The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022): Season 1, Episode 2 - Yearning to Breathe Free (1938-1942) - full transcript

Improved by Sailor420

Hope you enjoy the show

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

was provided
by David M. Rubenstein,

investing in
people and institutions

that help us understand the past

and look to the future;

by the Park Foundation;

the Judy and Peter
Blum Kovler Foundation,

supporting those who remind us

about American history
and the Holocaust;



by Gilbert S. Omenn
and Martha A. Darling;

by the Arthur Vining Davis
Foundations,

investing in our common future;

and by these members of
the Better Angels Society;

Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine;

Jan and Rick Cohen;

Allan and Shelley Holt;

the Koret Foundation;

David and Susan Kreisman;

Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder;

the Fullerton Family
Charitable Fund;

the Blavatnik Family Foundation;

the Crown Family Philanthropies,

honoring members of
the Crown and Goodman families;



and by these additional members.

By the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting

and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(birds calling)

(horn honks)

(laughing)

Daniel Mendelsohn: When I was
a small child,

5, 6, 7, 8,

we would visit
my grandpa and his wife

down in Miami Beach.

My grandfather was one
of 7 siblings.

5 immigrated to the States
in the early twenties.

They would gather
together their old pals,

and some of them would
get very emotional

when they saw me
because they said I bore

an uncanny resemblance to
my great uncle Shmiel Jaeger.

I felt haunted by this guy
because people looked at me

and they thought of him.

We had pictures of Shmiel
and Ester, his wife,

and these girls as they
grew up in a provincial town

in Eastern Poland

because all through the 1920s
they were sending pictures

as the girls were growing up.

So we had pictures of them,

and on the back
of every picture,

my grandfather always wrote,

"Uncle Shmiel killed
by the Nazis,"

or, "Aunt Ester killed by
the Nazis."

So I always wondered,
"Why are there no stories

about these people?"

♫ ♫

(Adolf Hitler speaking German)

(cheering)

Narrator: In open defiance
of the Versailles Treaty,

Hitler had built
a mighty military machine,

then sent his forces to seize
the Rhineland, Austria,

and the Sudetenland
in Czechoslovakia.

The Nazis had relentlessly
persecuted

German and Austrian Jews,

reducing their rights,
expropriating their property,

choking off their livelihoods,

declaring them parasites,
not citizens...

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

Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass...

Hitler unleashed Nazi mobs
on Jews in cities and towns

all over
the newly expanded Germany,

beating, burning,
raping, killing,

hoping to drive them all out
of their country.

Hundreds of thousands
of German and Austrian Jews

were now desperate
to escape the Nazis.

They knew their only
hope lay in flight

into friendly European countries
or across the ocean

to the United States.

♫ ♫

(ship horn blows)

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

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

came along, and he was shouting,

"Synagogues burning in Germany.

Read all about it,"

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

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

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

another part of my past,

and that was
the first inkling I got

of Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass.

Peter Hayes: At every American
consulate in Germany,

there were Jews seeking refuge
because their houses

had been pillaged overnight
and so forth,

and this was reported
in American newspapers.

The "Chicago Tribune," which
was an isolationist newspaper

in the middle of North America,

had pictures
of burning synagogues

in early November 1938.

Deborah Lipstadt: It's on the
front pages

of American newspapers.

Some major newspapers have it

on the front page
day after day after day.

People are shocked.

In America, there is
a tremendous response,

even from those who don't want
Jews coming

and even
from antisemitic sources

because while being
an antisemite is one thing,

but this is a civilized country

seemingly going crazy,

seemingly completely
out of control,

and there is
tremendous criticism.

This is not merely
a Jewish question,

a Catholic question,
a Protestant question,

a political question
or a labor question.

It is one, however,
that goes to the foundation

upon which we have erected
the America that has stood

all during our political life
for the preservation

of worldwide civilization.

Any attack on a minority group

in any country is an attack
on democracy itself.

Sheen: We might almost say
that Nazi savagery

against the Jew
is the straw that broke

the camel's back.

(applause)

Narrator: At President Roosevelt's

weekly press conference,
he said he could

"scarcely believe that such
a thing could occur

in a 20th century civilization"

and withdrew his ambassador
from Berlin,

the only world leader to do so.

Lipstadt: Because
of this public response,

the Germans make
a strategic decision.

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

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

of the newspaper.

Hayes: FDR, who was normally
very cautious

about his policy, did
the one thing in that interval

that he could do
by executive action.

He said every Jew
in America from Germany

who was here on a tourist visa
could now stay.

Narrator: "It would be
a cruel and inhumane thing

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

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

But when a reporter
asked if there were plans

for a "relaxation
of our immigration restriction,"

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

We have the quota system."

Roosevelt had
no executive power to change

that system.

Only Congress could alter it.

Mae Ngai: The people who
thought that immigrants

from Eastern and Southern Europe
should be highly restricted,

they were some of the worst
white supremacists

in the Congress,

and they had
deep-seated antisemitism,

so they were
at the forefront of making sure

that as little
would be done as possible

for Jewish refugees.

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

I am not willing myself,
while hundreds of thousands

in this country are hungry,
perhaps millions

of children underfed,

and hordes of young boys
and girls

coming into
active life seeking jobs

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

Senator William Borah.

Narrator: In the midterm
elections,

Republicans had
increased their numbers

in both the House and Senate.

The president found himself
more dependent than ever

on conservative Southern
Democratic committee chairmen,

all opposed
to allowing more refugees.

The public remained
overwhelmingly

against any change.

The "Christian Century"
editorialized that

admitting more Jews
would just exacerbate

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

Daniel Greene: Two weeks
after Kristallnacht,

Americans are asked
two questions.

"Do you disapprove of this?"

And 94% of Americans say,

"Yes, we disapprove of this."

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

Jewish exiles from Germany?"

And more than
7 out of 10 say no.

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

Nazi party members
thought the brutality

of Kristallnacht
had been excessive,

but Nazi leaders were more
impressed by the fact

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

and they were unmoved
by the outcry overseas.

They decided to make life
still more impossible

for the hundreds
of thousands of Jews

still in harm's way.

As what the Nazis called
"atonement" for the murder

of the German diplomat
in Paris that had been

the pretext for Kristallnacht,
the Jewish community was

fined one billion Reichsmarks.

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

and businesses
and places of worship

and pay for it all themselves.

The regime confiscated
their radios,

canceled
their newspaper subscriptions.

It expelled Jewish children
from state schools,

barred their parents
from driving or owning a car,

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

and from those few
professions that still

had been open to them.

Finally, Jewish Germans were
banned from running businesses

or buying
or selling goods of any kind.

Even getting out
of the Reich now meant dropping

into destitution.

Emigrants were permitted
to take with them

just 10 Reichsmarks.

Fully 5%
of the fast-growing Reich budget

would be funded
by property looted from Jews.

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

in Germany had applied
for visas to the United States.

Raymond Geist, the senior
American diplomat

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

"The Germans have embarked on
a program of annihilation

of the Jews,"
he wrote to a colleague.

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

On January 30, 1939,
the sixth anniversary

of his taking power,
the Fuhrer stood

before the Reichstag
and seemed to confirm

Raymond Geist's prediction.

(cheering)

Lipstadt: The time to
stop a genocide is

before it happens,

and whether you're talking
about World War II

or you're talking about Turkey
and the Armenians,

the time to stop it is
before it happens.

So that when Hitler is
speaking out and saying

these horrendous things
and Germany is

disenfranchising Jews
and conducting things

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

(horns honking)

Susan Hilsenrath: My father
had a cousin who lived

in the Bronx,
and they had a pickle factory,

and they figured that maybe
they would help them come

to the United States,

but it was almost impossible

because the United States
had a quota,

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

So my father had to think
of some kind of way

to get his children
into a safe place.

Joseph Hilsenrath: Our parents told us

that we had to get out,

leave, and that
they would follow us

and that we would go to,
to France,

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

Susan: My father had heard
of this lady,

a French lady,
who smuggled children

across the border into France,

and I understand that he

gave her all of the money

to take my brother and me

across the border.

I was almost 10 years old
by then,

and my brother was 8,

and...

I remember it vaguely
because the horror of being

separated from my parents,
I have pushed it

way in the back of my mind.

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

and how we said
good-bye to them,

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

and I'm a grandmother,
and the idea

of... of sending my children away

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

I can't even imagine doing that.

♫ ♫

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

(cheering and applause)

♫ ♫

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

my pathway to America.

One was baseball,

and secondly, it was music.

I'd never heard jazz before...

♫ ♫

and the third entrance
was through a girlfriend.

We walked arm in arm, and those

beautiful American songs,

they were washing over us,

and we were singing
and feeling good

at the few moments I had
of that relaxing moment

when I became
somewhat more American.

♫ Any old time
you want me ♫

♫ I am yours ♫

♫ For just the asking, darling ♫

♫ Any old time... ♫

Narrator: Gunther Stern's
girlfriend Ida Mae Schwartzberg

had trouble
pronouncing his name.

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

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

"That's a tongue twister.

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

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

I will call you... Guy."

Heh!

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

from you for so long.

It is comforting
to hear from you,

even if you have yet to
accomplish anything for us.

Please pull out all the stops,
dear Gunther,

so we can all be reunited.

Narrator: Every few months,
Guy received a letter

from his parents back in
Hildesheim, Germany,

sometimes including
photographs of his family.

Stern: It really shows
that one person

is missing in there.

Where the hell am I?

I belong there.

Narrator: Guy tried again
and again to find someone

willing to put up
a guarantee of as much

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

to the United States...
More than 3 times

the average annual income
of an American worker.

He had no luck.

Stern: And then,
a miracle happened.

Narrator: One Friday,
hitchhiking to work,

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

who after hearing his story
offered to help.

Guy immediately set up
an appointment for them

to meet with a lawyer
who had helped other families

obtain affidavits of support.

Stern: We went there
on a Saturday morning,

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

"And what's your occupation?"

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

And the lawyer said,

"We can stop right here.

"It says in the law,
the person furnishing

"the affidavit has to be
a well-established,

highly reputed person
of the community."

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

like, 'businessman'?"

This lawyer rose to
his full height.

"And deceive
the U.S. Government?"

And he added something else
that was insulting.

The man took
his hat and walked out.

My great chance...

rested on one damned lawyer.

Here, a Jewish lawyer
who saw all the niceties

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

which I had spread out.

(laughter)

Newsreel Announcer: 200 boys
and girls wave a greeting

to England, land of the free.

They are between
the ages 5 and 17.

The advance guard
of the first 5,000 Jewish

and non-Aryan child refugees
from Germany have been provided

with a temporary home
here while arrangements

are made for them to emigrate.

Narrator: After Kristallnacht,
Britain

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

to escape Nazism in what was
called the Kindertransport.

Newsreel Announcer: And the
youngsters tuck in

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

Narrator: In February 1939,

Democratic Senator
Robert Wagner of New York

and Republican Congresswoman
Edith Nourse Rogers

of Massachusetts introduced
a new bill.

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

between the age
of 5 and 14 per year,"

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

against the immigration
quota system."

Narrator: The First Lady
backed the bill.

Her husband privately
offered advice

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

but the American Legion,

the Daughters
of the American Revolution,

and the American Coalition
of Patriotic Societies

were all opposed.

They had favored some
of the 60 bills that had

recently been introduced to
reduce immigration quotas.

Nell Irvin Painter: It's a
xenophobic refusal.

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

especially given a country
as big as the United States

with plenty of space.

I do understand it
in terms of antisemitism.

I don't want to understand
that antisemitism

could be so deep and so cruel.

Father Coughlin: If I know
the American public

who fought the League
of Nations propagandists...

Narrator: Father Coughlin
called for the creation

of a national "Christian Front"
to combat

the influence of what he called
"Communistic Jews"

and claimed to his vast
radio audience

that Jewish businessmen were
firing their Christian employees

to make room
for Jewish refugees.

Coughlin: There is still
the United States Senate

with whom these forces
must contend...

Lipstadt: The restrictionists...
The people

who want to
restrict immigration...

the isolationists,
the antisemites

come out of the woodwork.

Democrats, Republicans,
people say things like,

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

Woman as Eleanor Roosevelt: What
has happened to us

in this country?

We have always been ready to
receive the unfortunates

from other countries,
and though this may seem

a generous gesture
on our part, we have profited

a thousand-fold
by what they have brought us.

Eleanor Roosevelt.

Narrator: No group was more
adamantly opposed

to admitting Jewish refugees
than the German American Bund.

(drums tapping)

20,000 members would fill
Madison Square Garden

on Washington's Birthday.

They were led by Fritz Kuhn,
a German immigrant

who fancied himself
the "American Fuhrer."

(applause)

(applause)

(louder applause)

Narrator: Other speakers railed

against the president
"Frank D. Rosenfeld"

and his "Jew Deal."

Kunze: We only call upon
our leaders to awake

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

and soul as any other non-Aryan

and that he is a thousand times
more dangerous to us

than all the others by reason
of his parasitic nature.

(cheering and applause)

(audience members chanting,
"Heil Hitler!")

Great floods of tears
for a few hundred thousand

job-taking so-called
poor Jewish refugees,

who incidentally in general...

(booing)

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

(applause)

Narrator: A "Fortune"
magazine poll found

that only 1 in 10 respondents

favored increasing quotas

or making exemptions
for refugees,

and 4 out of 10 believed
Jews had

"too much power
in the United States."

It further found that 85%
of American Protestants

and 84% of Catholics opposed

offering sanctuary
to European refugees.

So did more than a quarter
of Jewish Americans.

During hearings on the bill
to admit some refugee children,

a witness said
that it should be passed

because it was true
to the American tradition

of providing sanctuary
for religious

and political refugees.

New York Congressman
Samuel Dickstein

gently corrected him.

"This is the form
of our government,

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

We talked about it."

Hayes: The advocates
of that bill, the people

who submitted it, withdrew it,
and they withdrew it

because they thought
if it comes to the floor

it will open the way
to other proposals

to utterly stop all immigration
into the United States.

In 1939 for FDR, the most
important political challenge

he faced was getting
the Congress

to revoke the neutrality acts,

the acts that restricted
our ability to supply

other countries if they became
involved in a war

with Nazi Germany.

The relaxing of
the immigration quotas

was less important to him
than that.

To us looking back, we tend
to think that

the most important thing was
the humanitarian crisis

of the time,
but of course if FDR

had not succeeded in repealing
the neutrality acts

in 1939 and 1940,
we might think otherwise.

Mendelsohn: My grandfather,
Abraham Jaeger,

he emigrated
with his older sister

from this small town in Poland.

My grandfather always,
you know, prided himself

once he got his citizenship
on being an American.

He celebrated everything,

the Fourth of July,
Thanksgiving.

He loved it.

Narrator: Abraham Jaeger's
older brother Shmiel

had not loved America.

He had arrived in New York
back in 1912,

quickly saw that
the teeming streets

of the Lower East Side
were not paved with gold.

Woman: Shmiel saw the pushcarts
on Delancey Street.

The Jews who lived down
in those Jewish areas

was not his style.

He was a gentleman,

and he says, "At home,
I have vineyards

"and orchards
and a beautiful house.

What do I need America?"

(dog barking)

Narrator: After less than
a year, Shmiel Jaeger decided

to return to his hometown
Bolechow in eastern Poland.

Eventually he married
his sweetheart Ester,

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

Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele,
and Bronia.

Marlene: Shmiel was
the oldest brother,

and there was respect
and reverence.

They called him
the mayor of the town.

He was exceedingly handsome,

and then they had all
those darling children.

Mendelsohn: My grandfather
used to say with a sigh,

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

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

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

And that was
the right decision for him,

as strange as that sounds,
knowing what later happened.

Narrator: In the late 1930s,

antisemitism intensified
in Poland.

The Catholic Church
and the right-wing government

promoted boycotts
of Jewish businesses.

Politicians pressured
Poland's Jews

to leave the country.

Gangs attacked
their Jewish neighbors.

Thugs threatened Shmiel
on the street.

Hanging over everything
was the growing possibility

of a German invasion,
which would surely make life

far more harsh.

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

the Jews are going through here,
but what you know

is just one one-hundredth of it.

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

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

with a whole head or your legs
in one piece.

Shmiel.

Narrator: "I know that
in America life

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

back in the United States.

"Still, at least they
aren't gripped

by constant terror."

(crowd cheering)

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

the capital of what
remained of Czechoslovakia.

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

Hitler's promise of peace
to Britain and France

at Munich had lasted
less than 6 months.

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

any thought."

It was clear that Poland
would be his next target.

Hitler was sure that France
and Britain would not dare

intervene there either.

"Our enemies are little worms,"
Hitler said.

"I saw them at Munich."

This time, Hitler was wrong.

Britain and France finally saw

the folly of trying to

appease him further.

If he attacked Poland,

this time they would fight back.

(train whistle blowing)

With war more likely than ever,
more and more Jews

were desperate to get
off the continent.

Sol Messinger: It was very
difficult to get a visa

to the United States,

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

mainly, I guess, because
it was close

to the United States.

Narrator: The Cuban
government was now selling

refugees tourist visas
that allowed them to land

on the island and stay
until their turn came

to emigrate
to the United States.

Messinger: My mother finally
managed to get a Cuban visa

and tickets to go
on the St. Louis,

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

He had been deported back.

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

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

and he wrote back, "Leave
unless you want

your son's blood on your hands."

The day before we were
supposed to leave for Hamburg,

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

because she recognized
my father's knock.

Ran to the door,
opened the door,

and my father was there.

He had gotten permission
from the German government

to come back to Germany
for two days

so we could leave together.

So the next day,
we went to Hamburg,

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

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

one of many ships carrying
passengers anxious

to escape the coming storm.

More refugees got on
at Cherbourg.

Almost all of
the 937 passengers were Jewish,

most from Germany,
some from Eastern Europe,

and still others,
like the Messingers,

now officially "stateless."

Messinger: We all were
standing at the railing,

looking at Germany getting
a little and farther

and farther away,
and my father started crying,

and my mother looked at him,
and she says,

"What are you crying about?

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

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

"but I'm crying because
we're leaving

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

when we'll see them again."

Narrator: They traveled
in comfort, dining, dancing,

sunbathing, swimming
in the ship's pool.

The liner's captain
Gustave Schröder

was an anti-Nazi.

He saw to it that
a portrait of Hitler

was taken down
during Friday night prayers

and insisted that his crew
treat his passengers

with a kind of courtesy
no Jewish person was afforded

then anywhere
under Hitler's control...

(ship horn blowing)

but when the ship
reached Havana,

it was clear that
something was wrong.

Only 28 passengers
were allowed to come ashore.

All the rest, over 900
people who had paid

a corrupt Cuban official
back in Germany

thousands of dollars
for their tourist visas,

were ordered to stay on board.

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

that Cuba
had invalidated our visas.

We had paid for them,
we had gotten them,

we had gotten to Cuba
only to find out that

they had invalidated our visas.

Narrator: Things had changed in Cuba

since the St. Louis set sail.

Antisemitism had always
been strong on the island,

and some 4,000 mostly
Jewish refugees

had settled there
in recent months.

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

had gathered in Havana
to protest their presence.

Nazi agents encouraged
rumors that the refugees

would take Cuban jobs.

The largest Cuban
newspaper's headline

demanded "Out with the Jews!"

Under the pressure,
the Cuban government reneged.

For 6 days, friends
and relatives who had come

to Cuba earlier circled
the ship in small boats,

passing up fresh food
and shouting

what encouragement they could.

Finally, the Cuban government
ordered the St. Louis

out of Havana Harbor.

For 4 days,
the ship steamed aimlessly

along the Florida coast,
her stunned passengers

unsure where they were
now to go.

Messinger: I remember
it was dusk,

and my father and I were
standing at the railing,

and I saw some lights
in the distance,

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

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

called Miami."

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

and whenever I walk
along the beach

and look out at the water,

I get this very strange feeling
because now

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

Narrator: Some on board
the ship wired an appeal

to President Roosevelt,
begging him to intervene.

They did not receive a reply.

Instead,
the State Department insisted

that the passengers would have
to "Wait their turns

"on the waiting list
and qualify for and obtain

"immigration visas
before they may be admissible

into the United States."

That could take years.

Canada wouldn't
take them either.

The St. Louis turned
back toward Europe.

Man: The "New York Times."

The saddest ship afloat today,

the Hamburg-American liner
St. Louis,

with 900 Jewish refugees aboard,

steaming back toward Germany
after a tragic week

of frustration.

No plague ship ever received
a sorrier welcome.

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

There seems to be
no help for them now.

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

Narrator: A Nazi journal gloated.

"We say openly that we do not
want the Jews

"while the democracies
keep on claiming that they are

"willing to receive them
and then leave the guests

out in the cold!"

"The resolve of most
of the people aboard,"

one passenger wrote,
"is to die rather

than to see Hamburg again."

Captain Schröder considered
running his ship aground

somewhere off England or France,

anything to keep the passengers

from having to return
to Germany.

A private relief
organization called

The American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee,

along with The Intergovernmental
Committee on Refugees,

negotiated furiously
with European governments,

trying to get them to accept
the passengers.

They managed to scrape
together the enormous sum

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

Belgium, and the Netherlands
to take them all in.

"Our gratitude is
as immense as the ocean

on which we are now floating,"
the passengers

cabled to those who had
arranged their rescue.

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

Messinger: We got word that
4 countries in Europe

had agreed to split
the passengers up among them,

and we ended up in Belgium.

Narrator: No one aboard
the St. Louis was returned

to Germany,
but 254 of the passengers

would be murdered
after the Nazis overran

the countries that had given
them sanctuary.

Nearly 3/4 of the passengers
would survive.

(newsreel announcer
speaking Russian)

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

returned to Europe,
the world was stunned

by an announcement from Moscow...

The Nazi
and Soviet governments...

sworn enemies for years...

Had signed a 10-year
non-aggression pact

that would let Hitler and Stalin
destroy Poland

and divide its territory
between them.

Poland was home
to 3,300,000 Jews.

(air raid siren)

(people shouting)

On September 1, 1939,
Hitler launched

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

(explosion)

The Second World War had begun.

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

when he was awakened
with the news.

"God help us all."

As German warplanes attacked
Warsaw that evening,

Chaim Kaplan,
the director of a Jewish school

in that city,
made a note in his diary.

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

of the world," he wrote.

"This war will indeed
bring destruction

"upon human civilization.

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

"Wherever Hitler treads,
there is no hope

for the Jewish people."

Roosevelt: This nation
will remain a neutral nation,

but I cannot ask that every
American remain neutral

in thought, as well.

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

Even a neutral cannot be
asked to close his mind

or to close his conscience.

Narrator: The president
and most of his fellow citizens

sympathized
with the Nazis' victims,

and some wanted to help France
and England as they went

to war against Germany,

but a far larger number
was still opposed

to any American involvement
overseas for fear

the Allies would pull
the United States

into another war.

Roosevelt: And that I hate war...

Narrator: Roosevelt was
careful not to get too far

ahead of public opinion.

Roosevelt: I hope
the United States

will keep out of this war.

I believe that it will,

and I give you assurance
and reassurance

that every effort
of your government

will be directed
toward that end.

Narrator: The United States
was poorly prepared

for conflict in any case.

The segregated army was smaller
than that of Bulgaria,

fewer than 190,000 men
in uniform,

fitted out with tin hats
and leggings issued

during the Great War
and carrying rifles

designed in 1903.

Meanwhile, the president
believed the best way

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

to aid France and England.

He called Congress
into special session and asked

it to end the embargo
on the sale of arms

to belligerents so that
the Allies would be

better prepared for whatever
Hitler did next.

Isolationists flooded Washington
with antiwar messages.

After 6 weeks
of sometimes bitter debate,

Congress did lift the embargo

but only if buyers paid cash.

That same month,
a "Fortune" magazine poll

found that only 20%
of Americans favored aiding

the European democracies

while 54% of the country
were happy

for the United States to
trade with Nazis

and democratic
governments alike.

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

"is that public opinion
over here is patting itself

"on the back every morning
thanking God

for the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans."

(radio stations changing)

Charles Lindbergh: I speak
tonight to those people

in the United States
of America who feel that

the destiny of this country
does not call

for our involvement
in European wars.

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

the voice of
the only American whose fame

approached Roosevelt's,

the celebrated aviator
Charles A. Lindbergh.

His message was very different.

Lindbergh: These wars
in Europe are not wars

in which our civilization
is defending itself

against some Asiatic intruder.

This is not a question
of banding together to defend

the white race
against foreign invasion.

We must not permit
our sentiment, our pity,

or our personal feelings
of sympathy

to obscure the issue,

to affect our children's lives.

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

Narrator: Lindbergh
had first visited Germany

in 1936 at the invitation
of the American military attaché

in Berlin,
who was eager to glean

information about
the fast-growing Luftwaffe.

He returned two more times.

The Nazis did everything
they could to impress him,

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

and Lindbergh was impressed.

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

His wife Anne thought
Hitler "a very great man"

maligned by what she called
"Jewish propaganda."

The couple had
even considered moving

to the leafy Berlin suburb
of Wannsee

until Kristallnacht
made them rethink.

"My admiration for
the Germans is constantly being

dashed against some such
rock as this,"

Lindbergh wrote privately.

"I do not understand
these riots.

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

"They have undoubtedly had
a difficult Jewish problem,

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

On his voyage home
from Europe in 1938,

Lindbergh had been irritated
by the number of Jewish refugees

among his fellow passengers.

"Imagine the United States
taking these Jews

in addition to those
we already have,"

he'd written in his diary.

"There are too many places
like New York already.

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

"but too many create chaos,

"and we are getting too many.

This present immigration
will have its reaction."

Lindbergh: Our bond with Europe
is a bond of race

and not of political ideology.

It is the European race
we must preserve.

Political progress will follow.

Racial strength is vital,
politics, a luxury.

If the white race is ever
seriously threatened,

it may then be time for us
to take our part

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

French, and Germans,
but not with one

against the other
for our mutual destruction.

Narrator: "If I should die tomorrow,

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

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

For the next 27 months,
Franklin Roosevelt

and Charles Lindbergh would
engage in a bitter struggle

over whose vision
of the country would prevail

and about the future
of Western civilization itself.

(bombs whistling)

(explosion)

"Every war costs blood,"
Hitler had told

his commanders just before
sending them

into western Poland,
"and the smell of blood arouses

"in man all the instincts
which have lain within us

"since the beginning
of the world.

A humane war exists only
in bloodless brains."

There was nothing
bloodless, nothing humane,

about the German assault.

In the wake of the Panzer
divisions that pierced

Poland's defenses,
thousands of SS troops

and German infantrymen
fanned out

across the countryside.

Their goal was to destroy
the Polish state and reduce

the Polish people
to a leaderless population

of peasants and workers.

Told that anyone who dared
resist the advancing

master race was guilty
of "insolence,"

within 5 weeks they had killed

some 3,000 Polish
prisoners of war,

destroyed
more than 530 villages,

burned or blown up synagogues,

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

Priests, professors,
political leaders,

anyone thought capable
of mounting resistance,

as well as Jews,

and while the Germans
imposed their rule

on western Poland,
the Soviet Union

swallowed up its eastern half.

150,000 Poles were drafted
into the Red Army.

The Soviets shipped
200,000 civilians deemed

dangerous to Kazakhstan
and Siberia,

where tens of thousands froze
or starved to death.

They also secretly shot
22,000 Polish officers

and intellectuals
and buried their corpses

in mass graves
in and around the Katyn Forest.

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

steadily expanding
Greater Germany,

but as it expanded,
it inevitably encompassed

more and more Jews.

Before the invasion, Poland
had the highest proportion

of Jews in Europe.

Nearly two million of them
lived in the region

Germany had seized.

Most were people
without means and access

to diplomats or consulates
or well-connected

family members abroad
or anyone else

who could help them escape.

More Jews lived in Warsaw
than remained in Germany.

More lived in the city
of Lodz than in Berlin

and Vienna combined.

Nazi officials hatched
several schemes to rid

the region of its Jews.

The first would have
confined them

to a "reservation" located
in a remote underpopulated area

near Lublin,

but that quickly
proved impractical.

The Nazis offered
two million of them to Stalin,

who did not want them.

In the meantime,
the Germans were driving

Polish Jews into scores
of squalid, congested,

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

robbed of their possessions
and forced to wear

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

were shot
if they strayed outside.

The largest ghetto was
in Warsaw,

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

to survive in an area
initially measuring

less than two square miles.

The ghettos served
two purposes for the Nazis.

They provided
reliable pools of slave labor

for the German war machine,
and they acted

as holding pens for Jews,
now including many deported

from what had been Austria
and Czechoslovakia,

until the Nazi regime decided
where they were

finally to be sent.

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

of random shootings
by their German guards,

typhoid, deliberate
starvation, and despair.

In Bolechow, in eastern
Poland, Shmiel Jaeger heard

about the German obliteration
of western Poland.

Terrified of what might
happen next,

he wrote again to his relatives
in America.

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

This is my mission;

it's now the case that
many families can go

and have already emigrated
to America provided that

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

after which they can get
their brother and his wife

and children out,

and then they can get
the deposit back.

Perhaps you could manage
to advance me the deposit.

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

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

You should make inquiries,
you should write

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

and that I have training as
an auto mechanic

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

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

written in English,
to Washington,

addressed to President Roosevelt

and will write that
all my siblings

and my entire family are
in America

and that my parents
are even buried there.

Perhaps that will work,

as I really want to get away
from this Gehenim

with my dear wife and such
darling 4 children.

Shmiel.

Narrator: Shmiel had no way of knowing

that there were more than
100,000 other Poles ahead

of him on the waiting list.

With the current quota system,

it would be more
than 12 years before his family

would be eligible for a visa.

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

that there was big trouble.

It was very sad.

My mother would send
clothing or whatever

they would need for the winter,

and all of the family was
involved because they were

all here and all feeling
guilty that Shmiel

had not come.

They were all trying
to get money together to send.

They met, they talked
to the richer members

of the family,

and everyone was concerned,

but no one could do anything.

Mendelsohn: My grandfather
was a foreman

in a braids
and trimmings factory.

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

but I think it's also
an important part

of this story,
this sort of guilt,

the huge amount of guilt
in the American Jewish community

after because then,
of course, you say,

"Oh, I should have done more,"

but, again, that's not fair.

People really had
a hard time imagining

what was actually
going to unfold.

Narrator: As soon as German
troops had occupied Vienna

in 1938, Eva Geiringer's
father Erich had resolved

to find his wife Fritzi,
his son Heinz,

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

By early 1940,
he had managed to get them

to Amsterdam.

Eva Geiringer: The Dutch were
quite different

from the Austrians...
Very welcoming.

Everybody wanted
to be my best friend.

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

"You look like
a Dutch little girl."

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

We'll be here together
as a family,"

and we were actually
quite happy.

Narrator: The Geiringers
found themselves living

in the same apartment block
as Otto Frank,

his wife Edith,
and their two daughters

Margot and Annelies.

The Franks had fled
Germany 6 years earlier.

Geiringer: All the children
came to play after school

on this big open area,

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

realized I was new there,

and she introduced herself
and said her name

is "Anna Frank."

Narrator: Both Eva Geiringer
and Anne Frank

were 10 years old that winter

and both attended
the same Montessori School.

Geiringer: She was very,
very much outspoken,

very sure of herself.

She was definitely already more
intellectual than I was.

She was a big chatterbox.

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

She had to stay behind
very often to write

hundreds of lines
that she's not going to talk

so much in class.

She was already interested
in boys.

When I told her I had
an older brother,

her eyes grew very big,
and she said,

"When can I come and meet him?"

Narrator: Anne Frank's
father tried to stay

optimistic about the future,
reminding everyone

that the Netherlands had been
able to remain neutral

during World War I

and should be able
to do so again,

but he could not hide his
underlying anxiety

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

writing her that he worried
most about his daughters

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

His cousin offered to care
for them in England.

He thanked her for her kindness
but was sure

neither he nor his wife
could bear to part

with their girls.

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

to the United States
to come up for review.

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

A 7-month lull followed
the invasion of Poland.

To American isolationists,
it seemed to be proof

that events in Europe were
nothing to worry about.

Republican Senator
William Borah of Idaho

called it the "Phony War"...

(bicycle bell rings)

(airplanes flying)

but on April 9, 1940,

the Phony War became real again.

40,000 German troops surged
across the Danish border.

Denmark surrendered
by nightfall.

German paratroopers filled
the skies over Norway,

driving its government
into exile.

Then, on May 10,
10 Panzer divisions,

2,500 aircraft,

and 3 1/3 million
German ground troops

stormed into France
and the Low Countries...

Belgium, Luxembourg,
and the Netherlands.

We heard guns shooting
and the drones of airplane,

and we all got up,

and we had a little
Bakelite radio.

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

Geiringer: Listened to that,
and the newscaster said,

"Very bad news.

"The Germans are trying to
invade our country,

but we are going to
defend ourselves."

Narrator: At Otto Frank's office,

his employees remembered,
his face turned white as reports

of the attack continued
to come in over the radio.

The Germans threatened to bomb
the port of Rotterdam

unless the Dutch surrendered.

They tried to surrender...

and the Luftwaffe bombed
the city anyway.

Over 900 people were killed

and more than 85,000
left homeless.

The United States consulate
was burned, too,

and with it, Otto Frank's
application for visas

to bring his family to America.

Every port the Germans
overran closed off

yet another avenue
of escape for refugees.

France was next.

Its supposedly invincible
5-million-man army

would collapse
in just a few weeks.

(gunfire)

(man shouting in German)

Roosevelt: Tonight over
the once peaceful roads

of Belgium and France,
millions are now moving,

running from their homes
to escape bombs and shells

and fire and machine-gunning,
without shelter,

and almost wholly without food.

They stumble on,
knowing not where the end

of the road will be.

Narrator: "These are
ominous days,"

Roosevelt told Congress
on May 16,

"days whose swift
and shocking developments force

every neutral nation
to look to its defenses."

He called for an increase
in aircraft production

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

To isolationists like
Charles Lindbergh,

the president and other
unseen forces were taking

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

Lindbergh: The only reason
that we are in danger

of becoming involved
in this war is because

there are powerful elements
in America who desire

us to take part.

They represent a small
minority of the American people,

but they control much
of the machinery

of influence and propaganda.

They seize every
opportunity to push us

closer to the edge.

It is time
for the underlying character

of this country to rise
and assert itself,

to strike down these elements
of personal profit

and foreign interest.

Narrator: A week later,
battered British

and Belgian troops,
along with what little was left

of French forces, began fleeing

across the English Channel
from Dunkirk,

leaving behind tons
of arms and materiel.

The United Kingdom
now stood alone.

Many on both sides
of the Atlantic agreed

with the assessment
of Roosevelt's

ambassador in London
Joseph P. Kennedy.

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

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

when the Germans
came marching in,

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

Narrator: Susan
and Joseph Hilsenrath's parents

had arranged for them
to be smuggled out of Germany

into France,
where the children had endured

a precarious sanctuary
for 8 months.

They hoped their parents
had also gotten out of Germany.

In fact, they had managed
to get visas

and make it to America,

first the father
and then their mother

and baby brother
several months later,

but Susan and Joseph
weren't sure where they were

or how they would be reunited.

They had lived
with a young cousin in Paris,

then with a series
of foster families

until June 14 when the Germans
had entered the city.

(marching footsteps)

Susan: Everybody was going
on the bus, on bicycles

and cars and walking,
trying to get out,

to get to Versailles.

All of these people
marched to the...

To the palace,
and the mayor of the town,

he got the idea of giving
everybody a burlap sack.

They have these beautiful
gardens in the back

of the palace,
and way in the corner,

they had a big haystack,

and so all of the people
took their burlap sack

and filled it up with hay.

Then we had a mattress.

We took our mattress,
and we all walked

into the palace,
and there's this beautiful room

called the Hall of Mirrors,

and we slept in the palace.

For a few days, we were there,
and everything

seemed to be fine,

but then we heard that
same sound of the marching.

We heard tanks,
and we saw people going

on motorcycles,

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

and out came a German officer,

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

and he did not know
how to speak any French,

and the mayor of the town
did not know how

to speak any German.

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

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

how to speak German."

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

at this German officer.

He was as tall as the ceiling,

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

but at the end
of the conversation,

the Nazi officer
bent down to me,

and he said, "Little girl,

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

And I said to him,
"The French schools

"are really very good,
and I learned

how to speak German
in the French schools."

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

and he walked away.

Narrator: With Hitler's
conquest of Poland

and western Europe,
President Roosevelt

had understood that the ongoing
refugee crisis

was sure to turn
into a catastrophe.

"It is not enough to indulge
in horrified humanitarianism,

empty resolutions,
and pious words," he said.

Safe havens had to be
found quickly

for these "desperate people."

Before war broke out,
he had been unwilling

to go against public opinion
and call

for American immigration quotas
to be expanded,

in part because he knew
if he did so Congress

might well
close them off altogether.

Behind the scenes,
he had pressured

Latin American countries
into accepting

some 40,000 Jews in flight
from Hitler,

but no other nations had
proved any more welcoming

to refugees than they had been

before the Second
World War began,

and now, Roosevelt and much
of the American public

had begun to view would-be
immigrants differently,

not as victims
but as potential threats

to the security
of the United States.

Man: You'd think
from the number of spies

they've been sending
over here that

we're at war with Germany.

It looks more as if Germany were

at war with us.

Narrator: "Confessions
of a Nazi Spy,"

made by Warner Bros.,
the only movie company

to have pulled out of Germany

rather than do business
with Hitler's regime,

was the first overtly
anti-Nazi film made

by a major Hollywood studio.

The movie was based loosely
on the story

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

and it captured a growing sense
of public panic.

The sudden terrifying swiftness

with which the Western European
democracies collapsed

under Hitler's assault
led many to assume

he must have had
help from within.

The American ambassador to
France claimed the collapse

of that country had been
in part the work

of native Communists
and Nazi agents,

some of whom, he alleged,

had entered the country
as Jewish refugees.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
said the bureau

was now receiving 3,000 tips

about possible espionage
every day,

and hired 150 more agents
to seek out Nazi spies,

who were called
Fifth Columnists.

Martyn: And the government
alleged just conspired

to provide secret information to
an unnamed foreign government.

Lipstadt: A country can be
attacked from 4 sides,

but there's actually
a fifth side

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

if you have spies in your midst.

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

and they were.

There were spies for Germany.

But the fear of spies intersects
with the antisemitism.

The fear of spies intersects
with the anti-immigration,

anti-refugee sentiment.

Narrator: The "New York
Herald Tribune,"

one of the most respected
newspapers in America,

claimed that 42 Nazi agents
had supposedly

been recruited from among
German "half" Jews

and "quarter" Jews.

The "Saturday Evening Post"
charged that Nazi spies

passing as refugees had
infiltrated Europe and America.

Less than 3% of Americans
believed

Washington was doing enough
to combat subversion.

In the summer of 1940,

an Alien Registration Act
sailed through Congress,

requiring non-citizens
over the age of 14

to be registered
and fingerprinted

and sharply curtailing
their rights to free speech

and political participation.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
wrote in her column,

"and I think it is time
we stopped

"and took stock of ourselves.

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

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

But the president told the press

that he had been told
that in several countries

Jewish refugees had become
spies for the Germans,

involuntary spies, he explained,

because if
they didn't agree to spy,

the Nazi government
back home had told them,

"We are frightfully sorry,

"but your old father
and old mother

"will be taken out and shot.

Of course," the President
continued,

"it applies to a very, very
small percentage

of refugees
coming out of Germany."

Lipstadt: Of course, a refugee
would be

the worst person to be a spy.

A refugee doesn't speak
the language,

speaks the language
with an accent.

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

into the woodwork and not
be noticeable.

But nonetheless, there is
this irrational fear.

No one says a nation should
let people in

that is going to
harm it or weaken it,

but the evidence
was nonexistent.

Narrator: Assistant Secretary
of State Breckinridge Long

and many of his colleagues
thought, without evidence,

that Jewish refugees were
especially dangerous.

A wealthy contributor to Roosevelt's
first presidential campaign,

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

and was semi-retired when
Roosevelt called him back

to government service to
run the Visa Division.

Hundreds of thousands of
desperate people,

most of them Jews, were already
on the waiting list

for American visas,

and more were lining up
every day.

Long was unmoved.

To him, every train or ship
carrying Jews

out of Nazi Europe represented
what he called,

"a perfect opening for Germany
to load the United States

with Nazi agents."

Long's goal, he confided to
his diary,

was "practically
stopping immigration."

Lipstadt: Breckinridge Long is
working every which way

to prevent Jews from coming
into this country.

When people are
desperate to get out,

he is amongst those helping
to create the barriers.

Narrator: Long especially
loathed Rabbi Stephen Wise,

whom he found sanctimonious,

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

fleeing from
torture by dictators.

"Only an infinitesimal fraction
are of that category,"

Long noted in his diary.

Greene: One of
the lessons of this history

is something else was
always more important

for the Americans
than aiding Jews.

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

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

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

I joined the Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee.

Laura Margolis.

Narrator: While official
American policy

remained rigid and restricted,

individual women and men working

for dozens of Jewish
organizations,

including the National
Refugee Service

and the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society,

did all they could,

wherever in the world they
could, to help.

They would coordinate
loans, legal counsel,

ocean liner tickets,
and jobs for newcomers.

Without their help, tens of
thousands of Jewish refugees

would never have made it
to America.

They worked alongside other
committed Americans

from the YMCA, the Unitarian
Service Committee,

and the American
Friends Service Committee.

By the summer of 1940,

the focus of their relief
and rescue operations

was in southern France.

Germany occupied
only the western

and northern regions of France.

The south was left in
the hands of a collaborationist

French government
with headquarters at Vichy.

Some 50,000 refugees
from 42 countries were interned

in 93 squalid,
overcrowded camps.

Tens of thousands more
remained free,

trying to keep one step ahead
of the French police,

who were required to hand over

any refugees
the Germans demanded.

Scores of eminent artists
and intellectuals

were thought to be
in immediate danger.

To help, a group of prominent
writers in New York

formed the Emergency Rescue
Committee.

Eleanor Roosevelt talked
her husband into asking

the reluctant State Department
to issue a limited number

of emergency visitor's visas.

Man: I remembered what
I had seen in Germany.

I knew what would happen
to the refugees

if the Gestapo got hold of them.

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

of saving even a few
of its intended victims.

It was my duty to help them.

Varian Fry.

♫ ♫

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

and member of
the Emergency Rescue Committee,

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

He was every inch
the Harvard-educated

intellectual he appeared to be,

but as a foreign correspondent
visiting Germany 5 years earlier,

he'd witnessed attacks
on Jews that left him

with a visceral loathing
for the Nazis.

He arrived in Marseille
on August 15, 1940,

with $3,000 in cash
strapped to his leg

and a list of 200
distinguished women and men

thought to be somewhere
in Vichy, France.

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

one finds the greatest misery.

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

They have literally been
condemned to death here,

or at best to confinement
in detention camps,

a fate little better than death.

Narrator: He took room 307
at the Hotel Splendide

and went to work.

News quickly spread that
an American

with visas had arrived.

Refugees knocked
at his door at all hours,

filled the hallways,
and lined the stairs.

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

The telephone rarely
stopped ringing.

(telephone ringing)

The American Vice Consul in
Marseilles Hiram Bingham Jr.

and some of his colleagues

were happy to help whenever
they could.

Bingham was the son
of a senator from Connecticut.

His Groton classmates had called
him "Righteous Bingham"

for his earnestness.

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

and he believed it his duty
to obtain

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

and was sometimes willing
to break the rules.

He allowed the fugitive
German Jewish novelist

Lion Feuchtwanger to hide
in his villa

and then cooperated in smuggling
him out of the country

with Reverend Waitstill Sharp,

a veteran rescue worker for
the Unitarian Service Committee.

In order to emigrate to
the United States from Vichy,

each refugee required
an American immigration visa,

visas for neutral Portugal
and Spain,

a steamship ticket from Lisbon,

and an exit visa from France.

Each took time to obtain

and each had an expiration date.

By the time the last
document was procured,

another had often expired,

requiring the whole laborious
process to begin all over again.

To get around this system,

Varian Fry helped to
smuggle refugees

across the Pyrenees into Spain.

He assembled a staff
of 46 volunteers

that included refugees,
young American men and women,

a French gendarme,
and a Viennese cartoonist

who proved an adept forger

of documents
and official stamps.

Fry worked closely with
American Jewish organizations

that provided crucial financial
support from Portugal

and with sympathetic diplomats
from other countries...

Mexican, Brazilian, Siamese,

and an especially empathetic
Chinese consul,

whose formal-looking documents
in Mandarin

were rarely
challenged at the border

because neither French
nor German officials

could read them.

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

The experiences of 10, 15,
and even 20 years

have been pressed into one.

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

Narrator: Reports of what
Fry was up to

eventually reached Washington.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull
himself cabled

the Marseille consulate that

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

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

however well-meaning
their motives may be."

The State Department tried to
force Fry out of France,

but he somehow managed
to remain in Marseille

for another 7 months

until Vichy police escorted him
out of the country.

Together, Fry and Bingham,
whom Fry remembered

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

are thought to have rescued

at least 2,000 people
from the Nazis.

Some were the celebrated
people Fry

had been sent to save,

including the harpsichordist
Wanda Landowska,

the film director Max Ophuls,

the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz,

the philosopher Hannah Arendt,

and the artists Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp,

and Marc Chagall.

But also among them were
hundreds of men,

women, and children
who were not well-known,

just human beings
in need of help.

(air raid siren)

Murrow: Hello, America,
this is Edward Murrow

speaking from London.

There were more German planes
over the coast of Britain today

than at any time since
the war began.

Anti-aircraft guns were...

Narrator: In the summer
and fall of 1940,

as Britain was under relentless
attack from German bombs,

President Roosevelt ran for
an unprecedented third term.

He would have to persuade
voters that,

while he opposed American entry
into the war,

he also needed to
provide aid to Britain,

as the last, best hope
of defeating Hitler,

and to ready the United States

for conflict if it came,
as well.

On September 16, 1940,

he signed into law
the first peacetime draft

in the history of the country.

Roosevelt: To the 16 million
young men

who will register today,

I say that democracy
is your cause,

the cause of youth.

Narrator: The odds
against the democracies

had lengthened further.

Germany was now allied
with fascist Italy in Europe

and Imperial Japan
in Asia... the Axis.

Roosevelt's Republican
opponent Wendell Willkie,

nominated just a few days
after France fell,

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

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

Public opinion was slowly
beginning to change.

But soon after Roosevelt
agreed to provide Britain

with 50 old destroyers,

Charles Lindbergh became
the chief spokesman

for a new isolationist
organization

dedicated to keeping America
out of the war...

the America First Committee.

Lindbergh: France has now
been defeated,

and despite the propaganda
and confusion of recent months,

it is now obvious that
England is losing the war.

I believe...

(cheering and applause)

And I have been
forced to the conclusion

that we cannot win
this war for England

regardless of how much
assistance we send.

That is why the America First
Committee has been formed.

Narrator: It was founded
by a handful of students

at the Yale Law School

and run by a National Committee

that at various times included
General Robert E. Wood,

chairman of the board
of Sears Roebuck,

the head of the United States
Olympic Committee

Avery Brundage,

the automobile
magnate Henry Ford,

World War I ace
Eddie Rickenbacker,

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

and Theodore Roosevelt's
daughter

Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The Committee soon had
some 800,000 members

in 450 chapters all across
the country,

the largest anti-war
organization

in the history
of the United States.

Despite the opposition,

FDR was reelected to
a third term

and soon proposed
a Lend-Lease bill,

allowing him to supply Britain
with more

desperately-needed military
and naval supplies.

Roosevelt: I ask this Congress
for authority and for funds

sufficient to manufacture
additional munitions

and war supplies of many kinds

to be turned over
to those nations

which are now in actual war

with aggressor nations.

Narrator: The bill was
designated HR 1776

in hope that voters would see
its passage as patriotic.

Isolationists called
it the dictator bill.

Charles Lindbergh
testified against it.

He favored neither a British
nor a German victory,

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

would be "the greatest disaster
this country

has ever gone through."

FDR denounced him
as an appeaser.

Isolationist and antisemitic
groups now flooded

the halls of the Capitol to
oppose the new bill,

including black-clad members of
a self-proclaimed

"Mothers' Movement" who
cursed legislators

and insisted
that Jews were behind

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

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

England can fall.

Hitler will take over all
of the European continent.

And America First fails to see
the danger

to the world at large.

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

They're always
testing the waters.

Can I go further?
Can I push stronger?

And the America First
and the isolationists

refuse to acknowledge that.

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

Newsreel Announcer: Guns and
munitions of all sorts

pour into Britain
as almost hourly convoys

from the States bring
their precious cargos.

The original $7 billion
of lend-lease aid

has already been allocated.

Now Congress studies final
passage of another 6 billion,

and Britain studies
invading the continent

with arms made in the U.S.A.

Messinger: When the German
invasion was over,

we were glad we were in
Vichy, France,

not under the control
of the Germans.

There was still
an American embassy there.

My father could go there

and pursue our visa to
the United States.

Narrator: Sol Messinger
and his parents,

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

had now managed to escape
from Belgium

after the Germans invaded.

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

But after a few months,
they were arrested

and put in a French
internment camp.

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

which helped people to escape,

so we planned to escape.

My mother and I,
it was Christmas Eve,

and the French soldiers
were drunk,

and we simply walked past
the French soldiers.

(train whistle blows)

We had decided we would
go back to Savignac.

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

So we got on a train.

Of course, you were not allowed

to be on a train without papers.

Fortunately, nobody asked
us for our papers.

But my father was
still in the camp.

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

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

one of whom was my father.

He had escaped,

so we were reunited again.

It was just incredibly lucky.

(trolley clangs)

Narrator: Otto Frank was
ordinarily a cautious man,

content to keep a low profile
and go about his business

in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

But one day, he made an
uncharacteristically incautious remark

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

When the man expressed
confidence

that Germany
would win the war soon,

Frank had disagreed.

The man turned out to be
a Nazi sympathizer

who wrote a letter to
the Gestapo denouncing Frank.

A member of the Dutch fascist
party intercepted the letter

and demanded money to keep
quiet about it.

Now, subject to blackmail
and fearful

that the Germans would come
for him

and his family at any time,

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

despite the fact that
his visa application

had been destroyed
in the bombing of Rotterdam.

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

Straus knew the Roosevelts,

was the administrator of
the Federal Housing Authority,

and his father had been
a co-owner

of Macy's department store.

Man: April 30, 1941.

Perhaps you remember that we
have two girls.

It is for the sake
of the children mainly

that we have to care for.

Our own fate is of less
importance.

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

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

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

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

by the time this
letter is going to arrive?

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

As ever, Yours, Otto.

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

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

Consulates had been
ordered to deny a visa

to anyone with close relatives
in Germany

or any of the countries it had
annexed or occupied

out of fear of foreign agents.

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

that are designed to make it
even harder

for refugees to get in.

It's not only that
it's complicated

to line up the paperwork,

the State Department is moving
the bar on them.

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

about the United States
so high and so secure

that not a single alien
or foreign refugee

from any country
upon the face of this earth

could possibly scale
or ascend it.

Senator Robert Reynolds.

Narrator: Senator Robert Reynolds

of North Carolina,

chairman of the powerful
Military Affairs Committee

charged that Jews were
"systematically building

a Jewish empire in this country"

and called for still more
obstacles to immigration.

He also organized a group
called the Vindicators

to hunt down illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, in response to
President Roosevelt's decision

to freeze German and Italian
assets in the United States,

Germany and Italy ordered
American consulates

to close in their countries

and all the countries
they occupied, as well.

Now, for anyone waiting
in those countries,

there would be
no American visas.

Woman: American Friends Service
Committee, Rome.

All immigration to the U.S.
stopped,

thereby robbing
many people of their hopes.

They could not understand what
difference one day should make

and are naturally unable to
reconcile themselves

to the arbitrariness of laws

that affect their whole
futures so disastrously.

Another thing that
discourages us somewhat

is the general attitude
of Americans

toward the problems with which
we have been working.

Really I am so tired
of having well-meaning

and opinionated people
tell me about the Jews

and sounding off
to the effect of,

"Why don't we use
all this splendid zeal

and energy for some really
American activity?"

Marjorie McClelland.

Man: This is not
the Second World War.

This is the Great Racial War.

The meaning of this war,

and the reason we are
fighting out there,

is to decide whether the German
and Aryan will prevail

or if the Jew will rule
the world.

Hermann Goering.

(explosion)

Narrator: On June 22, 1941,
without any warning

to his supposed
ally Josef Stalin,

Hitler sent 3 vast army groups
into the Soviet Union

along a thousand-mile front

with 3,550 tanks,

2,770 aircraft,

and 600,000 horses

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

Hitler's goal was what it
had always been,

to enslave or eliminate
the peoples of Eastern Europe

and establish
a continental Reich

meant to last a thousand years.

The Red Army fell back.

Nearly 6 million
Soviet soldiers would fall

into German hands
during the coming months.

Well over half of them died,

most of them worked to death
or deliberately starved.

Snyder: Once Germany
invades the Soviet Union

with the idea of destroying
the Soviet Union,

mass murder can take place.

To Hitler, the Soviet Union
is not a state.

The rule of law does not apply.

This is not even an occupation.

These are just wild territories
inhabited by undefined peoples.

When the Germans arrived,
the Germans could say,

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

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

It was the Jews."

Narrator: Everywhere, Jews
were special targets.

Hayes: They're killing
Jews in two ways.

First, they are
starving Jews to death

in the ghettos that they have
established in occupied Poland.

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

they're going to shoot people.

Narrator: Specialists were
enlisted to follow

the advancing army and hunt
down and kill Jewish men

and partisans who dared
wage guerilla war

against the invaders,

along with other groups deemed
to be hostile,

inferior, or loyal to
the Soviet regime.

3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen,
Operations Groups,

were in overall charge,

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

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

and ordinary soldiers
from the German Army.

At first, the Einsatzgruppen
encouraged pogroms,

sometimes standing by while
Latvians, Lithuanians,

Poles, and Ukrainians

rounded up and murdered their
Jewish neighbors.

In scores of cities and towns,

Gentiles acting independently

also slaughtered
thousands of Jews.

♫ ♫

But the Germans soon
took over most

of the killing themselves.

They shot only Jewish men
in the beginning,

then started killing women
and children

who, their officers told them,

acted as the partisans'
eyes and ears.

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

as the German armies advance,

and they're going to shoot them
into ditches,

liquidate them in forests,
wipe them out.

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

28,000 at Vinnytsia,

nearly 34,000 at Babi Yar
outside Kiev.

It was all meant to be secret,

but many German soldiers
carried cameras

so that they could send
snapshots and home movies

to show their families
what their husbands and sons

and fathers were doing
as they moved east.

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

one soldier told his family,

"and in this case no quarter
is given."

Snyder: Every photograph
we have has to stand in

for many, many, many,
many other,

hundreds of other shooting pits,

which are not actually recorded.

These images are taken
for purposes,

which broaden
our sense of horror.

Because it's not just
that the event took place

and has been recorded.

It's that this is
a trophy photo.

And they're horrible
in yet another way.

This is typical
and not exceptional.

Narrator: One
Einsatzgruppen commander

remembered the routine.

There were 15-man firing squads.

One bullet per Jew.

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

He thought he and his
men had killed

somewhere between 60,000
and 70,000.

They'd lost count.

Mendelsohn: Two million Eastern
European Jews were killed

just in what they now call
the Shoah by bullets.

I'll never forget a survivor
that I interviewed.

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

"we couldn't believe it,

so how was anybody
else gonna believe it?"

If they to whom it was
happening could scarcely believe

the savagery and the sadism
and the depravity

of what was happening,
how are the relatives in America

even possibly going to imagine?

Narrator: The Einsatzgruppen
eventually

reached Bolechow
in eastern Poland.

It was home to some 3,000 Jews,

including Shmiel Jaeger,
his wife, and 4 daughters.

Mendelsohn: These people
are now statistics,

particularly now, as their
individual stories recede,

but they were not
statistics to themselves.

Every one of them died in
a different way.

The third daughter, Ruchele,
was taken by herself.

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

There was a roundup
of about 1,000 people.

That was the first action.

And she just happened to be

in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

She was out of the house.

She was walking
through the town.

She got caught in this roundup.

These people were held
in a local

Catholic community center,

and people were raped
and tortured

over about 24 hours.

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

where there
was an old salt mine,

and they were all shot.

♫ ♫

Man: Vilna, Lithuania.
March 2, 1941.

Elsa, today I'm
sending you a postcard.

I want to make sure that
maybe you will receive

a last postal item from me.

If something happens,

I would want there to be
somebody who would remember

that someone named David Berger
had once lived.

This will make
things easier for me

in the difficult moments.

Farewell.

Narrator: For many months,
British intelligence

had been decoding top-secret

German communications
from the front.

In August, the messages were
filled with mysterious numbers,

which they only
gradually realized

were evidence
of the systematic murder

of all the Jews living
in every town and village

the Nazis overran
on the Eastern Front.

Hayes: During the summer
of 1941 when the Germans

were invading the Soviet Union

and liquidating Jews
in their path,

Winston Churchill got
an intercept of the reports

that the shooting units were
sending back to Berlin.

"Yesterday we shot
X number of people."

Then the reports were
broken down as time passed

to men, women, children,

Jews, Communists, so forth.

Narrator: The intelligence
continued to come in.

367 shot on one day.

468 two days later.

1,625 the next day.

3,000 5 days after that.

6 days later more than 5,000.

So many dead
so regularly recorded

that the intelligence service
concluded that,

"The fact that the German police
are killing all Jews

"that fall into
their hands should by now

"be sufficiently
well appreciated.

"It is not therefore proposed
to continue reporting

these butcheries specially,
unless so requested."

The numbers would no longer
be included

in the Prime Minister's
intelligence briefings.

His problem was that if he
announced to the world

that he had these reports,

the Germans would know
they were being intercepted.

He couldn't do anything
about the shooting,

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

to how extensive
the shooting was.

♫ ♫

Erbelding: I would
argue that Nazi Germany

believes that it's
fighting two wars.

It's fighting a military war,

and it's fighting
a genocidal war.

The military war, obviously,

begins when Nazi Germany
invades Poland.

The genocidal war begins
two years later

when the Nazis abandon any idea

that the Jews are going to
emigrate and decide,

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

Narrator: The Nazis had assumed

Britain could not
hold out for long,

and back in the summer of 1940,
Adolf Eichmann,

the SS officer in charge of
forced Jewish emigration,

was ordered to draw up plans to
use captured British ships

to transport all the Jews
of Europe to Madagascar,

a French island
in the Indian Ocean,

where they would die
of exposure and starvation.

But Britain had not surrendered.

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

SS commander
Heinrich Himmler concluded

they would have to be eliminated
on the European continent.

On July 31, 1941,
Hermann Goering would ask

the SS second-in-command
Reinhard Heydrich

to come up with what he called
"an overall solution

to the Jewish question in
the German sphere."

Heydrich's plan had to
be "noiseless,"

SS planners said,

and therefore easily
kept secret,

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

not in order to ease
the deaths of victims,

but to spare the feelings of
those murdering them.

(bells clanging)

(Susan speaking German)

Narrator: After the Germans
occupied northern France,

Susan Hilsenrath and her
brother Joseph

had managed to make their way
from Versailles to Vichy

and the Chateau des Morelles,

a group home for Jewish children

who had been separated
from their parents,

financed by the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee.

Susan: They wanted to send
us to school,

to the public school in France.

But the people
in the village wouldn't let

those children from
the Chateau Morelles

mix with their children.

We kept writing to our
parents all the time.

Narrator: Their father had
managed to get himself,

his wife, and youngest
boy to the United States,

and was now feverishly
trying to gather Susan

and Joseph to them as well.

Joseph: He made a pest
of himself

at the State Department.

He wrote them letters, begged.

I have to be so thankful.

Without him, we would
never have made it.

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

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

because only when
you had problems

did you go to
that director's office.

And she was sitting behind
her desk,

and she said to me, "Suzie!

You are going to go to
the United States."

Our parents had found us.

Narrator: Susan and Joseph's
passage had been arranged

and paid for by
the New York-based

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

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

and there we
met, like, 50 children

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

to come to the United States.

♫ ♫

They put all of the 50
children in the bottom

on the lowest deck of the ship

and in the front of the ship,

and we were all in one room.

And we had these double-decker

and triple-decker beds.

And they told us we weren't
allowed to mingle

with the crowd.

♫ ♫

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

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

we were going to pass
the Statue of Liberty.

Of course we had learned

what the Statue of Liberty
was all about.

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

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

like the curtain
at an opera or at a concert

or at a play went up like that,

and right there just as it was
going up

was the Statue of Liberty.

Joseph: The fog lifted.

♫ ♫

And there it was.

After all this...

It's even worse now.

After all these years,

to taste freedom, do you...

It was just remarkable.

And, and the effects,
apparently,

has never left me.

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

which is... was part
of your being,

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

and have a life.

Newsreel Announcer: A cargo of
innocents from embattled Europe.

Arriving in New York aboard the
Portuguese liner Serpa Pinto,

these youngest refugees are
originally from Germany, Poland,

Czechoslovakia, and Spain,

but the war has
made them wanderers.

Susan: So we had to go to
Ellis Island,

and there we
found out everything

that we needed to know
about the United States.

We learned about food,

and we learned that they had
this white bread.

We could squash it up
and push it

and make a little
ball out of it.

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

And then they told us it
was called Wonder Bread,

and we were so happy
to be eating it.

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

had candy that you could eat
all day long.

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

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

It's just so exciting

because we knew we had come
to the place

where we were going to be
reunited with our parents.

Narrator: Susan
and Joseph's father had been

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

But their mother
was not with him.

They did not see her
until they arrived

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

Joseph: When we arrived,

I expected some
emotional response.

But she just lay there

and barely even smiled.

My father explained to me
that she was mentally ill.

Susan: I don't talk about it.

I couldn't understand

that there was
nothing between us.

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

and she just didn't understand.

Eventually, she ended up
in the hospital.

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

While my father was here
in the United States,

she was in Germany
with my younger brother.

They were alone
for about 4 to 6 months.

When I left her,
she was perfectly normal.

And I really don't
know what happened.

I asked frequently
if she was beaten

or traumatized,
but I never got an answer.

Not from her, certainly,

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

And she never recovered.

Roosevelt: America
has been attacked.

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

She belongs to every man, woman,

and child in this nation.

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

engaged with the U.S. destroyer
Kearny,

President Roosevelt ordered
the Navy to attack on sight

any German or Italian
vessels operating

in American defensive waters,

which he had expanded halfway
across the Atlantic.

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

Roosevelt: When you see
a rattlesnake poised to strike,

you do not wait
until he has struck

before you crush him.

These Nazi submarines
and raiders

are the rattlesnakes
of the Atlantic...

Narrator: That same evening,
Charles Lindbergh

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

In the strongest
language he had ever used,

he charged that there were
3 groups

pressing the country
toward war...

the British, the Roosevelt
administration,

and the Jews.

"Instead of agitating for war,

"the Jewish groups
in this country

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

"for they will
be among the first

"to feel its consequences.

"Tolerance is a virtue
that depends

"upon peace and strength.

History shows that it cannot
survive war and devastation."

And he went still further.

"Large Jewish ownership
and influence

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

and our government," he charged,

"constituted a great
danger to our country."

This time, the press exploded.

♫ ♫

"Liberty" magazine
called Lindbergh

"The most dangerous man
in America."

The "New York Herald Tribune"
accused him of antisemitism

and appealing to
the "dark forces of prejudice

and intolerance."

Republican Wendell Willkie
called his speech

"The most un-American talk made
in my time

by any person
of national reputation."

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

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

Greene: The reaction
in the press

to Lindbergh's speech is
resoundingly negative.

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

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

with Lindbergh up on the podium

and Hitler down below
applauding him.

But I also wonder,
is it fair to say

that Lindbergh
is saying out loud

what a lot of Americans
think privately?

And I think he is.

Narrator: Lindbergh was
unrepentant,

but America First
never recovered

from the damage
his speech had done.

Fritz Kuhn,
the self-styled Fuhrer

of the German American Bund,

was already in Sing Sing
for tax fraud and embezzlement

and would eventually be deported

as the agent of a foreign power.

And the National
Association of Broadcasters

had already banned
Father Coughlin,

the antisemitic radio priest,
from the airwaves.

But mostly Catholic
anti-Jewish gangs

affiliated with
his Christian Front continued

to terrorize Jewish neighborhoods
in New York and Boston,

desecrating synagogues, smashing
Jewish storefronts,

and beating Jewish children

while Irish-American
police officers

often looked the other way.

Meanwhile, American
newspapers had reported

that Jews were being
deported to ghettos in Poland

and labor camps in the
German-occupied Soviet Union.

But their readers had
no way of knowing

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

that they were actually
determined to eliminate

all the Jews of Europe,

and that they had found a new,

more efficient method
of doing it...

Gas.

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

had been using
commercially-produced carbon monoxide

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

of men, women, and children,

mental patients,
disabled people,

infants with birth defects.

The Nazis called them
all "useless eaters."

It was eugenics carried to
its most grotesque extreme.

The demand for commercial
carbon monoxide grew so large

it threatened
to outstrip production.

Then, the Germans realized

that the exhaust produced
by a motorized van,

piped into an airtight
compartment at the back,

could kill groups of people
at a time.

The Einsatzgruppen ordered up
some 30 of them for use

in the occupied Soviet Union.

In October, SS chief
Heinrich Himmler

ordered his men and the Gestapo

to officially end all emigration
of Jews from Germany

or any of the lands
it had conquered.

From then on, occupied Europe

was to be a vast prison for Jews

from which there was to be
no escape but death.

All that remained was
to set up a coordinated,

continent-wide system
to feed Jews

into the Nazi killing machine.

In late November,
the high-ranking SS officer

Reinhard Heydrich invited
representatives

of all the Nazi ministries that
would have to be involved

to a secret meeting to
be held on December 9.

That meeting would
have to be postponed.

Hitler was in his headquarters

on Sunday evening, December 7,

when an aide brought him
the news

that Japan had
attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Fuhrer claimed to be
surprised but delighted.

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

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

been conquered in 3,000 years."

And with the United States
now presumably forced

to focus its attention
on the Pacific,

it would no longer
be able to aid Britain

or the Soviet Union.

In any case, he believed
America had become

"a decayed country.

Half-Judaized," he said,

"and the other half Negrified,

where everything
is built on the dollar."

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

declared war on
the United States.

Congressional opposition to
fighting fascism vanished overnight.

The United States was now
at war around the world.

The following evening,

Hitler gathered
the administrators

of all the districts
in his expanding Reich.

The killing of Jews,
he informed them,

was already underway

and now was to be
undertaken everywhere

"without sentimentality."

All of them were
expected to participate.

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

the German suburb
where the Lindberghs

had once hoped to live,

Reinhard Heydrich's delayed
meeting of the Nazi bureaucrats

who would be responsible for
the extermination of the Jews

finally convened in secret.

Heydrich began by revealing
the sheer scale

of the job at hand.

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

a total he had reached in part
by including those currently

out of German reach in Spain,
England and Ireland,

Switzerland,
Portugal, and Sweden.

For the time being, the Germans
would accelerate

the deportation of Jews to
ghettos and concentration camps

in Nazi-occupied Poland,

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

He was confident that most
would die

of what he called
"natural causes"...

Starvation,
exposure, exhaustion.

But those who did survive,

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

were to be killed,

a fate Heydrich referred to as
"special treatment."

Jews were to die because
of who they were.

The Nazis would also kill
millions of non-Jews...

Soviet POWs, Belarussians,
Ukrainians, Poles,

Russians, and Roma
and Sinti peoples.

They also locked away gay men
and Jehovah's Witnesses

because their faith forbade them
from serving in any army

or saluting any flag,
including Hitler's.

♫ ♫

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

is that the core of it occurred

in a fierce and short
period of time.

3/4 of the victims
of the Holocaust

died in only 20 months.

♫ ♫

Narrator: The Nazis created
4 killing centers,

dedicated solely to murder,

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

Chelmno, where Nazi records list
the murders

of at least 145,000 people

during its first 12 months
alone.

Belzec, where an average
of 2,000 Jews

would die every day
for 10 months...

600,000 human beings.

Sobibor,

where somewhere between 167,000

and 200,000 would be murdered.

And Treblinka,
where 925,000 would die,

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

Chelmno did all its
killing in gas vans.

The other 3 relied
on permanent gas chambers

for which carbon monoxide
was provided by the engines

of captured Soviet tanks.

The Jewish victims of
these killing centers

were overwhelmingly Polish,

but they came from
everywhere the Nazis

could lay their hands on them.

The killing centers were
supervised by the SS,

but guarded mostly by
Eastern European support troops,

usually Soviet prisoners of war

who were recruited to serve
the Reich.

Some Jews were forced into
guiding victims to their deaths

and disposing of their bodies

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

These 4 centers alone would be
responsible for the death

of more than 1.5 million
human beings.

6 days after
the Wannsee meeting,

Himmler ordered that
two prisoner of war camps

in occupied Poland,
Majdanek and Auschwitz,

be transformed into additional
killing centers,

where 1,400,000 more

innocent men, women,
and children would be murdered.

Stern: The Navy had a placard,

"If you have language skills,

"understanding of the 3 enemies,
their psychology,

come to our
recruiting quarters."

Narrator: Soon after
Pearl Harbor,

along with tens of thousands of
other young men,

Guy Stern volunteered
to join the armed forces.

Stern: I was received
by a Navy ensign.

And he asked me about my skills.

I told him I was very good
in German writing

and that in talking and so forth

and understood Germany.

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

But I hear an accent."

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

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

I said, "No."

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

Narrator: A few months later,

Stern was drafted into the Army

and assigned
to the intelligence branch.

His parents, younger
brother, and sister

remained trapped in
Hildesheim, Germany,

and occasionally managed to
get a letter out

to Guy's uncle and aunt.

Man: My dearest, Benno
and Ethel,

We have grown quite despondent,

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

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

Please support him
by word and deed.

Help him cope
with disappointments

and lighten his burdens.

You write that Gunther
has grown strong.

If only I could see him again.

Write us often.

For now, I send
my heartfelt greetings.

Yours, Julius.

Stern: I studied these letters
for the high sign.

There was one substitution.

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

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

So I knew when they
substituted that,

that was bad news, indeed,

because everything they said
now,

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

Until I got one letter
that spoke of deportation,

and my anxieties
were overriding.

Narrator: In March 1942,
all the Jews in Hildesheim

were ordered to assemble
in the town square.

Government cameramen were
on hand to record

the supposedly humane way
in which they,

including Guy Stern's family,

were being deported to
"the East."

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

from inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

Stern: It had a sense of
finality about it

and was crushing.

♫ ♫

The despair was in every word.

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

and even my father's
unsuppressable optimism,

there was even
a straw of a hope.

So I was fighting my war,

as well as the American War.

If there was a glimmer
of a hope,

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

this horror as best I
personally could.

♫ ♫

♫ ♫

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

the shocking truth
is revealed...

Lipstadt: Americans are
beginning to get the picture.

Announcer: a hope of rescue...

Erbelding: These were
Americans who were really

trying to do good.

Announcer: and the aftermath
of genocide.

Man: This is not
a war between nations

but humanity's struggle
for the right to exist.

Announcer: Don't miss the conclusion

of "The U.S. and the Holocaust"
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.

♫ ♫

♫ ♫