I am the innocent Hulag. Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. Ask not what your country, although Kennedy has been shot.
I am the innocent Hulag. I have these tools to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall. In the summer of 1936, the city of Berlin had put on its best face as host of the Olympic Games.
Berlin was a lovely city, it was a joyous, it was a happy city at that time. It was more attractive as a city for me than were London or Paris. In a world still plagued by the Depression, the capital of Nazi Germany was thriving.
The Nazis used the Olympic Games of 1936 to try to project a positive image of the new Germany, to translate the athlete's success into the success of National Socialism. During the Olympics, the uglier side of Hitler's National Socialism was kept under wraps. There was no outward sign of anti-Semitism.
There were no signs that were reported later on, of course. Jews and dogs forbidden. I never saw that sign during the games. But the glittering surface of the international Olympic spirit could not completely obscure a darker reality.
Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were members of the American relay team. The morning of the day we were supposed to run, we were told, Sam and I, that we were not going to run. No fit American track and field athlete has ever not competed in the Olympic Games, except Sam Stoller and me, the only two Jews on the track team. Marty Glickman is convinced it was politics that kept him out of competition. He believes the American Olympic Committee did not want to embarrass Hitler by having Jews stand on the winner's podium.
Almost everything at the Olympics seemed to be going Hitler's way. In event after event, German victories appeared to support his notion of Aryan racial superiority. But then came the 100 meters.
The hopes of the American team rested on the son of an Alabama sharecropper, Jesse Owens. I was standing 10 yards behind a hipper. Hitler, hearing the name Jesse Owens, angrily pushed back his chair and with a deep growl on his face, walked right past me and walked out. In that tense summer of 1936, Owens went on to win four gold medals.
The competition was grand and we're very glad to come out on top. Thank you for coming. but Germany won far more medals than any other nation, and with the 11th Olympiad, Hitler had pulled off an international success.
For the rest of the decade, it was not his athletes but his soldiers who challenged him to the Olympics. challenged the world. As Hitler, with ever greater boldness, threatened his neighbors, the rest of Europe and Britain stood by incredulous. America, safe on the other side of the ocean, was still worried about the Depression.
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. January 1937. The clouds of the Great Depression still hovered over Franklin Roosevelt at his second inauguration. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent half a century ago. The president thought that in order to lift the nation's spirits, he had to make the country face the economic crisis head on, together. And he used a battery of newly available mass media to do that.
The government hired photographers to capture the faces of the Great Depression. No other government has ever done this. Carl Myden's Just 28 at the time was among those who set out with their cameras. The 35mm camera became the heart of the new age of photography, that is the new age of photojournalism. What moved me greatly was their spirit.
They simply were proud of the fact that they could live in the circumstances and still be solid citizens. We photographers were pretty skillful. One could not look at those pictures about what was happening in the country and not be affected by them.
These photographs were all over the new magazines, Life chief among them. I can remember as a kid running home from school on the day that Life came to get that copy before my brothers got home and take it to my room so I could look at it first. It was as if the whole world was opening up in those pictures. And that magazine changed the way we saw the world.
The state Supreme Court today handed down its long... At a time when people were desperate for news, radio, more immediate and more trusted than newspapers, became America's favorite way to keep up with events. Maritime labor leaders declared today that...
The man who really discovered radio to use... on a massive scale which made history with FDR. He found in order to be able to reach the citizenry, he could use radio.
And that was the beginning of the fireside chats. Our capacity is limited only by our ability... to work together. He made the difference.
People would be glued to their radios all over the country to find out from this man what's happening, what's going on, when can we get work, when will things change. And just as he understood the power of the still photograph and radio, Roosevelt also saw the newsreel as a way to pull the nation together. Boulder Dam put into operation. Giant spurts of water... Always there was something in there.
A dam was being built. or a river was being cleared, or a plant was being reopened, or some invention was being announced, there was something good going on. Roosevelt made the White House an amplifier of all that the government was trying to do. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
The President of the United States. Five years of information through the radio and the moving picture have taken the whole nation to school in the nation's business. We have learned to think as a nation.
We have learned to feel ourselves a nation. A people, a kingdom, a will and a better future for Germany. myth-making machine.
Joseph Goebbels, as Hitler's Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, controlled the printed press and exploited the power of pictures and sound. At Goebbels'direction, the government put loudspeakers in the streets and made cheap radios available to every shop, school and home. Every German was now within the sound of Hittner's voice. To have a real radio now, that was fantastic. Every day there were police.
political programs and so on. I learned a lot from the radio. I thought it was great, but Father thought it was one of the main weapons now of brainwash. Propaganda films promoted a glorious, Germanic world of tomorrow.
We were told that we were the top We were the chosen people. We were the Herenrasse, as we called it, the master race. And that we were more intelligent and better looking and stronger than all the others. And that it was our God-given duty to force our life onto all the others.
To glorify the master race on film, Hitler's choice was Germany's preeminent filmmaker, Fritz Lang. Lang, sensing the time when one could say no to the Fuhrer had passed, left for Paris. The powerful film propaganda post would go to Hitler's second choice, director Leni Riefenstahl. Her film, Triumph of the Will, used the 1934 Nazi Party Congress as a vast backdrop designed to make Hitler look like a god. Military music was played and he marched down the center aisle, flanked by heaven knows how many gorgeously uniformed creatures.
They would go behind the lectern, standing there, silent, waiting until the tension rose. And then he would start. The sixth party day of the movement is over. What for millions of Germans who are outside our ranks are slowly revving up the great personal and mental If you sat in an audience like that, you were swept along.
The youth is unscripted and will fall with your Never before had mass communication been more effective. Never before had it been used with more sinister intent. My fellow citizens, German men and women, the age of one of the most exalted Jewish intellectuals is now over. Only four months after Hitler came to power, bonfires burned in the streets of German cities.
The flames were fed with books by Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, and other authors who were deemed subversive to the German people. Democracy in Germany was dead. Hitler's own book, Mein Kampf, My Struggle, was now the blueprint for Germany's future. In the new Germany, Nazi party thugs, the paramilitary brown shirts, would patrol the streets to root out and arrest anyone who stood in Hitler's way.
Thousands of political opponents were sent to hundreds of concentration camps. The first was near the German village of Dachau. Everyone knew that you could be sent to such a camp without due process of law.
We had a verse that was widely recited, Dear God, silence me, that I do not come to Dachau. Dear God, strike me dumb so that I won't be sent to Dachau. In the new Germany, everyone was classified by race. In the new Germany, only those who Hitler considered perfect, the purest members of the Aryan race, were welcome.
The main anti-Sarum group are the Jewish people, the Jews. Being told that the Jews, they are behind everything which is bad in Germany. There was a lot of propaganda against the Jews.
There were no longer any normal newspapers. Most of them were Nazi. You saw headlines, the Jews are criminals, the Jews are vermin, they must be killed, they must be ousted. Hitler had declared in Mein Kampf that Jews weakened the German master race. Well, of course, we talked about race in school, and the superior races, the non-superior, the degenerate races, and the teacher had some calipers to measure the width of your eyes, and your nose, and so on, the head.
In our classroom we had a poster. The head shapes from the sides, the Aryans of course, they looked good from the sides, they looked good from the front, they were blonde and they were blue eyed. And when I was about 14 years old, my hair began to darken.
And I sometimes was worried that I didn't look like a proper Aryan anymore because my hair was not really blonde anymore. And also my nose is a little bit hooked, as you might probably see. I sometimes then looked in the mirror, I had another mirror here, and I was frightened that somebody should think that I had some Jewish connections.
Two years after they came to power, they came out with the Nuremberg racial laws, which separated the Jews from the German people. We were not allowed to go swimming with the other children, we were not allowed to play with the other children, we were not allowed to go on excursions with the other children, and so on. Jews were stripped of their citizenship, their businesses boycotted, they were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans. Any trace of Jewish ancestry meant immediate banishment from all civil service jobs. I was classified a quarter Jew, a mongrel of the second degree.
I was dismissed from the public service. All I had achieved through examinations, through studying and other efforts to establish myself in life, all that was by a stroke of the pen cut off. Hitler had made his vision for his people a reality, and he planned to force that vision far beyond Germany's borders. And I remember when I was a guest with my mother at the Berchtesgaden.
You could see on a clear day, you could see Salzburg. And he pointed out to me, he said, you see that there boy? That's Salzburg. in my homeland of Austria.
And one of these days I'm going to see to it that that will join with Germany. On March the 12th, 1938, Hitler made good on his plan. Americans heard it first from NBC's Max Jordan.
Ladies and gentlemen, at the Austrian frontier town of Linz, an endless stream of German soldiers is pouring into our... It was astonishing, the takeover of a country broadcast live on radio. The cheers are for Chancellor Adolf Hitler returning to his homeland for the first time in almost 25 years.
Carla Steppt lived in the Austrian capital Vienna. She was 20 years old and a Jew. It was my home.
So when suddenly the Germans marched into Austria, where they were welcomed with open arms, the world ended for me. It was a Friday evening. Crowds began to march down shouting slogans. I remember one specifically which was Jüde für Ecke in eigenem Drecke which translated means Jews perish in your own filth. And it was clear that something was imminent, something was happening.
Saturday morning. The brown shirts and black shirts already started to go against the Jewish population. They got Jewish men and women out to scrub the sidewalks on their knees, being kicked by the population standing around them.
Hitler wasn't even in Vienna yet, but what took Germany five years took Austria 24 hours. In the spring of 1938, few Americans could avoid the news of Hitler in Germany. The parade through Berlin's Tiergarten shows that once again, Germany has a real arm.
That would mean war. When will Nazi aggression end? The democratic nations draw together against...
As if in warning to the rest of Europe, Hitler orders all Germany to mobilize at its full war strength. A million and a half... Growing anxieties over the increasing power of the Third Reich turned a heavyweight boxing match in June 1938 into an international showdown.
In one corner of the ring would be Hitler's pride and joy, Max Schmeling. In the other, the American champion, Joe Louis. Joe symbolized not only the fight against discrimination, but the struggle against fascism. At a time when the entire world was talking about Hitler and Mussolini, anti-Semitism.
Under the ring, Max laying around. Joe Lewis led pick with two straight lefts to the chin. There was tremendous tension. A left to the jaw, a right to the head, and the gentleman is watching carefully.
I was glued to the radio. Lewis measured him, right to the body, a left hook to the jaw, and Schmeling is down. We just exploded, shouted, wow!
The count is five, six... The men are in the ring, the fight is over. Max Nevin is beaten in one round.
People shouted out of their windows, Joe won, Joe won, all up and down. And still champion, Calvin Miller. We won.
It was a victory. And we needed victories very badly at the time. When 21-year-old Milt Wolf heard the news about Joe Louis, Wolf was already fighting against Hitler in the Spanish Civil War.
In that war, Nazi Germany was supporting Francisco Franco's fascist rebels who were about to overthrow Spain's freely elected government. I was a kid in Brooklyn, okay, and I was caught up in this whole bit of the war in Spain. For myself it was a commitment to a struggle against fascism.
Milt Wolf joined 2800 American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in defiance of American neutrality. They went to defend democracy in what was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for the greater battle with Hitler. These were guys who were essentially coming off the street. Most of them had no military training at all.
And up to the front they went. They were hitting us with artillery and they were strafing us with the German planes. And guys were getting killed and wounded. For myself, the war in Spain gave meaning to the word anti-fascism.
By 1938, democracy was doomed in Spain as it had been in Italy and Austria and Germany. Hitler's ideology and Hitler's armies were a danger to freedom everywhere. It has now reached the stage where the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened.
Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked. September the 12th, 1938. The entire civilized world, as a CBS broadcast put it, was anxiously waiting to hear Hitler's next threat. It came in an unprecedented live broadcast from the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by German-speaking people, become a part of Germany.
The Columbia brought its listeners the address by Adolf Hitler. At this time we present H.P. Kosenbauer. Good afternoon, everybody.
Adolf Hitler... has spoken and the world has listened. The world has listened because it feared that this speech might mean war.
The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who'd never been on an aeroplane before, flew to Germany twice within 10 days to seek a peaceful settlement. Just to see on the newsreel screen Chamberlain coming there with his umbrella is unthinkable to a German mind. Hitler with an umbrella, you know.
You laugh when you think about that. We thought they were weak. Chamberlain failed.
Hitler refused to withdraw his demands. The Sudetenland would be his, one way or the other. War now seemed inevitable. In Britain, nervous citizens began to build bomb shelters. In France, army reserves were called up.
And then, only 24 hours before Hitler's promised invasion of Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Chamberlain once again flew to Germany. At a meeting in Munich with Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini, Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland to Germany in return for what he called peace in our time. Hitler gave his word that there would be no more territorial claims.
Chamberlain flew home to a hero's welcome from a Britain anxious to avoid another conflict after the devastating slaughter of World War I only 20 years earlier. Here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. As symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
Again! Chamberlain got what he thought was peace. Hitler got the Sudetenland.
To us Germans it was a great thing. Their land is bordering on Germany, and as the Sudeten people were Germans, so we thought, yes, well, why should they live in Czechoslovakia? On October 1, 1938, Hitler welcomed 3.5 million Czechoslovakians of German blood into the Reich. Hitler's reception was a replay of Austria. As Hitler was being cheered in the Sudetenland, the Nazis'campaign against German Jews was intensifying.
Very much aided by an incident in Paris. On November the 7th, a young Jew, Herschel Grinspan, distraught over the deportation of his parents, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot a minor official, Ernst von Rapp. While she was fighting death, the newspapers carried headlines, banner headlines against the Jewish people. The Jews have taken off their mask from their face. They have shown now what they want to do to us.
It was dreadful. We said if only this man does not die. But of course he died.
Von Rath's death became Hitler's opportunity. Only a junior diplomat, Von Rath was nonetheless accorded the honors of a fallen hero. The ceremony was intended to inspire revenge.
For once, said Joseph Goebbels, the Jews should get the feel of popular anger. That anger exploded on the night of November the 10th 1938. Kristallnacht. I saw the synagogue in flames. People came from all over.
The fire department came. I did not make one effort to put out the flames. Kids were laughing, kids were having fun.
I heard, kill the Jews, kill the Jews. For 24 hours, Nazi stormtroopers rampaged through Germany and Austria, destroying synagogues and shops. The night of broken glass, in German, Kristallnacht. Scores of people were killed, more than 20,000 arrested. It was now clear there was no future for Jews in Germany.
For the first time in America, it broke through a certain part of the awareness that something horrible was going to happen. was happening in Hitler's Germany. Heim Erlangen!
Heim Erlangen! Heim Erlangen! Roosevelt himself said he just was incomprehensible to imagine that such a thing could happen in the 20th century. Heim!
Heim! Heim! Heim! And still people felt, we've seen what happened when we get involved in Europe's wars.
Heim! Heim! Heim! This is Europe's problem. Unterführer!
Die! On Easter Sunday 1939, an enormous crowd came together around the reflecting pool in the nation's capital to hear one of the great voices of modern times, Marian Anderson. Because she was a Negro, Anderson had been barred from performing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
When President Roosevelt heard this, he enabled her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. And I was among the 75,000 people gathered to hear her sing that day. This was a moment maybe even more important to us than what Joe Louis had done when he demolished Max Schmeling. And we stood there and we listened.
And tears ran down our faces. It was a part of America's statement in Hitler's face about what we truly thought about black people. Marion affirmed for all of us what the true meaning of America was. That powerful symbol of racial justice gave hope to Europe to Jews. Hope that despite strict quotas limiting immigration, America would provide a haven from the terror of Adolf Hitler.
My mother desperately tried to get out of Austria. And because of the quota system, there were obvious difficulties and could not gain entrance to the United States. And one possibility was to get into Cuba. Fred Reif's family joined more than 900 Jewish refugees on board the steamship St. Louis bound for Cuba.
But at Havana, Cuban officials refused to let them land. Some suicide started to happen. I remember one person slid his wrists and jumped overboard in a harbor.
The fear is, of course, if you can't land in Cuba, then you have to go back to Germany, to a concentration camp. We all knew that. And so the St. Louis turned north towards the United States.
For five days, the ship sat off the Florida coast while the captain appealed for refuge. Everybody's hopes were up. Franklin Roosevelt was everybody's idol.
And nothing will happen to us. America wouldn't let us down. But the United States government did not permit them to land.
The passenger sent one last urgent plea directly to President Roosevelt. There was no reply. The St. Louis had no choice but to sail back across the Atlantic. At the last minute, England, France, Holland and Belgium agreed to take the stranded refugees.
But because the war was spreading, over the next six years, 660 of the more than 900 passengers would perish at the hands of the Nazis. President Roosevelt was sympathetic to the plight of the refugees, but with the United States Congress in an isolationist frame of mind, he felt he could not spend political capital saving a small number of Jews when all of Europe needed help against Hitler. Roosevelt believed that the only way to save the world was to save the people. way to stop Nazi aggression and keep America insulated from Europe's troubles was to arm Britain and France. It was not a popular idea in a country that was officially neutral.
In March 1939, six months after the Munich agreement, which Neville Chamberlain thought Hitler would honor, Hitler broke his promise not to make any territorial claims and took all of Czechoslovakia. And still, most Americans wanted to leave the Europeans to deal with their own crisis. America was interested in a very different future. In the summer of 1939, New York was home to the World's Fair.
It was called the World of Tomorrow. Visitors got their first look at television. How it worked, we did not know.
I didn't ask. I was just in awe of the whole thing. General Motors confidently offered visitors a future without traffic jams. General Electric dreams of easy living with a dishwasher. It was as if all of the dreams of the future were suddenly going to be materialized.
Machines were going to make us better people. And here he comes, ladies and gentlemen, walking up to greet you under his own power. It was like science fiction for me, 12 years old, waiting to see the world of tomorrow. Come hail the dawn of a new day. The flags of 60 nations flew over the fair.
Only one major power was absent. Germany had been invited, but Hitler had declined. He had his own plan for the world tomorrow. On the last day of August, visitors were enjoying another festive evening at the fair.
As we were approaching the Polish Pavilion, the lights went out. And we didn't know whether it was an electrical problem or what, because the rest of the fair was still lit. All of a sudden, a loudspeaker went on, and they had announced that Germany had just marched into Poland.
Suddenly, the world of tomorrow had lost its bright promise. And here is the United Press flash from Warsaw, which says officially that German planes have bombed railway stations in three Polish towns. I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. This country is at war with Germany.
I remember the broadcaster in London saying, and I'll never forget that sentence he used, tonight the lights are going out all over Europe and no one knows when they'll ever come back on. The war in Europe made Americans realize just how blessed they were. In a display of patriotism, flag sails soared. and a song by famous Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin went to the top of the hit parade. Most Americans still wanted Europe to fight its own battle, but President Roosevelt and a growing number of people knew that they had to prepare for the worst as events in Europe raged out of control.
In the spring of 1940, Hitler turned his blitzkrieg, his lightning war, against the countries of Western Europe. I think at that time probably he was at the top point of his power. Six weeks to be permanent and 18 days to occupy Norway and Denmark.
In five days in Belgium, in 17 days, I think those who doubted him, they then thought, that man is just superb, he wins everything. And then France fell in just six weeks. On June the 14th, German troops entered Paris.
Even as France collapsed, the German plane started to attack Britain, the last democratic stronghold in Europe. Still, the United States held back. President Roosevelt was able to help America's battered English ally with a program to lend and lease them arms. We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers ships, planes, tanks, guns.
That is our purpose and our pledge. But as a beleaguered Britain became freedom's last holdout in Europe, full American involvement became increasingly inevitable. In December of 1940, the first peacetime draft in American history began. America's armed forces were in woeful shape.
The U.S. Army had under 200,000 men, fewer than Holland or Portugal. I remember even running around with sticks for rifles and we used old tomato cans from the mess hall. They got Campbell's soup cans and they'd put gravel in them and they'd rattle.
And then we'd throw them as far as we could throw them. And that's learning how to throw a grenade. I was in ROTC.
I was studying to be an officer in the American Army. And I would look at that German war machine and it put cold chills up and down my back. And I used to say to myself, you mean to tell me we've got to go up against those guys?
It wasn't a very pretty picture. Music By 1941, history's deadliest conflict was underway, and the very survival of freedom in the world depended on the outcome. That's on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. I'm Peter Jennings. Thank you for joining us.