523,000
Jews constituted less than

1% of
their country's population.

But 100,000 of them had fought
during the Great War.

12,000 had died.

They had overcome
centuries of persecution

to become merchants,
manufacturers, musicians,

lawyers, writers, scientists,

artists, government officials,

and were loyal Germans.

Stern: We were
absolutely integrated

into this town of about
65,000 inhabitants

and felt completely at home.

Narrator: The city of Hildesheim,

in northern Germany,

was home to some
1,000 Jewish families.

Julius Stern owned a small shop.

His wife Hedwig
was the daughter of

a well-to-do-merchant.

They had 3 children.

Their oldest was Gunther,
born in 1922.

Stern: My mother was
a absolute luminous woman.

And she could write
German verses for all occasions

and was praised as the
"Poet Laureate" of our family.

I had a neighbor boy
who was my best friend

on the slim basis that both of
our names were Gunther.

His family was not all that
conservative as Protestants.

And we were
not that observant as Jews.

Narrator: But to Hitler, all
Jews were clannish, stateless,

subhuman "leeches"
who drained the strength

of every country
in which they lived.

From his cell, he promised
to one day make Germany

free of them... and, by so doing,

restore Germany's greatness.

Victory in that struggle,
he said,

demanded military might,
"Aryan fertility,"

and racial purity.

He would seek to destroy
the power of what he believed

was a worldwide conspiracy...
"International Jewry."

At the same time, he dreamed of
reclaiming German territories

and waging a war
against the Soviet Union

that would simultaneously
destroy what he called

"Jewish Bolshevism"

and win for Germany
the "Lebensraum"... Living Space...

To which he believed
it was entitled.

Hayes: Hitler saw the expansion
of Germany into Eastern Europe

as foreshadowed by what
we had done in North America,

the expansion of the white
people of the United States

across the continent
from east to west,

brushing aside the people
who were already here

and confining them
to reservations.

Narrator: "The immense inner
strength" of the United States,

Hitler said, came from
the ruthless but necessary act

of murdering native people

and herding the rest
into "cages."

Snyder: He saw us
as the way that

racial superiority
is supposed to work.

The higher races
conquer the territory.

So, if anything,
the attitude before the war

was an attitude of
a certain admiration.

Narrator: Hitler hoped that
just as the Americans

had conquered "the Wild West,"

his countrymen would conquer
"the Wild East"...

Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union.

"Our Mississippi,"
he said, "must be the Volga."

Germans would sweep aside
those who

inconveniently occupied
those lands...

Poles and other Slavs,
as well as Jews...

much as Native Americans
had been swept aside.

When Hitler was
released from prison

in December of 1924,

the fledgling Weimar Republic
that had been born

at the end of the Great War

was finally coming into its own.

Berlin, its capital
and largest city,

home to 1/3 of Germany's Jews,

had become
the intellectual and creative

center of Europe...

Expressionism on canvas
and on the movie screen,

Bauhaus architecture
and American jazz,

scientific advancement
and avant-garde music,

sexual freedom
and leftist politics.

Berlin represented
everything Hitler hated

and hoped to destroy.

♫ ♫

In the autumn of 1929,
after nearly a decade of

unprecedented economic growth,

the New York
stock market crashed.

The Great Depression
that followed would be

the worst crisis America
had faced since the Civil War.

Before it was over, one
out of every 4 wage-earners...

More than 15 million
men and women...

would be without work.

Now Americans
were even less eager

to welcome workers
from foreign lands

than they had been before.

President Herbert Hoover
directed all overseas consulates

to strictly enforce
what had been

a seemingly minor provision
of the immigration law.

From now on, the United States
would deny a visa

to any would-be immigrant

"likely to become
a public charge,"

dependent on government support.

Under the slogan "American
jobs for real Americans,"

Hoover's Labor Department
approved raids by

sheriffs, marshals,
and vigilantes

that rounded up some 1.8
million people of Mexican descent

and deported them.

It was called the "Mexican
Repatriation Program,"

but 6 out of 10
of those dispossessed

are believed to have been
American citizens.

In 1932, for the first time
in American history,

more people left the United
States than were allowed in.

Man: You are approaching
Ellis Island,

once the gateway for
thousands seeking fortune,

and now every month
sees hundreds banished

after being convicted
by the immigration board

of failing to meet the
requirements of good citizenship.

Today's batch of
deportees include

a husband and wife, forced apart

by Uncle Sam's stern edict.

And so the symbol
of liberty becomes

a fading memory of things
that might have been.

♫ ♫

Narrator: The Great Depression
spread relentlessly

around the world.

In Germany, more than a third
of the adult population

was without work.

Parliamentary democracy seemed
powerless to improve things.

The Weimar Republic
was teetering.

Governments came and went.

The search for
scapegoats intensified.

In the chaos,
Hitler saw his chance.

(Hitler speaking German)

(crowd cheering)

Narrator: In 1928,
the Nazi share of the vote

had been less than 3%.

By 1932, theirs was
the largest party in Germany,

but still not large enough
to form a government.

To appeal to moderates,

the Nazis downplayed
their antisemitism

and they stepped up street warfare
against socialists and Communists

to convince voters that
civil war was imminent.

Then, a small group of
elite conservatives stepped in

and on January 30, 1933,
saw to it

that Hitler was
appointed Chancellor...

Confident that they
could control him.

"We have hired him,"
one of them told a friend.

"In a few months,
we will have pushed him so far

into the corner
that he will squeak."

They had misjudged him.

Snyder: The people who
brought Hitler to power

didn't necessarily share
all of his ideas.

In fact, they didn't.

But what they did believe

was that we can't have
democracy anymore,

because if we have democracy,

then the Left
and the labor unions,

they're going to take
all of the power.

So, the people who brought
Hitler to power

were conscious and aware,

and desirous of
doing away with democracy.

(crowd shouting)

Narrator: Within two months,
with a ruthlessness that

stunned supporters
and opponents alike,

Hitler bullied
the parliament... the Reichstag...

into granting him the powers
of an absolute dictator.

The morning after
Hitler took power,

local Nazis staged victory
marches throughout the country.

In Hildesheim,
the Stern family's apartment

overlooked the parade route.

Stern: We stayed home,
and my parents said,

"Don't even
look out the window."

And at the very tail end of
that parade were my classmates.

My father called my brother
into our...

what was called the gute stube,

which was the best room
in the apartment.

And he said to us,
"Sit down, boys,

I have something to tell you."

And what he said was,
"Don't stick out.

He who sticks out,
gets stuck."

We took him seriously.
He said,

"Be like invisible ink."

In other words, what you are
will someday come out again,

but at this time,
fade into the crowd.

♫ ♫

Franklin Roosevelt: I, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt,

do solemnly swear that
I will faithfully execute

the Office of President
of the United States...

Narrator: The United States had
a new leader that winter, too.

Roosevelt: preserve, protect,
and defend...

Narrator: Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was sworn in

as the 32nd president
on March 4th.

Roosevelt: This is a day of...

Narrator: The economic situation
had

steadily worsened since 1929,

so steadily that some Americans
on both sides of the aisle

urged the new president also
to assume dictatorial powers.

Roosevelt: the Congress shall
fail to take one of these...

Narrator: In his inaugural
address, he assured Americans

that "the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself,"

but he also warned that
if all else failed...

Roosevelt: I shall
ask the Congress for the one

remaining instrument
to meet the crisis...

broad executive power to wage
a war against the emergency

as great as the power
that would be given to me

if we were in fact invaded
by a foreign foe.

(crowd cheering)

Narrator: His wife Eleanor
remembered that she'd

found the crowd's enthusiastic
reaction to that line

"a little terrifying."

During the 100 days
that followed,

Roosevelt would sign into law

16 major pieces of
domestic legislation

that laid the foundation for
what he called the New Deal.

His overriding objective was
to put Americans back to work.

Foreign policy was left mostly
to the State Department...

small, hide-bound, dominated by

conservative members of
the Protestant establishment.

FDR's secretary of state
was Cordell Hull,

a former Tennessee senator
most concerned with

increasing America's trade
with the world

and opposed on principle
to interfering in

the domestic affairs
of other countries.

(Hitler speaking German)

Narrator: Many Germans...
Jews and Gentiles alike...

believed that once in power,
Hitler would moderate his views.

They took comfort in
an old German saying,

"Nothing is eaten
as hot as it is cooked."

Others hoped his government
would quickly collapse

as so many others had.

(men chant in German)

Narrator: The Nazis soon
dashed those hopes.

Within weeks of taking power,

Hitler's Brownshirt street
fighters and black-clad members

of an elite
paramilitary organization

called the Schutzstaffel...
Or SS...

had rounded up some 4,800
socialists and Communists

and soon sent them to the first
of many concentration camps...

Guarded compounds
initially intended to hold

large numbers of
political opponents,

stripped of all their
rights as citizens.

It was set up about
12 miles from Munich,

near the village of Dachau.

By year's end,
more than 100,000 people

had been imprisoned
throughout Germany.

Meanwhile, Brownshirts stormed
up and down German streets,

beating anyone they decided
looked Jewish,

chanting, "When Jewish blood
spurts off the knife,

everything will be fine again!"

Man: "Chicago Tribune."

Bands of Nazis
throughout Germany

carried out
wholesale raids calculated

to intimidate the opposition,
particularly the Jews.

As hundreds have sworn
in affidavits,

men and women were insulted,
slapped, punched in the face,

hit over the head
with blackjacks,

dragged from their homes
in night clothes.

Never have I seen
law-abiding citizens

living in such terror.

Edmond Taylor.

Narrator: American newspapers
published more than

3,000 stories about
antisemitic incidents

during the first
100 days of Nazi rule.

Greene: Americans who
picked up their papers,

or who listened to the radio,

had access to
a lot of information

about Nazi persecution of Jews.

Is it the lead story? No.

The Depression in the 1930s
is the lead story.

But it's not right to say
the information wasn't there.

The information was there.

Narrator: Many Americans were
appalled by what they read.

But others were skeptical...
Remembering that

lurid anti-German propaganda
from the Great War

had turned out to be false.

Jewish-Americans were
deeply divided as to

what, if anything,
they should try to do about it.

I think a lot of
American Jews were torn between

wanting to ring the alarm

and not wanting
to seem alarmist.

They had just
precariously established

their identities as Americans.

Lipstadt: What's going to make
the situation better?

And no one really knew.

They were also continuously told
by political leaders, you know,

if you speak out
and make a fuss,

it'll only make it worse.

And there was also the fear,
and a legitimate fear,

that if we talk too much
about this,

Americans are going to say,
"Well, that's right.

You know, Jews are like that.
Jews are conniving."

Narrator: On March 20th,

despite a heavy rainstorm,

some 1,500 representatives
of Jewish organizations

gathered in the ballroom of
New York's Hotel Astor,

hoping to find consensus
about what to do.

When many called for a mass
rally at Madison Square Garden

and other demonstrations
across the country,

New York Supreme Court Justice
Joseph Proskauer rose to object.

He begged those present
to vote against public meetings

that could only
further inflame Hitler.

The crowd began to boo,
but he continued;

"I ask you to think
whether you want Jewish blood

to be seen in
the gutters of Germany."

Then Stephen Wise, the
best-known rabbi in America, stood up.

Wise demanded that
Proskauer apologize

for implying that American Jews
could ever be blamed

for what the Nazis did
to German Jews.

Wise had been born in Budapest

and was already so celebrated
that the post office

delivered to him letters
addressed only, "Rabbi, USA."

Worldly, charismatic,
and a brilliant orator,

he had broken from the world
of his orthodox ancestors

to establish the Reform
Free Synagogue in Manhattan.

"The time for prudence
and caution is past," he said.

Man as Wise: We must speak up
like men.

How can we ask
our Christian friends

to lift their voices
in the protest against

the wrongs suffered by Jews

if we keep silent?

What is happening
in Germany today

may happen tomorrow
in any other land on Earth

unless it is
challenged and rebuked.

It is not the German Jews
who are being attacked.

It is the Jews.

Narrator: Rabbi Wise prevailed.

The rally at
Madison Square Garden

was scheduled for March 27th.

Meanwhile, Jewish War Veterans
led a march

to New York's City Hall,

calling for a worldwide boycott
of German merchandise.

When Jewish organizations
in England echoed their demand,

the Nazis claimed
that this was proof

the Reich was under attack
by Jews everywhere.

The Nazis denounced
the stories of mistreatment

as lies... Jewish lies.

Hermann Goering, one of
Hitler's closest advisors,

assured the foreign press
that the German government

had moved against
Bolsheviks, not Jews.

No one, he promised, would ever
be "subjected to persecution

solely because he is a Jew."

And he also ordered
German Jewish leaders

to call for
an immediate end to all

"demonstrations hostile
to Germany."

Otherwise, Goering said, "We are
going to take our revenge.

"The Jews in America and England
are hoping to injure us.

We shall know how to deal with
their brothers in Germany."

The American Embassy in Berlin

cabled Secretary of State
Cordell Hull

that it was the Nazis
who were lying,

that the Jewish situation was
"rapidly taking

a turn for the worse."

But Hull insisted that

the mistreatment was
coming to an end,

that things would
"revert to normal"

if the protests in America
would stop.

Film Announcer: Thousands who
waited hours behind police lines

rushed forward as the doors of
Madison Square Garden are opened.

Jews and Gentiles
join in the race for seats

and 22,000 of them get in.

Narrator: On March 27, 1933,

more than 20,000 New Yorkers
packed the Garden

to show their support
for German Jews;

35,000 more gathered around
loudspeakers outside.

Christian clergymen
denounced the Nazis.

Former New York governor
Al Smith,

whose presidential candidacy
in 1928

had been undercut by
anti-Catholic bigotry,

equated the Nazis with
the Ku Klux Klan's;

"It don't make any difference
to me," he said,

"whether it's a brown shirt
or a night shirt."

Rabbi Wise was
the last to speak.

Man as Wise: If things are
to be worse

for our brother-Jews in Germany,

which I cannot bring myself
to believe...

then humbly and sorrowfully,
we bow our heads

in the presence of the tragic
fate that threatens,

and once again appeal to
the conscience of Christendom

to save civilization from
the shame that may be imminent.

(crowd cheering)

Narrator: Similar rallies
were held

in Chicago, Philadelphia,

Boston, Baltimore, and 70 other

cities and towns across America.

More than a million Americans
were said to have taken part.

Hitler now claimed
that Jews controlled

the United States government.

He ordered a one-day boycott of

Jewish businesses
throughout Germany.

Brownshirts stationed
themselves outside

shops and office buildings
to intimidate

anyone who tried
to venture inside.

(men speaking German)

Narrator: Again and again,

Jewish-Americans would
find themselves

in an agonizing quandary;

if they kept quiet about
Nazi persecution,

it looked as though they'd
abandoned their fellow Jews;

if they protested,
they ran the risk of

seeming to confirm
Hitler's delusions

about the power of
Jews around the world.

(men chanting in German)

Narrator: Rabbi Wise hoped
that President Roosevelt

could be persuaded to issue
a formal rebuke

of the Nazi regime.

FDR loathed Hitler,
whose "Mein Kampf"

he had read in
the original German,

and whom he privately called
"a madman."

He and Eleanor Roosevelt
had both been brought up

in a rarified patrician world
in which

antisemitism was commonplace.

But life in the multi-ethnic
world of New York politics

had altered their perspective.

FDR was seen as a friend
by American Jews.

Lipstadt: He knew a lot of
Jews and he's close,

he's a neighbor of Morgenthau,

who will go on to be
secretary of the treasury.

(cheering and applause)

But he wants to be very careful.

He knows he has a horrific
financial situation

facing the United States.

(crowd cheering)

Narrator: In 1932, FDR had been

the first major party candidate
ever publicly

to denounce prejudice
against Jews

and had been rewarded with
between 70% and 80%

of the Jewish-American vote.

The federal government
had always been

the private preserve of
white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

FDR opened it up to
men and women of talent,

regardless of their faith.

He appointed more Jews
to his administration

than any president before him.

But much of their counsel
continued to be divided,

and most of those closest
to Roosevelt warned that

speaking out would only further
endanger Jews in Germany...

and intensify antisemitism
at home.

Lipstadt: If anything,
they pulled him back.

Don't get involved,
don't make a statement,

you'll only make it worse.

Narrator: Roosevelt would
for now side with

those who urged caution,
hoping that

conciliatory gestures to Hitler
on other fronts

might encourage moderation.

(children shouting indistinctly)

(man speaking German)

Stern: It was
a gradual process.

(man speaking German)

First, there were some kids
who didn't greet you anymore.

But it was so gradual that
you accepted, or not accepted,

but tried to ignore
these early manifestations

of a change of ideology
into evil.

Man: Everything was fine
until, I don't know,

I was maybe 3 or 4.

One of the kids
that I played with

called me a dirty Jew
and beat me up.

So, after that, I stopped going
to play in the courtyard.

Narrator: Sol Messinger's parents,

like thousands of other
Polish Jews,

had emigrated to Germany,

hoping to escape poverty
and antisemitism.

They settled in Berlin,
which had been one of

the most tolerant cities
in Europe.

Messinger: Across the street
from us, on the ground floor,

there were many shops.

About half of them
were Jewish owned.

And I remember one day,
I saw crowds of people forming.

And eventually somebody threw
a rock through the window,

broke the windows.

And the people
went into the stores

and simply took the merchandise.

There were policemen
standing there,

and they did absolutely nothing.

They just allowed it to happen.

Narrator: Susan and Joseph
Hilsenrath lived with

their parents and little brother
in western Germany.

Susan Hilsenrath: I was born
in a small town in Germany,

in Bad Kreuznach.

Our life was pretty good.
My father had a linen store.

And we... he was doing really well

and taking good care
of his family.

We were very happy
living in our house

until Hitler came into power.

They boycotted
my father's store.

He wasn't able to make
a living for us anymore.

Joseph Hilsenrath: With the
rise of the Nazis, of course,

he had to close his business.

And he peddled
fruits and vegetables as...

to... just to make a living.

And, but he managed, somehow.

I'm flabbergasted
when I think about it.

We moved to an apartment,
and then another apartment.

So, it was... each step
was a down step.

And it was always because
we were Jewish, we had to move.

Susan Hilsenrath: My parents
did want us

to have a normal childhood
in an impossible situation.

I mean, we couldn't help
but see.

I mean, we were
intelligent children.

But we didn't
understand, really,

that it was going
to get any worse.

And I guess maybe a lot of Jews

that were living in Germany
at the time

didn't know that it was
going to get worse, but it did.

Narrator: On the evening
of May 10, 1933,

students in Berlin and some
30 other university towns

raided their campus libraries,

carried out armloads
of books by Jewish authors

and by those Gentile writers
deemed by the Nazis

to embody an un-German spirit,

and flung them into bonfires.

Writings by Sigmund Freud
and Albert Einstein,

Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway
and Rosa Luxemburg

and scores of others
all went up in flames.

The book-burning marked
the end of a month

during which the Reich
had promulgated

its first openly
anti-Jewish laws.

With certain exceptions,

men and women of so-called
non-Aryan ancestry

were ordered to leave
government service.

Jewish doctors and dentists
were barred

from treating patients enrolled
in the government health system.

Jews were no longer permitted
to enter the legal profession.

Jewish editors and journalists,

artists, and musicians
lost their livelihoods.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of
Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,

presided over the
book-burning in Berlin.

He exulted that it marked the
end of Jewish intellectualism.

Lipstadt: It's step by step.

Jewish judges are fired.

Jewish lawyers who work
in the courts are fired.

Jewish teachers are fired.

The Nazis were very attuned

to what the public reaction
would be.

It was drip, drip, drip.

They're judging.

They're very careful

of what the German people
will accept.

Narrator: Hitler eliminated
opposition parties,

crushed the labor unions,

and would eventually order
the murder of potential rivals.

(Hitler speaking German)

Narrator: The goal of the
Nazi government, Goebbels said,

was that "there should be
only one opinion,

one party, and one
faith in Germany."

Woman: There are to be no
minorities of opinion in the new Germany

and no division of loyalties.

Most men will wear uniforms,

the badge of their membership
in that secret,

mystic community
of blood-brothers,

the German state.

Women will, by preference,
wear kitchen aprons

and will stay home and take
care of the children,

which they will gladly bear
in large numbers for Germany.

They will not hold
political opinions,

but then, neither
will anyone else.

Dorothy Thompson.

"Saturday Evening Post."

Narrator: It was not easy
for foreign correspondents

to report what was really
happening in Germany.

Sources were often
too frightened to talk.

Reporters were reluctant
to quote witnesses by name

for fear of betraying them
to the secret police,

called the Gestapo.

The Nazis controlled
the German press

and exhorted foreigners to
"report on affairs in Germany

without attempting
to interpret them."

What that meant, the American
journalist William L. Shirer

wrote in his diary,

"is that we should jump on the
bandwagon of Nazi propaganda."

But the best American journalists
did write about what was going on,

however much the Nazi government
tried to hide it.

Edgar Ansel Mowrer of
the "Chicago Daily News"

covered Hitler's rise to power
with such brutal candor

that in the summer of 1933,

the Nazis made it clear
they could no longer

guarantee his safety in Berlin.

As Mowrer was leaving
the country,

a Nazi official asked when he
thought he might return to Germany.

The American answered,
"When I come back

with about two million
of my countrymen."

Dorothy Thompson's turn would
come the following summer.

She had covered Europe
off and on since 1920,

earning a reputation
for vivid reporting

and for making herself
part of her stories.

She had interviewed Hitler
for "Cosmopolitan" magazine

before he came to power

and had dismissed him then as
"formless, faceless, insecure,

the very prototype
of the little man."

But she had also read
"Mein Kampf,"

saw that Hitler's nightmare
vision of Germany's future

was fast becoming a reality,

and refused to mince
words while saying so.

"The situation for the Jews is
just ghastly, helpless," she said.

"Not only are the reports about
the atrocities unexaggerated,

they are underrated."

She returned to America
for a time,

but continued to write for the
"Jewish Daily Bulletin" in New York.

When she visited Germany again
in the summer of 1934,

Hitler, who had never forgotten
her scornful article about him

and was appalled that she,
a non-Jew,

had written for
a Jewish publication,

personally ordered her out of
the country within 24 hours.

On the morning of August 26th,

she boarded a train for France,

her arms filled with
American Beauty roses given her

by her admiring colleagues.

"I really was put out of Germany

for the crime of blasphemy,"
she commented.

"My offense was to
think that Hitler

is just an ordinary man."

Thompson: There seems
to me to be

a certain misunderstanding
about the Hitler movement.

A great many people seem to
think that the persecution of the Jews,

which has followed the
accession to power of Hitler,

is the result of something
that they have done.

As a matter of fact,
antisemitism has been a plank

in the National Socialist
platform for 13 years.

So-called civilized people
didn't believe

that if they came to power,

they would carry
this program out.

Narrator: Thompson's
expulsion made her

an instant celebrity
in the United States.

She undertook a 30-city
lecture tour,

warning that, "Germany has
gone to war already

and the rest of the world
does not believe it."

And in a syndicated column,

she called upon Washington
again and again

to ease the barriers that kept
desperate German Jews

from emigrating
to the United States.

But the State Department
claimed that very few

actually wanted
to come to America.

Erbelding: In the
1930s and 1940s,

you could be openly antisemitic

and serve as a
State Department official.

The rest of Washington
is changing.

They're changing under
the Roosevelt Administration.

They're changing with
the New Deal.

But State Department officials
were more conservative,

they were more antisemitic,
they were more nativist,

at least openly, than anywhere
else in Washington.

Narrator: Consular officials
in Berlin

and everywhere else in Europe

continued zealously to enforce
the old directive

to deny a visa to any
would-be immigrant

"likely to become
a public charge,"

and therefore required
extensive data

on each applicant's
financial resources.

Lipstadt: The American diplomat

at certain consulates
giving out visas

would have to essentially
engage in divination.

Is this person likely to
become a public charge?

Well, they say they have
an uncle who will support them,

we have all these letters, but an
uncle is not a parent, it's not a sibling.

You couldn't come
if you already had a job,

because that meant you were
taking a job away from America.

You couldn't come if
you didn't have a job,

because it meant you
might end up on the dole

or have to get
government support.

Narrator: They also
continued to insist upon

duplicate copies of birth certificates
and government documents

attesting to an
applicant's good character.

"It seems quite preposterous,"
one man recalled,

"to have to go to your enemy

and ask for
a character reference."

Having made it nearly impossible

for Jewish Germans
to obtain visas,

the State Department then cited
the lack of applicants

to reassure the White House

that there was no
immigration crisis.

Congressman Emanuel Celler
accused the consular service

of having "a heartbeat
muffled in protocol."

Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's
Secretary of Labor,

sided with critics of
the State Department.

The first woman ever to serve
in a presidential cabinet,

she had known and worked
with immigrants all her life,

believed the United States
should be a haven for refugees,

and promoted a plan
to make their entry easier.

But the State Department
refused to relax its rules.

"If ships begin to arrive in New York
City laden with Jewish immigrants,"

one consular official wrote,

"the predominant Gentile
population of the country

"will claim they
have been betrayed

through a sleeping
State Department."

Public opinion overwhelmingly
opposed loosening restrictions.

Lipstadt: People were out of jobs.

People were standing
on food lines.

"You're going to ask me to
worry about the persecution

"of 600,000 or 585,000
Jews in Germany?

I can't feed my family."

Narrator: And Roosevelt's
willingness to work alongside Jews

had already become a source
of controversy.

Right-wing orators now denounced
what they called the Jew Deal.

Others claimed FDR
himself was a Jew

whose real name was Rosenfeld.

Antisemitic organizations
proliferated across the United States,

more than 100 of them
before the decade's end.

On the East Coast,
William Dudley Pelley,

a mystic who believed he took
his orders directly from Jesus,

led a para-military
fascist organization

modeled after
the Nazi Brownshirts

called the
Silver Legion of America

and claimed there were 22 million
Communists in the United States,

all of them following
orders from rabbis.

In the Midwest, an evangelist
named Gerald Winrod

assured his radio listeners

that Roosevelt was
a "devil" controlled by Jews,

while Hitler was a "man's man"

and a stalwart defender
of Christianity.

A group that called itself
the Friends of the New Germany

desecrated synagogue walls
with swastikas.

And Father Charles Coughlin,

a Detroit priest with
a radio audience of millions,

blamed "Shylocks" and
"international bankers,"

code words for Jews,
for the Depression.

...would drive the money changers
from the temple, and you did it.

(all cheering)

Lipstadt: He begins to give
overtly, unquestionably

antisemitic sermons,

many of which come
straight out of Goebbels,

many of which come straight
out of German propaganda.

And millions of Americans
tune in.

Narrator: A visitor to the
White House reported that FDR

was "quite apprehensive of
the growing antisemitic

and pro-Nazi sentiment
in the United States."

(whistle blows)

Meanwhile in early 1935,

Hitler revealed that
he had begun to build

an air force, the Luftwaffe,

and called for a massive
rearmament program...

artillery, submarines,
an immense army,

all of it in flagrant violation
of the Versailles Treaty.

♫ ♫

On the night of July 26, 1935,

the SS Bremen was preparing
to set sail for Germany

from Pier 86 in Manhattan.

She flew two flags...

the imperial German colors

and at the bow, the crooked
cross of the Nazi swastika.

1,300 passengers
and elegantly-dressed friends

had come aboard to see them off.

So had several thousand
curiosity-seekers.

A dozen New York merchant seamen
had also slipped aboard.

The American Communist Party
Club on 10th Street

had sent them to avenge a sailor
who had been jailed in Hamburg

for possessing anti-Nazi
literature.

When it was time for guests
to disembark,

the seamen charged
toward the bow.

New York cops and German crewmen
tried to stop them.

One officer was badly beaten,

one invader was shot
in the thigh.

But two men managed to
make it to the Nazi flag,

and as onlookers cheered,

they cut it loose
and hurled it into the Hudson.

6 men were arrested and
arraigned before a judge,

a Russian immigrant
named Louis Brodsky.

He jailed one protestor because
he had worn brass knuckles.

But he let the others go.

The swastika, he said,

was nothing but "a black
flag of piracy."

It represented
"a revolt against civilization,

a merciless war against
religion, against freedoms."

Nazi leaders eagerly
exploited the incident.

An "impudent Jew in his
bottomless hatred for Germany,"

Hermann Goering said, had
insulted the whole country.

A formal protest was made
to the State Department.

Secretary Hull said he would not
question Judge Brodsky's decision,

but he did express "regret"
that the judge had indulged

in "expressions offensive
to another government

with which we have
official relations."

Hitler was not mollified.

At the annual Nazi party rally
at Nuremberg in September,

the swastika was declared
the German national flag.

"It," Goering said, "has become
for us a holy symbol.

It is the anti-Jewish symbol
for the world."

At Nuremberg, the Nazis also
issued a series of new

and still more harsh
antisemitic laws.

Jews, and potentially
anyone opposed to the Reich,

would become subjects,
not citizens, of Germany,

with no political rights at all.

To uphold the supposed racial
purity of the German people,

these laws banned marriage
or sexual relations

between Jews and persons
of what they called

"German or kindred blood."

The German jurists
who wrote these laws

had closely studied statutes
in the United States

that had for decades
reduced African Americans

to second-class citizens

and barred interracial marriage
in 30 states.

Greene: Even as the Nazis are
writing the Nuremberg Laws

that stripped Jews of
their citizenship in 1935,

they're looking to Jim Crow
laws in the United States

to understand segregation here.

Hayes: And when the
Nazis were reproached

for discrimination
against Jews in Germany,

their first answer was
"Mississippi."

They were able to say,
"In the United States,

"you say that we should
not treat these people

"whom we regard as inferior
badly, but you do it.

"You have lynching in
the United States.

"You make it difficult
for them to vote.

So how dare you reproach us
for this?"

Erbelding: African-American
newspapers at the time here in the U.S.,

they're saying, "You,
the American people,

"seem to be upset about
what Hitler is doing.

"You're not looking
down the street.

"We, too, are being persecuted.

"We, too, are being attacked
by our own neighbors.

"Where are the marches for us?

"Where are the petitions for us?

Where are the rallies for us?"

Narrator: In one respect,

the Nazi statutes were less
harsh than many U.S. state laws

that defined a person
of color as anyone

who had a single drop
of Negro blood.

Instead, they categorized
people as full Jews,

Jews by definition, and mongrels

of the first and second degrees.

Man: There has been no tragedy
in modern times

equal in its awful effects
to the fight

on the Jew in Germany.

It is an attack on civilization

comparable only to such horrors

as the Spanish Inquisition
and the African slave trade.

Adolf Hitler hardly ever
makes a speech today

without belittling,
blaming, or cursing Jews.

Every misfortune of
the world is in whole

or in part blamed on Jews.

There is a campaign
of race prejudice

which surpasses in
vindictive cruelty

and public insult
anything I have ever seen,

and I have seen much.

W.E.B. DuBois.

One night when my mother and I

were out of town visiting
my grandparents,

a group of Brownshirts

came and beat my father up.

We came back the next day.

And my mother took one look
at him

and screamed out, you know,

"What have they done to you,
Julius?"

It is a deep ingrained feeling

that your parents
are your protectors.

Now there is no protector.

Nobody is immune
from persecution.

Hayes: In the 1930s,
the objective of Nazi policy

was to make life in Germany
for Jews so miserable

that they would leave.

And a fair number of German Jews
understood right away.

There were 60,000 German Jews,

more than 10% of the population,

that left the country
in 1933-'34.

They were fortunate
in the fact that

in the initial shock of
discrimination against the Jews,

of outrages against Jews,
the neighboring countries,

the Netherlands, Belgium,
France, Czechoslovakia,

were relatively accepting
of people who left.

And so, in that first
wave of people,

they got refuge in
other countries.

As the 1930s went on, however,

the willingness of these
countries nearby

to accept refugees declined.

And as more and more
German Jews realized

they needed to get
out of the country,

it became harder and harder
for them to get out.

Man as Celler: To expect sportsmanship
from the Nazis is impossible,

for they obtained power by
treachery, violence, and bloodshed.

To regard these men as
true guardians of sports,

to turn the Olympics games
over to their administration

is to invite the possibility
that the Olympic games

shall be befouled.

Emanuel Celler.

Narrator: In 1936, both
the Winter and Summer Olympics

were held in Germany.

Hitler saw an opportunity to
show the world a reinvigorated,

allegedly peace-loving country,

its jobless rate slashed
by public works programs

and massive, rapid rearmament.

Some in Europe and America had
threatened to boycott the Games

because of the Nazi treatment
of Jews.

But Avery Brundage, the president
of the American Olympic Committee,

who privately admired Hitler
and personally disliked Jews,

urged Americans not
to be swept up

in what he called
a "Jew-Nazi altercation."

Congressman Celler
denounced Brundage

as the Nazis'
"willing dupe."

On March 7, 1936,

less than 3 weeks after
the Winter Olympics,

Hitler sent some 30,000 troops
into the Rhineland,

a German region that
had provided a buffer

between Germany and France,

which according to
the Treaty of Versailles

was to remain demilitarized.

Thousands of German-speaking
residents

lined the roads to cheer them.

"The Führer is immensely happy,"

Joseph Goebbels noted
in his diary that night.

"France won't take action,

England remains passive,
and America uninterested."

At the same time, Berlin
was being transformed

into a colossal stage set
for the Summer Olympics.

Some 1,500 reporters were
expected from all over the world,

and the Nazi regime made
sure that they would see

only what it wanted seen.

They removed every sign
forbidding Jews entry to restaurants,

kept antisemitic
publications off newsstands,

and ordered newspapers not
to report antisemitic incidents.

They also rounded up
and interned

several hundred Roma
and Sinti people,

often derogatorily referred
to as gypsies.

"We must be more charming
than the Parisians,"

Goebbels told Berliners,

"more easy-going than
the Viennese,

"more cosmopolitan
than the Londoners,

and more practical
than New Yorkers."

But anti-Nazi Germans managed
to slip between the pages

of a popular guidebook
a map peppered

with the locations of
the scores of jails and prisons

and concentration camps in
which the regimes' enemies

had been safely locked away.

Still, the Nazi genius for
propaganda and pageantry

overcame most visitors' doubts.

Man: The daily spectacle
was breathtaking

in its beauty and magnificence.

The stadium was a tournament of
color that caught the throat,

the massed splendor of the
banners made the gaudy decorations

of America's great parades,

presidential inaugurations,
and World's Fairs

seem like shoddy carnivals
in comparison.

Thomas Wolfe.

(gunshot)

Narrator: The Nazis were
pleased when German athletes

amassed the most medals.

But when Jesse Owens
set 3 Olympic records

and won 4 gold medals,
they were appalled.

"That's a scandal,"
Goebbels wrote.

"White humanity
should be ashamed."

In the future, Hitler assured
his inner circle,

the Olympics would always
be held in Berlin

and no "primitive men" would
ever again be allowed to take part.

U.S. Ambassador
William Dodd

had not been fooled
by the Nazi pageantry

and kept his distance
from the Games.

Germany's Jews,
he informed Washington,

were anticipating the withdrawal
of the world's attention

"with fear and trembling."

Once the visitors had left,

the Nazis resumed their
indoctrination of the German people.

"We must bring up a new
type of human being,"

Hitler had proclaimed.

"We have undertaken to give
the Germans an education

that begins with the child
and ends with the old fighter."

His portrait hung in
every school room.

Small children were made to
recite poems in his praise.

Children's books were filled with
venomous caricatures of Jews.

Millions of adolescents were
made to join the Hitler Youth.

Parents of children
who refused to join

were investigated, fired,
sometimes imprisoned.

♫ ♫

Stern: My mother had
a good insight.

She said, "This will
get worse and worse.

I will write to your
Uncle Benno in America."

She wrote and said,
"Can you save us?"

Back came the answer.

He said, "You know,
I have lost my job

"as a baker and pastry maker,

"and so I can take one of you,

but not all of you."

Behind my back,

a parental conference
must have taken place.

And they said, "OK,
we'll send the oldest,"

and with a mission of trying
to find other Americans

who could vouch for us.

Narrator: Gunther was just 15

and ambivalent
about leaving home.

Stern: There were
countervailing thoughts.

One of them is that you were...

Are going towards
a terrific adventure.

And then this dismal feeling,

everything I know would be
forcefully torn apart.

Narrator: Gunther
finally agreed to go

and to try to find someone in
America with enough money

to sponsor the rest
of the family.

While his father began
the laborious task

of filling out the paperwork to
obtain a visa for his son,

he hired a local English teacher

who had lived
for a time in Brooklyn

to teach Gunther everything
he could about America.

A few months later,

Gunther's parents again
called the family together.

Stern: They took me once more
in this good room,

and there was
papers all laid out.

It was the affidavit in concert

with a American-Jewish
Women's Organization.

They said, "You also have
a date in about a month

at the American
consulate in Hamburg."

Narrator: Gunther
was filled with fear.

He knew that unsympathetic
American officials

in some cities,
like the consul in Stuttgart,

routinely turned applicants down

over one technicality
or another.

Stern: If you were confronted,

like the one in Stuttgart,

by a virulent antisemite,

he followed the letter of
the law beyond its intent.

That kind of news got around.

Narrator: Gunther's appointment
was with the consul

in Hamburg,
Malcolm C. Burke.

Stern: I was prepared
to be grilled.

He started out, you know,
very routinely.

"Where do you come from?
What's your parents like?"

And then, he said... I'll
never forget that question...

"How much is 48 and 52?"

That was it.

He put his name on my
Youth Identity papers.

And there I was,
ready to immigrate.

Had we lived in Stuttgart,
I was out.

Snyder: Almost all of the major
rescuers were diplomats,

people who seemed most of the
time to have unglamorous lives,

people who seemed most of
the time to just be pushing

one piece of paper
from here to there.

But it turns out that
one piece of paper,

pushed from the right here
to the right there,

can save a life.

Narrator: In the fall of 1937,

the date of Gunther's
departure was set.

Stern: It was a highly charged,

emotional couple of weeks.

My mother had taken me
on very long walks

through the city

in the few days we still
had together.

I had played games against
my brother Werner,

and he against me.

And all that was going to
be taken away.

♫ ♫

Narrator: In November,
Gunther Stern

arrived in New York City
aboard a German ship.

After the German Jewish Children's
Aid Society determined his English

was good enough for him
to travel alone,

he boarded a train
and headed for St. Louis,

where his aunt and uncle
were waiting for him.

5 days after he got there,

Gunther was
attending high school.

He got his first job washing
dishes at a downtown hotel.

But the plight of his family
back in Germany

and the responsibility
he felt for finding a way

to bring them to America, too,

never left him for long.

(film projector whirs)

In the summer of 1937,

Herman and Lotte Bland
of Chicago,

who had come
to America from Poland,

took their two sons
to see the country

where they had been born.

Leonard, their oldest,

carried a brand-new
16-milimeter camera.

Harold, who turned 8
on the trip,

was deeply affected by
the poverty

and the antisemitism
he saw there.

In Suwalki, they
met Lotte's cousins,

and she installed a new
headstone on her parents' grave.

In the town's central square,

Leonard noticed that someone
had scratched "Kill the Jews"

in wet cement, and
he captured it on film.

Minutes later,
Polish policemen arrived

and detained the whole family.

Officers tore the film from
Leonard's camera,

and after several tense hours,

finally allowed the frightened
Blands to leave.

In the years to come,
nearly all of Suwalki's

14,000 Jewish inhabitants
would be murdered.

Even the Jewish cemetery
would be destroyed,

as if the generations buried
there had never existed.

(airplanes whirring)

In 1937, the world's
authoritarian regimes

were entering a new, more
threatening phase of conquest.

Hitler had taken back
the Rhineland.

Benito Mussolini's Italian
fascist troops

had crushed Libya
and invaded Ethiopia,

dropping bombs and deploying
mustard gas

against helpless civilians.

Japanese forces invaded China.

In Spain, German
and Italian warplanes

conducted terror bombing raids

in support of a fascist uprising

against a duly elected
left-wing government

supported by the Soviet Union.

Neither France nor England
nor the United States

was willing to intervene.

Franklin Roosevelt had been
re-elected by a landslide in 1936.

4 years of the New Deal had
helped restore American confidence

and begun to put the country
back to work.

But Roosevelt was
an internationalist

presiding over
an isolationist country.

Senate hearings had convinced
millions of Americans

that Wall Street bankers,
munitions makers,

and British propagandists
had conspired

to trick the United States
into entering the Great War.

Gerald Nye: American commercial
interest is selfish and greedy.

Sensing the opportunity for
profit from war

would do as they have
done in the past

if left to pursue
their own course.

Narrator: 125,000 college
students had staged

a one-hour Strike for Peace,

and 60,000 of them
signed a pledge never

"to support the United States
in any war it may conduct."

Congress had shrunk the Army,

kept the country out of
international organizations,

and passed two Neutrality Acts,

barring the sale of arms or war
materiel to any belligerent anywhere.

In Chicago, President Roosevelt
publicly expressed his alarm.

Roosevelt: The epidemic of
world lawlessness is spreading.

And mark this well,

when an epidemic of physical
disease starts to spread,

the community approves

and joins in a quarantine
of the patients

in order to protect the health
of the community

against the spread
of the disease.

(applause)

Narrator: Outraged
pacifists now charged

that Roosevelt was starting
America down the slope to war

by calling for a quarantine.

Isolationist congressmen
threatened to impeach him.

The leaders of his own party
remained silent.

"It is a terrible thing,"
he told an aide,

"to look over your shoulder
when you are trying to lead

and find no one there."

Erbelding: There is no real
perception in the 1930s

that America is a force
for good in the world,

or that we should be
involved in the world at all.

There is no sense among
the American people,

among the American government,
among the international community,

that it's anyone else's
business what is happening

within, you know,
your own country.

It is not illegal what Hitler
is doing to the Jews

under International Law.

You can attack your own citizens

under International Law
at this point.

Narrator: American corporations,
like those of other countries,

continued to conduct business
as usual with the Hitler regime.

The Nazis awarded Henry Ford
their highest civilian medal,

and his German plant began
supplying the German army

with 1,500 vehicles a year,

after turning down an offer

to build airplane engines
for Britain.

Woolworth's German subsidiary
fired all its Jewish employees

as the price of doing business.

So did the Berlin office
of the Associated Press.

All but one of the major
Hollywood studios

went along with the Nazis, too,

even though many of the men
who ran them were Jewish.

Joseph Goebbels had closed
the lucrative German market

to any film "considered
detrimental to German prestige."

For a time, the German
vice-consul in Los Angeles

had the power to approve
or disapprove scripts

before production began.

Between 1933 and 1939,
not a single word

was uttered against
the Nazis on screen.

The 80 million Americans who
went to the movies each week

got brief glimpses of
Nazi Germany from newsreels

made by Pathé, Paramount,
Fox Movietone,

and Hearst Metrotone News.

But the footage
was usually confined

to film produced by the Nazis.

Film Announcer: In united
Germany is the rallying cry

of Chancellor Hitler
as he tours the country.

In Westphalia, he is greeted
by a tremendous throng

of enthusiastic admirers.

(all cheering)

Narrator: "The March of Time,"
a series of shorts

made in association with "Time"
magazine, was different.

In January of 1938,

it offered a film called
"Inside Nazi Germany"

that included scenes
shot by American cameramen

when Nazi minders
were not looking.

Film Announcer: Still
going on as pitilessly,

as brutally as it
did 5 years ago

is Goebbels' persecution
of the Jews.

Sign-posts at city limits
bear the legend,

"Jews not wanted.
Jews keep out."

Nazi Germany faces her destiny

with one of the greatest
war machines in history.

And the inevitable destiny
of the great war machines

of the past has been to destroy
the peace of the world,

its people, and the
governments of their time.

Woman: The Nazis wanted
to annex Austria,

and there was supposed to be
a voting if Austria wanted it.

Hitler didn't wait for a vote,

just marched in in March 1938.

All our friends
and the whole city

became immediately
enthusiastic and Nazis.

They stood in the street
with swastika flags

and Heil Hitler.

Crowd: Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

Narrator: Hitler called
the unification

of his native
Austria with Germany

his greatest accomplishment,

and he basked in the
enthusiasm of the crowds

that had greeted him in Vienna.

"Such a stream of love as I have
never experienced," he called it.

One quarter of a million Jews
had somehow managed

to escape Hitler's Germany.

But now 192,000 Austrian Jews
had come under his control

and were stripped
of any citizenship.

SS men and Gestapo agents were
let loose to beat and humiliate them

and force them to clean
anti-Nazi slogans off the sidewalk.

Eva Geiringer was not quite 9
when the Germans entered Vienna.

Geiringer: And it was
just terrible,

from one day to the next,
the attitude changed.

Suddenly I was not allowed
to go and play

with my Catholic friends.

My brother Heinz,

who was at that time 12 years
old, he came home.

He looked terrible.
He was badly beaten up.

And when my parents
questioned him, he said,

"My own friends did that,

and the teachers just watched
to see it happening."

Narrator: Eva's father,
a shoe manufacturer,

soon joined would-be immigrants,
most of them Jews,

clamoring at consulates
for visas to somewhere,

anywhere that
seemed to offer safety.

Geiringer: People started
to queue at consulates.

You had to have an entry visa
and an exit visa by then.

And you know this.

So Hitler wanted to get
rid of the Jews,

but to get an exit visa
was as well difficult.

I didn't want to leave,
you know?

I know it didn't
feel nice anymore.

But still, I had
my relatives there,

and it was my language,

and I loved it there.

And my parents said,
"Well, it won't be long."

And you know,
"We'll come back again."

The people, even in '38,
didn't believe

that Hitler will be able to stay
in power for very long.

Narrator: Eva's father
would finally manage

to get his family
to the Netherlands

and launch a new business there.

He was one of the lucky ones.

The Nazis stepped up their
discriminatory decrees.

Throughout the
newly-expanded Reich,

Jews would soon be required to
register all Jewish-owned businesses

and all their personal
property from houses

and art collections down to
their dinnerware and jewelry,

an obvious prelude to
confiscation.

Those with first names the
Nazis didn't recognize as Jewish

were made to adopt
new middle names,

Israel for men
and Sara for women.

All Jews holding passports
had to have them stamped

with the red letter "J."

Before 1938, would-be emigrants
to the United States

already had to wait
3 or 4 months

before they could get
an interview for their visa

with consulate officials.

Now the steady stream of
frightened people became a torrent,

and they faced a wait of
two or three years.

Woman as Thompson: It is a fantastic
commentary on the inhumanity of our times

that for thousands
and thousands of people,

a piece of paper
with a stamp on it

is the difference
between life and death,

and that scores of people
have blown their brains out

because they could not get it.

Dorothy Thompson.

Narrator: It was now impossible
even for the State Department

to deny that there was
a growing immigration crisis.

Alone among world leaders,

FDR tried to ease it,
at least a little.

At his cabinet meeting 4 days
after Hitler entered Vienna,

Roosevelt announced
that he was combining

the small Austrian quota
with the larger German quota

in order to give
Austrian refugees

a better chance
of obtaining visas.

But when FDR asked his Vice
President John Nance Garner,

a former Speaker of the House,

if Congress could now be
persuaded to increase the quota,

he said no.

If his former colleagues could
vote in secret, he explained,

they'd shut down
immigration entirely.

No one in the room disagreed.

Snyder: FDR was dealing
with a society

that he knew to be vulnerable

to the German antisemitic
propaganda.

What he had to do
is find ways to save Jews

without drawing too much
American attention

to the fact
that he was doing it.

Lipstadt: Could FDR have
spoken out more strongly?

Could he have exerted
more influence? Certainly.

But there was no groundswell
of opinion in the Congress.

So, when people pin it on him,

"A," it's assuming
that he could have

just turned everything around.

And "B," it's forgetting
the public opinion

was strongly opposed to
immigration in general,

refugees in particular,

penniless refugees even more so,

and Jewish refugees
all the more.

It's on a lot of people.
It's on everyone.

Greene: In 1938,
Americans are asked

whether they think the
persecution of Jews in Germany

has been Jews' own fault.

And two-thirds of Americans
say partly or entirely.

Something bad is happening
to the Jews abroad

and an inclination of a lot of
Americans is to blame the Jews.

Narrator: Roosevelt called for
a conference in Evian, France,

for the international community
to discuss a collective solution

to the problem of
"political refugees"

seeking to flee Hitler.

He was careful not to say that
most of those in flight were Jews.

Erbelding: There is a sense
in the U.S. Government

that antisemitism is
so strong in America

that they don't want
people to think that,

or even get the hint,

that the United States
might be going to do

anything particular for
the Jews, to rescue the Jews.

Narrator: Since the U.S.
Congress was not willing

to alter America's quota system,

Roosevelt would not ask
any other country

to change its own laws
to take in more immigrants,

though it was his hope
that other countries

might volunteer to do so
at the upcoming conference.

In July, representatives of
32 countries met for a week

and managed only to form an
Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees

without any funds
or power to assist them.

Representatives of all
32 nations at that conference

stand up and say,
"This is a horrible problem.

Let us tell you why we can't
let in refugees now."

Narrator: The French delegate
claimed France had reached

"the extreme point of saturation
as regards refugees."

4 Central American
countries jointly said

they had no need for merchants
and intellectuals,

by which they meant Jews.

The Australian spokesman said,
"As we have no real racial problem,

we are not desirous
of importing one."

Great Britain
refused to increase

and then sharply limited

the number of Jews
allowed into Palestine,

the Middle Eastern territory
they controlled.

Representatives of Jewish
organizations were present,

but only as observers.

A young Golda Meir
remembered her

"sorrow, rage,
frustration, and horror"

at not being allowed to speak.

So, what you have is a week's
worth of nations

standing up one
after the other saying,

"This is terrible,
but we don't want any.

This is awful,
but we don't want any."

At which point, the Germans say,

"You don't want the Jews
any more than we do."

Narrator: Chaim Weizmann, the
president of the World Zionist Organization,

dedicated to creating a Jewish
state in Palestine, said

the globe was now "divided into
places where Jews cannot live

and places into which
they cannot enter."

Film Announcer: Today the wings
of the German air fleet

cast a threatening shadow
across central Europe.

From the sky and from the
highway comes the rumble

of the dictator's creed,
"Might makes right."

Caught between
the pan-German pincers

is little Czechoslovakia,
a republic of 15 million souls.

Narrator: In the late
summer of 1938,

Adolf Hitler claimed the right
to seize the Sudetenland,

the German-speaking region
of Czechoslovakia.

Newscaster: And as the tension
rises almost to breaking point,

might is answered with might,

Czechoslovakia mobilizes.

Narrator: France and
the Soviet Union had signed

a mutual defense pact
with the Czechs.

Britain mobilized.

But in the end,
no country proved willing

to come to the defense
of Czechoslovakia.

Instead, at a September 30th
meeting with Hitler in Munich,

the British prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain,

and the French premier,
Edouard Daladier,

told the Czechs they had no
choice but to give up their territory,

in exchange for
a pledge by Hitler

that he would make no further
territorial demands.

Nazi Germany had become the
most powerful nation in Europe.

But it also faced a new problem.

Hayes: There's a fundamental
contradiction

between the two central
teachings of Nazi ideology.

The first central teaching is
that the Jews have to be removed

because they are corrupting
and endanger the state.

But the second
central teaching is

for Germany to be a great power,
it must get living space.

It must expand
into enough territory

that will give it food production
to sustain its population

and the natural resources
that will sustain its power.

Well, in Europe of the 1930s,

these two principles worked
fundamentally against each other,

because where the Nazis
wanted the living space

was exactly the spot on the
globe with the highest density

of Jewish population...

Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania.

And so, the Nazis discovered
in the course of the 1930s

as they drove about 69%
of the Jews out of Germany,

that they also
then expanded into Austria

and the Sudetenland
and Czechoslovakia.

And with each of those steps,

they began to acquire more Jews
that almost canceled out

all of the numbers that
they had driven out to date.

(pounding on door)

Messinger: It was the middle
of the night,

and there was
a pounding on the door.

My father opened the door,

and sure enough, these
two policemen were there.

And they said to my father,

"Get dressed.
You're coming with us."

My mother was holding me.

And I started to cry.

And one of the policemen
said to my mother,

"Shut the kid up
or I'll kill him."

And they took my father away.

The next morning, we went down
to the police station.

My mother wanted to find out
what happened to my father.

When we got to
the police station,

there were about 100 or 150
other Jewish women standing there.

And it became clear to my mother

that they had taken all
Jewish men of Polish origin

and shipped them back to Poland.

Narrator: It was the first mass
deportation of Jews from Germany.

17,000 Polish Jews
were declared stateless,

stripped of their possessions,

and driven across
the border into Poland.

Snyder: In Eastern Europe,
there was a saying that,

"What holds the body and the
soul together is a passport."

What's meant
is that documentation,

the idea that you're
somebody's citizen,

that there's a state somewhere
looking after you

is fundamental to your ability
to survive in the modern world.

Man: It is not, after all,
a crime to be Jewish.

I am not a dog.
I have a right to live.

My people have a right
to exist on this earth.

And yet everywhere, they are
hunted down like animals.

Herschel Grynszpan.

Narrator: In the fall of
1938, Herschel Grynszpan,

a 17-year-old living in Paris,
learned that his family,

like Sol Messinger's father,

had been among those deported
from Germany to Poland.

Herschel's sister wrote to him

from a squalid refugee camp
begging for help.

He could provide none.

He had no papers and no ability
to earn a living,

just one more person without
a country on a continent

increasingly haunted by those
who had nowhere to go.

In Paris on November 7th,
Grynszpan bought a pistol,

entered the German Embassy,

and asked to see the ambassador.

In his pocket was a postcard
addressed to his parents.

He asked God to forgive him
for what he was about to do.

"I must protest," he wrote,

"so that the whole
world hears my protest."

Ushered into the office
of a junior German official

named Ernst Vom Rath,

Grynszpan pulled out his pistol,

shouted that he was
acting in the name

of all Jews deported
from Germany,

and fired 5 times, hitting
his target in the stomach.

Rath would die two days later
on November 9th.

Grynszpan was arrested
and disappeared.

(drumming)

Nazi leaders saw
a golden opportunity.

Goebbels instructed
the German press

to denounce the assassination

as a deliberate
attack by "world Jewry"

that would result
in what he called

the "heaviest consequences"
for German Jews.

Hitler ordered up
a massive, coordinated,

physical assault on Jews
in hundreds of communities

aimed at forcing
as many of them as possible

to flee their country.

It was staged as a
spontaneous uprising,

so some Stormtroopers
and members of the Gestapo

wore civilian clothes as
they attacked Jewish homes,

shops, synagogues, cemeteries,

and any Jews they happened upon.

(distant shouts)

Schoolchildren were
encouraged to join in.

Firemen stood by and allowed
Jewish properties to burn.

The police protected
only shops and homes

owned by so-called Aryans.

(glass shatters)

It would be remembered as
the Night of Broken Glass...

Kristallnacht.

Susan Hilsenrath: I was 9 years old,

and my brother and I were
sleeping in our bedroom.

Maybe it was around 11:00.

And all of a sudden
some bricks and rocks

were being thrown
through our window.

And I was really scared,

and I covered myself up
with a blanket.

And my brother, who was
a year younger than I am,

went to the window,
and he pulled himself up,

and he looked outside
and he said,

"Suzie, it is our neighbors
that are throwing

the bricks and rocks
through the window."

Then we were in
our parents' bedroom,

and we were all huddled
together trying to decide what to do.

Then they were carrying
this lamp post,

and they smashed it
through our front door

which was made out of glass.

Narrator: In Berlin,
6-year-old Sol Messinger,

anxious about his
absent father in Poland,

huddled together with his mother
in their apartment.

Messinger: I saw that the
synagogue had been burned.

When I talk about it, I sort
of can smell the smoke.

This was the synagogue
in which we had prayed,

where my father
used to take me on Shabbat,

and... and there it was
smoldering.

Narrator: The Germans
destroyed 1,400 synagogues

and other Jewish
religious sites,

wrecked and looted some
7,500 Jewish-owned businesses,

murdered at least 91 people,

and drove another 300
to kill themselves.

Many more were beaten,
raped, humiliated.

Susan Hilsenrath: I saw
the rabbi on his veranda.

And two SS men, I guess
that's what they were,

they were holding
him by the arms.

And another one came along
and cut off his beard.

And that was a very shocking
thing to me at the time

because it was a symbol
that he was the rabbi.

And it was very shocking
that anybody could do

such a thing to
the rabbi of our town.

My father had saved some money.

He had saved it
under the mattress

because at that time

Jewish people couldn't keep
their money in the bank.

So he gave me the money
and he told me to put it

in my underwear,
in my underpants.

So he figured that if
anything should happen,

they're not going to look in
the little girl's underwear

to see if there was any money.

Narrator: The Nazis rounded up
some 30,000 Jewish men

all across Germany

and marched them through
jeering crowds

to trucks and buses that
carried them to Dachau

and to newly-constructed
concentration camps

at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.

There, they were crowded
together, beaten, starved,

and allowed out only
if they signed over

all their property to the state

and agreed to leave the country.

Susan Hilsenrath: Before
the Night of the Broken Glass,

my father wanted
to stay in Germany,

but my mother was always wanting
to come to the United States

because she had heard such
wonderful things

about the United States.

But after the Night of
the Broken Glass,

both of them wanted to get out,

and I think all of the Jews in
Germany wanted to get out.

It was the primary goal was
to get to the United States,

represented by
the Statue of Liberty.

As a child, I heard
about the Statue of Liberty.

I heard what it stands for.

It was the goal.

Man as Frank: What can one say
in times like these?

We have to be grateful
for what we still have

and not give up hope.

It is miserably cold here, too,

and we think constantly of those

who, unlike ourselves,
have no warm place to stay.

Otto Frank.

Narrator: Otto and Edith Frank
had been living comfortably

in Amsterdam for
over 4 years now.

He had established
a successful business.

Their eldest daughter Margot
was doing well in school.

So was her younger
sister Annelies.

But after Kristallnacht,

a flood of new Jewish refugees

poured across the German border,

bringing with them
horror stories

of what they'd been through.

Seeking to put still more distance
between his family and the Nazis,

Otto Frank traveled to the
U.S. consulate in Rotterdam

and added his name to
the ever-growing list

of Jews from Greater Germany
and Czechoslovakia

hoping somehow
to escape to America.

♫ ♫

Announcer: Next time, on
"The U.S. and the Holocaust"...

(glass shatters)

a desperate exodus
from Europe...

Hayes: At every American
consulate in Germany,

there were Jews seeking refuge.

Announcer: a call for American isolation...

The isolationists,
the antisemites

come out of the woodwork.

Announcer: and behind enemy lines,

the unthinkable begins...

Mendelsohn: As it was happening to us,

we couldn't believe it.

Announcer: when "The U.S.
and the Holocaust"

continues next time.

Announcer: Stream the full series,

go behind the scenes,

and learn how to bring
"The U.S. and the Holocaust"

into the classroom by visiting

or the PBS video app.

To order "The U.S.
and the Holocaust"

on DVD or Blu-ray,

visit shopPBS or call

1-800-PLAY-PBS.

A CD of original music
from the series

is also available.

"The U.S. and the Holocaust"

is also available
with PBS Passport

and on Amazon Prime Video.

♫ ♫

♫ ♫