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This video is about Anne Frank and her sandwich from Angels gate the concentration camps, and how they got into concentration camps. (If you want more information, watch the movie about Anne Frank)

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The Nazis were a group of Germans led by Adolf Hitler, he had killed over 100,000 Jews and over 100,000 other religious people, Moms, Dads, Sons, Daughters, and even some pets I guess, it is very sad but life is life. Hitler was put through many things, prison, living on the streets, watching his parents die, and lost so many people in his life, but if that happens I guess you will want to tame your rage, and that will make you mad and want revenge.

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The Germans/Nazis were very bad people, the had killed many people just for being Jewish, and there is nothing wrong with having a different religion.

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“The US soldiers who helped defeat Nazi Germany and liberate the concentration camps were among the first eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. Remembering their stories of freedom inspires us to promote human dignity and confront hatred whenever and wherever it occurs.” (Same website)

Watch from the beginning to 2:18

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Narrator:
The history of the Holocaust raises challenging questions about our responsibility as a nation to offer refuge and rescue to persecuted people from beyond our borders. In the spring of 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, the MS St. Louis set sail from Germany. Most of its 937 passengers were Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution. Five years later, with the world now engulfed in war and well after the United States had learned about the Holocaust, over 400,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to German killing centers. In both instances, public opinion and government policy determined how the United States responded. What can we learn from American action-and inaction-in the face of these events that could help us prevent future genocides?

[TEXT ON SCREEN]
Confronting the Holocaust: American Responses

Narrator:
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi Party engaged in a campaign of violence against Jews throughout Germany and Austria, an event that became known as Kristallnacht-night of broken glass.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor:
Kristallnacht started for us early in the morning. My uncle wanted to close the shutters, leaving the outside world outside, and my grandmother said to him, "Stop that. It's too late. That's not going to protect us."

Narrator:
After five years of Nazi rule, hundreds of thousands of Jews were desperate to escape. The problem was few countries were willing to take in more refugees. Many looked to the United States, but did not yet have immigrant visas. Some hoped that Cuba might offer temporary refuge until their US visas came through. This set the stage for the voyage of the St Louis.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis left Hamburg to go to Cuba, and on board were 937 passengers. The vast majority of these were Jews. This was the beginning of something new, something good, but when they arrived in Havana harbor, those dreams were shattered.

Narrator:
The Cuban government reversed its policy, invalidating most of the passengers' landing certificates. Only those with valid immigration visas could disembark in Havana.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee sent a delegate to Cuba, but the negotiations fell apart and the St Louis had to leave Cuban waters. The captain decided that they were going to sail to the United States. They were America bound anyway, so it was believed that there'd be some flexibility. They sent telegrams to government officials, to President Roosevelt, and to the State Department asking for entry. The State Department stated that though they had waiting numbers to get into the United States, they would have to wait their turn and leave American waters.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
By 1938 and 1939, public opinion is clearly against Nazi Germany, but that doesn't translate into a willingness to bring in refugees.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Even confronted with specific lives right off the coast of Miami Beach, American public opinion was so against increasing the immigration quota.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
If immigrants come into the United States, it might represent a competition for jobs. Bad economic times fueled xenophobia. It also fueled antisemitism.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
So the St. Louis left American shores on June 7, 1939. Fortunately, with the intervention again of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a deal was brokered with four western European countries to take in the passengers: Belgium, Holland, France, and England.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
This was celebrated, that these refugees had finally found homes. What nobody knew at that time is that Europe would be engulfed in war just a few months afterwards.

Narrator:
In December 1941, the United States was officially at war with the Axis powers: Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan. For Europe's Jews, the situation had greatly worsened and they were increasingly trapped. By the middle of 1942, information about the Nazi policy to murder Jews began to reach the United States public. We now know that almost two million Jews had been killed by that time.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The persecution of the Jews in Europe had reached a really unimaginable scale, and that millions of people were now threatened with death. There was a new wave of interest in doing something, a sense that there had to be some kind of effort on behalf of the refugees.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
This creates a mood among Jewish organizations to call public attention to what's happening and to urge action to save what remains of Europe's Jewish population.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
So by the end of 1943, there is enough public awareness of the murder of the Jews that the Senate and the House of Representatives issued what is called the Rescue Resolution, calling for a US government agency designed for the relief and rescue of Jews and other persecuted minorities. Simultaneously in the executive branch, a battle was going on between the State Department and the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department, who needed to approve licenses for relief and rescue, realized that the State Department was delaying assisting some of these Jewish aid organizations to send money into Europe.

[TEXT ON SCREEN OF REPORT]
"Officials in our State Department...have been guilty...of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler."

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Treasury Department officials compile a report that is placed before President Roosevelt in January of 1944, and almost immediately Roosevelt decides on the creation of the War Refugee Board.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The War Refugee Board staff came from the Treasury Department. It was a group who worked with sending money overseas. John Pehle, as Director of the Foreign Funds Control, became the executive director largely because of the good work that his group was doing.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
These were people who were really committed-morally committed, as well as politically committed-to saving lives.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The Board organizes some relief, but for the most part they're working through other agencies, streamlining the process. They are able to facilitate sending millions of dollars into Europe and have a much greater impact.

Narrator:
Still, the War Refugee Board confronted a daunting task. The people it hoped to save remained far behind enemy lines, and the Board could not divert vital military resources from the Allies' goal of winning the war as soon as possible. Options were very limited.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
In the spring of 1944, the War Refugee Board was faced with one of its greatest crises, which was what to do about Hungary.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
The Hungarian government had engaged in secret negotiations to leave the Axis. When the Germans found out about this they sent troops into the country, and along with the troops came Adolf Eichmann's team of deportation specialists.

Narrator:
At the time of the German invasion in March 1944, Hungary was home to the largest Jewish community left in Europe, about 800,000 Jews. Within two months, at the request of the Germans, Hungarian authorities began deporting Jews by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
President Roosevelt held a news conference in which he warned the Hungarian government not to cooperate with Germany in its persecution. Government shortwave broadcasts to eastern Europe threatened the Hungarian government, that war criminals who cooperated with Germany in mass killings would be prosecuted after the war. This was not enough.

Steven Fenves, Holocaust Survivor:
There was a long, long line of railroad cars, and an order came to mount the cars. And I remember even at thirteen I had to help people like my grandmother, people like my aunt, to get up on the high car. And eventually the doors were closed, the locks were put on, and I don't know how many hours wait, and then the trains took off.

Agnes Laszlo Geva, Holocaust Survivor:
And we just couldn't believe that this is possible to transport people like this. It was, of course, standing places only, and there was a small window under the roof and a pail in the corner. It was unbelievable. People became hysterical. They were screaming. Some people were yelling, some people were fainting, some people were crying. It was a situation that I never, ever could imagine to happen to human beings.

Narrator:
On July 7, 1944, the Hungarian ruler announced his order to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. A variety of outside pressures, including a US bombing of Budapest on July 2, 1944, influenced his decision. By that time, over 400,000 people had been deported. Hungary's decision to halt the deportations offered the Jews remaining in Budapest a chance to survive-an opportunity the War Refugee Board seized.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
There were approximately 120,000 Jews in Budapest in July of 1944. For the moment, they were spared, but no one knew how long they would be spared.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The War Refugee Board petitions and cables to all of the neutral nations of Europe-to Portugal, to Spain, to Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey-and asks them if they could increase their diplomatic representation in Hungary.

Narrator:
Working through diplomatic posts and other intermediaries, like the International Red Cross, the War Refugee Board assisted a complex network of rescuers. They employed an array of tactics, from false passports and citizenship papers to safe houses and clandestine escapes. These measures enabled tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest to survive. Unfortunately, by July 1944, over 300,000 Hungarian Jews had already lost their lives.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The time for a War Refugee Board would have been before the war, when you really had refugees who were still looking for visas and able in some fashion to get out. If you wait until, in the case of the Holocaust, Hitler begins to expand his Reich across Europe, it's already too late.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
I think one of the lessons is that the individual has power. It's public pressure that leads to the rescue resolutions in Congress in the fall of 1943. It's a number of people writing; it's people showing up to protests; it's people saying: I know what's going on in Europe, I believe it, and I want this government to try to stop it.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
People want to know, have we learned from history? Have we learned specifically from the history of the Holocaust? And my answer is yes, but we learn very, very slowly.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Terrible things continue to happen. Governments continue to fail to respond sufficiently or soon enough to help victims of genocide around the world, and it's a tough call. There's no easy answer. There are challenges to intervening in a foreign country. There are certainly challenges when you implement a refugee policy that lets a lot of people in at once. And yet, we really do need to think about this. When you have millions of people that are left homeless, who are murdered, whose lives are destroyed-those ruins have a ripple effect for every nation on this planet. It carries such a heavy cost that we have a responsibility to figure this one out.

[TEXT ON SCREEN]
Many refugees from the St. Louis who returned to Europe were imprisoned or sent to killing centers after Germany invaded western Europe. Two hundred and fifty-four former passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

Shortly after Kristallnacht, Jill Pauly's family immigrated to Kenya and settled in the United States after the war.

Steven Fenves survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. After the war, he was reunited with his father, Lajos, and sister, Estera. Steven's grandmother was murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz and his mother died a few weeks later.

Agnes Laszlo Geva survived the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps with her mother, Rozsa, and sister, Zsuzsanna.

Transcript

Narrator:
The history of the Holocaust raises challenging questions about our responsibility as a nation to offer refuge and rescue to persecuted people from beyond our borders. In the spring of 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, the MS St. Louis set sail from Germany. Most of its 937 passengers were Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution. Five years later, with the world now engulfed in war and well after the United States had learned about the Holocaust, over 400,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to German killing centers. In both instances, public opinion and government policy determined how the United States responded. What can we learn from American action-and inaction-in the face of these events that could help us prevent future genocides?

[TEXT ON SCREEN]
Confronting the Holocaust: American Responses

Narrator:
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi Party engaged in a campaign of violence against Jews throughout Germany and Austria, an event that became known as Kristallnacht-night of broken glass.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor:
Kristallnacht started for us early in the morning. My uncle wanted to close the shutters, leaving the outside world outside, and my grandmother said to him, "Stop that. It's too late. That's not going to protect us."

Narrator:
After five years of Nazi rule, hundreds of thousands of Jews were desperate to escape. The problem was few countries were willing to take in more refugees. Many looked to the United States, but did not yet have immigrant visas. Some hoped that Cuba might offer temporary refuge until their US visas came through. This set the stage for the voyage of the St Louis.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis left Hamburg to go to Cuba, and on board were 937 passengers. The vast majority of these were Jews. This was the beginning of something new, something good, but when they arrived in Havana harbor, those dreams were shattered.

Narrator:
The Cuban government reversed its policy, invalidating most of the passengers' landing certificates. Only those with valid immigration visas could disembark in Havana.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee sent a delegate to Cuba, but the negotiations fell apart and the St Louis had to leave Cuban waters. The captain decided that they were going to sail to the United States. They were America bound anyway, so it was believed that there'd be some flexibility. They sent telegrams to government officials, to President Roosevelt, and to the State Department asking for entry. The State Department stated that though they had waiting numbers to get into the United States, they would have to wait their turn and leave American waters.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
By 1938 and 1939, public opinion is clearly against Nazi Germany, but that doesn't translate into a willingness to bring in refugees.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Even confronted with specific lives right off the coast of Miami Beach, American public opinion was so against increasing the immigration quota.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
If immigrants come into the United States, it might represent a competition for jobs. Bad economic times fueled xenophobia. It also fueled antisemitism.

Scott Miller, Director, Curatorial Affairs, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
So the St. Louis left American shores on June 7, 1939. Fortunately, with the intervention again of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a deal was brokered with four western European countries to take in the passengers: Belgium, Holland, France, and England.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
This was celebrated, that these refugees had finally found homes. What nobody knew at that time is that Europe would be engulfed in war just a few months afterwards.

Narrator:
In December 1941, the United States was officially at war with the Axis powers: Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan. For Europe's Jews, the situation had greatly worsened and they were increasingly trapped. By the middle of 1942, information about the Nazi policy to murder Jews began to reach the United States public. We now know that almost two million Jews had been killed by that time.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The persecution of the Jews in Europe had reached a really unimaginable scale, and that millions of people were now threatened with death. There was a new wave of interest in doing something, a sense that there had to be some kind of effort on behalf of the refugees.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
This creates a mood among Jewish organizations to call public attention to what's happening and to urge action to save what remains of Europe's Jewish population.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
So by the end of 1943, there is enough public awareness of the murder of the Jews that the Senate and the House of Representatives issued what is called the Rescue Resolution, calling for a US government agency designed for the relief and rescue of Jews and other persecuted minorities. Simultaneously in the executive branch, a battle was going on between the State Department and the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department, who needed to approve licenses for relief and rescue, realized that the State Department was delaying assisting some of these Jewish aid organizations to send money into Europe.

[TEXT ON SCREEN OF REPORT]
"Officials in our State Department...have been guilty...of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler."

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Treasury Department officials compile a report that is placed before President Roosevelt in January of 1944, and almost immediately Roosevelt decides on the creation of the War Refugee Board.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The War Refugee Board staff came from the Treasury Department. It was a group who worked with sending money overseas. John Pehle, as Director of the Foreign Funds Control, became the executive director largely because of the good work that his group was doing.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
These were people who were really committed-morally committed, as well as politically committed-to saving lives.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The Board organizes some relief, but for the most part they're working through other agencies, streamlining the process. They are able to facilitate sending millions of dollars into Europe and have a much greater impact.

Narrator:
Still, the War Refugee Board confronted a daunting task. The people it hoped to save remained far behind enemy lines, and the Board could not divert vital military resources from the Allies' goal of winning the war as soon as possible. Options were very limited.

Steven Luckert, Curator, Permanent Exhibition, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
In the spring of 1944, the War Refugee Board was faced with one of its greatest crises, which was what to do about Hungary.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
The Hungarian government had engaged in secret negotiations to leave the Axis. When the Germans found out about this they sent troops into the country, and along with the troops came Adolf Eichmann's team of deportation specialists.

Narrator:
At the time of the German invasion in March 1944, Hungary was home to the largest Jewish community left in Europe, about 800,000 Jews. Within two months, at the request of the Germans, Hungarian authorities began deporting Jews by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
President Roosevelt held a news conference in which he warned the Hungarian government not to cooperate with Germany in its persecution. Government shortwave broadcasts to eastern Europe threatened the Hungarian government, that war criminals who cooperated with Germany in mass killings would be prosecuted after the war. This was not enough.

Steven Fenves, Holocaust Survivor:
There was a long, long line of railroad cars, and an order came to mount the cars. And I remember even at thirteen I had to help people like my grandmother, people like my aunt, to get up on the high car. And eventually the doors were closed, the locks were put on, and I don't know how many hours wait, and then the trains took off.

Agnes Laszlo Geva, Holocaust Survivor:
And we just couldn't believe that this is possible to transport people like this. It was, of course, standing places only, and there was a small window under the roof and a pail in the corner. It was unbelievable. People became hysterical. They were screaming. Some people were yelling, some people were fainting, some people were crying. It was a situation that I never, ever could imagine to happen to human beings.

Narrator:
On July 7, 1944, the Hungarian ruler announced his order to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. A variety of outside pressures, including a US bombing of Budapest on July 2, 1944, influenced his decision. By that time, over 400,000 people had been deported. Hungary's decision to halt the deportations offered the Jews remaining in Budapest a chance to survive-an opportunity the War Refugee Board seized.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
There were approximately 120,000 Jews in Budapest in July of 1944. For the moment, they were spared, but no one knew how long they would be spared.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The War Refugee Board petitions and cables to all of the neutral nations of Europe-to Portugal, to Spain, to Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey-and asks them if they could increase their diplomatic representation in Hungary.

Narrator:
Working through diplomatic posts and other intermediaries, like the International Red Cross, the War Refugee Board assisted a complex network of rescuers. They employed an array of tactics, from false passports and citizenship papers to safe houses and clandestine escapes. These measures enabled tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest to survive. Unfortunately, by July 1944, over 300,000 Hungarian Jews had already lost their lives.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The time for a War Refugee Board would have been before the war, when you really had refugees who were still looking for visas and able in some fashion to get out. If you wait until, in the case of the Holocaust, Hitler begins to expand his Reich across Europe, it's already too late.

Rebecca Erbelding, Archivist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
I think one of the lessons is that the individual has power. It's public pressure that leads to the rescue resolutions in Congress in the fall of 1943. It's a number of people writing; it's people showing up to protests; it's people saying: I know what's going on in Europe, I believe it, and I want this government to try to stop it.

Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University:
People want to know, have we learned from history? Have we learned specifically from the history of the Holocaust? And my answer is yes, but we learn very, very slowly.

Victoria Barnett, Director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Terrible things continue to happen. Governments continue to fail to respond sufficiently or soon enough to help victims of genocide around the world, and it's a tough call. There's no easy answer. There are challenges to intervening in a foreign country. There are certainly challenges when you implement a refugee policy that lets a lot of people in at once. And yet, we really do need to think about this. When you have millions of people that are left homeless, who are murdered, whose lives are destroyed-those ruins have a ripple effect for every nation on this planet. It carries such a heavy cost that we have a responsibility to figure this one out.

[TEXT ON SCREEN]
Many refugees from the St. Louis who returned to Europe were imprisoned or sent to killing centers after Germany invaded western Europe. Two hundred and fifty-four former passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

Shortly after Kristallnacht, Jill Pauly's family immigrated to Kenya and settled in the United States after the war.

Steven Fenves survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. After the war, he was reunited with his father, Lajos, and sister, Estera. Steven's grandmother was murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz and his mother died a few weeks later.

Agnes Laszlo Geva survived the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps with her mother, Rozsa, and sister, Zsuzsanna.

Narrator
As we remember those whose lives were lost in the Holocaust, we're confronted by the question, "Could it have been prevented?" While at the time few saw that the events of 1938 were leading to the Holocaust, there were warning signs. Can our understanding of these events help us anticipate and prevent genocide in our own time?

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
1938 is such a key year because it marked an escalation both of the persecution of the Jews, the violence against Jews. It became more widespread. It also marked an escalation of the Nazi policy of expansion. This is where we can see all the dominoes begin to fall.

Narrator
From the time that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, German Jews had gradually seen their rights as citizens stripped away, and their employment options severely limited. But in those early years of the Third Reich, no one could imagine the physical annihilation of the Jews of Europe.

Hedi Pope, Holocaust Survivor
My parents and a lot of other of that generation tried to ignore it. They said, "Oh, this isn't going to last. This man is crazy. It's not going to last." Well, they were wrong.

Narrator
An initial warning sign of 1938 came in mid-March, when Germany annexed neighboring Austria, an act known as the Anschluss. Within hours, an explosion of violence engulfed the Jewish population in Vienna. It spread throughout Germany in the following months, accompanied by new anti-Jewish legislation. Jews no longer felt safe and tried to get out while they could.

Peter Black, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Beginning in March 1938, you have a real push for the first time since 1933 in Germany of large numbers of people trying to get out at any cost. Even if they had to give up all of their assets.

Narrator
But despite official Nazi policy demanding that the Jews leave Germany, emigration was not a simple matter.

Fritz Gluckstein, Holocaust Survivor
My parents really tried to leave. But where to go? We had some very distant relatives in the United States and some friends. But you needed an affidavit. And even if you had an affidavit, there was a quota number.

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
There's several reasons why governments didn't open their doors. The main one is cold, calculated self-interest. In the United States, you know, looking to the issues that were on the front burner in this country, the depression, the widespread isolationism of the American population, antisemitism.

Narrator
The United States was not alone in its refusal to raise its immigration quota.

Peter Black, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Many of the world's governments showed sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Germany and also showed, obviously, concern for Nazi intentions elsewhere in Europe. But few were willing to take significant steps to meet either crisis.

Narrator
This became clear in July of 1938 at the Evian Conference, convened by President Franklin Roosevelt to address the growing humanitarian crisis faced by German Jews.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
With the exception of the Dominican Republic, every single country refused to open its doors, to expand its immigration quotas.

Narrator
Over the summer of 1938, Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia to take control of the Sudetenland, a western border region where the majority of the population was ethnic German. Unprepared for war, Great Britain, France, and Italy agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland in an attempt to guarantee peace.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This was a cause for great jubilation in much of Europe because it was believed that war had been forestalled or prevented altogether. Other Europeans realized, though, that this was just Germany flexing its muscles and seeing whether or not the world would back down.

Narrator
And soon, Nazi policy toward Jews became even more aggressive. On November 9th and 10th, the Nazi Party unleashed a wave of anti-Jewish violence throughout Greater Germany.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Kristallnacht, the "Night of the Broken Glass," represents the first national, organized, physical attack on the Jews. It was a very public event. Germans saw it happening, and many participated in it.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor
I saw the smoke and the fire of the synagogue burning, and we both of us, my sister and I, started screaming from fear.

Susan Taube, Holocaust Survivor
Mid-morning came a hoard of people to the door. Just smashed the door down, came in with scissors and all kinds of instruments and just demolished the whole apartment.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor
It was so dreadful when my mother went into the house that she at that point internalized what was going to happen to us and to all the other Jews.

Hedi Pope, Holocaust Survivor
To me, this was the true beginning of the Holocaust.

Narrator
German police rounded up about 30,000 Jewish men and held them in concentration camps. In the weeks that followed, German authorities closed Jewish communal organizations and schools, and forced Jews to sell their businesses, property and stocks to non-Jews, usually at a great loss.

Susan Taube, Holocaust Survivor
I mean, no more business, no more income, nothing, nothing. The business was closed. They just put things in front of it, plywood or whatever it was, and nailed it down so nobody could come in anymore.

Narrator
In spite of the escalating violence, very few nations, individuals, or groups chose to help. Those who did made a difference. A small group of British and German Jews persuaded the British government to allow unaccompanied Jewish children to enter the United Kingdom under a program known as the Kindertransport.

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
It's a poignant success story because these are children who were, you know, their families put them on these trains to get out of harm's way, knowing full well that they might never see their children again. And in many cases didn't see their children. But the children survived. These were 10,000 lives that were rescued.

Narrator
As 1938 ended Nazi Germany's intentions were increasingly clear. In the coming year, Germany would occupy the Czech lands and invade Poland, igniting World War II. Efforts to rescue Jews, such as the Kindertransport, were effectively shut down. Looking back at the events of 1938, the signs of impending war and the Holocaust are clearer today than they were then. Unfortunately, acts of genocide have continued into the 21st century. But there's hope that the world has begun to heed the warning signs.

Cameron Hudson, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
We've learned enough, we've seen enough, we've studied enough the case of the Holocaust and the cases since the Holocaust to understand what those signs are.

Michael Abramowitz, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The choice is not just between sending in the 101st Airborne and doing nothing. There's diplomatic efforts, there's intelligence, there's financial sanctions. There's a range of different things that governments can do to prevent genocide.

Cameron Hudson, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The thing that we need to be conscious of is how quickly these events can develop into an act that cannot be undone. And so, why not take preventative steps early on so that we're not dealing with the effects of true mass violence and genocide?

[Text on screen] Our choices in response to hatred truly do matter. Together we can help fulfill the promise of "Never Again."

Transcript

Narrator
As we remember those whose lives were lost in the Holocaust, we're confronted by the question, "Could it have been prevented?" While at the time few saw that the events of 1938 were leading to the Holocaust, there were warning signs. Can our understanding of these events help us anticipate and prevent genocide in our own time?

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
1938 is such a key year because it marked an escalation both of the persecution of the Jews, the violence against Jews. It became more widespread. It also marked an escalation of the Nazi policy of expansion. This is where we can see all the dominoes begin to fall.

Narrator
From the time that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, German Jews had gradually seen their rights as citizens stripped away, and their employment options severely limited. But in those early years of the Third Reich, no one could imagine the physical annihilation of the Jews of Europe.

Hedi Pope, Holocaust Survivor
My parents and a lot of other of that generation tried to ignore it. They said, "Oh, this isn't going to last. This man is crazy. It's not going to last." Well, they were wrong.

Narrator
An initial warning sign of 1938 came in mid-March, when Germany annexed neighboring Austria, an act known as the Anschluss. Within hours, an explosion of violence engulfed the Jewish population in Vienna. It spread throughout Germany in the following months, accompanied by new anti-Jewish legislation. Jews no longer felt safe and tried to get out while they could.

Peter Black, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Beginning in March 1938, you have a real push for the first time since 1933 in Germany of large numbers of people trying to get out at any cost. Even if they had to give up all of their assets.

Narrator
But despite official Nazi policy demanding that the Jews leave Germany, emigration was not a simple matter.

Fritz Gluckstein, Holocaust Survivor
My parents really tried to leave. But where to go? We had some very distant relatives in the United States and some friends. But you needed an affidavit. And even if you had an affidavit, there was a quota number.

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
There's several reasons why governments didn't open their doors. The main one is cold, calculated self-interest. In the United States, you know, looking to the issues that were on the front burner in this country, the depression, the widespread isolationism of the American population, antisemitism.

Narrator
The United States was not alone in its refusal to raise its immigration quota.

Peter Black, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Many of the world's governments showed sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Germany and also showed, obviously, concern for Nazi intentions elsewhere in Europe. But few were willing to take significant steps to meet either crisis.

Narrator
This became clear in July of 1938 at the Evian Conference, convened by President Franklin Roosevelt to address the growing humanitarian crisis faced by German Jews.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
With the exception of the Dominican Republic, every single country refused to open its doors, to expand its immigration quotas.

Narrator
Over the summer of 1938, Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia to take control of the Sudetenland, a western border region where the majority of the population was ethnic German. Unprepared for war, Great Britain, France, and Italy agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland in an attempt to guarantee peace.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This was a cause for great jubilation in much of Europe because it was believed that war had been forestalled or prevented altogether. Other Europeans realized, though, that this was just Germany flexing its muscles and seeing whether or not the world would back down.

Narrator
And soon, Nazi policy toward Jews became even more aggressive. On November 9th and 10th, the Nazi Party unleashed a wave of anti-Jewish violence throughout Greater Germany.

Ann Millin, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Kristallnacht, the "Night of the Broken Glass," represents the first national, organized, physical attack on the Jews. It was a very public event. Germans saw it happening, and many participated in it.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor
I saw the smoke and the fire of the synagogue burning, and we both of us, my sister and I, started screaming from fear.

Susan Taube, Holocaust Survivor
Mid-morning came a hoard of people to the door. Just smashed the door down, came in with scissors and all kinds of instruments and just demolished the whole apartment.

Jill Pauly, Holocaust Survivor
It was so dreadful when my mother went into the house that she at that point internalized what was going to happen to us and to all the other Jews.

Hedi Pope, Holocaust Survivor
To me, this was the true beginning of the Holocaust.

Narrator
German police rounded up about 30,000 Jewish men and held them in concentration camps. In the weeks that followed, German authorities closed Jewish communal organizations and schools, and forced Jews to sell their businesses, property and stocks to non-Jews, usually at a great loss.

Susan Taube, Holocaust Survivor
I mean, no more business, no more income, nothing, nothing. The business was closed. They just put things in front of it, plywood or whatever it was, and nailed it down so nobody could come in anymore.

Narrator
In spite of the escalating violence, very few nations, individuals, or groups chose to help. Those who did made a difference. A small group of British and German Jews persuaded the British government to allow unaccompanied Jewish children to enter the United Kingdom under a program known as the Kindertransport.

Victoria Barnett, Committee on Church Relations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
It's a poignant success story because these are children who were, you know, their families put them on these trains to get out of harm's way, knowing full well that they might never see their children again. And in many cases didn't see their children. But the children survived. These were 10,000 lives that were rescued.

Narrator
As 1938 ended Nazi Germany's intentions were increasingly clear. In the coming year, Germany would occupy the Czech lands and invade Poland, igniting World War II. Efforts to rescue Jews, such as the Kindertransport, were effectively shut down. Looking back at the events of 1938, the signs of impending war and the Holocaust are clearer today than they were then. Unfortunately, acts of genocide have continued into the 21st century. But there's hope that the world has begun to heed the warning signs.

Cameron Hudson, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
We've learned enough, we've seen enough, we've studied enough the case of the Holocaust and the cases since the Holocaust to understand what those signs are.

Michael Abramowitz, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The choice is not just between sending in the 101st Airborne and doing nothing. There's diplomatic efforts, there's intelligence, there's financial sanctions. There's a range of different things that governments can do to prevent genocide.

Cameron Hudson, Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The thing that we need to be conscious of is how quickly these events can develop into an act that cannot be undone. And so, why not take preventative steps early on so that we're not dealing with the effects of true mass violence and genocide?

[Text on screen] Our choices in response to hatred truly do matter. Together we can help fulfill the promise of "Never Again."

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Narration: Winter and Spring, 1945. As Allied troops advanced across Europe toward Germany, they encountered Nazi concentration camps and liberated thousands of prisoners. In the camps, combat-hardened soldiers witnessed first-hand the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi regime and its so-called policies of "racial superiority." They found piles of unburied corpses and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners. The small percentage of inmates who survived often required immediate assistance after months and years of maltreatment, starvation, and forced labor at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower made a deliberate visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in order to witness personally the evidence of Nazi atrocities. He urged others to see the camps directly, lest "the stories of Nazi brutality" be forgotten or dismissed as "merely propaganda." The weeks and months following liberation did not bring an immediate return to normal life. Survivors struggled to restore their health, regain their dignity, and rebuild lives disrupted and destroyed during the Holocaust. Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, we honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust and the military personnel who liberated and cared for the survivors.

George Salton, Survivor: I ran in that direction and as I came onto that place I noticed many prisoners yelling and screaming and jumping and dancing. And there, standing among them were seven giants, young people. They must have been 18 or 19... American soldiers. There were seven or eight of them standing inside the camp. Apparently they cut the wire and came into the camp. They were bewildered by us, wild and unkempt and dirty and, I'm sure, smelly people, jumping and dancing and trying to embrace them and kiss them. And I did too. I also joined the crowd and yelled and screamed and somehow knew that the day of liberation has come. It was a strange feeling for me, however, because as I remember it, on the one hand, I was, I was overwhelmed by this unexpected and unhoped for encounter of freedom, but at the same time, what was happening was outside of me. I really... I didn't know what to make of it. I knew I was free, but I didn't count on it. I somehow didn't know what it meant. And I knew it was great, but I... I was overjoyed because all people around me were overjoyed and were singing and dancing and, and...But I was 17. I was free, but what it meant I wasn't sure.

Nicholas White, Sergeant, U. S. 7th Army: From there we go into the barracks. They were long, almost like a poultry building that we might see down in Missouri, perhaps a hundred feet long and maybe twenty-five feet wide. But as we went into this first barracks, we were overrun almost by about twenty-five or thirty of these inmates, who came and hugged us and tried to show us the gratitude they had for us being there liberating them. Actually, we did not liberate them. It was the infantry units themselves that liberated these people. But anyway, they were so overwhelmed with emotion that they tried every way they could to show us appreciation. But I remember this young man. His name was, we called him Bud. He and I both had some caramels and I had some K-ration biscuits, and we started to distribute them among these soldiers, or rather, these camp inmates. And the net result was all, we almost started a riot because they fought like animals trying to get anything that looked like food. And this man and I have discussed that since then and we have never encountered such an atmosphere of complete desolation of the, of mankind. And then I recall that in these, in this building itself, it was made like shelves that went clear to the ceiling and they would be just maybe two feet wide and two feet square, and these went the full length of the building, and these people would climb up and slide into these slots, I guess you could call them, and not a blanket, not any kind of bed clothes at all, nothing but pure wood. And there they slept at night, and no, no ventilation, and no sanitary equipment that they would need. But that, what bothered me the most was out of these 25 or 30, there was 6 or 8 that just stared at the walls. I mean, there was not one bit of a feeling of or any kind of expression of who they were or what they were doing there. They just stared at the walls and I've often wondered, I wonder how many of these ever will be able to recover from that traumatic experience that they had been through. And so, that left me sad to say the least.

Pat Lynch, First Lieutenant, U.S. Army nurse: They were so thin. I couldn't pick any of them up. I tried to, but if I were to pick them up I'd tear the skin. So we had to be very, very careful moving them out. The skin was just so terrible. So it would take, oh, about at least three people, one person take the head, one person take the legs, and very carefully lift them up and get them outside, go ahead and get them outside of that place. We put up tents outside. We had cots and clean bedding. So we'd take them out there. Or, if there was a hospital nearby, we'd go and take over that hospital and move them in there. But we couldn't... for typhus, that was the main thing, there was no medication. Just supportive treatment and get fluids down them. Well they couldn't drink anything, so we had to feed them with medicine droppers. And we couldn't give them hypos because there was no place to stick them. There was no skin at all... no muscle, just skin and bone. There was no place to give them a hypo.

Bella Tovey, Survivor: I want you to know that when the war ended, I weighed the equivalent of probably what is 70 pounds, and I was skin and bone. And I do remember that when that British soldier came and asked me... he said he's... can he do something for me? And I said to him I'd like two things. I'd like him to give me, bring me warm socks. We're talking, this was already May. It was warm. I was cold. I wanted warm socks, knee-length socks. And I wanted sugar. So he brought me - I was craving sugar, I suppose - he brought me socks and I do remember two things. I remember when he... that I put on the socks and I started to cry because I didn't have any calf. I was all bones and this... the knee-length socks wouldn't stay on. But I also remember that when he gave me the sugar, and it may not have been more than maybe a quarter of a pound maybe, a little bag of sugar, but it was maybe, as I said, sugar, just plain sugar. I took that bag and I just poured it into my mouth. I just ate it like that. And I remember... I remember it because he got scared, and he ran out looking for the nurses because he thought God knows what I did to myself by eating all this sugar. And I remember the nurse said to him in German that it's okay. I was probably just craving sugar.

Gerda Weissman Klein, Survivor, and Kurt Klein, Lieutenant, U.S. Army:
GERDA: My very clear view of freedom and liberation came that morning when I stood in this doorway of that abandoned factory and I saw a car coming down the hill. And the reality of that came when I saw the white star on its hood and not the swastika. There were two men in that car. One jumped out.
KURT: I saw some skeletal figures trying to get some water from a hand pump. But over on the other side, leaning against the wall next to the entrance of the building, I saw a girl standing, and I decided to walk up to her.
GERDA: I remember that aura of him, of that awe, of that disbelief in daylight, to really see someone who fought for our freedom, for my ideals. And he looked like God to me.
KURT: And I asked her in German and in English whether she spoke either language, and she answered me in German.
GERDA: And I knew what I had to say. And I said to him, "We are Jewish, you know." For a very long time - at least to me it seemed very long - he didn't answer me. And then his own voice betrayed his emotion. He was wearing dark glasses. I couldn't see his eyes. He said, "So am I."
KURT: I asked about her companions.
GERDA: He said, "May I see the other ladies?"A form of address we hadn't heard for six years. I told him most of the girls were inside. They were too ill to walk. And he said to me, "Won't you come with me?" I didn't know what he meant. So he held the door open for me and let me precede him. And that was the moment of restoration of humanity, of humaneness, of dignity, of freedom.
KURT: We went inside the factory. It was an indescribable scene. There were women scattered over the floor on scraps of straw, some of them quite obviously with the mark of death on their faces.
GERDA: I took him to see my friends.
KURT: The girl who was my guide made sort of a sweeping gesture over this scene of devastation and said the following words, "Noble be man, merciful and good." And I could hardly believe that she was able to summon a poem by the German poet Goethe, which was called, is called, "The Divine," at such a moment. And there was nothing that she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better than what she did.
GERDA: And this first young American of Liberation Day is now my husband. He opened not only the door for me, but the door to my life and my future.

Leon Bass, Sergeant, U.S. 3rd Army: On this day in April 1945, with some of my comrades, I walked through the gates of a place called Buchenwald. I was totally unprepared for what I saw. For someone of 19, they couldn't be prepared. They haven't lived long enough. I was still trying to develop my values system. I was still trying to sort things out. And then all of a sudden, slap, right in the face was the horror perpetrated by man against man. But nevertheless the story must be told. We must talk about the crematoriums. We must talk about the dead. We must talk about the denigration of human personalities. How they tried to make people less than human. And the purposes are beyond me. It boggles the mind for me to try to figure out, why? Why would someone take millions of people and in a planned, organized, systematic way try to destroy them and exterminate them? I have yet to come to grips with that in my own mind. But I know that I must share this so that the history books really tell the story as it is. That nobody sugarcoats the history as they did with slavery. And make you think that all slaves loved the plantation when it's not true. We cannot, even though the revisionists are out there today writing books and telling students that it never happened, we cannot ignore our responsibilities to tell the stories. Yes, we must be graphic. We must use the media. We must come together like this to focus attention across the world. But in the final analysis my friends, if we want to avoid another Holocaust, if we want to make sure that this doesn't happen again, then we have a personal responsibility to do something about it.

Transcript

Narration: Winter and Spring, 1945. As Allied troops advanced across Europe toward Germany, they encountered Nazi concentration camps and liberated thousands of prisoners. In the camps, combat-hardened soldiers witnessed first-hand the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi regime and its so-called policies of "racial superiority." They found piles of unburied corpses and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners. The small percentage of inmates who survived often required immediate assistance after months and years of maltreatment, starvation, and forced labor at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower made a deliberate visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in order to witness personally the evidence of Nazi atrocities. He urged others to see the camps directly, lest "the stories of Nazi brutality" be forgotten or dismissed as "merely propaganda." The weeks and months following liberation did not bring an immediate return to normal life. Survivors struggled to restore their health, regain their dignity, and rebuild lives disrupted and destroyed during the Holocaust. Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, we honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust and the military personnel who liberated and cared for the survivors.

George Salton, Survivor: I ran in that direction and as I came onto that place I noticed many prisoners yelling and screaming and jumping and dancing. And there, standing among them were seven giants, young people. They must have been 18 or 19... American soldiers. There were seven or eight of them standing inside the camp. Apparently they cut the wire and came into the camp. They were bewildered by us, wild and unkempt and dirty and, I'm sure, smelly people, jumping and dancing and trying to embrace them and kiss them. And I did too. I also joined the crowd and yelled and screamed and somehow knew that the day of liberation has come. It was a strange feeling for me, however, because as I remember it, on the one hand, I was, I was overwhelmed by this unexpected and unhoped for encounter of freedom, but at the same time, what was happening was outside of me. I really... I didn't know what to make of it. I knew I was free, but I didn't count on it. I somehow didn't know what it meant. And I knew it was great, but I... I was overjoyed because all people around me were overjoyed and were singing and dancing and, and...But I was 17. I was free, but what it meant I wasn't sure.

Nicholas White, Sergeant, U. S. 7th Army: From there we go into the barracks. They were long, almost like a poultry building that we might see down in Missouri, perhaps a hundred feet long and maybe twenty-five feet wide. But as we went into this first barracks, we were overrun almost by about twenty-five or thirty of these inmates, who came and hugged us and tried to show us the gratitude they had for us being there liberating them. Actually, we did not liberate them. It was the infantry units themselves that liberated these people. But anyway, they were so overwhelmed with emotion that they tried every way they could to show us appreciation. But I remember this young man. His name was, we called him Bud. He and I both had some caramels and I had some K-ration biscuits, and we started to distribute them among these soldiers, or rather, these camp inmates. And the net result was all, we almost started a riot because they fought like animals trying to get anything that looked like food. And this man and I have discussed that since then and we have never encountered such an atmosphere of complete desolation of the, of mankind. And then I recall that in these, in this building itself, it was made like shelves that went clear to the ceiling and they would be just maybe two feet wide and two feet square, and these went the full length of the building, and these people would climb up and slide into these slots, I guess you could call them, and not a blanket, not any kind of bed clothes at all, nothing but pure wood. And there they slept at night, and no, no ventilation, and no sanitary equipment that they would need. But that, what bothered me the most was out of these 25 or 30, there was 6 or 8 that just stared at the walls. I mean, there was not one bit of a feeling of or any kind of expression of who they were or what they were doing there. They just stared at the walls and I've often wondered, I wonder how many of these ever will be able to recover from that traumatic experience that they had been through. And so, that left me sad to say the least.

Pat Lynch, First Lieutenant, U.S. Army nurse: They were so thin. I couldn't pick any of them up. I tried to, but if I were to pick them up I'd tear the skin. So we had to be very, very careful moving them out. The skin was just so terrible. So it would take, oh, about at least three people, one person take the head, one person take the legs, and very carefully lift them up and get them outside, go ahead and get them outside of that place. We put up tents outside. We had cots and clean bedding. So we'd take them out there. Or, if there was a hospital nearby, we'd go and take over that hospital and move them in there. But we couldn't... for typhus, that was the main thing, there was no medication. Just supportive treatment and get fluids down them. Well they couldn't drink anything, so we had to feed them with medicine droppers. And we couldn't give them hypos because there was no place to stick them. There was no skin at all... no muscle, just skin and bone. There was no place to give them a hypo.

Bella Tovey, Survivor: I want you to know that when the war ended, I weighed the equivalent of probably what is 70 pounds, and I was skin and bone. And I do remember that when that British soldier came and asked me... he said he's... can he do something for me? And I said to him I'd like two things. I'd like him to give me, bring me warm socks. We're talking, this was already May. It was warm. I was cold. I wanted warm socks, knee-length socks. And I wanted sugar. So he brought me - I was craving sugar, I suppose - he brought me socks and I do remember two things. I remember when he... that I put on the socks and I started to cry because I didn't have any calf. I was all bones and this... the knee-length socks wouldn't stay on. But I also remember that when he gave me the sugar, and it may not have been more than maybe a quarter of a pound maybe, a little bag of sugar, but it was maybe, as I said, sugar, just plain sugar. I took that bag and I just poured it into my mouth. I just ate it like that. And I remember... I remember it because he got scared, and he ran out looking for the nurses because he thought God knows what I did to myself by eating all this sugar. And I remember the nurse said to him in German that it's okay. I was probably just craving sugar.

Gerda Weissman Klein, Survivor, and Kurt Klein, Lieutenant, U.S. Army:
GERDA: My very clear view of freedom and liberation came that morning when I stood in this doorway of that abandoned factory and I saw a car coming down the hill. And the reality of that came when I saw the white star on its hood and not the swastika. There were two men in that car. One jumped out.
KURT: I saw some skeletal figures trying to get some water from a hand pump. But over on the other side, leaning against the wall next to the entrance of the building, I saw a girl standing, and I decided to walk up to her.
GERDA: I remember that aura of him, of that awe, of that disbelief in daylight, to really see someone who fought for our freedom, for my ideals. And he looked like God to me.
KURT: And I asked her in German and in English whether she spoke either language, and she answered me in German.
GERDA: And I knew what I had to say. And I said to him, "We are Jewish, you know." For a very long time - at least to me it seemed very long - he didn't answer me. And then his own voice betrayed his emotion. He was wearing dark glasses. I couldn't see his eyes. He said, "So am I."
KURT: I asked about her companions.
GERDA: He said, "May I see the other ladies?"A form of address we hadn't heard for six years. I told him most of the girls were inside. They were too ill to walk. And he said to me, "Won't you come with me?" I didn't know what he meant. So he held the door open for me and let me precede him. And that was the moment of restoration of humanity, of humaneness, of dignity, of freedom.
KURT: We went inside the factory. It was an indescribable scene. There were women scattered over the floor on scraps of straw, some of them quite obviously with the mark of death on their faces.
GERDA: I took him to see my friends.
KURT: The girl who was my guide made sort of a sweeping gesture over this scene of devastation and said the following words, "Noble be man, merciful and good." And I could hardly believe that she was able to summon a poem by the German poet Goethe, which was called, is called, "The Divine," at such a moment. And there was nothing that she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better than what she did.
GERDA: And this first young American of Liberation Day is now my husband. He opened not only the door for me, but the door to my life and my future.

Leon Bass, Sergeant, U.S. 3rd Army: On this day in April 1945, with some of my comrades, I walked through the gates of a place called Buchenwald. I was totally unprepared for what I saw. For someone of 19, they couldn't be prepared. They haven't lived long enough. I was still trying to develop my values system. I was still trying to sort things out. And then all of a sudden, slap, right in the face was the horror perpetrated by man against man. But nevertheless the story must be told. We must talk about the crematoriums. We must talk about the dead. We must talk about the denigration of human personalities. How they tried to make people less than human. And the purposes are beyond me. It boggles the mind for me to try to figure out, why? Why would someone take millions of people and in a planned, organized, systematic way try to destroy them and exterminate them? I have yet to come to grips with that in my own mind. But I know that I must share this so that the history books really tell the story as it is. That nobody sugarcoats the history as they did with slavery. And make you think that all slaves loved the plantation when it's not true. We cannot, even though the revisionists are out there today writing books and telling students that it never happened, we cannot ignore our responsibilities to tell the stories. Yes, we must be graphic. We must use the media. We must come together like this to focus attention across the world. But in the final analysis my friends, if we want to avoid another Holocaust, if we want to make sure that this doesn't happen again, then we have a personal responsibility to do something about it.

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Days of Remembrance Commemoration Themes

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Narrator: The history of the Holocaust raises challenging questions about our responsibility as a nation to offer refuge and rescue to persecuted people from beyond our borders. In the spring of 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, the MS St. Louis set sail from Germany.

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Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their communities, their families, even their names. The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany's attempt to annihilate Europe's Jews.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as inferior-including Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma people, and Communists. However, historians use the term "Holocaust"-also called the Shoah, or "disaster" in Hebrew-to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of human beings-and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand. How did a democratically elected politician incite an entire nation to genocide? Why did people allow it to happen in plain sight? And why do some still deny it ever happened?

(How genocide is defined-and why it's so difficult to prove.)

European Jews before the Holocaust

By 1933, about nine million Jews lived across the continent and in every European nation. Some countries guaranteed Jews equality under the law, which enabled them to become part of the dominant culture. Others, especially in Eastern Europe, kept Jewish life strictly separate.

Jewish life was flourishing, yet Europe's Jews also faced a long legacy of discrimination and scapegoating. Pogroms -violent riots in which Christians terrorized Jews-were common throughout Eastern Europe. Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, fomented myths of a shadowy cabal that controlled world finances and politics, and claimed Jews brought disease and crime to their communities.

The rise of Adolf Hitler

It would take one man, Adolf Hitler, to turn centuries of casual anti-Semitism into genocide. Hitler rose to power as leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, also known as the Nazi Party, in the 1920s.

Hitler harnessed a tide of discontent and unrest in Germany, which was slowly rebuilding after losing the First World War. The nation had collapsed politically and economically, and owed heavy sanctions under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi party blamed Jews for Germany's troubles and promised to restore the nation to its former glory.

(How the Treaty of Versailles ended WWI-and started WWII.)

Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933, where he was soon appointed as chancellor, the nation's second-highest position. Less than a year later, Germany's president died, and Hitler seized absolute control of the country.

The early Nazi regime

Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at excluding Jews from German life-defining Judaism in racial rather than religious terms. Beginning with an act barring Jews from civil service, they culminated in laws forbidding Jews from German citizenship and intermarriage with non-Jews.

These were not just domestic affairs: Hitler wanted to expand his regime and, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. It marked the beginning of the Second World War-and the expansion of the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies.

German officials swiftly forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews into crowded ghettoes, and with the help of locals and the German military, specially trained forces called the Einsatzgruppen began systematically shooting Jews and other people the regime deemed undesirable. In just nine months, these mobile murder units shot more than half a million people in a "Holocaust by bullets" that would continue throughout the war.

But Hitler and his Nazi officials were not content with discriminatory laws or mass shootings. By 1942, they agreed to pursue a "final solution" to the existence of European Jews: They would send the continent's remaining Jews east to death camps where they would be forced into labor and ultimately killed.

Genocide in plain sight

By characterizing their actions as the "evacuation" of Jews from territories that rightfully belonged to non-Jewish Germans, the Nazi operation took place in plain sight. Though thousands of non-Jews rescued, hid, or otherwise helped those targeted by the Holocaust, many others stood by indifferently or collaborated with the Nazis.

(Learn about Anne Frank's life in hiding-and why her legacy is still fought over.)

With the help of local officials and sympathetic civilians, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their personal possessions, and imprisoned them in more than 44,000 concentration camps and other incarceration sites across Europe. Non-Jews were encouraged to betray their Jewish neighbors and move into the homes and businesses they left behind.

Dachau, which opened near Munich in 1933, was the first concentration camp. Five others-Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka-were designated as killing centers, where most Jews were immediately murdered upon arrival.

The killings took place in assembly-line fashion: Mass transports of Jews were unloaded from train cars and "selected" into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness. Those selected for murder were taken to holding areas where they were told to set aside their possessions and undress for "disinfection" or showers.

In reality, they were herded into specially designed killing chambers into which officials pumped lethal carbon monoxide gas or a hydrogen cyanide pesticide called Zyklon B that poisoned its victims within minutes.

The earliest Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves. Later, in a bid to keep the killings a secret, corpses were burned in large crematoria. Some Jews were forced to participate in the killings, and then were themselves executed to maintain secrecy. The victims' clothing, tooth fillings, possessions, and even hair was stolen by the Nazis.

Life in the camps

Those not chosen for death were ritually humiliated and forced to live in squalid conditions. Many were tattooed with identification numbers and shorn of their hair. Starvation, overcrowding, overwork, and a lack of sanitation led to rampant disease and mass death in these facilities. Torture tactics and brutal medical experiments made the camps a horror beyond description.

"It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so," wrote Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir. "Nothing belongs to us any more...if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name."

(The first transport to Auschwitz brought 999 young women. This is their story.)

But despite almost inconceivable hardships, some managed to resist. "Our aim was to defy Hitler, to do everything we [could] to live," recalled Majdanek and Auschwitz survivor Helen K. in a 1985 oral history. "He [wanted] us to die, and we didn't want to oblige him."

Jews resisted the Holocaust in a variety of ways, from going into hiding to sabotaging camp operations or participating in armed uprisings in ghettoes and concentration camps. Other forms of resistance were quieter, like stealing food, conducting forbidden religious services, or simply attempting to maintain a sense of dignity.

The aftermath of the Holocaust

As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes, burning documents, dismantling death camp sites, and forcing their remaining prisoners on brutal death marches to escape the advancing Allies.

They didn't succeed: As they liberated swaths of Europe, Allied troops entered camps piled high with corpses and filled, in some cases, with starving, sick victims. The evidence collected in these camps would become the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes tribunal.

In the war's aftermath, the toll of the Holocaust slowly became clear. Just one out of every three European Jews survived, and though estimates vary, historians believe at least six million Jews were murdered. Among them were an estimated 1.3 million massacred by the Einsatzgruppen; approximately a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

Many survivors had nowhere to go. Poland had Europe's largest Jewish population before the war, but lost 93 percent of that population in just five years. Entire villages and communities were wiped out and families scattered across Europe. Labeled "displaced persons," survivors attempted to rebuild their lives. Many left Europe for good, emigrating to Israel, the United States, or elsewhere.

Holocaust denial

Despite the enormity of evidence, some people sowed misinformation about the Holocaust, while others denied it happened at all. Holocaust denial persists to this day, even though it is considered a form of antisemitism and is banned in a variety of countries.

How to counter the hate? "Educating about the history of the genocide of the Jewish people and other Nazi crimes offers a robust defence against denial and distortion," concluded the authors a of a 2021 United Nations report on Holocaust denial.

Though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled, their testimonies offer crucial evidence of the Holocaust's horrors.

"The voices of the victims-their lack of understanding, their despair, their powerful eloquence or their helpless clumsiness-these can shake our well-protected representation of events," said Saul Friedländer, a historian who survived the Holocaust and whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, in a 2007 interview with Dissent Magazine. "They can stop us in our tracks. They can restore our initial sense of disbelief, before knowledge rushes in to smother it."

Editor's note: This story incorrectly listed the number of Jews that remained in Europe in 1942. It has been updated.

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How the Holocaust happened in plain sight

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Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party turned anti-Semitism into genocide.

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The Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and machinelike murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million Soviet prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims.

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The Holocaust started World War II in Europe.

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The Holocaust (1933-1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933-1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when 1 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as "the Shoah," the Hebrew word for "catastrophe."

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other antisemitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany's Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945. This radicalization culminated in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The "Final Solution" was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945.

Why did the Nazis target Jews?

The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic. This means that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. In fact, antisemitism was a basic tenet of their ideology and at the foundation of their worldview.

The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany's social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany's defeat in World War I (1914-1918). Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims. Anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crises that followed contributed to increasing antisemitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, including antisemitism.

However, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism. Antisemitism is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. In the the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, Middle Ages (500-1400), prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly early modern Europe (1400-1800). At that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most other types of antisemitism

The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party's race-based worldview. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some of these races were superior to others. They considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior "Aryan" race. They asserted that "Aryans" were locked in a struggle for existence with other, inferior races. Further, the Nazis believed that the so-called "Jewish race" was the most inferior and dangerous of all. According to the Nazis, Jews were a threat that needed to be removed from German society. Otherwise, the Nazis insisted, the "Jewish race" would permanently corrupt and destroy the German people. The Nazis' race-based definition of Jews included many persons who identified as Christians or did not practice Judaism.

Where did the Holocaust take place?

The Holocaust was a Nazi German initiative that took place throughout German- and Axis-controlled Europe. It affected nearly all of Europe's Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people.

The Holocaust began in Germany after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. Almost immediately, the Nazi German regime (which called itself the Third Reich) excluded Jews from German economic, political, social, and cultural life. Throughout the 1930s, the regime increasingly pressured Jews to emigrate.

But the Nazi persecution of Jews spread beyond Germany. Throughout the 1930s, Nazi Germany pursued an aggressive foreign policy. This culminated in World War II, which began in Europe in 1939. Prewar and wartime territorial expansion eventually brought millions more Jewish people under German control.

Nazi Germany's territorial expansion began in 1938-1939. During this time, Germany annexed neighboring Austria and the Sudetenland and occupied the Czech lands. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany began World War II (1939-1945) by attacking Poland. Over the next two years, Germany invaded and occupied much of Europe, including western parts of the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany further extended its control by forming alliances with the governments of Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. It also created puppet states in Slovakia and Croatia. Together these countries made up the European members of the Axis alliance, which also included Japan.

By 1942-as a result of annexations, invasions, occupations, and alliances-Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and parts of North Africa. Nazi control brought harsh policies and ultimately mass murder to Jewish civilians across Europe.

The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews.

Geography of the Holocaust

How did Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators persecute Jewish people?

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators implemented a wide range of anti-Jewish policies and measures. These policies varied from place to place. Thus, not all Jews experienced the Holocaust in the same way. But in all instances, millions of people were persecuted simply because they were identified as Jewish.

Throughout German-controlled and aligned territories, the persecution of Jews took a variety of forms:

Legal discrimination in the form of antisemitic laws. These included the Nuremberg Race Laws and numerous other discriminatory laws.

These included Various forms of public identification and exclusion. antisemitic propaganda, boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, public humiliation, and obligatory markings (such as the Jewish star badge worn as an armband or on clothing).

The most notable example is There were also isolated incidents and other Organized violence. Kristallnacht.pogroms (violent riots).

Physical Displacement. Perpetrators used forced emigration, resettlement, expulsion, deportation, and ghettoization to physically displace Jewish individuals and communities.

in overcrowded Internment. Perpetrators interned Jews ghettos, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps, where many died from starvation, disease, and other inhumane conditions.

Widespread theft and plunder. The confiscation of Jews' property, personal belongings, and valuables was a key part of the Holocaust.

Jews had to perform Forced labor. forced labor in service of the Axis war effort or for the enrichment of Nazi organizations, the military, and/or private businesses.

Many Jews died as a result of these policies. But before 1941, the systematic mass murder of all Jews was not Nazi policy. Beginning in 1941, however, Nazi leaders decided to implement the mass murder of Europe's Jews. They referred to this plan as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

What was the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"?

The Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (" Endlösung der Judenfrage ") was the deliberate and systematic mass murder of European Jews. It was the last stage of the Holocaust and took place from 1941 to 1945. Though many Jews were killed before the "Final Solution" began, the vast majority of Jewish victims were murdered during this period.

Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. There were two main methods of killing. One method was As part of the "Final Solution," mass shooting. German units carried out mass shootings on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities throughout eastern Europe. The other method was asphyxiation with poison gas. Gassing operations were conducted at killing centers and with mobile gas vans.

Mass Shootings

The Nazi German regime perpetrated mass shootings of civilians on a scale never seen before. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German units began to carry out mass shootings of local Jews. At first, these units targeted Jewish men of military age. But by August 1941, they had started massacring entire Jewish communities. These massacres were often conducted in broad daylight and in full view and earshot of local residents.

Mass shooting operations took place in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages across eastern Europe. German units tasked with murdering the local Jewish population moved throughout the region committing horrific massacres. Typically, these units would enter a town and round up the Jewish civilians. They would then take the Jewish residents to the outskirts of the town. Next, they would force them to dig a mass grave or take them to mass graves prepared in advance. Finally, German forces and/or local auxiliary units would shoot all of the men, women, and children into these pits. Sometimes, these massacres involved the use of specially designed mobile gas vans. Perpetrators would use these vans to suffocate victims with carbon monoxide exhaust.

at these killing sites. At Maly Trostenets, thousands of victims were also murdered in gas vans.

The German units that perpetrated the mass shootings in eastern Europe included (special task forces of the SS and police), units. The provided logistical support and manpower. Some Wehrmacht units also carried out massacres. In many places, local auxiliary units working with the Einsatzgruppen Order Police battalions, and Waffen-SS German military ( Wehrmacht ) SS and police participated in the mass shootings. These auxiliary units were made up of local civilian, military, and police officials.

As many as 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans in territories seized from Soviet forces.

Killing Centers

In late 1941, the Nazi regime began building specially designed, stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland. In English, killing centers are sometimes called "extermination camps" or "death camps." Nazi Germany operated five killing centers: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They built these killing centers for the sole purpose of efficiently murdering Jews on a mass scale. The primary means of murder at the killing centers was poisonous gas released into sealed gas chambers or vans.

German authorities, with the help of their allies and collaborators, transported Jews from across Europe to these killing centers. They disguised their intentions by calling the transports to the killing centers "resettlement actions" or "evacuation transports." In English, they are often referred to as "deportations." Most of these deportations took place by train. In order to efficiently transport Jews to the killing centers, German authorities used the extensive European railroad system, as well as other means of transportation. In many cases the railcars on the trains were freight cars; in other instances they were passenger cars.

The conditions on deportation transports were horrific. German and collaborating local authorities forced Jews of all ages into overcrowded railcars. They often had to stand, sometimes for days, until the train reached its destination. The perpetrators deprived them of food, water, bathrooms, heat, and medical care. Jews frequently died en route from the inhumane conditions.

The vast majority of Jews deported to killing centers were gassed almost immediately after their arrival. Some Jews whom German officials believed to be healthy and strong enough were selected for forced labor.

My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me "Leibele, I'm not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother."
- Leo Schneiderman describing arrival at Auschwitz, selection, and separation from his family

At all five killing centers, German officials forced some Jewish prisoners to assist in the killing process. Among other tasks, these prisoners had to sort through victims' belongings and remove victims' bodies from the gas chambers. Special units disposed of the millions of corpses through mass burial, in burning pits, or by burning them in large, specially designed crematoria.

Nearly 2.7 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at the five killing centers.

What were ghettos and why did German authorities create them during the Holocaust?

Ghettos were areas of cities or towns where German occupiers forced Jews to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. German authorities often enclosed these areas by building walls or other barriers. Guards prevented Jews from leaving without permission. Some ghettos existed for years, but others existed only for months, weeks, or even days as holding sites prior to deportation or murder.

German officials first created ghettos in 1939-1940 in German-occupied Poland. The two largest were located in the occupied Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz (Łódź). Beginning in June 1941, German officials also established them in newly conquered territories in eastern Europe following the German attack on the Soviet Union. German authorities and their allies and collaborators also established ghettos in other parts of Europe. Notably, in 1944, German and Hungarian authorities created temporary ghettos to centralize and control Jews prior to their deportation from Hungary.

The Purpose of the Ghettos

German authorities originally established the ghettos to isolate and control the large local Jewish populations in occupied eastern Europe. Initially, they concentrated Jewish residents from within a city and the surrounding area or region. However, beginning in 1941, German officials also deported Jews from other parts of Europe (including Germany) to some of these ghettos.

Jewish forced labor became a central feature of life in many ghettos. In theory, it was supposed to help pay for the administration of the ghetto as well as support the German war effort. Sometimes, factories and workshops were established nearby in order to exploit the imprisoned Jews for forced labor. The labor was often manual and grueling.

Life in the Ghettos

Life in the ghettos was miserable and dangerous. There was little food and limited sanitation or medical care. Hundreds of thousands of people died by starvation; rampant disease; exposure to extreme temperatures; as well as exhaustion from forced labor. Germans also murdered the imprisoned Jews through brutal beatings, torture, arbitrary shootings, and other forms of arbitrary violence.

Jews in the ghettos sought to maintain a sense of dignity and community. Schools, libraries, communal welfare services, and religious institutions provided some measure of connection among residents. Attempts to document life in the ghettos, such as the Many ghettos also had underground movements that carried out armed resistance. The most famous of these is the Oneg Shabbat archive and clandestine photography, are powerful examples of Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. spiritual resistance.

Liquidating the Ghettos

Beginning in 1941-1942, Germans and their allies and collaborators murdered ghetto residents en masse and dissolved ghetto administrative structures. They called this process "liquidation." It was part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The majority of Jews in the ghettos were murdered either in mass shootings at nearby killing sites or after deportation to killing centers. Most of the killing centers were deliberately located near the large ghettos of German-occupied Poland or on easily-accessible railway routes.

Who was responsible for carrying out the Holocaust and the Final Solution?

Many people were responsible for carrying out the Holocaust and the Final Solution.

At the highest level, inspired, ordered, approved, and supported the genocide of Europe's Jews. However, Hitler did not act alone. Nor did he lay out an exact plan for the implementation of the Final Solution. Other Nazi leaders were the ones who directly coordinated, planned, and implemented the mass murder. Among them were Adolf Hitler Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann.

However, millions of Germans and other Europeans participated in the Holocaust. Without their involvement, the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe would not have been possible. Nazi leaders relied upon German institutions and organizations; other Axis powers; local bureaucracies and institutions; and individuals.

German Institutions, Organizations, and Individuals

(the SD), the the Nazi leaders relied on many German institutions and organizations to help them carry out the Holocaust. Members of Nazi organizations initiated and carried out many anti-Jewish actions before and during World War II. These organizations Schutzstaffel , Protection Squadron). Once the war began, the SS and its police affiliates became especially deadly. Members of the Sicherheitsdienst Gestapo ,Criminal Police (Kripo), and the Order Police played particularly active and deadly roles in the mass murder of Europe's Jews. Other German institutions involved in carrying out the Final Solution included the German military; the German national railway and healthcare systems; the German civil service and criminal justice systems; and German businesses, insurance companies, and banks.

chose to implement the regime's policies. Ordinary Germans also participated in the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Some Germans cheered as Jews were beaten or humiliated. Others denounced Jews for disobeying racist laws and regulations. Many Germans bought, took, or looted their Jewish neighbors' belongings and property. These Germans' participation in the Holocaust was motivated by enthusiasm, careerism, fear, greed, self-interest, antisemitism, and political ideals, among other factors.

Non-German Governments and Institutions

Nazi Germany did not perpetrate the Holocaust alone. It relied on the help of its allies and collaborators. In this context, "allies" refers to Axis countries officially allied with Nazi Germany. "Collaborators" refers to regimes and organizations that cooperated with German authorities in an official or semi-official capacity. Nazi Germany's allies and collaborators included:

The European Axis Powers and other collaborationist regimes (such as Vichy France). These governments passed their own antisemitic legislation and cooperated with German goals.

These organizations helped round up, intern, and deport Jews even in countries not allied with Germany, such as German-backed local bureaucracies, especially local police forces. the Netherlands.

Local auxiliary units made up of military and police officials and civilians. These German-backed units participated in massacres of Jews in eastern Europe (often voluntarily).

The terms "allies" and "collaborators" can also refer to individuals affiliated with these governments and organizations.

Individuals across Europe

Throughout Europe, individuals who had no governmental or institutional affiliation and did not directly participate in murdering Jews also contributed to the Holocaust.

One of the deadliest things that neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues, and even friends could do was denounce Jews to Nazi German authorities. An unknown number chose to do so. They revealed Jews' hiding places, unmasked false Christian identities, and otherwise identified Jews to Nazi officials. In doing so, they brought about their deaths. These individuals' motivations were wide-ranging: fear, self-interest, greed, revenge, antisemitism, and political and ideological beliefs.

Individuals also profited from the Holocaust. Non-Jews sometimes moved into Jews' homes, took over Jewish-owned businesses, and stole Jews' possessions and valuables. This was part of the widespread theft and plunder that accompanied the genocide.

Most often individuals contributed to the Holocaust through inaction and indifference to the plight of their Jewish neighbors. Sometimes these individuals are called bystanders.

Who were the other victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder?

The Holocaust specifically refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews. However, there were also millions of other victims of Nazi persecution and murder. In the 1930s, the regime targeted a variety of alleged domestic enemies within German society. As the Nazis extended their reach during World War II, millions of other Europeans were also subjected to Nazi brutality.

The Nazi regime also targeted Germans whose activities were deemed harmful to German society. These included men accused of homosexuality, persons accused of being professional or habitual criminals, and so-called asocials (such as people identified as vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and alcoholics). Tens of thousands of these victims were incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. The regime also forcibly sterilized and persecuted Afro-Germans.

People with disabilities were also victimized by the Nazi regime. Before World War II, Germans considered to have supposedly unhealthy hereditary conditions were forcibly sterilized. Once the war began, Nazi policy radicalized. People with disabilities, especially those living in institutions, were considered both a genetic and a financial burden on Germany. These people were targeted for murder in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

The Nazi regime employed extreme measures against groups considered to be racial, civilizational, or ideological enemies. This included Roma (Gypsies),

How did the Holocaust end?

so-called The Holocaust ended in May 1945 when the major Allied Powers (Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives, they overran concentration camps. There they liberated the surviving prisoners, many of whom were Jews. The Allies also encountered and liberated the survivors of death marches. These forced marches consisted of groups of Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp inmates who had been evacuated on foot from camps under SS guard.

But liberation did not bring closure. Many Holocaust survivors faced ongoing threats of violent antisemitism and displacement as they sought to build new lives. Many had lost family members, while others searched for years to locate missing parents, children, and siblings.

How did some Jews survive the Holocaust?

Despite Nazi Germany's efforts to murder all the Jews of Europe, some Jews survived the Holocaust. Survival took a variety of forms. But, in every case, survival was only possible because of an extraordinary confluence of circumstances, choices, help from others (both Jewish and non-Jewish), and sheer luck.

Survival outside of German-Controlled Europe

Some Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping German-controlled Europe. Before World War II began, hundreds of thousands of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany despite significant immigration barriers. Those who immigrated to the United States, Great Britain, and other areas that remained beyond German control were safe from Nazi violence. Even after World War II began, some Jews managed to escape German-controlled Europe. For example, approximately 200,000 Polish Jews fled the German occupation of Poland. These Jews survived the war under harsh conditions after Soviet authorities deported them further east into the interior of the Soviet Union.

Survival in German-Controlled Europe

A smaller number of Jews survived inside German-controlled Europe. They often did so with the help of rescuers. Rescue efforts ranged from the isolated actions of individuals to organized networks, both small and large. Throughout Europe, there were non-Jews who took grave risks to help their Jewish neighbors, friends, and strangers survive. For example, they found hiding places for Jews, procured false papers that offered protective Christian identities, or provided them with food and supplies. Other Jews survived as members of partisan resistance movements. Finally, some Jews managed, against enormous odds, to survive imprisonment in concentration camps, ghettos, and even killing centers.

Aftermath

While the Holocaust ended with the war, the legacy of terror and genocide did not. By the end of World War II, six million Jews and millions of others were dead. Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators had devastated or completely destroyed thousands of Jewish communities across Europe.

In the those Jews who survived were often confronted with the traumatic reality of having lost their entire families and communities. Some were able to go home and chose to rebuild their lives in Europe. Many others were afraid to do so because of aftermath of the Holocaust, postwar violence and antisemitism. In the immediate postwar period, those who could not or would not return home often found themselves living in displaced persons camps. There, many had to wait years before they were able to immigrate to new homes.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world has struggled to come to terms with the horrors of the genocide, to remember the victims, and to hold perpetrators responsible. These important efforts remain ongoing.

Last Edited: Nov 5, 2021

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Introduction to the Holocaust: What was the Holocaust?

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Learn about the Holocaust, the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

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One Survivor Remembers.   Watch from beginning to 1:20 to see the reenactment.

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This video shows what the Jewish people went through and what they did when Jews died.
WARNING: THIS IS A REENACTMENT

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[Text on screen] In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the following film presents the story of one Holocaust survivor as a tribute to the millions whose stories cannot be told.

Narrator: During the final days of World War II, in the hills of southern Czechoslovakia, U.S. Army cameras recorded the aftermath of a little-known Nazi atrocity. American troops had come upon the bodies of young women who had been killed during the final stages of a three-month death march.

Of the 2,000 women who began the march, fewer than 150 would survive to be liberated. For each of the survivors, liberation would mark the end of a six-year nightmare through ghettos, deportations, slave-labor camps, and forced marches. These are the memories of one of those survivors.

Gerda Weissmann: I was the only one from my family who survived. The only one of my dearest friends.

Narrator: In August 1939, 15-year-old Gerda Weissmann returned from a summer vacation to her family home in Bielsko, Poland. She was to begin school within a few weeks. On September 1, World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. Within hours, the peaceful city of Bielsko was overtaken by the German army.

Gerda Weissmann: We were sitting at breakfast. It was a beautiful, beautiful autumn day-very bright, very golden. We were all together, and it seemed all activity outside has stopped as well. And it was sort of a very, very special, memorable day because it had no...no intrusion whatsoever.

Then, in the evening, a great deal of activity started. There was shooting, there were planes, there were some explosions. We went to the basement. My cat was outside, and my brother went out to let the cat in; the cat was meowing. And he came back with a hole in his trousers. And he said there was shooting from the rooftops, and the Germans were coming.

And at that moment, we heard an incredible roar, and a motorcycle came down the street, and it had a sidecar, and there were people in different uniforms. You know, our army, the Polish army, had sort of beige-khaki uniforms, and those uniforms were green. People were shouting, you know, "Heil Hitler! Long live the Führer!" And people were waving flags with swastikas. There was a feeling of complete betrayal. Suddenly, you were home-and you were not home anymore.

[Text on screen] Gerda Weissmann's brother Arthur was 19 years old. He was a student of chemistry at the local technical college.

He was really my hero. Very accomplished in everything he touched, he seemed to be able to do well. And he was a wonderful brother. He always protected me. And, of course, he had his friends coming to the house. So there were boys around, you know. I started to get interested in boys. And a lot of my friends were seeking my friendship because of my brother.

[Text on screen] Within weeks of the invasion, the able-bodied Jewish men of Bielsko were ordered to register for forced labor.

Unfortunately, pretty soon orders came for all young men to register, between 16 and 50. And...And they were taken away. The last day before Arthur left-as a matter of fact the night before-I went to his room. And when I was little, I used to always go, and he would read me stories, and then he would throw me out of his room. But apparently he didn't that night. I must have fallen asleep at the foot of his bed. When he left, he asked me to be strong and to look after my parents. My mother didn't make his bed for a very long time for the imprint of his head. I guess the loss of my brother is the hardest one to bear.

[Text on screen] Many ethnic Germans living in Bielsko welcomed the German invasion and were given the homes of displaced Jewish families. The Weissmans were confined to the basement of their home.

The war started in September. By Christmas, we had to move to the basement of our home. It was very cold and clammy. We had no running water, no electricity, and things were really quite bad, but we were still in our own home. And spring was very difficult because I always loved my garden. I used to spend a lot of time there as a child. And a sign appeared there that dogs and Jews were not permitted to enter. I remember I said, "I don't care what they're going to do. I have to see my garden again." It was a beautiful and fragrant spring morning. It was in April. And I remember I jumped over the fence and went to the garden and pretended that I was just picking violets. I could see from the garden the room which had been mine, the wallpaper. Even though we lived in the basement, I was still there. And I pretended just for a little bit what it would be like if the war hadn't happened. I would be going in, my mother would say I need to take my raincoat to school, and my brother would be hurrying off. My father would be going to his office. My mother would be setting the table for breakfast and urging us to do this or that. And I remember it was sort of the most incredible thing that the reality, which I had always taken for granted, now became the most remote fantasy.

[Text on screen] In 1942, Polish Jews were deported to slave labor, concentration camps, and killing centers.

The worst day of my life: the 28th of June, '42. That is when I saw my father for the last time. The day before, we were... I... I heard my parents-of course, you know, we all lived in one room-and I heard my parents talk through the night. And I still cannot comprehend their incredible bravery. They spoke only of their lives together, their love, the good times, their children, their parents. And with that, they faced the morning. After my father left, my poor mother, you know, I remember I begged her to have something to eat, and she wouldn't. But she had also...saved from before the war a bit of cocoa and...and some jam. And she decided to make that cocoa for me that morning. I remember all those years looking at that cocoa with great longing-we didn't have any throughout-but it didn't taste particularly sweet on that morning.

[Text on screen] On June, 29, 1942, the Jewish women of Bielsko and their children were deported by the German authorities.

We had to march through our town. And...I guess it is sort of a similar journey than a journey to execution when I think of it now, because, you know, you saw people looking out from behind curtains, some waving sort of a mute farewell. Seeing somebody was painting a new sign on a shop. The movie was putting a new feature on the marquee, and we were marching.

There was an SS man there that was near the railroad tracks where the circus used to come. It was sort of an empty place. I was with my mother and a number of my friends as well, with their mothers. And we heard that Merin was there. Merin was a man of-if the stories were to be believed-not anyone to be greatly admired. He was working with the government there. He was standing to the side. We had to form a line, and an SS man stood there with a little stick. And I was holding hands with my mother, I came up to him, and he looked at me, and he says, "How old?" I said, "18," and he sort of pushed me to one side and my mother to the other side. I wasn't aware what was happening at that particular point, but shortly thereafter, when I stood with my other friends who were also separated from their mothers, we realized that we were going to go to separate places. There was an enclosure, an enclosure there, with barbed wire to the right where our mothers were, and we were immediately taken to the left. Now, again, I don't remember the time sequence at all. I just remember the tremendous panic. And shortly thereafter, some trucks arrived, open trucks, with sort of a gate behind it, and we were loaded on the truck. And I heard my mother's voice from very far ask, "Where to?" And I shouted back, "I don't know." And I guess I must have been aware that I was taken away from my mother, so I jumped off. And Merin came. And he was very slight, a small man. I didn't expect such strength from him. And he picked me up bodily, and he threw me on the truck, and he says, "You are too young to die." And I guess the trucks were set in motion. I just heard my mother's voice, and it came like an echo, and she was saying, "Be strong." You know, "Sei stark," in German. And then the trucks rolled out of there, and, ironically, the sun came out, sort of. I still see it, the rooftops looked wet, illuminated by the sun, and the church bells ringing, and that was the last view.

We were taken to a train. And, of course, I was with my friends, and I think we all started to talking and facing the reality of what was probably happening. And I had a friend by the name of Ilse Kleinzähler. I'd known Ilse since childhood. Ilse was a little younger than I, and we looked quite a bit alike, and people took us as sisters. And, as a matter of fact, Ilse had a horrible headache on the train, and she said, "Oh, if somebody would just have an aspirin or something." And there was this really stunning, beautiful, tall, slim, redheaded girl, very friendly face, and she said, "Oh, I have one," and she gave it to me, and I gave it to Ilse. And she introduced herself in sort of a very open manner, and she said, "My name is Suse Kunz." And, of course, I told her mine, and we started talking. And the windows of the train were open. It was a beautiful summer day, and we said, "Won't it be fun when we make the journey back?" And we were sort of looking back and forth, and she said, "That war is going to go on for a long time," and I said, "No, it won't." And she said, "It's going to be years." I said, "No, it's going to be less than six months." And she said, "I wouldn't bet on that." And I said, "I would." And we made a bet and shook hands on that. And the bet was for a quart of strawberries and some whipped cream, to be payable after the war. I lost that bet.

[Text on screen] Gerda Weissmann was deported to a slave labor factory that produced fabric for the German military.

The camp we came to was a small town called Bolkenhain. I remember we were marched from the railroad station. People looked very curiously at us. We came to an enclosure adjacent to a factory which had a couple...a barrack, and it was a tremendous click as the gates closed, sort of that finality. And there stood a woman clad all in black, and she was literally barking. I've never heard a human voice being that harsh. She looked like a bulldog, you know. And I said, "This is going to be absolutely the worst." We were supposed to refer to her as Frau Kügler. She turned out to be the hope, the inspiration, and the knowledge that perhaps not all Germans were cruel. She was a decent, wonderful, warm, caring human being. No doubt she was picked for her position because of her looks, but the looks completely belied what was underneath it all.

We stayed in that camp for a little over a year. No one was sent to Auschwitz. I don't know if she particularly loved us, but she pinned a lie to the lips of all those who said they had no choice. I personally am indebted to her for my own life at one point, when this infamous Lindner, who was known for his cruelty, swooped down for an inspection of the camp. And I had been very ill at the time-I was running a very high fever-and I was permitted to stay in my bunk. And she came in-there were two, no, there were three of us who were ill-and she came and she said, "Girls, get yourself together." I remember she stooped down to tie my boots, and she literally dragged me and the two other girls to the factory. And she set my looms in motion, and she said, "Pull yourself together. This is life or death today."

[Text on screen] Gerda Weissmann would spend three years in camps along the Polish-german border. For Gerda, the conditions of slaver labor in Marzdorf, Germany, were the most intolerable.

Marzdorf was a horrible camp. We were housed in a building maybe on the sixth or seventh or eighth floor, way up, and it was terribly hot. We worked at different jobs there. There were several that were dreadful. And I remember my resistance really weakening there. And I said to myself, once, after the...the coal car was empty and I was with that, standing on that, with that shovel in my hand, and I said, "It would be so easy now to jump an oncoming train, and it will be over in a couple seconds." Become a part of that stillness, not to have to face tomorrow. What's going to be tomorrow? It's going to be flax in the morning, and the bundles at night, and the swamp again, and the hunger and that, and I just felt I had enough. And I said to myself, "It's time to do it." And I heard very faint oncoming of a train, very far away, probably. Suddenly, I felt a pain in both sides of my neck, very sharp.

And it was right at the beginning of the war, when we had not heard from my brother, and my mother was sick, and we were told that we had to leave, with 20 pounds of our belongings, our home. And I remember standing there, and we heard of a family who committed suicide together, and I sort of half-wished that my parents had suggested that. And I remember standing at the window and thinking about that. My father came up behind me-and he always knew what I was thinking-and he said to me, "What you are thinking is wrong. It's cowardly, it's terrible." He said, "You promise me never to do that, no matter what." And I didn't answer him. And then he sort of took me, he took my head, like that, and he turned it toward me, toward him, and he looked at me, and he said, "I want your promise now." And I said, "Papa, I promise." And during those last days in Märzdorf, that promise became pretty faint. And I knew that the train was going to come, and I figured, I'm going to jump. Suddenly I felt that very sharp pain in my neck. And the promise came back, and obviously I didn't.

[Text on screen] During the final stages of the war, the Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of their crimes, especially the living witnesses. Prisoners were forcibly evacuated from the camps, largely on foot. These evacuations became known as "death marches."

It was bitter cold-it was in January-and I was coughing terribly. I had a very bad cold. And my three dearest friends-Suse Kunz, Liesel Steppe, and Ilse Kleinzähler-and I-we huddled together, the four of us. And they were very concerned about me. They said, you know, "If you can only pull through with that terrible cold and that terrible cough." It was like pneumonia or what have you. And in the morning, very early, the doors opened, not to the type of freedom we had hoped, but it opened to an incredible picture. There was freshly fallen snow for as far as the eye could see... an enormous sort of plateau, and then we came up to a gentle hill, and it was covered with snow. It was gray, it was snowing, and we were told to assemble four abreast. So, of course, it was the four of us, and we held hands, and we took the first step. And I guess we all knew that this was going to be the first step to the end of the road, either to liberation or to doom. And in front of us stretched this incredible line. Well, people looked, you know, with gray camp blankets over them-and they looked like winged death. That's all you could see. Way, way ahead, four thousand girls. And on the side were the SS men and the SS women, and they lifted their whips, and they said, "Forward, march!" And we started to march.

It was the 29th of January. We left a lot of girls back in the snow. Many were killed. That was something one can barely...can really not describe. My father had asked me when I last saw him in June-the very last day, practically in the last moment-before he left, he said to me, "Where are your skiing boots?" And I said, "Why?" And he said, "I want you to wear them today." I said, "Papa, skiing shoes in June?" He said, "I want you to wear them." One didn't argue with one's father. So I put on those boots, and I wore them throughout my entire stay in the camps for three years. And in them I'd also hidden the pictures of my parents and my brother. I didn't know, and I don't know, how my father could have known that those boots were really instrumental in saving my life on that march. I had ski shoes. Some girls had sandals. We slept outside. The frost. I saw girls breaking off their toes like twigs. And I had my ski boots.

[Text on screen] The women were divided into two groups. Gerda Weissmann and her fellow prisoners were to endure three months of exposure, starvation and arbitrary execution.

We didn't get anything to eat for days, literally. We were bitter cold and hungry and everything. And I was planning a party after the war, and I had the dilemma for almost an entire day if I should have a blue velvet dress or a red velvet dress. I couldn't resolve it. I really liked the color blue much better as a color, but I knew that red looked better on me. So... But you could occupy your mind and hang your thoughts on trivia of that nature-it became very important, and this is how you passed the hours and forgot the hunger and the cold. And I do believe that if you were blessed with imagination, that you could work that. If, unfortunately, you were a person that faced reality, I think you didn't have much of a chance.

[Text on screen] This death march would continue into the spring of 1945.

We devised sort of what we thought an incredible plan to run away. That was when we saw refugees on the road who spoke similar German than we did. So we thought at the next stop we are going to disappear in the woods. And we stopped for that rest, and I remember giving Ilse sort of a sign with my eyebrows that we should now disappear into the woods, pretending that we needed to go to relieve ourselves. And suddenly she looked up, and she said, "I'm afraid." And normally, I must say, I overruled her, you know, in most instances, and suddenly I lost, I think, my courage as well. And I said, "Okay, maybe, maybe we'll do it on the next stop." And we came out of the forest, and then we heard horrible screams. And 14 girls had hidden, had the same ideas we did, and they were all killed in front of us. That's when I decided, no matter what, I'm never going to try to run away. We'll go to the end whatever the end will be.

On the 28th of April, Ilse wasn't well at all. She was sort of hallucinating. She was saying things, which I didn't know what she meant. But then she became totally lucid. And one of the most shocking things was that one of my other friends had somehow found two potatoes. And she gave them to me, she said, "For you and for Ilse." And I gave Ilse this potato, and she said she wasn't hungry. That was the most incredible statement, not to be hungry. And she said to me, "You eat it." And then she said...she said, "I'm angry at no one. And I hope nobody is angry at me." And then she said, "If my parents and Kitty"-Kitty was her little sister-she said, "If they survive, don't tell them how I died." And then she said to me, "You'll be alone." She said, "But you have always been lucky." And there was a little brook nearby, so I got up and I wanted to get it, and an SS man came, and he shoved me, and I begged him to let me have water for her, and he kicked her head. So it was raining and so I caught some water in my hands and gave it to her. And I held her, and we both fell asleep. I woke up but she didn't.

[Text on screen] By May of 1945, the death march had come to a halt in the town of Volary, Czechoslovakia.

And I remember sitting there and really knowing that this was definitely the end. I heard American planes overhead. There was shooting. The German army was running away. There were people on the roads with children, with animals-tremendous chaos.

[Text on screen] The SS guards abandoned the survivors of the march in a vacant bicycle factory on the outskirts of Volary.

We were very, very ill. I weighed 68 pounds. My hair was white. So I was going to be 21 the following day. That morning, I went to look for Suse because Liesel said to me, "Suse went out to get some water and she has not returned." So I went out to look for her. And I found her near the pump. I thought she had fainted, but I touched her, and she was gone. I wanted to tell her, "Suse"-and I did tell her-I said, "Suse, we are liberated! We are free!" We had made a bet more than three years earlier on the train which took us to camp-a bet for a quart of strawberries and cream, to be payable after the war. I said we will be liberated, and she said we would not.

[Text on screen] U.S. Army troops entered Volary on May 7, 1945.

My very clear view of freedom and liberation came that morning when I stood in the doorway of that abandoned factory, and I saw a car coming down the hill. And the reality of that came when I saw the white star on its hood and not the swastika. There were two men in that car; one jumped out.

Kurt Klein: I saw some skeletal figures trying to get some water from a hand pump, but over on the other side, leaning next to the...against the wall, next to the entrance of the building, I saw a girl standing, and I decided to walk up to her.

Gerda Weissmann: I remember the aura of him, of that awe, of that disbelief in daylight to really see someone who fought for our freedom, for my ideals, and he looked like a god to me.

Kurt Klein: And I asked her in German and in English whether she spoke either language, and she answered me in German.

Gerda Weissmann: I knew what I had to say, and I said to him, "We are Jewish, you know." For a very long time, at least to me it seemed very long, he didn't answer me. And then his own voice betrayed his emotion-he was wearing dark glasses, I couldn't see his eyes-he said, "So am I."

[Text on screen] Lieutenant Kurt Klein was born in Waldorf, Germany. In 1937, his parents had sent him to safety in the United States.

Kurt Klein: I asked about her companions, and she said, "Come, let me show you."

Gerda Weissmann: He said, "May I see the other ladies?"-a form of address we hadn't heard for six years. I told him that most of the girls were inside and were too ill to walk. And he said to me, "Won't you come with me?" I didn't know what he meant. So he held the door open for me and let me precede him. And that was the moment of restoration of humanity, humaneness, dignity, and freedom.

Kurt Klein: We went inside the factory. It was an indescribable scene. There were women scattered over the floor on scraps of straw, some of them quite obviously with a mark of death on their faces. Something that I have never been able to forget was an extraordinary thing that happened. The girl who was my guide made sort of a sweeping gesture over this scene of devastation, and said the following words: "Noble be man, merciful and good." And I could hardly believe that she was able to summon a poem by the German poet Goethe, which was called...is called "The Divine," at such a moment. And there was nothing that she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better than what she did.

Gerda Weissmann: And this first young American of liberation day is now my husband. He opened not only the door for me, but the door to my life and my future.

Narrator: Gerda Weissmann and Kurt Klein were married in June of 1946. Gerda Weissmann would never find out what happened to her brother. Her father and mother are known to have been deported to Auschwitz. Kurt Klein's parents were unable to escape Nazi Germany. They, too, are reported to have died in Auschwitz.

Of the 2,000 women who began the death march, most would die along the route to Czechoslovakia. Ninety-five of these women are memorialized in this small cemetery in Volary. Among the monuments are those dedicated to Liesel Steppe, Suse Kunz and Ilse Kleinzähler-the friends of a young survivor named Gerda Weissmann.

[Text on screen] Gerda Klein lives in Phoenix, Arizona. In 2002, Kurt, 82, died after 56 years of marriage to Gerda.

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In this film, Gerda Weissmann shares her account of surviving the Holocaust. It was produced in 1995 by HBO and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Hitler and the Nazis were behind the start of the holocaust.

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Millions of people were killed during the Holocaust, especially lots of Jews.