we're kicking off our morning session at the department of national security and strategy. we focus on this how the event shaped the holocaust.

he also serves as presidential counselor of the museum. heat advisory finger prints are all over this one. we really are grateful for that. we'll especially things up with questions as part of an important conversation on this topic. >> good morning. thank you so much for being with us this early in the morning. i say to someone if this program continues until next thursday, we will be starting at 6:00 many

the morning. the remarks we're talking about this morning, the holocaust and what's important to understand is that road was a crooked one. maybe starting with hitler's anti-semitism. there's a debate among his tor -- historians when it started. i think it started with his vienna years. that's when he encountered a lot of jews where he was failing as an artist. when he came to power, he quickly began to exclude the german public life.

he threatened annihilation of the jewish in the event of war. hitler would use this kind of prophesy after 1939. on december 12, 1941, this was the day after he declared war on the united states.

he said, coming back to his prophesy, regarding the jewish question, he's determined to clear the table. he warned jews if they were the cause of another world war i it would lead to their destruction. those were not empty words, he added. now the war has come. the destruction of the jews must be the necessary consequence. we cannot be sentimental about it. if you think about the holocaust, don't think about a

straight line. he was the previous convener of the presidential counselors. she's the author of too well known books, sort of a history

of berlin. also, a book on the warsaw prizing of 1944. you heard he's the chair of war studies. he's teaching history. he's written well known books on world war i and he comes back to world war ii. i remember chairing a panel where she was talking about a book of his. he's come back to world war ii with the book that just out when france failed. he will talk about that this

morning. i hand it over to alex richie. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. i know it's very early. i know this subject is very, very grim and very difficult to face sometimes. it's also very necessary to look at the holocaust, to look at the final solution and to understand really how crucial this was in hitler's war, in the nazis war and the consequences of what hitler began.

it's a very important thing to understand some of steps that lead to the final solution and that's what the conference was all about. on january 20, 1942, a number of elegant, black cars would be seen pulling up to this lovely place and the house owned by right wing industrialist in germany had in 1941 been sold to the ss and the ss used it as a guest house when they wanted to meet the guys to come in and have some drinks together and have a meal. this was the place they chose.

to discuss the final solution of the jewish question in europe. hitler called him the man with if -- the iron heart. the germans, the nazis originally wanted to push the jews out of germany and austria. not enough countries were willing the take them in.

when none of these worked they round the jews up in poland. put them in ghetto, walled them in and many tens of thousands died of starvation, of disease and so on in these ghettos alone. this was not yet the final solution. many people were dying.

specifically deck indicated by hitler. this mass murder began right away. this was called the holocaust by bullets. 1.4 million people were simply lined up or in mass graves and forest or whatever and shot. what were you going to do with the population of jews in poland. hitler wanted to create a paradise in the east.

this is where the conference fits in. hitler corrected calculated you could shoot people in the soviet union and get away with it. this would be noticed by the rest of the world. this was the beginning of the genesis. the idea of the extermination camp. this was absurd. the nazis put their engineering

minds to work. they put together in things they developed into this horrific conclusion. one was the euthanasia program. they wanted to kill people with disabilities or mentally handicapped. they didn't fit into this perfect nazi world. second piece of the puzzle was the ability to move large numbers of people. this began in things like the olympic games.

it's really quite terrible to have to shoot tens and tens of thousands of people into pits. the sensibilities were being challenged. they were looking for a more, i suppose, kind way of killing people. not kind for the victims but kind for the perpetrators.

it worked. they started using the small crematorium. this was true of what could become extermination camps. they were up and running. he proposed the construction of a gas chamber and this would be first actual extermination camp. they were hidden deep in forest. nobody could see them but they

were reached by train line that came right up to the camps. the particular invitation is sent to martin luther. you may be able to see the original date was december 9th, 1941. quite a few important things happened in december of 1941 which would be one of the most dramatic week of the war.

hitler seems to consider this to be a way to trigger to give the go ahead on the mass murder for remaining jewss of europe. returns to his prophesy on the 30th of january. if the jews ever started a world war again, they started this, it would mean they're annihilation. in reality, this meant the jews of europe were doomed. they were all well educated. eight of them had academic

doctorates. he was there on hand. it was he who was going to be in charge of this new innovative idea of exterminating europe. this is a picture. what is really very, very chilling, i still can't look at this list without feeling sick. it's a list, if you can read it of countries of europe and elsewhere as well because turkey

is included and morocco and the number of jews the nazis figured out lived in places. europe was come to from west to east. every single jewish man, woman and child was going to be found and transported to the east. what is shocking is it's the scale of the crime they were planning. here they were in glorious villa having a wonderful breakfast, the cognac had already started to flow.

the rest would have to disappear. the meeting took an hour and a half. that was resolved. the nazi machine pulled together to create and run these any factory of death. up with of the most terrible years of systematic mass killing in the history of man kind. most of those people died in one

year. they were supposed to be destroyed. one person, martin luther decided he was going to keep his. we don't know why. he hid it away in his papers. after the war it was discovered by a brit. he handed it over to u.s. prosecutor who used it in later

proceedings. ooze for the other participant who is survived, only a few were brought to trial. they were deporting these people to the east. we didn't understand what it meant. absolutely nothing and frajicily this argument worked and they didn't go to prison. they got off scot-free and had successful careers in west germany after the war.

who named nazi criminals who were having wonderful careers. he tried the explain what he meant. this was the time of the cold war and he was ignored. sadly, he committed suicide in despair. as we all know, attitudes changed in west germany so by the 1980s, the holocaust had become very much more of an important subject in both germany and around the world. for those who have been on or going to go on my rise and fall tour, we go to the conference which has a new display in sort

of rebound an we also go to aushwitz and it's this terrifying reminder of these gentlemen, in quotation marks, having their wonderful breakfast then you go to see the horrors of what the camps were lieng and bha the consequences were of their life comments and discussions. it's chilling as to how something like the holocaust can happen. thank you. [ applause ]

>> good morning. i want to say what a pleasure it's here to be here at an actual conference. i want to thank everybody i know worked hard to put this together. i have to be honest you, i'm not a holocaust scholar. as i was reflecting upon this, i think this might be the first time in 25 plus years of coming the conferences that i've spoken about the holocaust. my work kept me coming back to themes of second world war history in dh ways of america's relationship touched on everything. it touched on the eastern front. it touched on the middle east. it touched on the holocaust as well. i want to talk about the way the very strange relationship to that very strange political entipty conditioned much of what the united states knew and what it did.

what they manage to get out is an unoccupied or free zone shown here in blue on this map. it maintains control of the french navy and control over the french empire overseas. those are critical for american planners who are shocked that france had fallen. what will happen to that fleet and what will happen inside the french empire. the two men most connected with france, the men on the left is pierre. uniformly disliked inside the

united states. the man on the right is one of the great heroes of the great world war for france. he's a man very much loved and admired inside the united states. there's still six american states that had streets or boulevards in them. the american administration, especially secretary of state and the ambassador to france, gave these two men a lot of room and a lot of space inside u.s. policy.

in part because of promises that despite everything that had happened in 1940, france and the united states could continue with positive relationships. he clearly knew what was going on. at one point when robert murphy questioned, his answer was if you don't like what we're doing with jews, we'll be happy to send them to you.

the united states also knew that those people elsewhere inside of france were being sent to this place. you'll pass by the station which is where it was. it contained four works toilet, no heat, minimal food and water and the united states knew all about it. this political cartoon here is showing this is the domestic plan that the government had to renew france.

there's a word for judaism and capitalism all tied together about the role of jews inside europe. a wide open category that included teachers, doctors, anything in the civil service. it was coming either directly or indirectly through france. it was coming from french source or from swiss sources that were

then sending them through france. he demanded an answer as to what had gone onto that cable. roosevelt refused to get involved. this happened in the summer of 1942.

just for your nflgs, this dm did not appear on the front page of any american newspaper. it appeared only in the back pages. the number of reports coming out of france where the unoccupied zone, so people can operate slightly more freely from german interference.

reports of fren mp officially actively supporting the deportation and the killings going on inside france. it's possible he was getting on top of the news cycle trying to get out in front of the story. the second thing that's going on and as you can hopefully figure out is the united states and great britain are getting very close to executing operation torch and coming into north africa. the united states and britain have no idea what the response of french frorss are going to look like once they get there. this could be part of trying to lay the ground work for saying if they do not cooperate, we're trying to lay the ground work to take it out.

some argue that one thing is true that's not true about occupied france is it has borders, mountainous, difficult to patrol borders that can let some jewish escapees get into spain, switzerland which was good for jews until the fall of the german occupation of northern italy. it's very easy for people to

move between france and the french em spire. that means morocco, algeria. it has far fewer cities inside of it. those in the unoccupied zone are in paris. in france, most are scattered throughout the country side making it harder for police units to come and get them. there was an active, underground operating inside france that was trying to protect these people and get them to safety when they could.

we know what he did in 1942, the year alex sited as being so critically important. the own behavior in 1942 begins to change. where as trying to police the people as gently as possible. every time i read that, every time i read a title like that, it just boggles the mind to think they created an office like that meaning they are perfectly up front and comfortable doing what they did.

the second world war for the french is a war between the resistance. this has been the memory of the war in france that french people have been trying to deal with. when the united states and great britain entered north africa and entering operation torch, this ends france. now it's not just french forces but germans as well. what i want to do with this to make sure i end on time, i want to end with something that's always fascinating me. many of the places, they kr created historical markers to

indicate what happened and where. this is what i'd like to end with. i hope some of you in the back can read it. it's talking about deportations on the 16th and 17th of july, 1942 when jews were arrested in paris in its suburbs. this is talking about another one of these round ups. they were placed in inhumane conditions. by the police of the government under the order of the nazi occupiers. these are fascinating as historian.

the language of this, the way you understand this, the way you create a historical memory of this is to me, fascinating in is the political debate that remains ongoing. much of the own anti-semitism was driving the way that france behaves. for the united states, this was not a high moment of, high morality for us either. the united states raised no objection to the anti-semitic policies that had been going on. the united states luallowed the

to run north africa for a good long time and the united states raised no objection. no american official raised any objection to the suspension or insisted upon changes in domestic policy. remiepds everybody for many people living inside europe and france, the battles over memory, the battle over the political meaning of these events continues to be something that is very important in the french political sphere. it's important today as they have a presidential election coming and it's back in the news as a result of that. thanks very much. [ applause ]

>> thank you for the wonderful presentation. i'm going to start out by asking them a question or so and then we'll throw it out to the audience for questions and answers. both ended with an appeal of these events. this is a reminder for you that we have a memory conference coming up in march. the question i have is the issue of the importance of the conference on this twisted road. i think it was front and center

as the turn point towards the final solution but now more recent the holocaust they see a continuum with hitler speech of december 12th and so forth. >> i think one of the reasons-so important in the early scholarship was because we had the proof of it. if you've got the whole protocol and the information, it's very, very rare to have documentation saying this is what we're going to do. this was gold dust for holocaust scholars.

in the '70s and '80s, there are were two schools of thought. the funl solution was the result of this one thing leading the another and another. with the opening up of the archives with the collapse of the soviet union, the functionalist won the day because we got so much more evidence from the files, including the things like the day book and complete diaries which show step by step how this came about.

there are important meetings that took place that we don't have evidence of. there were other meetings but it seems hitler made the final solution some time in the autumn of 1941. and that is pointed to by new scholarship and evidence from the soviet union. in that sense, to answer your question, the conference was more rubber stamping exercise and as i mentioned earlier to make sure that the ss made sure there was not going to be any interference from other bodies, that they were going to be in charge of this and nobody else was going to get a look in. that's really the significance of it. it's one in many other meetings and ideas that came along

between 1941 and 1942. >> thank you. i find it odd or ironic the official after whose minutes survived is martin luther. we associate holier matters with that name. >> exactly. >> indeed, it's ironic. he would have been chastised had he been discovered he kept the minutes. we are very grateful, ironically that he did. >> okay, thank you, alexandra. a question for michael. michael, you pointed to the fact roosevelt made this decision to recognize the vichy government and that you say was a very unpopular decision. >> the way i love to do this is to show clips from the movie "casablanca" being made at this point.

one of the last scenes is him opening up a bottle of vichy water and throwing it in the trash can. they were clearly turning to charles de gaulle as a free france movement, fighting france. leahy was being disillusioned. they saw a lot they liked. they saw a government that was stable, that they thought they could manipulate with carrots and sticks, and a government anti-communist and anti-charles de gaulle, both popular inside washington. this tension between the american government pursuing this policy and the intense, intense hatred inside the united states and it's a reason roosevelt pulled marshall to launch operation torch before 1942.

if the midterm elections of 1942 turned on foreign policy roosevelt is reasonably weak and that's what they're worried about. to me it was fascinating the way the threads of vichy connect to everything. >> i think the importance of your book and you sort of pointed out in your introduction you are trying to salvage the u.s./french relationship in the war from oblivion, so to speak. americans are infatuated or enthralled with the special relationship to great britain, and you say wait a minute, don't forget france. in your introduction you make, i think, an important point that i'd like you to debate a bit more, namely that for the u.s., you say the war began with the fall of france in may/june of 1940 and not with pearl harbor. could you develop that a bit?

>> if you think about this, so france -- the united states' policy in the 1920s and 1930s begins with an unquestioned assumption the french navy, they will keep the germans away long enough until we can commit at the time of our choosing. when the french army is no longer there and the french navy is in this weird state where it's part of the weird country of vichy, those assumptions go away. it includes senegal, the part of africa and interferes with the shipping lanes, martinique, where half of france's gold is. the map goes from something that looks safe and secure for americans to something that looks terrifying for americans and it's in this period, these few weeks after the fall of france that we pass the two

ocean navy acts, this is where destroys for bases goes through. these enormous spending bills that keep going up and up and up as people get more and more scared where we debate a 4 million man army in 1940 that marshall and roosevelt ratchet down to 2 million. it's this flurry that gets the united states involved and the key thing, and i credit pete crane, ridgeway was in the division and ridgeway is righting to marshall and to president roosevelt saying, look, we no longer choose the time of our entry into the war now. the fall of france means this is no longer in our control. it is this moment of absolute panic. i don't want to go on too long but another thing vichy connects to is roosevelt's decision to tell the fbi just ignore the fourth amendment of the constitution on wire taps, the

two recent supreme court cases and do what you have to do in the opening up of this tension between civil liberty and security. >> the point stephanie made yesterday the u.s. constitution is under threat with all these wartime orders. ladies and gentlemen, we have about 20 minutes left for your questions. i defer to you. you're a wonderful audience. you have lots of good questions which are surely much smarter than mine would be. jeremy, do you want to take over? >> yes, we'll start to your left in the very back, please. >> thank you very much for this very interesting panel. one question to michael, you remember you closed your presentation with a plague and how big discussions are going on in france about how they should be written and what sort of

memory we should state vichy. how would you write this plague after having written the whole book and why? >> i'm really tempted to give the army answer that as a federal employee i cannot comment on the intergovernmental affairs of another state. i think i'm going to do that. i'll be happy to talk to you off line. i'm going to duck that question since i am a federal employee here on official business. i can't believe i got away with that. >> great answer, man. great answer. pardon my voice. i'll do this as quickly as possible. the point was made we had never seen a killing like this before.

my mom's family walked across the syrian government in about 1915 because there was a killing of this scale going on. to a better point, though, you guys do great scholarship and i still wish i was a history professor and not hiding as an administrator now, but, thank you. the point being it's not us you have to be talking to. look around this country. there are people thinking it's okay to be nazis. we have to be speaking to the people that aren't listening to us. make our scholarship accessible. i think if they knew the stories you are telling about how horrible this is and why public history is important to understanding these things, we would be a better country. [ applause ] >> your point is well taken about the armenian genocide, of course, and hitler himself said who remembers the armenians?

and he was very well aware of the fact that was a precedent which he very consciously referred to. you can mass murder hundreds of thousands of people and nobody seems to bother much. it's very important also in the run-up to the genocide. the point i was trying to make, yes, there had been genocides, mass killings before, but what made the holocaust and to this day the final solution slightly different was the use of all of this technical and engineering know-how to create an entire system whereby, for example, in one month 315,000 people are mass murdered and the scale to which it was done. this is not to denigrate the fate of the armenians or others

but to say this was a quite unique mechanism. >> next question is immediately to your front with connie on the right side, please. >> thank you both so much for an excellent presentations. a question for michael if we can go back to the plaque, and maybe we could see it again. is that possible? facing it to the bottom right there are hebrew letters. what are they? >> i think they mean don't forget. the french letters never forget. i think that's what the hebrew is referring to, though i wouldn't bet my mortgage on that. >> okay. well, we have to find out. >> i'm pretty sure it says never forget. >> in hebrew or in yiddish? >> in hebrew because, of course, these are jews, most of whom would not have spoken yiddish, would have spoken french,

unlikely to be yiddish. there it is. >> an interesting point the first jews who were transported were jews who were stateless and, therefore, were, in a sense, easy to move. including one whose parents were being deported across the german/polish border in such terrible condition he murdered an official. >> just to be clear what it says is never forget. it says passerby remember and uses the informal form of french so it's an informal speaking to you as a friend kind of thing. i don't know what the hebrew says. >> to your left towards the front, please. >> was there a relationship between the german campaign

against the soviet union and the decisions made in the timing of the decisions made? >> well, yes. as i mentioned the first phase of what we know of as the holocaust was the invasion of the soviet union and it was the mass killings into pits, the holocaust by bullets. and so this was really the first phase when the germans had decided, the nazis had decided, the ex termination of the jews was paramount now, the closing of all borders, the last place jews could get out of europe was lisbon. that was closed off at the same time and the decision was made not to try and push jews out to palestine or britain but to lock them in and then they were destined for mass murder. it is related to the invasion of the soviet union as the first phase of the holocaust. >> next question is in the center aisle with connie please.

>> in his book hitler's willing executioners, they go into great detail explaining how hitler didn't have to do a whole lot of motivating to many germans because for centuries back to martin luther, germany's jewish problem or misery was discussed and like police battalion 101 took their wives along killing thousands and thousands of jews in pits in poland. i still have difficulty in putting my head around how cultured people could just ignore all this stuff and go on. they're the ones, the functionaries and the cops and the guys in the police 101 were older. they were not members of the

nazi party, took their wives along and killed with glee. help me understand what happens there? >> again, one of the most baffling questions of history, how could the germans, this land of beethoven and schiller have become the perpetrators of such a horrific crime. everything was preplanned and the anti-semitism led to the holocaust. you mentioned others have put a little bit more nuance on to this. the germans weren't predestined to do this. that makes it even worse because it wasn't something they couldn't help in their dna. the holocaust was man made. it was choices taken day by day

by people like those who made this decision and they made this decision and they made this decision which ended up in this horrific mass murder and the irony after the war, as i said, even talking about the people who were arrested and questioned over their involvement said we didn't do anything. no idea what you're talking about. we weren't involved in this. we didn't shoot anybody. we didn't go to the camps. didn't know they existed. they were able to morally distance themselves from the fact they knew exactly what transportation to the east meant. called the jews pieces, not human beings, and this language was developed to distance themselves morally from the thing they were doing. the overall question is one of the great mysteries. when we say never again and this should never happen again, what

do we mean? education, what is it we're trying to warn against, to prevent? it doesn't help, oh, they were just anti-semitic from birth. it will never happen with us. that's not the answer. every single human being is capable of great good and great evil and if the circumstances, propaganda, the conditions are of such that people make those wrong, immoral, criminal choices, how does that come about, how do we prevent that from coming about? >> let me add something here. in german it sounds even better. [ speaking foreign language ] how could the people of poets and thoughtful people, philosophers, become the people of hangmen, so to speak? but on the controversy i would add this.

i remember when he was here giving a speech and filled a synagogue, more than 1,000 people. he was a phenomenon when the book came out in germany, too. then i think more thoughtful people like chris browning, who has been at this conference, came and gave a more nuanced explanation of the police battalion 101. and so i would say today it is no longer the gold standard because he came one an argument the nazis had been anti-semitic since the middle ages and they still were at the time of world war ii and that explains it all. >> to your left at the very front, please. >> thank you very much. the nazis were a lot of things, but they were not chemical or mechanical engineers. can you talk about the role that

german industry played in the development of these camps, and were any of them ever held accountable for their role or any consequences in making these things happen? >> no, there were nazis who were chemical engineers and biologists and the experts in the t4 euthanasia program went on to work -- they were pediatricians and medical doctors or whatever who then when the euthanasia program stopped just transferred into working in the camps and figuring out what was the best way to gas people or whatever else. the organization and all of many other industrial concerns were involved in the creation of the camps, specialists came to check how do you build the crematorium, how do you empty from the canisters and so on.

on all layers of german society, industry, finance and chemists and all others took part in this exercise. and you will of this, for example, with the building of auschwitz we have documentation for practically every single contract that was given out to these people. we have evidence of the contracts, for example, of the companies that worked in the warsaw ghetto. we have lists and lists of these things but, again, after the war, most of these people got off scot-free because they said i have nothing to do with this. i didn't pull the trigger. i didn't kill anybody. with very few exceptions. you have horrific cases of some of the doctors involved in the euthanasia program and, indeed, in the holocaust itself being famous pediatricians or medical doctors in german society. i think one of the problems after the war was the disconnect

between the mass of people who were involved in creating this horror and the misunderstanding it wasn't just those at the top who did this. it was many, many people involved but they were often cogs in the wheel. there wasn't the enthusiasm because we needed chemists and engineers. so a blind eye was turned to a lot of people who should have been questioned if not in prison. >> alexandra, let me add a footnote since you mention the role of doctors in the euthanasia program. not too long ago there was a book and dr. asperger, an austrian doctor who gave the name to asperger syndrome and

explained in how he was involved in killing children. she pleads for the name being changed. it hasn't happened yet but to show you how these battles are still being fought as new information is being discovered. >> the next question is to your far right halfway back with connie. >> just a quick lead-in to the question. i was fortunate enough to work with edward teller a long time ago. there was a comment in a private conversation we were having, and he said it's going to happen again. holocausts are going to happen again. and i asked him and he didn't mean just to jews. he said holocausts will happen again around the world. they have. he was right -- cambodia, africa, today ongoing, others,

kosovo. you can perhaps add to the list or correct my comment. there aren't probably too many holocaust deniers here in this forum, but there are some around the world. are forums like this, the kinds of research that you all and others here continue to do, are memorials and plaques enough to prevent more holocausts from occurring? if not, what else can be done? >> it's a huge, huge question. i think that everything we try to do whether or not it's the creation of institution, respect for international law, those put

into place because and after the horrors of the second world war, fighting against holocaust deniers, the trial against david irving was a milestone and constantly trying to say to people who denied the holocaust, look, this is the evidence. absolutely 100% credible scholarship so nobody could say this wasn't correct, whatever else. i think the real way to prevent such things is to build democratic tolerance based on the rule of law and those rights and privileges put in place after the war. it's a tall, tall order, very difficult. and then education and so on. >> this is why the debate was so important. if you wanted to you could say, well this is specific to germany

and we can kind of close the door and sleep at night that this isn't going to repeat itself. that's why the book was a hit in germany. you've locked the door, turned that behind you. i wish i could believe it. as you pointed out, the evidence is that isn't true. i'm not sure if it reaches the levels it needs to and the way people understand our work is important. >> i think ultimately what it depends on is whether it will get into the schools. we can do it here, we can do it at the university level but if it doesn't reach school and you have school administrators in texas who think the holocaust needs to be contextualized then we're in trouble. >> to your left towards the front. [ applause ] >> i heard or read one time about a german concentration

camp commander asked how could you commit such monstrous acts, and he made a comment -- he said, killing one jew was hard but it made killing ten easier. killing 10 jews was hard but it made killing 100 easier. killing 100 was hard, but it made killing 1,000 easier. i don't know if you've ever heard that. would you like to comment on how this thing kind of snowballed and got worse and worse and worse? >> well, this is a common phenomenon. stalin said 1 is a number, 1 million is a statistic. people forget statistics. this is true of, i think, a situation like this. even people like hindler were worried about this one-on-one killing.

hindler goes to minsk and is shattered by it, he gets blood on his tunic and it's terrible. he says you see this is a killing of just 100 people. imagine what my poor men are facing with the killing of over a million people. and this was the impetus for the holocaust, for the ex termination camps which, of course, were very different from the camps which we know in our public memory because they were precisely that. the statistics, the numbers got so high. when you think, as you said, 1.1 million people murdered in auschwitz, how can we imagine what 1.1 million people look like whereas a group of 10 people we can relate to. i agree the higher the number the more distanced from our tiny imaginations. >> you said the perfect thing.

>> next question is to your right. >> this is a question, there had to be at some point when america's military and political leadership understood what was going on in germany. when was that? >> that's a really tough question. you have information coming in. how do you piece it together? how do you figure out what's going on? the evidence is what's being discussed is so horrible they don't believe it's actually happening. i think for others the decision making calculus is, okay, we know what's happening. what's the best way to stop it? senior government clearly knew by the fall of 1942 what

germany's intent was and what they were doing to achieve it. do you make any special effort outside the war effort to stop it. i asked this question of my family. when did you know what was going on. their answer was we heard terrible, terrible things but not until 1945 did we know for sure those rumors were true. we couldn't psychologically process it. >> the story of one of the couriers in poland who got to london who flew to see roosevelt and got himself smuggled into the transit camp and he talks to then justice frankfurter. this is what's going on, the crimes being committed. i'm an eyewitness to it and frankfurter says to him, it's not that i say you're lying, it's just i don't believe you. >> i think the debate came to

the floor in the debate about whether the lines to auschwitz should be bombed. and if you recall the assistant secretary of war mclloyd, we heard about him yesterday sort of decided not to do that because he wanted to concentrate the effort on winning the law and that would liberate the jews as he thought. i think that took place in 1944. so that's when it was discussed within the u.s. government. to your right halfway back with connie, please. >> good morning. it's funny how you remember things. years ago i watched a movie i think called "a town without pity," and it wasn't about the holocaust but a comment was it was about a trial in germany i think of an american soldier after the war. one of the comments by a german,

i think played by kirk douglas, she said the people didn't know anything, the german people. we didn't know. we didn't know. i was a kid so i believed the comment at the time. later as i did more reading there's no way they could not have known. i'm not talking about the people working at the camps, just the general population. so can you comment about -- we talk about what the united states knew. what about the german population and were there any efforts to help some jews? >> can i give it a stab? i think you are referring to the case of anna, a young woman in bavaria who somehow got interested in what did her town know. she found out nobody knew anything or said they knew nothing but she discovered there

were all kinds of war criminals in her midst. on your larger question, let me answer it from an austrian perspective. i was born in a small village in the swiss alps and there were no jewish people living there so people had probably a general anti-semitism because there was lots of nazi propaganda in that direction but they didn't have the experience of jews. if they tell me they didn't know anything, i tend to believe them. however, if you lived in a town like vienna that had 200,000 jews, more than 10% of the population was jewish and they were gone after 1938, there is no way you could not know because you saw people later on being departed if they hadn't left on their own. i would say in urban areas you

must have known. in rural areas people might get away with saying i didn't know. >> just to add to that, from the different perspective, the soldiers going off -- if you were on the eastern front in 1941-'42 there's no way you wouldn't have either seen yourself, and there was massacre tourism, people going with cameras and taking pictures of these massacres, although sometimes it was frowned upon, you certainly would have heard more about what they were up to and would have known about the treatment of the soviet prisoners of war at 5.2 million of whom were captured and about 3.5 million died in terrible conditions. it was impossible for a soldier on the front to not have had knowledge of the crimes committed by the germans. they were going home on leave, ways in which this information sort of filtered into society. the question was what could a

german do about it if they heard there was a massacre on the eastern front? and so i think a lot of people stepped back. they didn't want to accept responsibility and chose to effectively do nothing and close their minds to what was going on. so it's not that they did not know but they chose not to pay attention. >> but there was also germans and austrians who resisted. the brave people we're going to talk about next year in a symposium, but let me mention two cases, the white rose students, the brothers and sisters in munich who protested because they knew terrible things happened on the eastern front. they were executed by the nazis and there was a lesser known

austrian case, a very simple farmer living where hitler was born close to upper austria. he refused to be drafted and he was executed for refusing to be drafted because that couldn't be tolerated. those were brave, rare cases of people who knew and were horrified by what was happening. >> ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for our panel. thank you to gunter, alex and mike. they will be outside at the book signing station right now. first ladies: in their own words. our eight-part series looking at the role of the first lady, their time in the white house, and the issues important to them. >> it was a great advantage to know what it was like to work in schools because education is such an important issue both for

a governor but also for president and so that was very helpful to me. >> using material from c-span's award winning biography series "first ladies." >> i'm very much the kind of person who believes you should say what you mean and mean what you say and take the consequences. >> and c-span's online video library will feature lady bird johnson, betty ford, rosalynn carter, nancy reagan, hillary clinton, laura bush, michelle obama, and melania trump. watch "first ladies: in their own words" saturdays at 2:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span2 or listen to the series as a podcast on the c-span now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. now we're going to shift a bit moving to our next session, a panel on the evolving relationship between germany and the soviet union from