- We've seen the footage,
the dictator frothing at the mouth,
the uniformed masses raising their right arms.
We're familiar with the photos, the ghettos,
the box cars, the refugees with their thousand-yard stares.
And we know where the story ends, in death camps,
in crematoria, with body stacked unbearably high.
What was the catalyst that took Germany from a democracy
to a genocidal dictatorship?
When did the Nazis realize
that they could get away with genocide?
(tense brooding music)
Ever heard of boiling frog syndrome?
No, it's not some insane medical condition.
It's an old analogy that explains how it's possible
for humans to accept, well, basically anything,
even things that are utterly unacceptable.
It goes like this.
Let's say that for some reason, you wanna cook a frog alive.
Side note, don't do this.
You have two options.
The first is just to drop him in a pot of boiling water.
If that doesn't kill him right away,
he'll do his best to jump out, because being dropped
in a pot of boiling water hurts.
But if you don't want him to squirm and escape,
you ease him into his fate.
You stick him in a pot full of tap water
and slowly turn up the heat.
And in the metaphor, he won't notice
that he's being cooked alive until it's too late.
Sure, it's gross and cruel,
but it illustrates an uncomfortable facet of human nature.
Under the right circumstances,
humans can come to accept almost anything.
And that's one of the many reasons that the Nazis
were able to exterminate millions of people
while their neighbors stood by or participated.
The Holocaust didn't start with death camps.
It was a gradual process, a slow burn
that eventually turned to a rolling boil.
But by that point, it was too late.
The fire was raging.
The box cars were full.
Within 12 years, Europe's diverse
and thriving Jewish communities had turned to ash.
So how did it start?
How do we go from this to this?
World War I left Germany in tatters.
Millions of Germans were dead, and it was the victors
who determined Germany's fate after the war.
Germany didn't exactly want to sign a treaty
that demanded it reduce its military, give up territory,
and pay other countries for the cost of the war.
But they didn't have much of a choice.
Ordinary Germans seethed with anger and humiliation,
and their feelings of betrayal only intensified
as their country buckled under the weight
of reparations payments.
By 1923, the German mark
was more or less worthless, seriously.
The government was printing billion mark notes,
and they weren't enough to buy a cup of coffee.
People were desperate and demoralized and angry.
How could their leaders
have stabbed them in the back like this?
How could this have been allowed to happen?
The Nazis provided German society with a perfect scapegoat.
Jews had lived in Germany for over 1,500 years.
Some of those years were good.
Most were not.
But by World War I, Jews were German citizens,
many of whom served their country proudly during the war.
Though some of Germany's Jews were quite religious,
a significant percentage were fully secular
and integrated into German society.
Still, they maintained a Jewish identity,
a marker of their difference.
And when things are bad, being different is dangerous.
By 1923, the Nazis were ready to seize their moment.
The government of Germany, though,
was definitely not ready to cede its power,
and the Nazis' attempted coup failed miserably.
Hitler was charged with treason
and sentenced to five years in prison.
And that should have been the end of it, right?
But Hitler didn't exactly suffer in prison.
In fact, he used this time to write a 720-page book
outlining his life story and his vision for Germany.
He called it "Mein Kampf."
And by the time he left prison,
having served less than nine months
of his five-year sentence,
he was ready for a career in politics.
See, the coup had convinced him
that violence wasn't the answer.
If he wanted real power, he'd have to get it legally.
But the Nazi party got less than 3% of the vote
in the 1928 parliamentary elections.
And again, that should have been that
if not for the stock market crash of 1929.
The Great Depression erased whatever progress
Germany had been able to scratch out
in the years after World War I.
And as people grew impoverished and disillusioned
once again, Nazi ideas started taking off.
In the elections of 1932,
the Nazis managed to garner 37% of the vote.
It wasn't enough to make Hitler the president of Germany,
but it was enough for the current president
to start getting worried.
So instead of ignoring the Nazis, President Hindenburg
took his advisors' very bad suggestion to heart.
"Keep your enemies close," they told him,
"like second-in-command close."
And that's how Hitler became the chancellor of Germany,
effectively making him the head of the German government.
But if President Hindenburg had hoped to control Hitler,
he was in for a rude awakening.
In his first month as chancellor, Hitler convinced
the president to suspend individual rights and due process.
Overnight, the German government gave itself the power
to round up political dissidents,
censor newspapers, overthrow state governments
and outlaw political organizations it didn't like.
Ordinary Germans, whether Jewish or not,
could no longer rely on freedom of speech or assembly,
and they could no longer trust the media,
which was now another arm of the state.
But Hitler wasn't gonna stop there.
By March of 1933, he'd built a concentration camp
to house his political opponents.
And then he began the systematic process
of stripping Jews of their rights.
First, he organized an anti-Jewish boycott.
Then he forbade Jews from holding civil service positions
or practicing law.
He was crafty though.
Some Jews were allowed to keep their civil service jobs
if they met certain strict conditions.
Then came the quotas.
Soon, Jews could no longer make up more than 5%
of any public school or university.
Those who were allowed to stay were forced
to endure the grotesque new Nazi curriculum.
Remember, all of this was legal.
Protest, on the other hand,
grew increasingly dangerous.
And what was there to protest, really?
After all, some Jews could still do their jobs
and attend public schools.
This was a temporary measure for security, right?
But remember the frog in the boiling water.
Follow-up laws targeted the so-called undesirables
of society, the mentally or physically disabled.
So-called criminals, a category that included non-violent
or low-level offenders, and even alcoholics.
It was a test.
Would German society protest a government measure
to keep them safe by eliminating criminals?
Did German society really object to the government
keeping the gene pool strong by weeding out the sick?
Slowly, the Nazis were writing the playbook
on how to commit genocide.
You don't start with murder.
You don't start with persecuting the average Joe.
No. Instead, you target the people on the fringes.
You find a justification to oppress them.
Your minister of propaganda works overtime
to make sure that everyone knows how dangerous they are.
Then, you turn up the heat just a little,
just to make them uncomfortable,
just to see what you can get away with.
And eventually, people forget or get used to it.
And if they make too much noise,
well, that's why you've got concentration camps,
to shut out dissent.
This is how you make a new reality.
This is how you boil a frog alive.
There was only one check on Hitler's power,
German president, Paul Von Hindenburg.
But he was 86 and dying of cancer.
And when he passed away in the summer of 1934,
Hitler passed a law that basically made him
both president and chancellor.
The last check on his power was gone.
Germany's new president, chancellor,
dictator banned Jehovah's Witnesses,
made homosexuality a crime,
passed race laws that stripped Jews
and other racial minorities of their citizenship
and their protections under the law.
It was time for act 2, physical violence.
But remember, everything needed to look legal.
So the Nazis waited for a pretext.
They found it in Herschel Grynszpan.
Grynszpan was only 17 when he entered
the German Embassy in Paris with a pistol.
He asked to speak to a diplomat, any diplomat.
He got a young Nazi named Ernst Vom Rath.
"You're a filthy kraut,"
Grynszpan told Von Rath in perfect German.
And then he shot him five times.
Grynszpan didn't resist arrest.
A postcard in his pocket explained why he killed the Nazi.
His parents, along with 12,000 other Polish Jews
living in Germany, had just been deported without cause.
And Grynszpan was horrified and heartbroken.
So he wrote to his mom and dad, "I could not do otherwise.
May God forgive me.
The heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy
and that of the 12,000 Jews.
I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest.
And that I will do. Forgive me."
The whole world did hear his protest,
but it was soon drowned out by the sound of breaking glass.
The Nazis seized their chance.
They framed the whole affair as proof
of a Jewish conspiracy against all Germans.
Hadn't they been saying for years now that the Jews
were their enemy, that they were the reason
that Germany was suffering, that it had lost World War I.
It was time to punish the architects
of Germany's misfortune.
Nazi top brass instructed their three paramilitaries
to raise hell in Jewish communities across Germany.
Police and fire departments were told not to intervene.
So they didn't.
Meanwhile, German police, on Nazi orders,
deported 30,000 Jewish men to Dachau, Buchenwald,
solely for being Jewish.
The heat was all the way up now.
The water was boiling.
The world condemned the so-called Night of Broken Glass,
or as it's known in German, Kristallnacht.
President Roosevelt even demanded the American Ambassador
to Germany to return home.
But no one stopped trading with the Nazis.
Even Germany's harshest critics were reluctant
to take in the masses of Jewish refugees
scrambling to get away.
The Nazis' test had worked.
The police had fallen in line just as instructed.
The fire department had let the synagogues burn.
Neighbors watched.
Few, if any, protested.
And the rest of the world could mouth platitudes
about how awful this was, how uncivilized,
how bad they felt, but no one was taking concrete action.
No one sanctioned the Nazis or embargoed, or protested,
or took in the thousands upon thousands of refugees
who needed somewhere to go.
I don't think it makes sense to label a single event
as the start of it all.
History is a lot more tangled than that.
But Kristallnacht just might have been the moment
that the Nazis realized they could get away
with something like the Holocaust.
This was proof that they could do
whatever they wanted to the Jews.
And from there, it was a straight line
to the Final Solution.
But things were moving quickly now.
Within seven years of Kristallnacht,
two-thirds of Europe's Jews would be gone.
So there's a reason we commemorate
the Night of Broken Glass every year,
not because it's the worst moment of the Holocaust,
not because it was the only atrocity,
not even because it was the moment it all began,
but because this was the moment the reality sank in.
And it's a reminder for us to be vigilant,
to stop the water before it boils,
to intervene when we see something go so terribly wrong,
to make good on our promise of never again.