The U.S. and the Holocaust

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Gunther

It was a gradual process. (announcer speaking German) First, there were some kids who didn't greet you anymore, but it was so gradual that you accept it or not accept it. but try to ignore these early manifestations of a change of ideology into evil. (mournful music) Everything was fine until, I don't know, I was maybe three or four. One of the kids that I played with called me a dirty Jew and beat me up. So after that, I stopped going to play in the courtyard. -

Narrator

Saul Messinger's parents, like thousands of other Polish Jews, had immigrated to Germany hoping to escape poverty and antisemitism. They settled in Berlin, which had been one of the most tolerant cities in Europe. Across the street from us, on the ground floor, there were many shops. About half of them were Jewish owned. And I remember one day I saw crowds of people forming and eventually somebody threw a rock through the window, broke the windows, and the people went into the stores and simply took the merchandise. There were policemen standing there and they did absolutely nothing. They just allowed it to happen. -

Narrator

Susan and Joseph Hilsenrath lived with their parents and little brother in Western Germany. I was born in a small town in Germany, in Bad Kreuznach. Our life was pretty good. My father had a linen store and he was doing really well and taking good care of his family. We were very happy living in our house. Until Hitler came into power. They boycotted my father's store. He wasn't able to make a living for us anymore. With the rise of the Nazis, of course, he had to close his business. And he pedaled fruits and vegetables just to make a living. But he managed somehow, I'm flabbergasted when I think about it. We moved to an apartment and then another apartment. So it was, each step was a down step. And it was always because we were Jewish, we had to move. My parents did want us to have a normal childhood in an impossible situation. I mean, we couldn't help but see, I mean we were intelligent children, but we didn't understand, really, that it was going to get any worse. And I guess maybe a lot of Jews that were living in Germany at the time didn't know that it was going to get worse, but it did. -

Narrator

On the evening of May 10th, 1933, students in Berlin and some 30 other university towns raided their campus libraries, carried out armloads of books by Jewish authors and by those Gentile writers deemed by the Nazis to embody an un-German spirit and flung them into bonfires. Writings by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway and Rosa Luxembourg and scores of others all went up in flames. The book burning marked the end of a month during which the Reich had promulgated its first openly anti-Jewish laws. With certain exceptions, men and women of so-called non-aryan ancestry were ordered to leave government service. Jewish doctors and dentists were barred from treating patients enrolled in the government health system. Jews were no longer permitted to enter the legal profession. Jewish editors and journalists, artists and musicians lost their livelihoods. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, presided over the book burning in Berlin. He exalted that it marked the end of Jewish intellectualism. It's step by step. Jewish judges are fired. Jewish lawyers who work in the courts are fired. Jewish teachers are fired. The Nazis were very attuned to what the public reaction would be. It was drip, drip, drip. They're judging. They're very careful of what the German people will accept. -

Narrator

Hitler eliminated opposition parties, crushed the labor unions, and would eventually order the murder of potential rivals. "The goal of the Nazi government," Goebbels said, "was that there should be only one opinion, one party, and one faith in Germany." -

Dorothy

There are to be no minorities of opinion in the new Germany and no division of loyalties. Most men will wear uniforms. The badge of their membership in that secret mystic community of blood brothers, the German state. Women will, by preference, wear kitchen aprons and will stay home and take care of the children, which they will gladly bear in large numbers for Germany. They will not hold political opinions, but then, neither will anyone else. Dorothy Thompson, Saturday Evening Post.