- [Narrator] It was not easy for foreign correspondents
to report what was really happening in Germany.
Sources were often too frightened to talk.
Reporters were reluctant to quote witnesses by name
for fear of betraying them to the secret police
called the Gestapo.
The Nazis controlled the German press
and exhorted foreigners to report on affairs in Germany
without attempting to interpret them.
"What that meant," the American journalist,
William L. Shirer, wrote in his diary,
"is that we should jump
on the bandwagon of Nazi propaganda."
But the best American journalists did write
about what was going on,
however much the Nazi government tried to hide it.
Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the "Chicago Daily News"
covered Hitler's rise to power with such brutal candor
that in the summer of 1933, the Nazis made it clear
they could no longer guarantee his safety in Berlin.
(people chattering)
As Mowrer was leaving the country, the Nazi official asked
when he thought he might return to Germany.
The American answered, "When I come back
with about two million of my countrymen."
Dorothy Thompson's turned would come the following summer.
She had covered Europe off and on since 1920
earning a reputation for vivid reporting
and for making herself part of her stories.
She had interviewed Hitler for "Cosmopolitan Magazine"
before he came to power and had dismissed him then
as formless, faceless, insecure,
the very prototype of the little man.
But she had also read "Mein Kampf,"
saw that Hitler's nightmare vision of Germany's future
was fast becoming a reality
and refused to mince words while saying so.
"The situation for the Jews
is just ghastly, helpless," she said.
"Not only are the reports
about the atrocities unexaggerated, they are underrated."
She returned to America for a time, but continued to write
for the "Jewish Daily Bulletin" in New York.
When she visited Germany again in the summer of 1934,
Hitler, who had never forgotten
her scornful article about him and was appalled
that she, a non-Jew, had written for a Jewish publication,
personally ordered her out of the country within 24 hours.
On the morning of August 26th,
she boarded a train for France.
Her arms filled with American beauty roses
given her by her admiring colleagues.
"I really was put out of Germany
for the crime of blasphemy," she commented.
"My offense was to think
that Hitler is just an ordinary man."
- There seems to me to be a certain misunderstanding
about the Hitler movement.
A great many people seem to think
that the persecution of the Jews,
which has followed the accession to power of Hitler
is the result of something that they have done.
As a matter of fact, antisemitism has been a plank
in the National Socialist Platform for 13 years.
So call the civilized people that didn't believe
that if they came to power,
they would carry this program out.
- [Narrator] Thompson's expulsion
made her an instant celebrity in the United States.
She undertook a 30-city lecture tour
warning that Germany has gone to war already
and the rest of the world does not believe it.
And in a syndicated column,
she called upon Washington again and again,
to ease the barriers that kept desperate German Jews
from emigrating to the United States.
But the State Department claimed
that very few actually wanted to come to America.
- In the 1930s and 1940s, you could be openly antisemitic
and serve as a State Department official.
The rest of Washington is changing.
They're changing under the Roosevelt's administration.
They're changing with the new deal,
but State Department officials were more conservative.
They were more antisemitic.
They were more nativist at least openly
than anywhere else in Washington.
- [Narrator] Consular officials in Berlin
and everywhere else in Europe continued zealously
to enforce the old directive
to deny a visa to any would-be immigrant
likely to become a public charge
and, therefore, required extensive data
on each applicant's financial resources.
- The American diplomat
at certain consulates giving out visas
would have to essentially engage in divination.
Is this person likely to become a public charge?
Well, they say they have an uncle who will support them.
We have all these letters, but an uncle is not a parent,
it's not a sibling.
You couldn't come if you already had a job
because that meant you were taking a job away from America.
You couldn't come if you didn't have a job
because it meant you might end up on the dole
or have to get government support.
- [Narrator] They also continued
to insist upon duplicate copies of birth certificates
and government documents
attesting to an applicant's good character.
"It seems quite preposterous," one man recalled,
"to have to go to your enemy
and ask for a character reference."
Having made it nearly impossible
for Jewish Germans to obtain visas,
the State Department then cited the lack of applicants
to reassure the White House
that there was no immigration crisis.
Hi this is Lynn Novick.
Thanks for watching that excerpt from our film
"The U.S. and the Holocaust",
which explores the story of how the American people
grappled with one of the greatest humanitarian crises
of the 20th century.
Here are some more clips from the film
and you can watch the entire series
on the PBS Video app or at PBS.org