>> look at the density of those dots. this gives you a physical image of how concentrated the jewish population was. and this is very important because it unlocks the secret9 to something -- the secret to something. one of the few records we have of the planning to will the jews of europe is on january 20th, 19 39, the head of the ss sat down with representatives of all kinds of german institutions and asserted his authority over the process and got their agreement to participate in it. he also said something that has often been quoted that was deeply misleading. he said europe will be combed there west to east. -- from west to east. in other words, the jews would be killed first from france and the netherlands and so forth, and the killing process would go across the continent. and yet anyone who has studied the holocaust knows that that is exactly the opposite of the way it happened. the killing went from east to west at least on the northern half of the european i continen. the million and a half victims of the holocaust who were deaded by the end of 1941, so one-quarter of the total lived almost entirely in the areas where you see those dots. occupied poland and the parts of the soviet union that were invaded this 1941. -- in 1941. the few additional victims of the holocaust in 1941 are mostly german jews who are being deported from the country. in france people were not being killed in the netherlands, they were not being killed and so forth. now, why is this so? and this is the last part of my first question, why were the jews killed. why did the killing start here? why with -- why was it so intense here? i i do not believe, as has been recently argued, that the reasons or absence of local governments had anything to do with it, so-called statelessness. it is true that in most of these regions there were no independent governments. there was no to -- no pole toish government -- polish government. but lithuania and latvia had puppet governments, led by former military leaders. all of these areas had local administrations and local police forces, they were all thickly staffed with local collaborators through which thgermans worked. the reason why the killing starts here, look at the dots. the reason why the killing starts here is because this is where germany intended the expand. this is where the largest population of jews was. this is where the rest of the -- the germans expected the rest of the population to come lie or to help with the killing -- to comply or to help with the killing of the jews. and this is where the approximate sumty of the fighting -- proximity of the fighting. remember, they're still invading, there's still war going on here unlike in western europe. and this is where the fighting activated german air now ya about so-called partisans and the jews being guerrilla fighters behind their lines of which there were, in fact, very few in 1941. in other words, the reason why the killing here first is so intense is because german ideological fascination with the region coupled with the density of the jewish pop belation, the unlikeliness of local resistance to the killing of the jews and the presence of military activity. all combined to suggest to german policymakers that the solution as they called it to the longstanding jewish question was to kill the people in their path. and then it was a short step to killing the people behind them. the jews who were already in occupation this other parts of europe. i do not think as has been claimed that expectations on the germans' part of either victory or defeat had anything to do with the decision. the momentum was rolling by september9 and be october of 1941, remember those experiments as auschwitz? why are they testing gas on people at the end of august and the beginning of september? because they're looking for another method. and the momentary likelihood of either winning or losing the war could be and was used throughout 1941 as an argument to expand the killing. hitler's confidence in defeating the soviet union waxed and waned several times in the last half of 1941. whether he thought he was winning or whether he thought he was losing, the momentum increased to killing the jews who were defined as subversives and threats. and thus, it was that not only did they make the tests at auschwitz in early september, the location of another of the death camps, the construction begins on november 1st. still a third of the death camps is picked in mid november, its location. on november 18th, designated german minister of these conquered areas tells the german reporters in berlin on deep background that the physical extinction of european jewry is at hand. and the invitation to the conference went out on november 29th. it was supposedded to be held on december 7th, i think -- no, 9th. and the reason it wasn't held is because the japanese attack on pearl harbor struck the germans as a surprise, they weren't alerted in advance. berlin was thrown into consternation, the meeting was canceled. it therefore didn't occur in early december, it occurred in january. we have absolutely in reason to think that the agenda of the meeting changed in the interval. when that meeting was called in november, he knew what he intended to say and to do, and the preparations had already been made. so why were the jews killed? because of a longstanding tradition of hatred activated under particular political circumstances, fomented by a regime that was thoroughly capable of whipping up the population to participate in it, then undertook a war into a region where there were hundreds of thousands of the people it had defined as enemies. and it resolved, under the conditions of wartime, to wipe these people out. why couldn't, didn't anyone stop this? how was it that this process was allowed to unfold? the short answer is that because the jews were internally divided and largely powerless in the taste of the nazi onslaught. in the face of the nazi onslaught. and be every other relevant party always had something else her important to do. germans themselves who might have been shocked by what the nazis seemed to be encourageing actually thought in 1933 about resigning. one of the most little known facts about the history of the third reich is that the ambassadors to washington, paris, london and oslo consulted in the spring of 1933 right after hitler was appointed about whether they should all resign. because they thought this was a potentially criminal government. and in the end, only one of them did, the man who was the ambassador here in washington. the others stayed, and a man who was the ambassador in oslo who later became the second hand in the german foreign ministry offered this explanation for why. he said one does not abandon one's country because it has a bad government. the leaders of german industry didn't behave much better. there were a number of them who thought that the future looked dark and that this regime would bring trouble, and many of them were deeply opposed to the anti-semitic policies that they saw unfolding, and many of them consulted in the course of 1933 about what they could do. almost all of them came up with rationalizations for saying we should work from within, we should do what we can to make this better. the thisre was a very colorful e for this, we should do our best to see this wild-grown juice becomes wine. and that was their job. over and over the people -- and many of the industrialists who were consulted decided that what was being done to the jews was regret be bl; the expulsion more positions as university teachers started very early, the expulsion from some prominent economic positions also started early. they saw old old -- they saw all of this. it was regrettable, but the economic revival, the improvement of conditions, the assertion of national prestige, all of this outweighed what they called, quote: the inevitable excesses that come with revolution. unquote. one way or another, german bees bees -- germans found ways of rationalizing cooperation with the regime. one of my favorite quotes, history never repeats itself; people always do. and i don't need the tell you how many people in the spring of 1933 in prominent positions of german life said i have more to gain by going with the way these things are developing than by resisting them. so this was the pattern that helps to explain why so few germans stood up and resisted. europeans outside of germany were, had a horror of the repetition of world war i. they believed in the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. they feared an influx of refugees and also a very topical issue. in britain tier of immigration -- fear of immigration to palestine and the resulting political robs that would come for the british mandate was very strong. german prop be began da was, had certain appeal in allied countries because the germans kept saying was all we want is self-determination. all we want is the right that you have claimed for yourselves before we want to bring other germans back into our country. the austrians, of course, had never been german. but they spoke german. and, thus, this was a kind of idealistic appeal that was made. in the united states, a combination of nativism, antisemitism, a fear of an influx of immigrants not from germany, not from germany. there were only 560,000 german jews. even the opponents of immigration were not necessarily convinced that this country could not absorb half a million people. the problem was there were 3.3 million jews in to beland, there were 800,000j well,ews in lithu, and every single one of those governments had publicly expressed the desire to reduce its jewish population and had gone to the league of nations anded and asked for help in that respect. the ambassador of poland in great britain in 1938 actually tried to blackmail the british government into accepting 100,000 poll -- polish-jewish immigrants, or, he said, we will be compelled to adopt the policies of the german reich toward its jewish citizens. so this was a world in which resistance to immigration was enflamed by a sense that the influx would be even greater than was predicted. the extent of u.s. nativism, i think this is where we go to the next one. everybody will recognize the illustrator. almost everybody will. this is dr. seuss. and, of course, in the 1940s on the left what you have is the logic of appeasement. this is actually from 1940. no heart how many countries the germans actually go after, they will leave us alone, because they'll be tired. or even more shocking, the illustration on the right, the world chewed up the children and spit out their bones, but those were foreign children, and it didn't really matter. northwestern has a very distinguished journalism school. it's actually named after a man who was the editor of "the chicago tribune" in the late 19th sent aboutly and a vicious opponent of irish immigration to the united states. so it is, you know, the laundering of names that goes on in culture. but this ma dill school of journalism had a class that met in january 1939. now, these are journalism students. they were asked the assemble a list of the ten most significant historical events of 1938. okay? this is like the scherr hock holmes story about the dog that didn't bark. what's not on the list? the burning to have the synagogues, the attack on the jews of germany was front page on the chicago tribune. on the mostly white, northwestern was a methodist university in those days, on the mostly white anglo-saxon protestant students, even the journalism student, the attack on the jews of germany had made almost no impression judging from their list. this is the world outside of germany that the german jews were facing. now, the miracle is, of course, how many people got away. 60% of the german jews escaped in the 1930s, 67% of the austrian ones, a little less than a quarter of the jews of the occupied czech parts of that country. one of the reasons why this pattern of noninterference with the holocaust continues after the war has to do with the next illustration. after the war began in 1931 -- '39, and after the united states came into the war in 1941, this is a nazi propaganda poster. it says behind the enemy powers is the jew. and notice the flags. it's britain, it's the american flag, and it's the soviet union. the depiction of all of these powers were all tools of the jewish enemy, it was a central theme in nazi propaganda. and it turned out to be an inhibiting theme in the ability of the american and the british governments to react. because what they constantly worried about was if we speak out against the persecution of the jews, we look like we are the tools of the jews. if we make the persecution of the jew central to the war effort, we lay into nazi prop -- we play into nazi propaganda. now, you and i looking back on this may find that argument strange. i certainly do. but at the time it was extremely powerful. and though the allies could do not very much about the holocaust as it unfolded, about the only thing they could have done was to publicize it more. and to whip up public opinion on the subject. and this is the reason why they in large measure did not. one of the most shocking facts i discovered in my research for this book is that the united states knew, in fact, about auschwitz about eight months earlier than our official declarations show. we officially acknowledged the existence of auschwitz in the spring of 1944. we were informed of it by the polish underground in early november 1943. we got details about what was happening there, we knew the location, we knew the name. we consciously repressed this information. and the reason are was in relation to this, the desire not to play into nazi propaganda. now, let me give you one other illustration of the difficulties of inhibiting or interfering with the holocaust. once more, i have recourse to a map. now, the map, the map shows you the routes by which, the main routes by which people were deported to death camps in europe. and the concentration of the death camps over there in the upper right is an important fact what i did in the book and id like you to do with me now mentally is to stick your finning per on that map at vienna -- finger on that map at vienna, in the middle. draw a line up, so a vertical lewin up from vienna and draw a horizontal line to the right from vienna. what you have done is you have isolated the northeast quadrant of the european continent, okay? 90% of the victims of the holocaust died there. three-quarters of the victims of the holocaust came from there. now, think about what that mean. in the first place, this is a reinforce bement about europe was not comed from west to east and that this is where the visions of -- [inaudible] the presence of the jews, the presence of the fighting and the absence of sympathy were the causes for the carnage. for most of the war, the only place where the united statessed had planes that could bomb these sites was great britain over there in the upper left. great -- a plane could not reach from great britain to the auschwitz camp which is almost the westernmost. auschwitz is almost the westmost. a plane could not go from great britain to auschwitz and return on a single tank of gas without crashing. now, what this means is that until 1944, until we had fought our way up the boot of italy to just northeast of rome and we could fly a plane from there up to auschwitz, it was not within target range. and every single other of those -- well, almost every single one of those death camps was closed by the time we could do that in 1944. actually, they all were because majdanek was liberated just as the soviets came within reach. the it was not inhibited by lack of knowledge. we knew i a great deal about what was happening. but it was inhibited by the fact that it was geographically impossible until late in the war. and indeed, host of the murder -- the murder in the holocaust was as come pressed in time as it was compressed spatially. 90% in the northeast squad rant of the european continent, 75% of the victims. 75% of the victims were killed within 20 months. they were dead by the time the russian army surrendered at stalingrad. 75% of the victims obviously the holocaust were killed while the germans were winning the war. when they stopped winning the war, their ability to kill jews declined greatly for two reasons. they had virtually killed all of the jew up there where the jewish population was concentrated, and the remaining jews lived in countries participate in nominally -- participate in be nominally -- that were nominally allied. that to cooperate further with the germans would mean that they would have a great deal of explaining to do after the war. that the germans were likely to lose, the allies were likely to win, they were going to have to explain why they had cooperated. and they largely stopped cooperating. the romanian government reneged on its promise to deliver the jews of the romanian homeland which is marked out -- well, most of it which is in that area called romania, and refused to deliver them to the nazis. though the romanian troops had killed almost 400,000 jews in the areas they had invaded. the bulgarians refused at all apart from a small thurm in greece they had taken over. the french began dragging their feet. more than half of the jews deported from france were deported in 1942. then the number greatly declined, and the willingness of french police to help round up jews also declined. all right, these are some of the reasons why nobody else was able to stand in the way. let me conclude by saying a few things about the difficulties of the jes themselves -- jews themselves x this is where we move to the next two slides. this is probably the most famous image of the holocaust. this is the little buy in the cloth -- little boy in the cloth cap during the the suppression of the warsaw ghetto. and be this is part of a document which is name bed after the german commandant of the operation that put down the warsaw uprising. almost everybody has seen this photograph. it appears in book after book. i don't think i've ever seen anyone say what i'm about to say to you. the most remarkable thing in that photograph is that there are -- is a child in it. a child under the age of 10. in fact, there are three or four children under the age of ten in that staff. now, this is a photograph taken in the spring of 1943. we though when the population of the warsaw ghetto, it was down to about 50,000. we know from the records of the warsaw ghetto administration be how many children under 10 were still alive. officially acknowledged, known by the administration. fewer than 500. there had been 50,000 of them when the ghetto was closed. now flash to the next picture. this is another one. this is a -- people having been rounded up from the warsaw uprising and being marched off where they were going to be sent to auschwitz. there is another child under the age of 10 on the right. we actually know her name. we do not know the name of the boy in the preceding photograph. now what can i want to draw your attention to is something tragic about these pictures. who are these people? who could these children be? who's still alive under the age of 10 in the warsaw ghetto after three years of german persecution and deportation and suffering and starvation and so forth? who's still alive? a few months earlier the head of the jewish administration had pleaded with the people, give me your children. the germans have demanded x number of people in tomorrow's shipment, we don't want to give them the people who are working in the factories because the germans might keep them alive, give me your children. and they had sent off all the children except the children of the jewish administration in the ghetto. except the children of the jewish police force. what children were still alive in warsaw when the ghetto uprising was suppressed? children of people who were connected. children whose parents had kept them alive somehow. but who had also probably participated in choosing who was to go on the transports and and die. now, when i say to my students when i show them this picture and i tell them that background story, i say do you have any less sympathy for those kids thousand that you know that than you had before? i hope. no -- i hope not. but that is the illustration that the germans created in the ghettos in which among the jews themselves, by definition the prevailing mentality was every person for himself. because the choices available to the inmates of these places were all bad. what lawrence langer has called choiceless choices. and to expect that they would somehow have coalesced and reached a consensus on how to do this at risk to their children, because if you chose to cooperate with the germans and somehow play for time and you were connected, there was less chance that your son or daughter would be carted off than if you rebelled which is, ultimately, what happens to them when they do rebel. they are carted off. so if we ask why no one impeded this process, one of the reasons is, of course, that for the victims of it themselves, standing up against it was impossible. and it is cruel for subsequent generations to look at their history and to say they should have done better. i want to say one more thing illustrated by one final illustration. s this is, of course, an image that everyone has in his head of people being loaded up to be sent off to death camps, and this is a boxcar which was the typical vehicle used in poland and in the east in occupied russia. it is not the typical vehicle that was used for deportations from western europe. deportees from western europe as well as from germany itself were often sent in third class passenger cars, and that was part of camouflaging what their fate was going to be. but what i want to underline for you is you look at that boxcar, and it's not apparent from the picture, but one of the reasons why the holocaust was so devastating, was capable be of wiping out two-thirds to have jews from europe, three-quarters of the jews the nazis ever got their hands on, and this all in the space mostly of 20 months. half the victims die, actually, in the 11 months before the germans surrender at stalingrad at a rate of 325,000 people a month. how can they do this? we tend to think they do this because they could apply all of the massive resources of a modern state, that the motor process was factories of death, industrialized murder, that there was an efficient bureaucracy that handled all these deportations and so forth. no. look at that boxcar. almost all of the trains that were used were, the equipment that was used for them is what the germans called decommissioned. they were all old cars that had been destined to be scrapped. the locomotives were relics. the resources the germans applied this process were tiny, they were not particularly -- they didn't demand a great deal. the 105,000 jews of holland were killed by a train that went to auschwitz once a week. over a period of about 15 months one train a week, 20 boxcars. the germans loaded 13 be 0,000 -- 13 be 0,000 boxcars a day, okay? we tend to think of this, we believe that massive outcomes must have massive causes. it's a reflex, a mental reflex we have as people. the germans did this with their little finger. the rolling stock they devoted to this on any given day was with infinitesimal. the rolling stock required to kill this number of people was tiny. most of the gas chambers were ramshackle affairs. the first ones that operated in poland were basically built of two vertical stacks of wood with sand in between and tar paper on the outside. after a few months, these were replaced by pour bed concrete. it was very -- poured concrete. it was cheap. it cost almost nothing to put up. it could be paid for and -- more than paid for out of what they stole from the jews of europe. it was not technically difficult to do this because the people in the carbon monoxide camps were killed with captured soviet tank engines. germans didn't even buy them. people at auschwitz, it was an industrially produced product that was incredibly cheap. and so the cost of the zyclon purchased to kill people at auschwitz from, the beginning of 1942 until the last gassing in the first days of november 1944 works out to one u.s. penny per corpse in 1940s money. this was an incredibly inexpenseoff -- inexpensive process. it never diverted funds or even men from the german war effort. and it was massively destructive. so what i tried to do, and i know it's a depressing tale, what i tried to do was explain why the jews were killed and why anyone could not prevent this. and i think many of the myths that have grown up around the holocaust are part of our human need to find some way out of the answers i've provided. we want to find some mistake that somebody made that could have turned this around, and i can't find it. thank you very much. [applause] i will be happy to answer questions. that dull, was it? of. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> so you said that allied bombers couldn't reach the death camps. from england. but we did have an ally who was in much closer striking distance. >> yes. >> and you say that you didn't, don't find a mistake. but allied resistance to admitting the existence of the holocaust along with not pushing our eastern ally to take part in strikes, that would seem to with a big mistake. >> the soviets could have hit the camps. the soviets knew about auschwitz by name and by function months before we did. even allowing for the suppression of the information from the poles. stalin referred to the massacre of the jews just as infrequently as pope pius xii which is to say they each gave one speech in the course of the second world war that had anything to do with what was happening to the jews. stalin on november 7th, 941, while the germans were hurtling toward moscow spoke about pogroms. the pope in december of 194 2k, i believe, gave a christmas sermon in which he declared how sad it was that many people in europe were dying because of their race. he didn't even mention the word jew. there's a parallel kind of indifference here. when the soviet armies got within reach of auschwitz in the summer of 1944, they were 160 kilometers away. even allowing for the fact that soviet use of air power was tactical rather than sending fleets of bombers over cities, mostly, that would have been a moment that they could have struck the camp. finish the nkvd, the equivalent to have kgb, knew about the camp and so forth, but that information did not filter down to the troops on the line. it was never a priority to liberate auschwitz. and there was, if the united states and britain had been willing to pressure the soviets on this, there's no sign that they would have achieved success. the one issue on this that we tried to pressure the soviets on is we tried to persuade the soviets if we were allowed to send bombers from britain to relieve the warsaw uprising of 1944 -- not the ghetto uprising, the polish uprising -- could we then send the planes on and land them behind soviet lines, and stalin said no. we were not successful in getting them to prioritize this east, even if we had wanted to. >> thank you. >> i just wanted to say -- ask, actually, are you saying we allowed in the happen? this to happen? >> i didn't hear this. >> i'm asking, are you saying we allowed this to happen? >> i still didn't understand -- >> did we allow this to happen. >> did we allow this to happen. well, you know, look, the one thing the united states could have done that or western countries could have done at least in the initial stages was to have let more people in in the 1930s: and that would have put them out of harm's way. and in that sense, our refusal to let in more refugees and so forth was an enabling fact. now, once the war started we were restricted by how much we could succeed at. we just, we couldn't reach the death camps even when we knew about them, we could not impede that. there are several groups that could have done something, but remember what i said at the beginning, everybody always had something more important to do. why didn't the poll -- poll bish under23wr0u7bd -- [inaudible] they thought about it, they considered it, but the strategy of the home army in poland was to conserve its strength until the moment when the germans were about to lose and then to rebel. because that would be the moment where they could establish themselves as an independent political forest that might be able -- force that might be able to deal with stalin who was coming in from the east. that was their strategy, and that head them say we're not wasting, if you will, wasting, we're not spending any resources on blowing up these railroad lines that might lead to german reprisals. everybody always had an argument for something that was more important to do than to aid the jews. i'll go back to, back and forth? >> i seem to talk every time i come here. i disagree with many things you have said. i was late, so i don't know whether you talked about it, but one of the main causes of holocaust was communism. and i didn't see you talking about it -- >> you were late. you were late. >> and without it, without you cannot understand holocaust. >> yeah. >> the fact remains industrial revolution caused, that's another reason why we had the second world war ii and holocaust happen caused horrible conditions in the world, and jews were the leaders in promoting social justice in the 19th century and 20th century. and that was one reason, and this is what hitler was using against them, that you don't want the jews here because they are behind commune. communism. another thing you did not mention which is very important, complicity of every country including the united states, again, it was commune bism. every -- the bolshevik revolution took place exactly at the same time the first world war ended. jews were blamed for being very active. there were socialists, they were always fighting for human rights, and we should be proud of that. that's what the jews were. but this was the downfall. and -- [inaudible] in poland, poland and the thursday thing you didn't discuss was collaboration. and all of the church. in poland the main reason why so many jews died was that -- >> okay. let me just say, let me just -- [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> let me just say so we don't go on all night -- >> you miss many --? >> no, in fact, if you read the book, you will see i -- >> [inaudible] >> of course. i cannot read to you a 400-page book. >> you don't have to, but you can make point. >> all right. your points are well taken. i did refer to the bolshevik revolution at the beginning and its importance in creating the appetite and the audience for modern anti-semitism. i did leave out two things that you said, number one, the role of communism and the role of the catholic church. i couldn't talk about everything. it's here in the outline, but, please, there is a chapter devoted to the activities or non-activities of the catholic church, and there is half a chapter devoted to the problem of poland. >> and if you could take in 20 minutes -- >> i could take 20 minutes on an infinite number of subjects, ma'am, i could do that. >> and unfortunately, that's why holocaust happened, because the german was using -- >> all due respect, you write your book, i wrote mine. [applause] >> i grew up with that -- [inaudible] very superficial, and i'm very sad about that. >> thank you very much. with can we take the next question, please? >> professor be, thank you for this deeply insightful presentation. my question pertains to civil registration documents and population registries. what is your opinion about how the civil registrationing documents this in different countrieses kind of in a way amplified what -- [inaudible] because there is a particular school of thought that say that is the civil registration documents or the population registries are misused and they are used to target the population -- >> okay, i've got to confess, i'm deaf in one ear, and so i'm not quite getting everything that is being asked. what was the question? >> i believe the question was to what extent documents of population registrations were used as an instrument to carry out deportationses and so forth. so population and demographic reports. >> a lot less than you would think. this the first place, in the east, in the parts of poland and the occupied soviet union where the great mass of the murder occurred, there are no population registries. the germans come into a village, and they basically say all of the jews have to go into the ghetto, and if you don't, you will be shot. and be, of course, the enforcement mechanism is the other jews will denounce them. the neighbors will say, but you should be there, and then the germans will shoot them. and be then, of course, when the murders start, basically what the germans say is you will all assemble in the central square of the town, and if you don't assemble, it's the same penalty. people will finger you. they will point you out, and you will be shot. so in most of europe where these great numbers of shootings are taking place, there's no registration process, there's none of that. now, one of the terrible tracks of the murder -- tragedies of the murder process from the ghettos of poland where it's organized is the germans always delegate the dirty work to the people in the ghettos themselves. when they go to the head of the ghetto administration in warsaw and they say starting tomorrow 6,000 people every day at the assembly point or we will take reprisals, or we'll pick them ourselves. and the jewish administrators always say, well, it's better if we do it than they do it, because we'll be morers inful -- more merciful, and we'll save the people we think are more worth while than the other people. and be so they delegate the process. and we, and some of these people survived. i mean, the person who did this process survived and lived in israel for many years after the war and gave interviews and said, you know, was i right? was i wrong? i asked the rabbis, they said it was okay. incidentally, under the tall mood it is not okay to do that, but that's what they were told. so these or one the impossible positions in which they put people. now in germany and the netherlands where the written record of who's the a jew and who's not a jew is the best, they don't rely on census data. they don't. the ss administration in berlin relies on the card registration files of the -- [inaudible] [speaking german] the national assembly of german jews, because they think that file is better and easier to handle than the huge census records. so they basically go, they basically take these files, and they send to the jewish council in berlin, the leading jewish administration, they say for the next depor oration, we -- deportation, we want men between the ages of 55 and 70. you pick 'em. or send us all the registration forms of all the men who are between 55 and 70, and we'll pick them. and that's the way that deportations from germany go. in the "in depth"er lands, it's dell -- in the netherlands, they do the selecting and so forth. you see, this is -- remember the children? the members of the administration are often people with little children. and they're placed in this position are they going to comply with the germans and give them the names, or are they going to run the risk that the germans are going to come in and take them all? and that's the way they experienced this impossible choice. so census data, registration data and so forth turns out to be a great deal less important in this process than that kind of pressure put on people. i can take one more in one more. >> ah, thank you. i had originally asked exactly what you meant by being in an impossible situation, i think you've expounded on that just now. so basically you said that the people were guided amongst themselves -- divided amongst themselves, and anyone who spoke up was either killed or made to suffer, and people -- i wonder too many times that if people didn't act because they didn't fully comprehend the expansion, the horrors that were happening. i mean, the whole event is just beyond imagine imagine imagine d what any decent person could imagine. >> yep with, absolutely. at first they couldn't comprehend because it was unprecedented. what they heard was rumors, they didn't quite trust them, so on. and then even after the flow of information thickens, they desperately find way of denying it. because how can you face it? there is in a book a quotation by a man with who was a jew in occupied poland who for a while was part of a jewish police force and then went into the underground and the resistance. he died in 1944, but he left behind a diary. and one of the passages that i found just so powerful is he talks about in his little town not far from warsaw the rumors come in that a town nearby has been totally liquidated where all the people have been killed. and he dose and he give -- he goes and he gives a sort of four-paragraph description of how this message is received. and be at first we said, you know, how can human beings do that and so on and so forth. and by the last paragraph he says, oh, there must be an explanation for why it happened to them but it can't happen to us. they're on the other side of the border between the general government which is the german-administered part and the occupied soviet union. maybe it was that. maybe they resisted. you, see, it dose through a process -- goes through a process somehow denying it can happen to them. and this is another part of the enormous tragedy of this situation and the requirements for us of empathy with what these people were being put new to imagine how they could have comprehended it. leo beck, who was a rabbi in berlin who became the religious leader of the ghetto in occupied czech republic, learned by mid '44, he knew what was happening to the people who were put on the trains to auschwitz, and he decided not to tell the other people in the ghetto. and his explanation after the war was it would have been much harder to live with the certain knowledge of death than to live with the possibility that you would survive. so there's somebody who actually understood, he knew, and he said it's better that they don't know. thank you all very much. [applause] >> hello. i just have a couple of announcements before you lee this evening. my name is jennifer schmidt, and i'm the public programs manager here at the museum. first, i want to start by thanking peter for joining us, very enlightening. i also want to thank all of you, our in-studio audience as well as those who joined us online. as wendy mentioned at the start of this evening, tonight's conversation is the first event in a programming series entitled the power of memory to shape our future. the series explores the power of our collaborative understanding of the holocaust and how we can use it to create a better world. to learn more about our public programs as well as digital contend, please visit the museum's events calendar at ushmm.org. please sign up for museum e-mails and also follow us on social media. we have both facebook and twitter channels. finally, you can purchase peter's incredible book, "why: explaining the holocaust," as you exit this evening, and peter will also be able available to sign copies outside of the theater. thank you all again for coming and have a wonderful evening. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> and this is booktv on c-span2, it's it's for serious readers. here's our prime time lineup for this president's day. beginning at 7 p.m. eastern time, lisa napoli talks about her book, ray and joan, the man who made the mcdonald's fortune and the woman who gave it all away. at 8 p.m., telecommunication cans and "the communicators" program and national association of broadcasters' ceo gordon smith looks at the future of television. we go back to book tv at 8:30 p.m. with a history of france and spain's involvement in the revolutionary war, and that's followed by radio talk show host dennis prager and "wall street journal" columnist brett stephens discussing the boycott, divestment and sanction movement. now, we wrap up our prime time lineup at 11. april ryan is the author, and her new book is called "at mama's knee be: mothers and race in black and white." now, that all happens tonight on president's day weekend on c-span2's booktv. >> after testifying before congress and making front page news with the sunnyside case, grace returned to new york and once again threw herself into the strange and unusual cases that somehow always found their way to her desk. she fought gwen the same doctor who -- against the same doctor who tormented the famous reporter nelly bly when she went undercover at an insane asylum,

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