Paris, 1900.
More than fifty million people from around
the world visited the Universal Exposition—a
world's fair intended to promote greater understanding
and tolerance among nations, and to celebrate
the new century, new inventions, exciting
progress.
The 20th century began much like our own—with
hope that education, science and technology
could create a better, more peaceful world.
What followed soon after were two devastating
wars.
The first "world war," from 1914 to 1918,
was fought throughout Europe and beyond.
It became known as "the war to end all wars."
It cast an immense shadow on tens of millions
of people.
"This is not war," one wounded soldier wrote
home.
"It is the ending of the world."
Half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at war's
outbreak were dead when it was over.
More than one third of all German men aged
19 to 22 were killed.
Millions of veterans were crippled in body
and in spirit.
Advances in the technology of killing included
the use of poison gas.
Under the pressure of unending carnage, governments
toppled and great empires dissolved.
It was a cataclysm that darkened the world's
view of humanity and its future.
Winston Churchill said the war left "a crippled,
broken world."
The humiliation of Germany's defeat and the
peace settlement that followed in 1919 would
play an important role in the rise of Nazism
and the coming of a second "world war" just
20 years later.
What shocked so many in Germany about the
treaty signed near Paris, at the Palace of
Versailles, was that the victors dictated
a future in which Germany was deprived of
any significant military power.
Germany's territory was reduced by 13%.
Germany was forced to accept full responsibility
for starting the war and to pay heavy reparations.
To many, including 30-year old former army
corporal Adolf Hitler, it seemed the country
had been "stabbed in the back"—betrayed
by subversives at home and by the government
who accepted the armistice.
In fact, the German military had quietly sought
an end to the war it could no longer win in
1918.
"It cannot be that two million Germans should
have fallen in vain," Adolf Hitler later wrote.
"We demand vengeance!"
Many veterans and other citizens struggled
to understand Germany's defeat and the uncertain
future.
Troops left the bloody battlefields and returned
to a bewildering society.
A new and unfamiliar democratic form of government—the
Weimar Republic—replaced the authoritarian
empire and immediately faced daunting challenges.
Thousands of Germans waited in lines for work
and food in the early 1920s.
Middle class savings were wiped out as severe
inflation left the currency worthless.
Some burned it for fuel.
Economic conditions stabilized for a few years,
then the worldwide depression hit in 1929.
The German banking system collapsed, and by
1930 unemployment skyrocketed to 22%.
In a country plagued by joblessness, embittered
by loss of territory, and demoralized by ineffective
government, political demonstrations frequently
turned violent.
Many political parties had their own paramilitary
units to attack opponents and intimidate voters.
In 1932, ninety-nine people were killed in
the streets in one month.
Right--wing propaganda and demonstrations
played on fears of a Communist revolution
spreading from the Soviet Union.
New social problems emerged from the impact
of rapid industrialization and the growth
of cities.
Standards of behavior were changing.
Crime was on the rise.
Sexual norms were in flux.
For the first time, women were working outside
the home in large numbers, and the new constitution
gave women the right to vote.
Germany's fledgling democracy was profoundly
tested by the crumbling of old values and
fears of what might come next.
Adolf Hitler had been undisputed leader of
the National Socialist German Workers Party—known
as Nazis—since 1921.
In 1923, he was imprisoned for trying to overthrow
the government.
His trial brought him fame and followers.
He used the jail time to dictate his political
ideas in a book, Mein Kampf—My Struggle.
Hitler's ideological goals included territorial
expansion, consolidation of a racially pure
state, and elimination of the European Jews
and other perceived enemies of Germany.
He served only a short jail sentence, and
after the ban was lifted on his National Socialist
Party, Hitler and his followers rejoined the
battle in the streets and in the countryside.
The Nazi Party recruited, organized, and produced
a newspaper to spread its message.
While downplaying more extreme Nazi goals,
they offered simple solutions to Germany's
problems, exploiting people's fears, frustrations,
and hopes.
In the early 1930s, the frequency of elections
was dizzying.
So was the number of parties and splinter
groups vying for votes.
Hitler proved to be a charismatic campaigner
and used the latest technology to reach people.
The Nazi Party gained broad support, including
many in the middle class—intellectuals,
civil servants, students, professionals, shopkeepers
and clerks ruined by the Depression.
But the Nazis never received more than 38%
of the vote in a free national election.
No party was able to win a clear majority,
and without political consensus, successive
governments could not effectively govern the
nation.
Adolf Hitler was not elected to office and
he did not have to seize power.
He was offered a deal just as the Nazis started
to lose votes.
In January 1933, when the old war hero, President
Paul von Hindenburg, invited Hitler to serve
as Chancellor in a coalition government, the
Nazis could hardly believe their luck.
The Nazis were revolutionaries who wanted
to radically transform Germany.
The conservative politicians in the new Cabinet
didn't like or trust Hitler, but they liked
democracy even less, and they saw the leftist
parties as a bigger threat.
They reached out to the Nazis to help build
a majority in Parliament.
They were confident they could control Hitler.
One month later, when arson gutted the German
parliament building, Hitler and his nationalist
coalition partners seized their chance.
Exploiting widespread fears of a communist
uprising, they blamed Communists for the fire,
and declared emergency rule.
President Hindenburg signed a decree that
suspended all basic civil rights and constitutional
protections, providing the basis for arbitrary
police actions.
The new government's first targets were political
opponents.
Under the emergency decree, they could be
terrorized, beaten and held indefinitely.
Leaders of trade unions and opposition parties
were arrested.
German authorities sent thousands, including
leftist members of Parliament, to newly established
concentration camps.
Despite Nazi terror and brutal suppression
of their opponents, many German citizens willingly
accepted or actively supported these extreme
measures in favor of order and security.
Many Germans felt a new hope and confidence
in the future of their country with the prospect
of a bold, young charismatic leader.
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels planned
to win over those who were still unconvinced.
One must govern well, and for good government
one must also practice good propaganda.
They work together.
A good government without propaganda is not
more possible than good propaganda without
a good government.
Hitler spoke to the SA, his army of storm
troopers.
Germany has awakened!
We have won power in Germany.
Now we must win the German people.
The ceremonial reopening of Parliament, orchestrated
by Joseph Goebbels, aimed to link the Hitler
government to Germany's imperial past and
portray the Nazis as saviors of the nation's
future.
The event was carefully staged to reassure
the German establishment, including the military,
that Hitler would respect their traditions.
Nazi--controlled newsreels then gave the impression
that the Army supported the new government.
Though Hitler walked behind longtime President
Hindenburg for now, the new chancellor would
soon be Germany's absolute dictator.
Today was dedicated to the New Germany.
And more than one hundred thousand schoolchildren
stood, shoulder to shoulder, as the car bearing
the aged President and the Chancellor proceeded
through the crowd to the speaker's stand.
Whether you agree with his doctrines or not,
it must be admitted that the leadership of
Hitler has united the German people for the
first time since the war.
Their almost fanatical enthusiasm is a marvel
to the entire world...
Hindenburg remained President until his death
in August 1934.
With Hindenburg gone, Hitler, by agreement
with the army, abolished the office of President,
declaring himself Führer and Reich Chancellor,
leader of the nation and head of the government.
Now there was no authority above or beside
him.
Immediately, the armed forces swore an oath
of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
I swear by God this sacred oath to the Führer
Adolf Hitler to render unconditional obedience...
All civil servants, including teachers and
police, members of parliament and the judiciary,
swore an oath of loyalty—not to any constitution—but
to Hitler as Führer of the German nation.
The economy had reached rock bottom when the
Nazis came to power.
They boosted its recovery with huge public
works projects for the unemployed.
A half million folk comrades have gone back
to work this year.
Since the takeover of power, unemployment
has fallen by more than half.
Hitler christened new autobahns triumphantly
in a display of national will that would unite
the country and facilitate the secret expansion
of Germany's armed forces.
In 1935, Germany openly defied the 1919 Treaty
of Versailles by reinstituting the draft and
increasing its military strength.
The Nazis were delivering on their promises
to restore and strengthen the nation.
Their achievements encouraged many people
to overlook radical Nazi policies, or even
to support them.
In September 1935, the Nazi Party gathered
in Nuremberg for its annual rally.
It opened with a traditional hymn that added
solemnity and a sense of continuity with the
past.
It ended with a special session of Parliament
far from Berlin.
New race laws were introduced by Hitler and
read by Parliament President Hermann Göring.
German citizenship is restricted to persons
of German or kindred blood.
Marriages between Jews and citizens of German
or kindred blood are forbidden.
[Cheering]
The Nazi regime aimed to create a racially
pure Germany whose so-called "superior traits"
would make it ideally suited to rule the entire
European continent.
Nazism taught that racial struggle was the
driving force in history—"superior" races
must battle "inferior" races or be corrupted
by them.
The Nazi concept of a national community was
exclusive and based on race, as defined in
the new laws and decrees.
Heinrich Himmler and the SS led the ideological
battle.
Racist ideas were taught in schools.
Some groups, such as Jews, Slavs, Blacks and
Roma (also called Gypsies) were labeled racially
inferior.
People with mental or physical disabilities
were designated "unworthy of life."
Scientists and medical professionals applied
pseudo-scientific theories for measuring and
valuing racial characteristics.
Before the Nazis assumed power, Jews enjoyed
all rights of citizenship in Germany.
After 1933, the German government gradually
excluded Jews from public life and public
education.
Newly established Jewish private schools provided
a safe learning environment for some.
By 1938, German authorities had isolated and
segregated Germany's Jews, expelling them
from the professions and eliminating most
opportunities to earn a living.
We felt so... why can't we be part of it?
Why can't we?
Everybody said, "Heil Hitler," like this.
I did, too.
What did I know?
I was eight years old.
So my mother said to me, "You're not supposed
to do that."
I said, "Why not?"
She said, "Haven't you been told that you
are Jewish?"
I said, "Oh, I forgot."
Germany's Jews would get plenty of reminders.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a boycott of
Jewish shops.
Please keep moving.
This sense of isolation that came upon us
after 1933, gradual and increasing, it also
affected us psychologically.
We knew we were in a hostile world.
Between 1933 and 1939, the German government
enacted hundreds of laws to define, segregate
and impoverish German Jews.
My sister and I used to slink by those huge
banners that were all over the city.
And we used to just try not to see them, thinking
if we didn't see them, they weren't there.
But they were there.
That just, little by little, that really took
over.
...without a solution to the Jewish question,
there will be no solution for humanity.
The goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize
Jews and encourage Germans to see Jews as
dangerous outsiders in their midst.
After 1935, everyday antisemitism was a regular
part of carnival parades and floats.
Public displays of antisemitism reinforced
a climate of hostility toward Jews in Germany,
or at the least, indifference to their treatment.
In March 1938, German troops moved into neighboring
Austria.
Germany shredded another provision of the
Versailles Treaty, as Hitler's homeland was
incorporated into Germany.
It was a disaster for Austrian Jews.
Within a year, the Nazis achieved in Austria
what had taken five years to carry out in
Germany.
On November 9th, the Nazi Party orchestrated
an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence throughout
Greater Germany.
It was a lawless onslaught that outraged the
world and provoked criticism of the regime
by many Germans.
Jewish businesses that had already suffered
antisemitic attacks were targeted for deliberate
vandalism disguised as spontaneous public
action.
Party officials directed the SA, SS and Hitler
Youth to destroy Jewish shops and torch synagogues.
Over 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized.
Germans named the violent attacks Kristallnacht—Night
of Broken Glass—for the shattered windows
of Jewish-owned stores that littered the streets.
The nationwide violence damaged or destroyed
more than 250 synagogues.
After Kristallnacht, I remember driving through
Berlin and seeing the synagogues in flames
and all the glass on the streets, and the
people huddled and depressed.
They walked around like the victims, like
the hunted.
German police filled the concentration camps
with thousands of Jewish inmates.
The SS released them only if they agreed to
emigrate.
But Jews faced increasingly restrictive immigration
quotas in most countries and bureaucratic
hurdles in Germany.
A new law issued in October 1938 required
Jews to surrender their old passports, which
would be valid only after the letter "J" was
stamped on them.
Two months later, another law prevented the
flight of capital owned by Jews, when the
Economics Ministry froze all Jewish property
and assets.
Many who had the means and somewhere to go
tried to leave Germany.
Some families sent their children alone to
other, safer countries.
They could not know how soon the world would
be at war.
As the Nazi regime implemented its long-standing
goal of territorial expansion, aggression
against Germany's neighbors initially succeeded
without encountering armed resistance.
Hitler counted on the reluctance of Britain
and Europe to intervene, for fear of another
war.
The German occupation of Prague, capital of
Czechoslovakia, left no doubt as to Germany's
intent on military conquest in Eastern Europe.
On September 1, 1939, a massive German force
invaded and conquered Poland within a month.
It was the start of the Second World War.
In April 1940, Germany occupied Denmark and
Norway.
In May, the German armed forces attacked France,
the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium.
In June, Paris fell and France surrendered.
The swift and unexpected victory over France
avenged Germany's defeat and humiliation in
the First World War.
It propelled Hitler to a new level of popularity
and trust among the German people.
In June 1941, the German Army, with more than
three million soldiers, invaded the Soviet
Union to wage a war of annihilation that targeted
tens of millions of civilians.
Under conditions of war and military occupation,
the Nazi regime could pursue its political
and racial goals with more radical measures.
As German troops advanced into eastern Europe,
Germany's power extended over millions more
Jewish inhabitants in the occupied lands,
where German authorities could exploit existing
anti-Jewish attitudes among local populations.
Across eastern Europe, German authorities
forced those identified as Jews into tightly
packed areas called ghettos.
Separated from the non-Jewish population,
Jews in the larger ghettos were imprisoned
behind brick walls and barbed wire.
The German drive eastward was cast as a crusade
against Judaism and Communism—in the Nazi
view, two aspects of the same evil.
German soldiers and police officials treated
Soviet prisoners of war as sub-humans, either
shooting them or deliberately causing their
deaths by exposure to the elements and by
starvation.
Millions died in German captivity.
On the eastern front, racial political instruction
was part of regular training for all types
of German occupation forces.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler referred to the
war against the Soviet Union in an address
to his men: "This invasion is an ideological
battle and a struggle of races.
Here in this struggle stands National Socialism—an
ideology based on the value of our Germanic,
Nordic blood...
On the other side stands a population of 180
million, a mixture of races whose very names
are unpronounceable, and whose physique is
such that one can shoot them down without
pity and compassion..."
In July 1941, Hermann Göring—Hitler's second--in--command—authorized
all necessary preparations for the "final
solution of the Jewish question" in the European
territory under German control.
As German military forces advanced, mobile
killing squads advanced with them.
The German Army, military SS and German police
units took an active part in authorized mass
murders.
The Germans and their accomplices rounded
up the victims, drove them on foot or in trucks
to a killing site, often made them remove
their clothes, and shot them.
Participants in the murders included local
collaborators—especially police—in Latvia,
Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus.
The German killing squads and their auxiliaries
murdered at least two million Jewish men,
women and children in mass shooting operations.
Back in Germany, SS and police deported the
remaining Jews to the occupied eastern territories.
In German-occupied Warsaw, the walled ghetto
that German Jews entered as newcomers in 1942
was already a place of mass suffering due
to terrible overcrowding, lack of sanitation,
disease and starvation imposed by the Germans.
Despite all efforts of the imprisoned Jews
to find ways of surviving and sustaining their
communities, those conditions increasingly
led to death for scores of thousands.
Most vulnerable were the orphaned children.
Originally, German occupation authorities
established ghettos to concentrate Jews and
separate them from the non-Jewish population.
Later in the war, many ghettos served as staging
grounds for the transportation of Jews to
the east, euphemistically called "resettlement"
by the Germans, who promised their captives
better conditions and opportunities to work.
People endured unimaginable suffering on journeys
that lasted days, without food, water, or
toilet facilities.
Many of the weak, the young, and the elderly
died before reaching the destination.
The Germans and their collaborators deported
roughly 2.7 million Jews and others to killing
centers in German-occupied Poland.
At the largest of the camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau,
transports arrived from all across Europe.
Transports were coming in every day, people
with all kinds of different languages—Hungarian,
Poles, Czechoslovakians, from Holland, from
France, from Belgium, from Germany, from Italy,
Russians.
They were from everywhere.
My wife was somehow waving to me, and that's
the last I've seen of her.
The smell, gas chambers.
When I asked, "When will I see my mother?"—I
was shown the smoke.
This is how I found out where she went.
It took a long time until I started to realize
that we are condemned to die.
All Jews are condemned to die.
Those whom the SS judged unable to work were
killed, often within two or three hours of
arrival.
Those who could work would be used for forced
labor, under punishing conditions.
When they could no longer work, they, too,
would be put to death.
In several killing facilities, exclusively
designed to kill human beings on an industrial
scale, camp authorities used poison gas to
murder children, women and men.
At these killing centers, nearly half of all
Holocaust victims died.
The camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz were the
first liberated, as Soviet troops reached
Poland.
News of Majdanek's liberation in summer 1944
was met with disbelief.
The New York Herald Tribune said, "Maybe...we
should wait for further corroboration...this...sounds
inconceivable..."
In April 1945, US troops in Germany and Austria
came upon concentration camps at Buchenwald,
Dachau, Nordhausen, Mauthausen and Ohrdruf.
The soldiers saw the camps with their own
eyes, and the truth was undeniable.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander of the
Allied liberating forces, wrote: "The things
I saw beggar description....
The visual evidence and the verbal testimony
of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were...overpowering..."
In American movie theaters, newsreels made
witnesses of thousands more.
One commentator said, "To future generations
it must be told: Once man did this to his
brothers.
In the 20th century there existed a civilization
which for twelve years returned to barbarism."
Shock permeated the camps as liberating troops
tried to grasp what they had found.
Soldiers did all they could to attend to the
dead and to support the living.
Those who survived faced the slow task of
reclaiming their dignity 
and returning—somehow—to life.
