(slow music)
(exploding)
- [Narrator] Perhaps no other
century in human existence
experienced the terrible
and remarkable contrasts
of the 20th century.
The century was heroic and tragic.
Progressive and reactionary.
Forward-looking and
frighteningly regressive.
A century of contradiction, confusion,
and massive change.
But the nature of human
beings had not changed.
And it is that basic nature
more than anything else
which is the determining
catalyst of human history.
Certainly the history of the 20th century.
Faith and fate, we'll focus
on how all these events
and occurrences impacted
our one specific group
of people, a people
whose survival has defied
the ravages and challenges
not only of this century,
but of the over 40 centuries
that have led up to it.
Faith and Fate, the story
of the Jewish people
in the 20th century.
Episode four, Ominous Skies, 1930 to 1939.
The Roaring 20s came to an
economically devastated end
with the Stock Market crash of 1929.
And the advent of The Great Depression.
Most of the industrialized
nations in the world
were severely affected.
In Europe as well as the United States,
millions of people were out of work.
- [Radio] Financial panic grips the world.
(yelling)
For the majority, it means
the interminable line
outside Buckley Gates,
desperately hoping for a job
that rarely comes.
It means hunger and the
march of the unemployed
in the nation's capital.
It started in America,
but practically overnight
an economic blizzard swept the world.
In Japan, France, Britain,
always the unemployed.
The soup kitchens, the grinding poverty,
and the despair.
- [Berel] The impact
of The Great Depression
upon the Jews in Europe
was even greater than
upon the Jews in The United States.
Because the Jews in Europe
faced an endemic antisemitism
without a depression.
And the depression just exacerbated it.
It just brought it to a head.
And because of the fact
of the grinding poverty,
and because of all of
the economic problems,
people always look for a scapegoat,
well the handy scapegoat
in European history
for fifteen hundred
years has been the Jew.
So whenever there's a
problem, it's the Jew's fault.
- [Narrator] To understand
the 1930s and Hitler's
and the Nazi's autocratic
rise to power in Germany,
we need to understand
four critical factors.
One, Germany was bankrupt.
And with the German and
European economies devastated,
there were no jobs, and
Germans were finding it
increasingly harder to
put food on their tables.
Two, Germany had lost World War One.
And Germans were under
the crushing war debt
of trillions of dollars imposed upon them
by the Versailles Peace Treaty.
Three, Germany, once a
world imperial power,
had had its pride crushed
by the Allied victory.
And four, Germany and
its impotent democratic
government had no
leadership that could solve
Germany's problems.
But Adolf Hitler understood
the mood and the needs
of the German people, and he had answers
to solve their problems.
(speaking German)
(cheering)
- [Monty] In 1930, the Nazi
party wins a very respectable
107 seats in the Reichstag.
How to explain this,
from a non-entity in 1925
to the leader of a major party
in the Reichstag in 1930,
only five years.
(speaking German)
This is due to Hitler's
incredible charisma,
even his greatest enemies admitted this.
But it's not only that,
he is fine-tuning his political message.
He downplays sometimes
attacks against the Jews,
picks up the attacks
against the communists,
the natural enemy of the right wing,
and goes on a huge media campaign.
Flying all over Germany,
using the radio effectively,
massive speeches to the crowds,
dressing as a bourgeois almost,
getting rid of the Austrian lederhosen,
but wearing a suit and so forth.
He comes across as somebody respectable
who will appeal both to
the bankers who are worried
if the communists come to power,
the middle class who always are worried
Jewish competition, and some workers
who also are pulled into
the idea that he's saying
that Jews are too
materialistic and so forth.
- Hitler pitched several themes
over and over and over again
so that nobody could
afterwards claim they had been
fooled or mislead.
He pitched the concept of
German racial superiority
which entitled them to vast conquests.
You therefore needed to change drastically
the domestic situation in Germany,
and the multi-party
system, which had existed.
Get rid of any Jewish
presence and influence.
Rebuild Germany's military power.
There was a very strong sense of
we can do it, we will do it,
and this is the way we'll do it
- [Narrator] In 1931,
even though more than
thirteen million Germans
voted for the Nazi party
in the parliamentary elections,
Hitler and his party still
did not have full power.
Using increased violence
against his opposition,
and his powers of persuasion
to swing more and more
Germans to his side, Hitler
stepped up the pressure
to take control of Germany.
Hitler's brown shirts, while
continuing their assaults
on the Jews, now assassinated
leading socialists,
communists, and leaders
of democratic parties.
- There's genius in operation here,
because he's pushing the right
buttons for every individual.
One, the Christian argument,
although he's certainly
a pagan in belief, that the
Jews rejected Jesus as messiah.
The dual-loyalty argument of
the secular enlightened people
that their loyalty is not to
Germany, but to elsewhere.
The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, that the Jews
are really an international
race conspiring
to control the entire world.
And most important, the
Jews are the Aryan enemy,
it's a race of parasites.
They're trying to control
and literally suck the blood
out of vibrant Germany and
other Aryan white pure races.
It's a fight to the finish and
it's a war that we must win
lest they annihilate us,
lest they exterminate us.
(speaking German)
- [Narrator] Hitler understood
that if you said something,
even if it was untrue, enough times,
especially if you said it convincingly,
people would believe it.
The Nazi propaganda machine continuously
and successfully demonized the Jews.
Der Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper
was full of articles
and cartoons which showed
the Jews to be sub-human.
Equating them with vermin and rats.
(fanfare)
Themes, including themes
of Hitler's speeches
extolling German superiority
and stressing the
demonic inferiority of
the Jews were especially
convincing and effective.
- The idea that the Jews
were not really humans
in the ordinary sense was with the Nazis
from the very beginning.
From the Nazi point of view, the Jews
were the Satan, they
had inherited that idea
from Christian antisemitism where the Jew
was considered to be possessed by Satan
because only somebody possessed by Satan
could have killed God, Jesus Christ.
Unless the Jews were removed in some way,
not only the physical
survival of the German people
was in danger, but the whole
world would be conquered
by Bolshevism and Jewish capitalism.
Well the counter argument
is that this whole thing
is a nightmarish delusion.
The Jews were slightly less than
seventeen million all over the world,
they did not control anything at all,
they had no territory,
they had no political presence,
this is many years
before the establishment
of the state of Israel.
If you look at the American,
British, French archives,
you see that they consider
the Jews, at the most,
as a very unfortunate group of people
who had no power.
- By the early 1930s,
Hitler had electrified
many many Germans in his
sense of world conquest,
to bring back German
honor, to get rid of Jewish
materialist influence.
What he does also is, with
the aid of people like
Joseph Goebbels' administer of propaganda,
and in these massive
demonstrations at Nuremberg
where the party congresses are held,
you basically see people
swept aside by the aura
not only of Hitler's
presence coming at the end
as a mighty crescendo,
but just the masses of
Nazi soldiers marching
in perfect formation.
A massive ceremony, a
spectacle where the savior,
the messiah, Hitler
comes at the end in his
Mercedes Benz and people
are literally swept away
gleefully, hands shooting forward,
Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler.
- [Narrator] To understand
how the majority of Germans
were swayed by Hitler,
we need to see exactly
how masterfully he manipulated them.
- He developed the manipulation
of large numbers of people
in a process in which vast
numbers are in uniform
in marching columns
and the others standing
by the side of the road
in huge numbers, cheering.
They were playing a critical role in the
development of what the Germans called
the Volksgemeinschaft,
the people's community.
And you were tied to your fellow Germans
either because you were
marching between two of them
or you were cheering among
tens of thousands of them.
The Germans refer to their own
people and their own soldiers
with the word Menschenmaterial,
human material.
People in other words are
converted, essentially,
into something like bricks,
and you use bricks the way you wanted,
to make a sidewalk, to build a house,
or to throw at somebody.
But they are, if you will, at the disposal
of the regime exactly the way bricks
are at the disposal of bricklayers.
- [Radio Announcer] Forget
hours, forget working conditions,
forget how to think.
Forge the club of blood and
iron and let the democracies
talk about freedom.
No freedom here, no labor
unions, no overtime.
The fuhrer tells you where
to work, when to work,
how long to work, how
much your work is worth.
Forge the club of blood and iron.
We have a sacred mission.
Today we rule Germany, tomorrow the world.
(cheering)
- [Gerhard] There is a suggestive power
to this kind of showmanship,
parades, decorations,
and events that seduces
large numbers who might
have been uncommitted, to
come to commit themselves
alongside their fellow citizens.
- And I came across an incredible story.
A young woman who was fortunate to get out
of Germany in time before World War Two
who said "What's this all
about Hitler and everything?"
A Jewish girl, "I want to see for myself."
She took off the yellow
star, she could pass
as a so-called Aryan,
made it to one of the
Nuremberg rallies, and
was just sitting there.
She found herself so transfixed
by the drama, the aura, the strobe lights,
Hitler's ranting but charismatic voice,
the thousands of people around,
the serried ranks of
the S.S. and the army,
that her hand shot forward unconsciously.
Seig Heil, Seig Heil, Seig Heil.
When I read that for the
first time years ago,
I then began to understand the incredible
magical power of that
evil genius whom we call
Adolf Hitler.
- Hitler somehow had a
magnetic personality.
People were mesmerized by him.
If he fixed his blue eyes on you,
then you were paralyzed.
It was a demonic force.
One of my earliest
memories is how my parents
were white ashen,
listening to his screeching
screaming voice which came
over the radio in our home.
He could control millions
through his speeches.
And therefore you have
here another anomaly
that exists.
Hitler is the most non-Aryan
looking person in Germany.
Dark hair, that silly
Chaplain-esque mustache,
small in stature, not a
very great military bearing,
Hindenburg called him
"That Little Corporal."
Well that's what he was, but
somehow that little corporal
was able to sell the idea of Aryanism,
and that he was the great
representative of it,
even though if you looked
at him, he was not.
He was looking for blonde,
six foot, blue-eyed
Scandinavian-looking population.
He couldn't fit the bill himself.
But that's part of the mystery,
I think Hitler is a mystery.
- [Narrator] The evil
forces of Nazism in Germany
were gathering steam,
but in the early 1930s,
no one outside Germany seemed
to take Hitler too seriously.
But the propaganda-inspired
hatred was building
and began to erupt on
the streets of Berlin
and other German cities.
- In the 1930s, Hitler wrote
his book, Mein Kampf, and in
Mein Kampf he said exactly
what he was going to do
and he did exactly what he
said he was going to do.
All of his points were
clearly spelled out.
Nobody took him seriously.
First of all, the book made
him a very wealthy man.
And secondly, the book became
the Bible, so to speak,
of the Nazi party.
Of what would happen in
Germany and eastern Europe,
and Europe generally,
not just eastern Europe,
when Hitler came to power,
when it was controlled by him.
Why people didn't believe the book,
again because it was unimaginable.
So they thought it was
the rantings of a mad man.
Well maybe the rantings of a mad man,
but once he had power,
he was able to enforce
all of his rantings.
- In November 1932, there
were the last three elections
in Germany, in republican
Germany before Hitler.
And the Nazis lost two million votes
and 34 places in the German parliament.
That is when they came into power.
Because the conservative
right-wing thought that
now the Nazis were no
longer a threat to them.
And they, together with the Nazis,
they would be a majority.
- The conservative parties
in the government said
oh we'll be able to control
him, he'll be our front,
we'll give him the
chancellorship, but we'll really
control him.
Well within a very short
time, he was controlling them.
He won the army over to his side,
it wasn't clear that the
army would support him.
He was a genius, he was a
genius in terms of propaganda,
he was a genius in terms
of controlling his enemies.
- It's fortunate in my opinion
that there wasn't television
then, that there wasn't
internet, et cetera,
I think he would he would
have been able to convince
the whole world.
I don't know if America would
have gone to war with him either.
And we see that America did not go to war
until he declared war
on The United States.
Germany declared war, he
had that master stroke
of being able to bamboozle everybody.
All people at the same time.
He absolutely bamboozled the whole world.
- He wants to create a
totalitarian government.
So at the end of February,
the Nazi stage a fire
in the Reichstag, blame
it on a Dutch communist.
This frightens enough
people in the Reichstag
that they enable Hitler,
it's known as the Enabling
Act, in March 1933,
to give him power for one year.
He uses that one year
to consolidate his power
completely and then control everything.
No free press, no free parties,
which is why that same month
March '33, Hitler creates
the first concentration camp
in Dachau outside of
Munich, in order to put
their political enemies of the state.
Communists, socialists, Jews
included but not specifically
geared against Jews.
- [Narrator] Hitler moved
very quickly to silence
any opposition to his power.
It is estimated in the first
months after the Enabling Act,
the Nazis murdered 40 thousand people.
Armageddon for the world,
and especially the Jews
was fast approaching.
(melancholy music)
- [Yehuda] Germany 1933
when Hitler came to power,
thought that this was a
transitionary phenomenon,
it wouldn't last.
Nobody thought that
Hitler was going to carry
on being the Chancellor
of Germany for more than
a couple of years.
The German people would
remove him sooner or later.
- There's a letter that the
Orthodox Rabbis of Germany
wrote to Hitler upon his
assuming the Chancellorship
of Germany, and the letter says, you know,
we congratulate you, we're
glad that you've gained all,
you made it, and we know
you're going to treat us well,
and you know that, you
understand that we're part
of the German nation.
You read the letter today, you weep.
But that's perfect hindsight, right?
- [Dan] Now another direction of reaction
of the German Jews in the
beginning was to reorganize.
To establish a roof
organization for German Jewry.
And they start with the
re-education of the German
Jews, many of whom were secularized
and were not already estranged
from their Jewish roots
and bringing in Jewish values
and teaching Jews history.
A new feeling of Jewish identity rises,
and that is a process which is called
Aufbau en untergang, that is building up
when the situation is declining.
- The regeneration of Jewish culture,
which was something quite unexpected,
German Jewry turned into itself.
Why are we Jews?
They didn't become orthodox,
but from a liberal
religious point of view,
and from a secular point of view,
there was a turning inwards, if you like.
An attempt to see what
Jewish culture was all about.
The Bible was translated into German,
there was a tremendous
flowering of Jewish culture
in Germany.
More books on Jewish themes were published
between '33 and '38, than in
a hundred years before that.
The leadership stood up.
They couldn't stand up against the Nazis,
there's no possibility of that,
but they stood up to the
Nazis, in other words,
they did not cringe, they did not beg,
they tried to maintain their
honor and their cultural
or moral superiority and
this is very important.
Because the image that
many, especially many Jewish
people today have is
that the Jews of Germany
sort of morally collapsed.
This is absolutely untrue.
- [Narrator] Nazi
violence against the Jews
was not limited to the street.
Jewish students and
professors were expelled
from universities.
And civil servants were
removed from office.
Hitler began to expose his
scientific racial theories
into the mainstream of daily German life.
This theory placed the Aryan race,
represented by the Germans as the highest
prototypical human being.
Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies,
and other untermenschen,
sub-humans, were deemed to
be the lowest of animals.
Designated for slavery and extinction.
- That idea of Social Darwinism
which was a quasi-science,
was believed by scientists, by professors,
by biologists, et cetera,
created a climate.
And the climate was that inferior people,
people with handicaps, that
are a burden on the state,
should somehow be eliminated.
Hitler destroyed 75
thousand mental patients.
Doctors and nurses in the
insane asylums in Germany
in the 1930s killed their patients.
The world said great, I'm not a problem.
They gave Hitler the idea,
if you can kill 75 thousand
people who we deemed
to be inferior, you can certainly kill
a few million Jews who
certainly are inferior,
and the world won't say
anything then either.
- [Gerhard] In Hitler's eyes, the superior
German race is threatened
by this inferior race.
And a particular way which
has made them threatening
is that they have, in terms of clothing,
habits and language, so assimilated
into German society of
which they're a little less
than one percent, that that makes
them all the more dangerous.
Because people can't tell.
Let me give you an example
from my personal experience
in this regard.
In the 1930s, late 30s,
under mistaken belief
that Walt Disney was Jewish,
the Nazis banned Mickey Mouse.
I thought that was terrible.
But if you asked why are
they banning Mickey Mouse,
they are banning not just
because they believe that
Walt Disney is Jewish,
they know that people
can't tell that Pluto and
Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse
are Jewish.
It's very dangerous to
have infiltrated into
the culture of a society
things that people
can't tell apart.
And so by a series of steps and stages,
they tried to segregate what
Jewish population there is,
and to chase as much of it out
of the country as possible.
And eventually of course to
kill any they could get ahold of
- [Berel] The whole idea
of racial antisemitism
as against religious
antisemitism is what destroyed
the Jews.
If you're a race, so then
there's no way to change it.
Religion you can buy out,
right, you can convert,
you can say I'm not religious, whatever.
But if you're a race, if that's your DNA,
if it's in your blood, then you're doomed.
- [Narrator] But in the
1930s, who was really
listening to Hitler,
especially his rantings
against the Jews?
The world was too busy trying
to solve its own problems.
(fanfare)
- [Radio Announcer] Roosevelt
is the nation's idol
here today.
Thousands of Americans are
here to cheer the birth
of a new era in national affairs.
A New Deal era, which is
supposed to pull the country
out of its chaos.
- [Deborah] FDR becomes
president of a country
that is in terrible economic shape.
And that was his first priority.
Getting Americans back to work.
Putting the banks on a secure footing.
Doing everything possible
domestically for this country.
- Let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself.
- [Narrator] Franklin
Delano Roosevelt instituted
The New Deal, which
created numerous programs
to help those affected
worst by the depression.
And to hasten America's economic recovery.
But in March 1933, some 13 million people
were still out of work.
The stock market had lost
almost 89% of its value,
and virtually every bank
was closed for business.
It would take time to see
the effects of The New Deal.
- He also faced a growing
sense of political isolationism
and this is very important.
America had been founded
on the notion that we're
not going to get involved
in European wars.
And that is even more
prevalent as a sentiment
in the 1930s when people
think we went to war in Europe
to make the world safe for democracy,
and what do we have on
the European continent?
We have fascism in
Italy, we have communism
in the Soviet Union, and
we have Nazism in Germany.
That's not our affair,
we're staying out of it.
- The United States was neutral,
there's three thousand
miles of Atlantic Ocean
between them and the continent of Europe,
they don't want to open
their doors to massive
immigration, lest these
people take away jobs,
lest Jews bring in some
alien communist views.
All of this increases also
antisemitism in the 1930s,
and all of this plays
together to explain why
Roosevelt is not going
to take active steps
to challenge congress
and the public opinion,
which does not want to
get involved in the ills
of Europe.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile the Soviet Union,
delighted at the failure
of the capitalist system,
predicted its demise.
And the inevitable triumph of
communism in world society.
The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin was also
consolidating his own power.
By purging the political
and military ranks
of anyone real or
imagined that he believed
was a danger to him.
- In 1934, Stalin began
a massive, nation-wide
reign of terror.
The so-called Great Purgers.
All of the leading
oppositioners to Stalin,
whether from the left or the right,
were tried in public
show trials in Moscow,
were convicted of treason,
having confessed to the most absurd,
unimaginable crimes, and executed.
That escalated between 1934
and 1939, to the point where
millions, and we still
do not know any precise
number, millions of Soviet
citizens were arrested,
sent to labor camps, imprisoned, or shot.
Most of the people in labor camps,
of course, did not survive there.
So in effect, they too were killed.
- [Narrator] It is an
ironic historical footnote
that Stalin's head of secret
police, his foreign minister,
and even his brother-in-law,
were all Jews.
Eventually most of the top-ranking Jews
in Soviet power were
ultimately purged and executed.
- The terrible irony
of this is that Stalin
purged the Soviet armed
forces of its leadership,
for example, 110 out of
195 divisional commanders
were removed, two, three, and four years
before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
And this involved a tremendous weakening
of the ability of the Soviet armed forces
to withstand the Nazi invasion.
- [Narrator] In Germany, in a symbolic act
of ominous significance, on May 10, 1933,
an event took place
that publicly ushered in
an era of Nazi state censorship
and cultural control.
- Two months only after The
Enabling Act gave Hitler
total power for a year,
there was on the 10th of May
a massive book-burning in Germany
of all books that the
Nazi party believed were
pernicious to the German pure Aryan mind.
Naturally, German books written by Jews,
including Freud and all the other greats,
were thrown into the bonfires.
In the 19th Century,
the great German poet,
Heinrich Heine, said a
country that burns books
may well end up burning bodies.
He didn't realize how
accurately he prophesied.
- The Jews in Germany
were very comfortable.
They thought, you know, we're
Germans to the core, right?
So there are German Lutherans,
and German Catholics,
and German Jews, but we're all Germans.
And the German Jewry, the
harder it tried to assimilate,
the greater the antisemitism.
No matter what they did,
they weren't German enough.
- [Deborah] So when Germany
starts to persecute Jews,
and the persecution has been described as
salami tactics, slice by slice by slice,
first people are fired
from the public sector job,
then other jobs, then
they can't own stores,
then can't sit on certain benches,
then they can't swim
in the swimming pools,
and it gets worse and worse and of course
one of the turning points
is in the fall of 1935,
when the Nuremberg Laws are issued.
- [Narrator] The Nuremberg
Laws of 1935 deprived
all Jews of their German citizenship,
and made them state subjects.
Jews were to be persecuted,
and even those Germans
who believed themselves
not Jewish but had a Jewish ancestor,
four generations back,
were now defined as Jewish.
Marriages between Jews and
non-Jews were invalidated.
And even Jews who had
converted to Christianity
were targeted.
Jews were barred from
working in the hospitals,
government offices, banks,
and major companies.
Seemingly overnight, more
than one hundred thousand Jews
were suddenly unable to make a living.
- Well this is a preparation
for removing them.
Chasing them out of Germany.
This was a policy between 1935, and 1938,
in fact between '33 and '38.
To get rid of the Jews by
exploiting them somewhere else.
- And by this point many
German Jews want to get out
of Germany and in fact over
half of the German Jews
do leave Germany.
So where do they go?
They go to places that look very safe,
they go to Paris, they go to Amsterdam,
they go to Brussels.
Places that turn out to be not so safe.
You know, the most famous
of all the stories,
because of her book,
is Anne Frank's family.
That leaves Germany and goes to Amsterdam
and thinks it's very safe in Amsterdam.
And by this point, and
this is before Nazism
in the 1920s, America institutes something
called the Quota system,
which sets a quota
for how many people can
come from each country.
And the quota system is designed
to keep America white
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant,
northern European.
It heavily favors people
coming from northern Europe,
it heavily discriminates against people
coming from eastern
Europe, Jews, Catholics.
So Jews who want to come
from Germany cannot come in
freely, it's very hard if
they're trying to leave
from eastern Europe it's even harder.
- [Narrator] With America
and most of the world's
doors closed to mass Jewish immigration,
one surprising country, as
late as 1937 still allowed
Jews with financial means to emigrate.
And that was British-controlled Palestine.
- [Anita] Those Jews
who had a bit of capital
and could smuggle it out of the country,
they could get into Palestine
with no problem at all
because according to the
British instructions,
those capitalists, namely people with more
than a thousand English
pounds, could get a certificate
no matter what.
As many as they wanted to.
About 50 thousand Jews from
Germany emigrated to Palestine
during those years.
Now, the exceptional thing
about this immigration wave
was that here for the
first time in the history
of immigration to
Palestine, the Jews who came
from abroad were on a
higher cultural, economic,
and social level than
the Jews in Palestine.
This was a very important
addition to the make up
of Jewish society in Palestine.
Now we have to understand the
importance of this period.
There was here a discrepancy.
While the Jewish world,
the Jewish people in Europe
were undergoing one of the worst
periods in their existence,
Palestine knew prosperity
and growth and a promise
of a future for the Jews,
so for the first time
in Jewish history, Palestine
became the main country
for Jewish immigration, the
main country for Jewish refuge.
And so in a way, the balance
between Europe and Palestine changed.
- [Narrator] What was
remarkable, looking back
at the inter-war period between
the end of World War One
in 1918 through to the 1930s
was, despite the difficulties,
the resurgence and
vibrance of Jewish life,
not only in Palestine, but
especially in eastern Europe.
(melancholy music)
- Eastern European Jewry was
a very vital and energetic
place, there were many
competitors, so to speak,
on the Jewish street.
First of all the Ushevoltan
Lithuania revived
themselves and became very influential.
Produced great people.
The Hasidic Courts in Poland and Galitzia
and Hungary also became strong.
But they were in competition
with the secularization
of the Jewish people with
the fact that a large
proportion of the Jewish people no longer
were observant and
followed different gods.
One of the gods was the
left communism, socialism,
they felt that they're doing, so to speak
God's work and opposing religion.
And this competition on
the street in newspapers,
in essays, all of this made
for a very very vibrant
Jewish life, almost a chaotic Jewish life.
Because so much was going on
and everybody seemed
to be against everyone.
- In the inter-war period
in Poland, the Bund was one
of many actors on the
Jewish political street.
Agoda Seroyal, Mizrachi,
various Zionist organizations,
left polatsian, right
polatsian, a huge plethora
of Jewish organization,
each with its own newspaper,
with its own football
club, with its own schools.
(speaking German)
- [Narrator] How deeply
this divided Jewry is
reflected in the story of one family.
The family of Mordechai
Tenenbaum in Poland.
- This family was a religious family,
the parents were religious,
but in the crisis
of the inter-war period,
each of the six children
chose a different Jewish direction.
One became A Bundist, another
became more religious,
Mordechai himself was later
the leader of the Zionist
Underground in the Bialystok Ghetto.
And so we can see how
the crisis of the period
impacted on one family,
they all remained Jews,
but they chose different paths.
- Then there also were
developments, new developments,
women's education in
eastern Europe, which until
the first World War was
nil, except for individuals,
but as a system didn't exist,
and now the basic back of
school system was created.
Sarah Schenirer was able
to enlist the aid of great
rabbis and Hasidic leaders to back it.
And now you had tens of
thousands of religious women
that attended school, that were literate.
It was a great change, a great revolution.
That was a step towards modernity.
Eastern European Jewish
life was also influenced
by technological advance.
Radio, the Jewish theater
reflected different viewpoints.
Great canters gave
concerts and made records,
the old vinyl '78 records,
and it was a new world.
- [Narrator] Despite all the
changes social, political,
philosophical and
economic, and the defection
of so many Jews from traditional Judaism,
Orthodox life, especially
in Poland and Lithuania,
remained strong and highly motivated.
- Eastern European Jewish
life in its religious sector
was led by such luminaries
and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan,
known as the Chofetz Chaim,
and Rabbi Chaim Ozer
Gogentski, who was the untitled
Rabbi of Hilna and really the strong man
of the Lithuanian Jewish world.
And the Hasidic world was
led by the Gerer Rabbi,
and the other rebellion that existed then,
that had large and powerful courts.
You had very very strong leadership
and you had very powerful people.
- [Narrator] With the pressure on Jews
to abandon their faith
and toe the communist line
increasing in the Soviet Union,
and the winds of discrimination and danger
blowing stronger and stronger in Germany,
the troubling question is
why did the Jews not
emigrate en masse from
Europe or eastern Europe at that time?
- One has to realize that
because the Nazis did not
say exactly what they were
going to do with the Jews,
the Jews couldn't have known.
There was no threat of murder before 1939.
And so the reaction everyone finds today,
why didn't the German Jews
realize what was going on?
They couldn't have realized
because even the Nazis
didn't know what was going to happen.
Anything like what we know
today as the Holocaust,
was in no one's mind,
not in the German minds,
not in the Jewish minds.
- [Narrator] Some groups
like the Gur Hasidim
and Mizrachi, the religious
Zionists, did emigrate
to Palestine in the 1930s.
But the majority of the
Orthodox and the Bundist
for different reasons,
were against Zionism.
The Bundists believed
in a social brotherhood
and hoped to rebuild Polish
society on socialist principles.
And thereby erase antisemitism.
Many orthodox leaders
discouraged their religious
followers from immigrating
to Palestine in the 1930s
because they were afraid of
the influence of the secular
culture of the Zionist Yishuv.
(speaking German)
For these orthodox
leaders, the risk of going
to a secularized no man's land versus
the established orthodox
infrastructure that existed
in Poland was simply too great.
- It's easy to say to leave,
but who where, and how?
You know you're talking
about millions of people.
How do you move them?
And we know that inertia is a great force.
It's not easy for people to move.
And then especially the
people who had wealth,
businesses, real estate, et cetera,
they are loathe to leave.
Because they have to give up everything.
And it's those who have nothing
that find it easier to leave
And because of that therefore that we had
religious groups that said
you're not allowed to leave,
we have to stay here
until the messiah comes.
They said you can't go to America because
there nobody can be totally observant.
Can't go to the land of Israel because
there somehow it's controlled
by the secularists,
all real Judaism will be destroyed.
So we'll stay here and fight it out.
The communists for instance
said we have to stay
here and build communism.
It's cowardly to leave.
And the liberals said how can you leave,
you know Germany is our father land.
How can we abandon it now
in the time of trouble?
We have to stay here and
rectify the situation.
So again, in retrospect,
it's all frightening
how blind everybody
was, but that's because
we have perfect hindsight,
they did not have that.
What the Holocaust was, was unimaginable.
It was unimaginable to the world generally
and to the Jew's world particularly.
(exploding)
(yelling)
- [Narrator] In 1936, major
civil war broke out in Spain.
Uniting Hitler and Italy's Mussolini with
General Francisco Franco on the right.
Against the Soviet Union
backing the Spanish leftists.
The Spanish civil war
allowed Germany to test
the superiority of its new weaponry.
- The Spanish civil war
was a testing ground
for Hitler's armies, for the air force,
for the Luftwaffe, for the
pouncers, for everything,
and it was a testing
ground diplomatically.
Because neither England nor France said
get out of the war or we're
going to go against it.
He believed that the western democracies
would never go to war with him.
That we're too weak, too pacifist.
And that was one of his miscalculations.
- [Narrator] By the mid 1930s,
Hitler was supremely confident.
And this confidence fueled
his drive to not only
re-empower Germany and restore
it to its former glory,
but to prepare it for world domination.
However, to do that, Germany
needed to expand territorially.
- A concept that not only
Hitler but others in Germany
used a great deal, was the
German word lebensraum,
and translated into
English, is living space.
A critical point that runs
through all of Hitler's
writings and speeches
was that the German race
must be able to feed
itself on its own soil.
And that therefore
meant that the territory
you conquered for your
living space would have
to be emptied of non-German
people who were already there.
They could be expelled
or they could be killed,
but they couldn't be Germanized.
Only soil can be Germanized.
- The very first major
bold move Hitler does,
is in 1936, he occupies, once again
the Rhineland that had been given over
by the Versailles Peace Treaty to France.
His generals before
this were panic-stricken
we're not ready for war,
the French will quickly
overcome us, and Hitler says follow me,
he really believed that God was with him,
he was on a crusade as
he saw it, in apocalyptic
terms, for the benefit of the world.
And in fact not a shot is fired.
This also increases, clearly,
his popularity in Germany,
it's the same year
that that summer he stages
the Olympics in Berlin,
which is a major triumph
clearly, for the so-called
Aryan race.
- [Berel] In 1936, the
Olympics were held in Berlin.
The United States debated whether or not
it should even participate.
There were Jewish athletes
that also had to decide
whether or not they would participate.
In the end, they joined the American team,
but when they came to Berlin,
the American track team
decided that they would not
use Jewish athletes in the games.
They were afraid that they
would embarrass Hitler
if a Jewish athlete won.
It sent a subliminal message to Hitler.
And the message was
America will not stand up
for its Jews.
It was a terrible message
to send to a lethal mad man.
- [Deborah] The Olympics
was a chance for Germany
to show the world what
it had accomplished.
And people came away from the Olympics
enthralled by what they saw.
They didn't see people being beaten up,
they didn't see Jews being persecuted.
They saw a country where
people were working.
They saw a country where
nobody was selling apples
on the street, as was still the case
in the United States.
They saw new buildings, they
saw a grand and glorious
operation, and they
came back and they said,
we didn't see anybody persecuted.
What is this all about?
Of course the persecution
had gone underground
for the duration of the Olympics.
- [Narrator] Hitler's plans for rebuilding
the German economy were
proving very successful.
He believed that creating
great monumental works
would set the German people back to work
and revitalize the economy.
And it did.
The rearmament of Germany
was also progressing rapidly.
In 1936, Hitler had
presented a four-year plan
to ready his country for war.
He told his advisors that
the big war should be won
by 1942, or '44 at the latest.
But first he had to prepare the groundwork
to diffuse and make sure that
the countries surrounding
him would not try to stop him.
- Hitler himself is very
concerned in the first years
of his rule that there
will be preventive action
against Germany.
And so he does various
things to fool people.
He signs a non-aggression
pact with Poland.
He renews a credit agreement
with the Soviet Union.
He signs a concordant with the Vatican.
Now all of these get broken,
and he plans to do that.
But it calms people down.
- [Narrator] With Germany's advantage
of an early head start on
rearmament, Hitler knew
he had to strike before
England, France, and America
could re-arm and oppose him.
In his plan to expand
his borders and unite
the German-speaking countries of Europe,
Adolf Hitler now turned his
sights on Germany's neighbor,
Austria.
- [Radio Announcer] On
March the 12th, 1938,
without warning, the German armies marched
over the Austrian border.
It was really only a
full-scale invasion test,
and Hitler rode in triumph into Vienna.
Even the very name of Austria
disappeared from the map.
- He walks in and the
League of Nations, which is
more about, which is
dormant, does nothing.
The only two powers which
really could have stopped him,
the U.S. is neutral, it's not
even in the League of Nations,
are Britain and France,
and they appease him.
They don't want to have
another World War One.
- [Deborah] The Austrians
welcome the Germans
with open arms.
And Austria's Jewish community,
which I believe was around
two hundred thousand,
suddenly faces the antisemitic regulations
which have taken six years
to put in place in Germany.
In Austria it happens overnight.
One day you're a free Jew
in Vienna living your life,
the next day you can't
work in certain places,
you can't live in certain places,
you must turn in your money,
you must turn in your possessions.
- Now Hitler's got all these extra Jews
on his hands, what's he gonna do?
This is the real change
because now the call is sent
to a colorless bureaucrat,
he may have been 37 or 38,
named Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann is in fact the
expert in the Gestapo,
the secret police.
Eichmann begins in March
of '38, to forcibly
take everything in his own hands
and realizing this is
where he can win his spurs,
gain real public acclaim,
start to forcibly push
Jews out of Austria.
- [Narrator] With the noose tightening
and the position of the Jews deteriorating
in Germany and eastern Europe,
the question of where
Jewish refugees would go
forced world leaders to at
least discuss the problem.
- The very first step that Roosevelt takes
to respond to public opinion in England
and America to do something for refugees
is in July of 1938, convening
in Evian back in France
a conference of refugees
coming from Germany
and Austria.
Many countries are not
involved, especially Poland
'cause that has over three million Jews,
where as Germany had a
little over half a million
to start with in 1933.
But already even before
Evian, the United States
representative said we're
not changing our immigration
laws, mainly we continue the restrictions.
As a result, if they the nations at Evian,
see the U.S. as not taking a lead,
why should they?
The British have an additional problem.
Palestine.
- [Anita] The British
went into the new phase
of saying the Jews are
in our pocket anyway.
We are their only ally in the world,
we have nothing to worry about then.
But the Arabs controlled imperial roads,
the Suez Canal, the oil in Iraq,
so we have to appease the Arabs.
And the result was the
White Paper of 1939,
which said loud and clear that the growth
of the Jewish community in
Palestine can be stopped.
It says that within ten years, there will
be Jewish immigration into the country,
all in all of 75 thousand Jews.
And nothing more.
- [Monty] With Arab and
Jew fighting at that time,
the Arabs maintaining a revolt
from 1936 onward to '39,
they don't want to open
the accessible haven
and the most obvious haven,
i.e. The Promised Land
to the Jews.
So already at Evian, July
'38, more than a year
before the war erupts,
no nation of major import
says fine we'll open our doors to Jews.
The world signals its
indifference or worse
to the Jewish tragedy.
- [Narrator] A tragic example
of exclusionist immigration
policies with 939 refugees from Germany,
who sailed to Cuba on board the St. Louis.
Barred from entering Cuba, they were also
turned away by America and Canada.
Eventually the St. Louis
sailed back to Europe,
where England, Belgium, and
Holland accepted the refugees.
Unfortunately, later
over 250 of them perished
in the Holocaust.
The Jews of Germany were
caught in a no-win situation.
They were rejected by
most of the outside world,
and their Nazi-controlled homeland.
- You couldn't have the Jews stay.
But they were not leaving
in large enough numbers.
So you need to exercise
some pressure on them,
some harsh, very harsh pressure
in order for them to go.
To run.
And then, something happened
which helped them do that.
And that is a young
name Jew by the name of
Herschel Grynszpan.
- [Monty] Herschel decided I'm
willing to sacrifice my life
if necessary, I have to
alert the world to the crisis
that my people are facing not only in that
no man's land, but always
and everywhere under Hitler.
Goes to the German embassy in Paris,
in the hope of killing the
German ambassador there.
He's not going to run away,
he's ready to come to trial,
in order that the world
will find out about
the tragic plight of his brethren.
The German ambassador is not there,
German secretary vom
Rath, who ironically is
an anti-Nazi secretly,
comes to receive Grynszpan.
Grynszpan doesn't know
this is the ambassador,
and so he shoots him, as
it turns out, mortally.
It's the night of November
8th, here it's clearly
orchestrated, they're only
waiting for the proper incident
to set it all off.
The explosion follows which
we now call kristallnacht,
kristallnacht getting its name
from the shattered glass of
shops and burned synagogues
and so forth, all around occupied Germany.
(melancholy music)
- [Yehuda] This was a sign with
Hitler's explicit approval,
for the Nazi party and the
Nazi thugs to do something
that was really had been prepared before.
And that is attack Jews all over Germany.
Attack them physically,
burn does their synagogues,
and arrest large numbers of Jewish males,
approximately 26 thousand, put
them in concentration camps
so that their families will
do everything they could
to get them out.
And the only way they could
get out of a concentration
camp is if the Nazis were
shown a visa or some kind
of paper that enabled the Jews to leave.
- Of the things that
happened at that time,
two really disturb me the most.
One was that the synagogue
that we attended in Hanover
had been burned and was
eventually of course leveled.
That whole notion of burning
what the Germans called
a Gottes Haus, a house of God, shook me up
probably more than anything else.
That people were sometimes
nasty to each other,
and that in the first World War they tried
to kill each other and
had wounded my father,
well it's not nice, but
that people do nasty things
to people was something I understood.
But what they had against God that they
would burn down his house?
That seemed somehow almost
beyond belief to me.
The other thing that happened,
was a couple days after,
would have been around
the 10th or 11th of
November, I'm in the class
with all the other boys,
the principal came into the room
and read the order that
no Jews were allowed
in the regular school, and
another boy and I got up,
collected our things, and left.
That was for me, I must say,
such a traumatic experience,
and that really shook me up.
- Kristallnacht was not
only the destruction
of the synagogues throughout
Germany and the smashing
of all of the windows of
Jewish shops and homes,
and apartments, and
Jews were forced to wear
signs that said "I'm Germany's misfortune,
"I'm a pig, I'm an exploiter."
That was a public shaming
that didn't exist from
medieval times until that time.
And all of the sudden it began to sink in
how malevolent this danger was.
That Hitler really meant
what he said in Mein Kampf.
And that the Jewish world was in danger.
- [Monty] And that is in
fact what Geuring says
after kristallnacht, "I
would not want to be a Jew
"in Germany today."
Kristallnacht is vital for another reason.
With kristallnacht, the
bureaucrats take over.
They meet, Eichmann is now put in charge
not only of the Jews in occupied Austria,
but of any future place where the Germans
are going to gain control of Jews.
Eichmann from that day on will really be
pulling all the strings of
the so-called Final Solution
of the Jewish question.
- [Narrator] The people of Germany
by now inculcated with
the notion that Jews
were too prominent and too
integrated into German society
supported these anti-Jewish atrocities.
In the eyes of the German
people, and to the world
at large, Hitler seemed to be unstoppable.
- The next major step
that Hitler takes in terms
of lebensraum, is Czechoslovakia.
The sudetenland, where
many Germans were living
and they clearly wanted to
be united with the greater
Germany.
Again, September '38,
Hitler threatens war,
the Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain of England
steps back, Chamberlain met with Hitler,
meeting in Munich, hence
the Munich Conference,
in September 1938.
What do do with the sudetenland that is
an area of Germany given to a free liberal
Czechoslovakia after World War One?
And basically Hitler said,
if you give me this, I'll pull back,
there will be no war.
Chamberlain comes back to
London to cheering crowds
waving in one hand the
document signed with Hitler
and the other proverbial British bowler
and umbrella, and he says,
I bring you peace in our time.
It wasn't peace in our
time, it was pieces.
You're going one by one by
one, like the old Pac-Man,
you never satisfy a totalitarian dictator,
he always wants more.
Proof in the pudding
is a few months later,
in march of '39, he lops off
the rest of Czechoslovakia.
With its valuable armaments and so forth.
They could have stopped
him earlier, they did not.
- Whenever people outside of Germany think
of the Munich Agreement,
we have to remember that
Hitler thought of it
as the greatest mistake
of his life, that he should
have gone to war then.
When the U.S. wasn't
going to help anybody,
when the British dominions,
Canada, South Africa,
and Australia had told
the British government
we're not fighting over this
mess with Czechoslovakia.
You're on your own.
- [Monty] England,
France, the United States,
they could have stopped
Hitler at may points prior
to 1939, why did they not stop him?
Not wanting to have another World War,
they're prepared to do almost anything,
and therefore they're
willing to appease him.
Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister
of England, de Gaulle for France,
they are gentleman of the enlightenment.
In their case, that we
can rationally sit down
with Heir Hitler, as
Chamberlain referred to him,
and somehow arrive at a peace.
Hitler is not a rationalist.
He is a fixated mind and he
knows what he wants to do.
They did not take him seriously enough,
and when they did it was too late
and the war erupted.
- [Narrator] The Neutrality Act,
passed by the United States
congress in November 1939,
signaled to England
and France that America
would not come to their aid if
they went to war with Germany
- [Radio Announcer] And
where do you think this is?
Right in Madison Square Garden, U.S.A.
And this is Fritz Coon, leader
of the German American bund.
Hiding behind the
American flag, but taking
his orders from Berlin
and copying the methods of Berlin.
- [Narrator] In this charged atmosphere,
Jewish communal leaders in the
U.S. assumed a low profile.
Which would continue
throughout World War Two.
Condemnation of Hitler and his brutality
towards Jews was muted,
and little was done
to persuade the U.S. government to allow
Jewish refugees to enter America.
- [Berel] There was a great deal of open
antisemitism and
discrimination and bigotry
against Jews, you couldn't
go to every hotel,
you couldn't go to every university,
you couldn't be the chairman
of a Forbes 500 company.
And there was a quota
against Jewish immigration.
The Jews in the United
States hunkered down.
They also were going to ride it out.
And that weakened any
influence they could have
on the American government.
- [Narrator] For Hitler in the 1930s,
his main focus was to
make sure the Russians
would not militarily go against him
or prevent Germany from
implementing its plan
to expand.
- But Hitler understand
it's a serious problem.
Geography is all.
To the right of Poland is Russia,
the Soviet Union, his major
enemy, his bete noire,
this is a massive empire,
how can he possibly
go into Poland without the
Russian's counterattacking?
So a non-aggression pact is
signed between the Germans
and the Soviets.
They basically agree secretly
to divide Poland in half,
the western part going to Germany,
the eastern part to The Soviet Union,
and that is how now
Hitler, having the Soviets
out of the way, begins immediate steps
to attack Poland and annex that area,
promised him by the Soviets,
and that will happen on the
first of September, 1939.
- [Narrator] With Hitler's
plans of expansionism
beginning to succeed,
the master manipulator
turned his attention back to the Jews.
- [Monty] At the end of
his Reichstag speech,
January 30th, 1939, publicized world wide,
Hitler says "If world war breaks out,
"it will not see the
annihilation of the German
"nation, but of the
Jewish race in Europe."
Now one can easy dismiss
this simply as verbiage,
and many people did
not take him seriously,
but we always know that
actions begin in words.
- [Gerhard] It takes a very long time
for people to grasp that
others may have notions
that we consider ridiculous and crazy.
But others act on their notions, not ours.
They act on what they believe.
There's probably a very
large number of people
in this country today
who fail to understand
that the German ambition in World War Two
was to conquer the world.
- [Narrator] What made Hitler so credible,
especially to the German people,
was how passionately he
believed in what he said.
Demonic and perverted as it was,
he truly believed that
his mission was divine.
In the second chapter of Mein Kampf,
he said
- "Today I believe that
I am acting in accordance
"with the will of The Almighty Creator,
"by defending myself against the Jew,
"I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
He saw himself as fighting
not only for Germany's glory
and vindication and revival
of the old German past,
but also for the good of man-kind.
Remember he says that the Nazi party
wants to exist for a thousand years.
In his mind, there is that
image of world domination,
it is to redeem the
world from the evils of
the international poisoner
of the world, world Jewry.
- [Berel] Hitler's
diatribe against the Jews
is a classic example of
what the psychologists call
projection.
We project upon others
the faults that we have.
So Hitler was the poisoner and he said
the Jews poisoned.
Hitler was the hater, he
said the Jews are the haters.
Hitler is the one that wanted to destroy,
and he said the Jews are the
ones that want to destroy.
Every fault that existed
within the Nazi party,
within Hitler's warped mind,
he projected upon the Jews.
That is classic antisemitism.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile
Europe and the world teetered
on the edge of war.
Adolf Hitler's long-planned
expansionist vision
for Nazi Germany was
about to become a reality.
On September the 1st,
1939, he made his move.
(exploding)
- [Radio Announcer] War, precisely at dawn
on September 1st, without
warning, the German
Vermant rolled over the Polish border.
Before the invasion was 30 minutes old,
the planes of the
Luftwaffe were over Poland.
(exploding)
- [Narrator] Hitler believed that although
Britain and France had
gone to treaty with Poland,
they would maintain their previous policy
of appeasement.
However, two days later,
Britain and France
declared war on Germany.
- [Announcer] I am speaking
to you from the Cabinet room
at 10 Downing Street, this
country is at war with Germany.
- [Radio Announcer] The
day after Hitler crossed
the Polish border, France
called up her reservists.
Within 24 hours, British planes had bombed
German warships in the Keel Canal.
- [Narrator] Hitler was
stunned and the world
was plunged into a second world war.
- By 1939, there was an
unstoppable darkness,
a palpable darkness that
engulfed not only Europe,
but engulfed the world generally.
And there was no way
to stop that momentum.
And this darkness provoked World War Two,
one mad man's idea, it
provoked the Holocaust.
It brought about the
death of tens of millions
of people, it created World
War Two, it reshaped the world,
and it brought about the
darkest days in the story
of the civilization of the human race.
All of this a product of this
terrible, frightening decade
which was the 1930s.
- [Narrator] With the rise
to power of Adolf Hitler
in the 1930s, one man's distorted vision
created a nightmare world
of murder, of death, of destruction.
Something that was
unbelievable at the beginning
of the decade was only
so believable at its end.
Soon the world and all of European Jewry
would be in the grip
of an unfathomable era
so vast that neither memory nor history
would ever be able to temper or erase it
from man's conscience.
(sad music)
