Stephanie Hinnershitz:
In the summer of 1944, Soviet forces liberated the Majdanek concentration camp and continued to encounter the full horror of the Holocaust, freeing more victims of Nazi brutality. That following year, US troops liberated the Buchenwald camp, and through reports from on-the-scene journalists, Americans were forced to face the extent of the Holocaust and grapple with its lasting legacy.

Speaker:
Prosecutor Robert Jackson of the United States opens the trial with a strong indictment of the defendants.

Robert Jackson:
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
On April 12, 1945, Leon Bass, as part of the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, approached Weimar, Germany. American troops would experience the horrific scenes of the Holocaust for the first time. Mr. Bass recalls this moment in an interview with The National WWII Museum for the Museum's oral history collection.

Leon Bass:
Broomhill came out and came over to me and two others, and he said, "Come with me." So we followed him and got aboard a truck, but I leaned over and I said, "Sir, where are we going?" [He] said, "We're going to a concentration camp." And I said to myself, "What? A concentration camp?" I didn't know anything about concentration camps. In all the training they had given me, no one ever mentioned concentration camps. But on this day in April in 1945, I was to have the shock of my life.

I was going to walk through the gates, concentration camp called Buchenwald, and I wasn't ready for that. Totally unprepared for that kind of an experience, but I can never, ever forget the day. That spring day in April when I walked through the gates and I saw in front of me what I now call the “walking dead.” I saw human beings. Human beings that had been beaten and starved and tortured and denied everything. They were standing in front of me, skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deep set eyes in it. Were standing there, some of them were holding on each to each other to keep them falling. Others were on the ground and they were dying. And I looked at that, I said, "My God, who are these people? What have they done that was so terrible that could cause anyone to treat them like this?" I didn't know. I didn't know, honestly.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
As Germany's surrender seemed imminent, Allied troops continued to push east and came face to face with the inhumanity of Nazi policy. Confused, angry, and shocked, what Allied troops experienced was difficult to convey back home. National WWII Museum fellow Dr. Jason Dawsey explains more.

Jason Dawsey:
Yes, there's a couple of reasons why Americans didn't fully comprehend what was happening until March, April, May of 1945. One reason one could say easily is because it's almost incomprehensible to think about orchestrating the genocide of an entire group of people from one end of a continent to the other. A second factor is that yes, the war itself was going on, there was horrendous news coming in all the time about bloodshed and the like, so it was very difficult for that story to get extra traction when most of the coverage is really about the American war effort. And then third, once these stories by people like Lawrence and Snow did come out and the American press was paying attention, there was a lot of skepticism in the American leadership that this stuff was true.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
As camps were liberated, these firsthand accounts became undeniable proof of the atrocities involved. Then General Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 12, 1945, sent a telegram to Washington: “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were overpowering. I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things, if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'”

For the men and women who were part of the liberating forces, the extent of what they encountered was nearly incomprehensible. Leila Morrison was a nurse with the 118th evacuation hospital and witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald.

Leila Morrison:
But first of all, honey, there's no way to describe the people, the way they look. If they could have been without their skin, they would've. I tell you, it was skin and bones. Oh, they just wondered how they could even walk. They look so dried up and you knew they'd nearly starved, but this man was going to take us through and tell us about it. So he had been a prisoner there, and by the way, a younger man. See, the Germans kept some of the young fellows, like older teenager, young 20, if they looked strong and could work.

And apparently one of those fellow fellows came up and said, "Oh, you Americans. You are Americans, you are wonderful. You're wonderful. You have no idea. We've been prisoners here. And suddenly one day all these tanks came and they didn't pay any attention to this iron fence. They just came in with their tanks and knocked it down and said, 'You're free. You're free.'" And oh, he was just overcome. He couldn't believe he was free and we just rejoiced with him, but we … couldn't empathize with them. We had no idea. We'd never seen anything like that, honey.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Even those who were liberated still faced antisemitism in Europe. Mark Rubin was liberated from Terezin as a boy. In an interview with Dr. Rob Citino, he talks about his move to America.

Mark Rubin:
Well, it's all about antisemitism.

Rob Citino:
Please tell me more.

Mark Rubin:
It's that simple. I used to be called “parshivy” Yid.

Rob Citino:
Yid is Jew.

Mark Rubin:
Yid is just Jew. Scabby. Scabby Jew.

Rob Citino:
Remember that? You remember that specific incident?

Mark Rubin:
Oh yeah, or “parshivy” Yid. I remember all those good phrases.

Rob Citino:
And this was after the war, so—

Mark Rubin:
During, after.

Rob Citino:
Hitler's gone.

Mark Rubin:
Didn't make a difference.

Rob Citino:
In World War II, President Roosevelt famously said the United States was fighting for the four freedoms. And he said that was freedom of expression and freedom of religion and then freedom from fear and freedom from want. When did the fear that had to have been a part of your little boy life, when did it begin to dissipate? When did you start saying this is—

Mark Rubin:
When I got off the boat.

Rob Citino:
The moment you got off the boat?

Mark Rubin:
Just about. Yeah.

Rob Citino:
You knew you were in a new land?

Mark Rubin:
I knew they were not going to call me “parshivy” Yid.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Only 12,000 Jewish refugees successfully immigrated to the United States before 1948. Soldiers were not the only ones present for the liberation of the concentration camps. Journalists like Edward R. Murrow traveled to the site of the atrocities to report to Americans on what they encountered. Americans were horrified, but what they heard during the broadcast...

Jason Dawsey:
There was a tendency to want to think that the Soviets were actually exaggerating the violence, exaggerating the brutality. And so there was a real reluctance to accept the news that was coming in, even when it was being provided by American reporters. Of course, all of that is just swept aside once American units themselves are doing the liberating. So there is this moment really, I think you can talk about, around April 15, 1945, as a decisive moment in the history of what we would call Holocaust awareness in the United States. A consciousness, a recognition of what happened, and that was all the footage that was coming back with the liberation, especially there were several camps that were liberated in the space of about a month.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Following Hitler's suicide, Germany surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. After the V-E Day celebrations in the United States, the Jewish American community faced the aftermath of the Holocaust. Dr. Daniel Greene, adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and the curator of the Americans in the Holocaust exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, tells us more.

Danny Greene:
It's a common misconception that antisemitism goes away in the United States after the Holocaust. And maybe we would like to think that it would be so, that Hitler would give antisemitism a bad name in the United States, but in fact, antisemitism doesn't go away. And there are a few ways that you can really see this play out in US society, that there's some consistency, meaning prewar, postwar, like certain universities still hold quotas that limit the number of Jewish students that can be admitted. There's housing discrimination still with restrictive covenants or just neighborhoods that even if they don't have restrictive covenants on them, it's known that Jews are not welcome, or certainly certain professions and jobs. So that's a consistency prewar, postwar that takes a while to change.

I think one of the most interesting ways, though, to measure whether antisemitism goes away is the American attitudes towards displaced persons. Just because the war ends doesn't mean that the crisis is over for Jews in Europe. There are so many Jews who don't feel that they can go back to the lands that they came from before the war because continuing antisemitism in occupied Poland and other places. And our doors in the United States remain closed for the most part to displaced persons. Our restrictive immigration laws don't change. President [Harry S.] Truman tries to push Congress to make some changes to the admission of displaced persons to allow for a greater proportion of the displaced persons who are admitted to be Jewish, and that doesn't land well in Congress.

So if you look, for example, in the five or six years after the end of the war, so 1945 to 1951 or so, the United States lets in about 330,000 displaced persons, but fewer than 20% of those are Jews. The Jewish community responds in multiple different ways and you see Holocaust commemoration begin pretty quickly after the war among some parts of the Jewish community. But it's really in Jewish organizational work, nongovernmental organizations where you see Jewish communities try to respond to this antisemitism by pointing out the lies of antisemitism and also arguing or making the case that Jews are loyal Americans.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Today, educators and activists stress the importance of remembering how antisemitism, when unchecked…

... can lead to tragedy. Anne Levy, a volunteer at The National WWII Museum believes in the power of educating the public and especially children on the Holocaust to confront prejudice and hate in America. This is part of her interview with The National WWII Museum recalling her childhood during the Holocaust.

Anne Levy:
As far as I remember my life before the war, I was just a little girl like everybody else, but just because I was Jewish, I suffered a lot during the war. I just don't know how to define it, how to describe it, because it's so hurtful as it is for anybody that's being discriminated against. I never spoke in front of people. The first time was, they were bringing the Anne Frank exhibit to New Orleans and all the schools were going through there, were bringing their children to see the exhibit, and I was approached to take part in it. She was hidden and I was hidden. And I always thought if there's anything since I survived, I had an obligation and what is it that I could do? What could I do? And so I decided that was the way to do it: Talk to children. Because as a child survivor talking to children of age that would understand it. ... And that became my mission really, to talk to schools. And you'll be surprised how you wake up some of these kids that have been programmed to hate.

I experienced firsthand—I'm going to tell this story because it always has stayed with me—I spoke at a school and this young girl wrote me a note, and in it she mentioned that her father hated Jews, and that that came up in the family home. And she wrote me that when she listened and what I had to say, she went home and she looked at her father, told him what she had heard and what she has learned, and that that wasn't true, what he was saying. That made such a difference to me. To think and for that to give her the strength to go to her father and confront him with his beliefs—that was the best thing that ever happened, for her to be able to do that.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
For many like Anne, emphasizing the importance of the war and its legacy is vital for the present and future. In the immediate postwar years, Americans struggled with how to deal with that legacy.

Danny Greene:
The Jews in the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II exhibit really a variety of responses to the question of how much do they want talk about or publicly face the horrors of the Holocaust. One of the things I think that I as a historian wish we could know more about is, what were survivors saying to each other in private? But we do see aspects of memorial culture in the United States in the ’40s and ’50s. Not as much as we'll see by the ’60s, ’70s, or certainly by the 1990s and the 21st century, but there are cultural ceremonies that we can point to and religious ceremonies. Some Jewish communities start to write in references to Nazi persecution, for example, in the Passover Seder, the religious ceremony that celebrates the Jews freedom from slavery.

And then I think we see some important pop culture turning points in popular culture, especially around moments like the Broadway play debut of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1955 that becomes a popular movie in 1959. There's not a lot of Jewish content actually though to that story. Anne Frank's Jewishness arguably is played down. And I think then the moment of a huge turning point where we really do start to hear from survivors comes in the early 1960s with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. And in that trial in Israel, then we really start to hear testimony from survivors about their experiences.

Jews in the United States are not a monolith, so you really see a wide variety of a community trying to cope with memories and also trying to move on. Many survivors were young people who wanted to come to the United States and establish their lives here, have families, and raise those families, have careers—and are maybe not as focused on their wartime experiences then as they are when we come to a moment like today, where we're getting to the very end of living witnesses to the war.

Anne Levy:
We'll be gone in another five, 10 years. But it's teachers, museums that will teach the future, because we won't be here teaching. That's all there is.

Danny Greene:
I think it's critically important to learn about the history of the Holocaust and the history of antisemitism in a United States context as well. If you're looking at the war years or the prewar years, the Nazi period in the 1930s before we go to war, I think it's too easy to assume—and I see students assume this sometimes—“Oh, well, there was antisemitism over there in Nazi Germany, but here in the United States, we were a country that was accepting of immigrants, tolerant and a land without prejudice.” And of course, there's a lot to celebrate about the American immigration story, including for Jews. The United States has in fact often been a land of opportunity for Jewish immigrants, but it's also been a land, as it was in the 1930s, where the doors are relatively closed. The Jewish refugees and antisemitism is an important reason why.

As we kind of back out of that, maybe to a higher level, antisemitism is dangerous. Antisemitism is dangerous to Jews, but it's dangerous to others as well. It's often a harbinger of other forms of hate. When we see a society with a great deal of antisemitism, we often witness other forms of prejudice taking hold. The Holocaust, of course, is the prime example of the dangers of unchecked antisemitism, but we should never ignore antisemitism. Antisemitism, unfortunately, is very adaptable, so we see antisemitism change over time. It can be adaptable to the times, but it's not grounded in facts or in reality. It's grounded in hateful lies about Jews. And ultimately I think a society where lies thrive, whether it's lies about Jews or other sorts of lies that thrive, is a society where democracy is under threat. So often in societies as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s where we see antisemitism thrive, we see democracy crumble very quickly.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
For those who amplified pro-Nazi ideologies in prewar America, like Father Coughlin and Fritz Kuhn, both men were ultimately forced out of the public eye. And in the case of Kuhn, he was deported to West Germany after serving time in prison for financial crimes. But the battle against antisemitism in America still continues today, uniting those looking to build a more just and welcoming United States. Thank you for listening to this podcast series from The National WWII Museum. Subscribe and follow for future podcast programs. This podcast is made possible by the support of the Billy Rose Foundation.