Americans consider themselves a 'nation of immigrants,' but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge.
Through riveting firsthand testimony of witnesses and survivors who as children endured persecution, violence and flight as their families tried to escape Hitler, this series delves deeply into the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America. Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? This is a history to be reckoned with.
In the first episode, a xenophobic backlash prompts Congress to restrict immigration. Hitler and the Nazis persecute German Jews, forcing many to seek refuge. Franklin D. Roosevelt is concerned by the growing crisis but is unable to coordinate a response.

The Nazis had relentlessly persecuted German and Austrian Jews, reducing their rights, expropriating their property, choking off their livelihoods, declaring them parasites, not citizens and on the evening of November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Hitler unleashed Nazi mobs on Jews in cities and towns all over the newly expanded Germany, beating, burning, raping, killing, hoping to drive them all out of their country. Hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews were now desperate to escape the Nazis. They knew their only hope lay in flight into friendly European countries or across the ocean to the United States.
As WWII begins, Americans are divided over whether to intervene against Germany. Some individuals and organizations work tirelessly to help refugees escape. Germany invades the USSR and secretly begins the mass murder of European Jews.

The Chicago Tribune in late June of '42 reports the mass killing of Jews. Like many other newspapers, the Tribune puts it on page 6 or 7 in a tiny, little article. You either missed it, or if you saw it, you would say the editors don't think this is true. If they thought this was true, this would be on the front pages. Only a few of papers did put the story on the front page, including the Pittsburgh Courier.
The dominant idea in the American government is any act of rescue will be a diversion from the war effort. Both could've been done at the same time. In spite of that, a group of government officials supports and finances rescue operations. Allied soldiers begin to liberate concentration camps and find mass graves. The public sees the sheer scale of the Holocaust.

Hitler’s rise to power was a unique moment in history. Germany suffered a humiliating defeat in WWI; now it's crippled by massive war reparations. Hitler offers a scapegoat: the Jews. The Nazis are quick to institute anti-Semitic laws and stoke distrust of the Jews. Anyone deemed 'undesirable,' from political opponents, to the handicapped, gypsies and Jews are sent to camps. There they are either worked to death, starved or executed. But just how much did the rest of the world know of what was going on?

A Chapter of forgotten history. The first permanent European settlement in the United States was founded in 1565–two generations before the settlements in Jamestown and Plymouth–not by English Protestants, but by the Spanish and a melting pot of people they brought with them from Africa, Italy, Germany, Ireland and even converted Jews, who integrated almost immediately with the indigenous tribes.
The film uncovers one story of America’s past that never made it into textbooks. Follow some of America’s leading archaeologists, maritime scientists, and historians as they share the story of Florida’s earliest settlers. It’s a story that has taken more than 450 years to reveal.

Part 2 examines how the freewheeling modernism that had shocked audiences in the first two decades of the century came under state control. Initially, many practitioners thought the totalitarian regimes would be good for music and the arts. What followed in Germany was a ban on music written by Jews, African-Americans and communists, while in the Soviet Union there was a prohibition on music the workers were unable to hum. After the cataclysm of the 1940s, a new generation of composers - Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Nono, Ligeti - turned their back on what they saw as the discredited music of the past and tried to reinvent it from scratch. Or, at least, from serialism, which became as much of a straitjacket as totalitarianism's strictures had been. But from this period of avant-garde experimentation, which many listeners found baffling and terrifying, came some of the most influential and radical musical innovations of the century.