Darkness Falls

Summary

Podcast Summary: World War II with Tom Hanks — Episode 7: Darkness Falls

Release Date: June 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

Theme:
In "Darkness Falls," Tom Hanks and leading historians lay bare the origins, mechanics, and horror of the Holocaust—the Nazi regime’s systematic effort to annihilate the Jewish people. The episode traces the ideological roots of antisemitism in Nazi Germany, the legal and societal steps leading to the "Final Solution," and the mechanization of genocide across Europe. Through survivor accounts, expert analysis, and chilling Nazi documentation, this episode makes clear how intimately the Holocaust was tied to the course of World War II and how evolving Nazi policy turned murder into industrial-scale extermination.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Boycott to Genocide: Early Roots of the Holocaust

• Nazi Antisemitism as State Policy:
  • Begins with commercial boycotts and quickly escalates to legal and physical persecution (02:06–06:46).
  • Quote: “Winston Churchill calls it the crime without a name. It becomes known as the Holocaust.” — Tom Hanks (02:06)
• Mein Kampf and Racial Ideology:
  • Hitler’s worldview as laid out in his ‘manifesto autobiography’ prioritizes race and antisemitic grievance (04:29).
  • Quote: “It contains a rough sketch for the world as he would like it to be, and an endless documentation of all the groups of people he has grievances against.” — Holocaust Expert (04:29)

2. Legalizing Hatred: Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht

• Racial Laws:
  • 1935 Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship, ban intermarriage, and institutionalize racism (06:22–06:46).
  • Quote: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden." — Tom Hanks (06:22)
• Kristallnacht (1938):
  • State-orchestrated “Night of Broken Glass” marks open violence and the mass arrest of Jewish men.
  • Quote: “...it is a government coordinated terrorist attack against Jews.” — Rabbi Stephen Wise (08:15)
  • Impact: Shows population’s complicity; signals the regime’s readiness for further escalation (08:44).

3. Escalation: Ghettos, Occupation, and Systematic Oppression

• Ghettoization in Occupied Poland:
  • Nazis create overcrowded, walled ghettos, most notably in Warsaw, fostering starvation and disease (09:36–10:40).
  • Survivor’s account of daily life and suffering (10:59):
    • Quote: “I remember that as a small boy, I used to walk the ghetto streets, and I could see people dying, people screaming.” — Mendel Yakubovich (10:59)
• Emergent Resistance:
  • Smuggling food, slow sabotage, and other daily acts of resistance against Nazi orders (11:38).

4. Barbarossa and Mass Murder in the East

• Operation Barbarossa:
  • The invasion of the Soviet Union transforms Nazi genocide from persecution to direct mass killing (14:56–15:36).
  • Special death squads—Einsatzgruppen—tasked with “pacification” via mass shootings (15:53–17:07).
  • Quote: "The conflict now was being raised to a new level of ideological and racial warfare." — Military Historian (17:29)
• Einsatzgruppen Atrocities:
  • Widespread collaboration and local complicity, as Jews are gathered and executed, often forced to dig their own graves (18:38–19:43).
  • Quote: “Einsatzgruppen killed nearly half a million Jews in the Soviet Union in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa.” — Holocaust Survivor/Expert (20:21)
• Institutionalized Murder:
  • High-level directives from top Nazi officials (Goering, Himmler, Heydrich) seek efficiency and totality in extermination (“Final Solution”) (21:08–22:01).

5. Turning Points: T4 Program and the Birth of Death Camps

• T4 Euthanasia Program:
  • Nazi experience with mass murder of disabled Germans using poison gas becomes a template for later genocide (24:54–25:23).
• First Gas Vans and Extermination Centers:
  • Chelmno (Kalmo) is used to gas Jewish and Romani victims in specially constructed vehicles (25:44–26:24).
  • Eyewitness account:
    • “The smell of gas that met us was overpowering. Out of my family of about 60 people, I was the only remaining survivor.” — Shloma ber Wiener (26:24)

6. Wannsee Conference: Bureaucratizing Mass Murder

• Planning the "Final Solution":
  • At Wannsee, bureaucrats calculate the targeted extermination of 11 million Jews—demonstrates chilling organization and scope (29:14–31:12).
  • Quote: “It's a meeting to determine how that's going to take place and what the responsibilities are of all of the bureaucratic elements of the Nazi state.” — Holocaust Historian (30:06)

7. Industrial Genocide: Extermination Centers Across Europe

• Expansion Across Europe:
  • Death camps operationalized in Poland (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno), covering all occupied territories, with deportations from the west (34:52–35:15).
  • Notable Moment: Anne Frank and her family decide to go into hiding after Himmler's Amsterdam visit, highlighting the reach of Nazi terror (35:15).
• The Killing Process:
  • Use of carbon monoxide and Zyklon B; sorting of arrivals into labor and death (37:41–39:29).
  • Detailed, harrowing descriptions of gas chamber procedures and aftermath (39:29–40:25).
  • Quote: “Just the pinnacle of evil.” — Holocaust Scholar (40:41)
• Himmler’s Boast:
  • Confident claims of having already murdered 2 million Jews by mid-1942 (41:02).

8. The World Begins to Learn

• Transmission of Evidence and Outcry:
  • News of genocide reaches the West through Gerhardt Rigner; initial disbelief and bureaucratic delays mean little immediate action (42:02–43:07).
  • Quote: “They call it an unreliable war rumor and they bury it.” — Rabbi Stephen Wise (42:49)
• Public and Allied Response:
  • December 1942: Day of mourning, global protests, Allied declaration condemning Nazi atrocities (44:02).
  • Quote: "They are using phrases like cold blooded extermination and bloody atrocities." — Jewish Community Representative (44:02)
  • Churchill’s resolve:
    • “The best thing that we can do to help Europe’s Jews is to win this war as quickly as possible.” — Military Historian paraphrasing Churchill (44:34)

9. Epilogue: Legacy and Aftermath

• Individual Fates:
  • Anne Frank and Helene Berr die in the final months; Shloma ber Wiener’s attempt to testify to the truth is extinguished in Belzec (45:06).
  • Mendel Yakubovich survives and emigrates to the US, building a new life (45:41).
• Continuing Atrocity:
  • The Holocaust continues until Allied victory; the episode ends as the Allies prepare to confront the Nazi war machine on new fronts (46:54).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Banality of Evil:
  • “By all appearances, Heinrich Himmler seems like an ordinary human being... he came under Hitler's spell.” — Holocaust Survivor/Expert (16:26)
• Eyewitness to Atrocity:
  • "It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be a baby and firing a gun at them." — Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator (20:02)
• On Bureaucracy’s Role:
  • “The Wannsee conference is a coordination meeting... to determine how that's going to take place and what the responsibilities are.” — Holocaust Historian (30:06)
• The Mechanization of Death:
  • “They told them that they were going there to be showered. They would be given fabric ties to tie their shoes together.” — Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator (39:29)
• Chilling Administrative Language:
  • “...the plan for the execution of the intended Final solution of the Jewish question.” — Narrator re: Goering’s directive (21:43)
• International Mourning and Outrage:
  • “At the beginning of December, there's a day of mourning, not just in the United States, not just in Britain, but internationally.” — Jewish Community Representative (44:02)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Advent of State-Sanctioned Antisemitism: 02:06–06:46
• Kristallnacht and the German Response: 07:07–08:55
• Ghettoization and Survival in Poland: 09:36–12:01
• Operation Barbarossa and Mass Shootings: 14:56–20:31
• Transition to Industrialized Genocide: 24:54–26:24
• Wannsee Conference/Final Solution Planning: 29:14–31:12
• Auschwitz and Death Camp Mechanization: 37:41–41:02
• Western Knowledge and (Limited) Response: 42:02–44:34
• Personal Stories and the War’s End: 45:06–46:54

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Episode Tone and Style

The episode maintains an unflinching, factual tone, anchored by Tom Hanks’ sober, reflective narration and the expert voices providing clarity and emotional resonance. Survivor testimonies and primary source documents are woven throughout to ensure the historical reality remains front and center, never losing sight of the human cost amid the statistics.

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Usefulness

This summary captures the major threads of "Darkness Falls"—for newcomers to World War II history, it contextualizes the Holocaust as both part of the larger war and as a project of genocidal intent; for those familiar with the period, it brings fresh immediacy through quotes, survivor vignettes, and the integration of evolving Nazi policy with the military campaign.

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Transcript

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

On April 1, 1933, Adolf Hitler's first official act to persecute Germany's Jews is an attempt to sever them from all commercial life with a boycott. What follows over the next 12 years is an organized, sustained cruelty unparalleled in human history. It unfolds step by step when he first grasps the enormity of the evil. Winston Churchill calls it the crime without a name. It becomes known as the Holocaust.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

This is World War II with Tom Hanks. Episode 7 Darkness Falls

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

in early 1939, Germany has seized Austria. Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer, wants to take even more land in Europe. On January 30, Hitler tells the German Reichstag that if War comes, it will not be his fault. The blame will lie with one the Jews.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Two months later, Hitler will take all of Czechoslovakia. On September 1st, he invades Poland and World War II begins.

[Holocaust Historian]

One of the things that's critical for us to understand about the history of World War II and history of the Holocaust is that all of these things are inextricably linked together. The ebb and flow of the war itself impacts the way the Holocaust unfolds on the ground.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Antisemitism is central to Hitler's and the Nazi party's philosophy, which he clearly stated in his book Mein Kampf or My Struggle.

[Holocaust Expert]

Mein Kampf is a manifesto autobiography of the young Hitler. It contains a rough sketch for the world as he would like it to be, and an endless documentation of all the groups of people he has grievances against.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Hitler reserves his greatest grievance for Germany's Jews. He uses base metaphors to describe them. Playing on long held anti Semitic tropes. He portrays them as exploiting or manipulating the German people.

[Holocaust Scholar]

In order to understand Hitler, one has to understand the importance of race. That underlines every single thing that he does. He believes that the whole human race is divided into categories. The Aryan race is at the top of that category. The Jews are at the bottom.

[Rabbi Stephen Wise]

Hitler is obsessed with Jews. He's obsessed with Jews as an internal enemy, as impure racially as non German. And he believes that Germany will fulfill its destiny when it's free of Jews.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In 1934, Hitler appoints himself the the leader of Germany. And he will quickly turn his hatred of Jews into law. In the fall of 1935, at a Nazi gathering in Nuremberg, Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering unveils a sweeping set of legal measures targeting the country's Jewish population.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The laws prohibit marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non Jews and strip German Jews of their citizenship.

[Rabbi Stephen Wise]

For Jews living in Germany, the Nuremberg Laws are a huge turning point. It doesn't matter if you're not religious. Identity is now biological. It plants the seeds for saying Jews are a separate race that are polluting Germany.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The Nazis intend to make life so difficult for German and Austrian Jews that they will want to immigrate. Around half of Germany's Jewish community of 500,000 go into exile. In November 1938, the Nazis coordinate a brutal wave of destruction and violence across Germany. Jewish businesses are looted and burned, synagogues razed, and homes left in ruin. Jews are killed and raped. The event is called, in German, Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

The windows of Jewish shopkeepers are smashed. There's also incursions into their homes. They're kicking in the doors, they're dragging people out. They're beating them up. To petrify the Jewish population,

[Rabbi Stephen Wise]

police or military were instructed not to wear their uniforms when they went out to commit the violence on Kristallnacht, to make it look like it was more spontaneous than it actually was. But it is a government coordinated terrorist attack against Jews.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The morning after Kristallnacht, The Nazis arrest 30,000 Jewish men and marched them off to concentration camps.

[Jewish Community Representative]

I think Kristallnacht is an inflection point because it showed the Nazi government that average Germans would be willing to go along with the violence.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

By the late 30s, Jews living within Germany and Austria face persecution and intimidation. Even worse dangers are on the Horizon. In early September 1939, German forces invade Poland. In just a few weeks, the Poles are conquered. Poland's 3 million Jews are now controlled by Hitler and the Nazis.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

When the Nazis enter Poland, they have no real coherent strategy about what they're going to do with Jews. So they start to improvise pretty quickly. And one of the things that emerges as part of this improvisation is an idea about creating ghettos.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Within days of the German occupation, many Polish Jews are forced into ghettos. Jews are ordered to wear armbands and are restricted on entering and leaving.

[Holocaust Expert]

The decision is made in Warsaw to create a closed ghetto. There is movement across the gates of guards and of Poles, but not of the Jews themselves. They are locked into the ghetto and a wall is created to restrict Jewish movement. It's a very visible signal of the racial segregation of the city of Warsaw.

[Holocaust Scholar]

Over 100,000 Jews who lived in other parts of Warsaw had to move into this area. It was 1.3 square miles, so it was tiny.

[Holocaust Expert]

The circumstances of the ghettos actually create the perfect breeding grounds for disease. This is exacerbated by the fact that running water is limited and sewage systems are not adequate, especially with the size of the population.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Mendel Yakubovich is 14 when his family is sent to the ghetto in Ostrovic southeast Poland. He later writes, I remember that as a small boy, I used to walk the ghetto streets, and I could see people dying, people screaming. There was no food, especially for the people that had no money. The Jews fight to survive in the ghetto and even look for opportunities to resist.

[Jewish Community Representative]

There were smugglers who would smuggle in food and smuggle out people, sometimes for forced labor. They would sometimes slow their work or make sure that whatever they were told to do would be broken by the time the Nazis get it. There was all sorts of work that they were doing to try to resist as long as possible.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

For the first year of the war, life in the ghetto is the cruelty daily reality of Poland's Jews. But Hitler is planning a new campaign and millions of people are about to descend into horror.

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[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

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sponsored by shamba casino. By mid-1941 Germany controls much of Western Europe. But Hitler's true goal is to create Lebensraum, living space for the German people which will be found in the East.

[Military Historian]

Hitler now realized that this was the ideal moment to begin the secret planning of the invasion of Russia. The great climax of his life's work, the destruction of the entire Soviet Union.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Barbarossa. For Operation Barbarossa, Hitler and his generals will deploy three army groups and 3 million men supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft across a vast front.

[Holocaust Scholar]

The German preparations for are on a scale that's almost unimaginable. This is going to be and remains the largest invasion in human history.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Hitler adds another mission to the plan. He issues a directive stating in the invasion there will be special tasks. In charge of these will be Heinrich Himmler, head of the ss.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

If you want to know what Hitler's thinking, look at what Himmler was doing, because Himmler was talking to and meeting Hitler very, very frequently across these periods of time.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Himmler has been a member of the Nazi party since 1923.

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

By all appearances, Heinrich Himmler seems like an ordinary human being. He was born to a good family, went to decent schools. He hooks up with various kinds of occupations. He's a chicken farmer, sells fertilizer for a time and like so many young men of his generation, came under Hitler's spell.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Himmler's mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, will follow the advancing German army into Soviet territory. They have orders to move into occupied communities and kill anyone who threatens the operation.

[Holocaust Expert]

The Einsatzgruppen will follow the Wehrmacht and the Barbarossa campaign and their task is the long term pacification of Soviet society. They are above all targeting what they believe are the two key facets of the Soviet social commissars or communist political leaders, and they particularly single out Jews.

[Military Historian]

The conflict now was being raised to a new level of ideological and racial warfare. The annihilation of certain groups was encouraged, sanctioned and ordered. And this is a dark step. The world is darkening visibly as this, as this operation begins.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In June 1941, the Wehrmacht smashes through Soviet defenses and makes rapid advances across the front. There are over 5 million Jews in the Soviet Union.

[Military Historian]

The Jewish communities in the Soviet Union were very different from those in many parts of Eastern Europe, like Poland and Romania. They weren't generally communities of orthodox Jews with ringlets and black hat. Jews in the Soviet Union were assimilated within the general population.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In the wake of the German army, the Einsatzgruppen begin their special task.

[Holocaust Expert]

Einsatzgruppen didn't know enough about who was Jewish. So locals would volunteer or be seized in order to give them exactly the information they wanted.

[Holocaust Historian]

There are groups within Eastern Europe of people who are already very anti Semitic and will voluntarily sign up to be auxiliaries and help these units. An Einstein Groupen usually would round up the Jewish populations. They're then assembled at a central location where they're guarded and then marched in groups to a killing site.

[Holocaust Scholar]

They would be taken to a place of execution on the edge of the town. They would be very often forced to dig pits for their own bodies, and then they would be shot into these pits.

[Holocaust Expert]

Sometimes they used wooded areas or forests, and sometimes these executions were remarkably public.

[Holocaust Historian]

They're bringing Jews to a killing site, often in family groups, forcing them to undress and then making them lie down on the bodies of people that have already been murdered to wait to be shot themselves.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

This is grown men standing, aiming it, but not the human being. It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be a baby and firing a gun at them. And it's happening on a huge scale over a huge territory.

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

Einsatzgruppen killed nearly half a million Jews in the Soviet Union in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa.

[Holocaust Historian]

Just incredible numbers of human beings murdered by shooting over and over and over again.

[Military Historian]

There's a close relationship between the actual military campaign, Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust. The Holocaust really begins the moment they cross the border into the Soviet Union. The war enabled the entire Soviet Union to be treated as a killing zone. It meant that the lifting of norms of civilized behavior, the lifting of norms of warfare, all restraints were removed.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The killing of Jews is reported back to Berlin. Every day, senior Nazis discuss the next stages of Hitler's plan. Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering writes to Reinhard Heydrich, the SS official responsible for executing Nazi plans for the Jewish population.

[Holocaust Expert]

Reinhard Heydrich is one of the key figures in the ss. He's distinctly Aryan in his visage. He has icy, cold blue eyes, and his face registered almost no emotion.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In late July 1941, Goering sends an official communique to Heydrich. He asks him to promptly submit an overall plan for the execution of the intended Final solution of the Jewish question.

[Holocaust Historian]

This is essentially the order authorizing Heydrich to begin preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe. They are going to remove them from the world by murdering them.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

As the German army advances across the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht works with units liquidating communists and Jews. The SS and particularly the Einsatzgruppen. In August, SS leader Heinrich Himmler visits Minsk in Nazi occupied Belarussia.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

Himmler maintains a really close watch on what the Einstein's gripen are doing because ultimately they're his responsibility. So he travels a lot around the Eastern front.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Himmler realizes that the shootings are taking an emotional toll on his men.

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

It's difficult, no matter who you are, to wake up in the morning and to shoot people all day long and then to try to go to bed at night and know that the next morning you're going to wake up and do it all over again.

[Holocaust Scholar]

A massacre of 100 people is set up for him so that he can see how difficult it is to actually watch the killing of human beings. Because Himmler has never had to do this before. He's never really seen. Seen death firsthand. He reacts very badly to the sight of bodies being murdered in front of him and he turns green and he almost throws up.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Himmler returns to Berlin to help design ways to execute mass killings that are more efficient. On the Soviet front. The killing continues. Baba Yar is ravine just outside Kyiv in Ukraine. In September 1941, over 33,000 Jewish men, women and children are marched here across two days. They are all shot and then buried in a mass grave. The Nazis had already developed a method of mass murder. At the start of the war, Hitler authorized the killing of patients with disabilities. A euthanasia program known as T4.

[Holocaust Historian]

The T4 program, which is codenamed after Tiergartenstrasse no. 4, which is the building in Berlin that was the headquarters, was the program to murder with carbon monoxide physically and mentally disabled Germans because they were deemed to be drains on the state.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The T4 program runs for two years before it's officially halted in August 1941.

[Holocaust Historian]

What you then have is a group of men with a particular set of skills. The use of gas to murder people, the transportation and logistics of that, the hiding of the evidence of that operation, and these people are then available to be used in another operation.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The first extermination center where Jews are sent to be gassed is at Helmo, located in German occupied Poland. The victims in the Khelmo center are Jews from the ghetto of the Polish city of Lodz and the Romani, who the Nazis also regard as an inferior race. On December 8, 1941, the first Jews are killed using gas vans.

[Jewish Community Representative]

They are vans where the Nazis could pipe carbon monoxide into the back of the bed of the truck.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Shloma ber Wiener is a Jew from central Poland who is deported to Kalmo. Shlomme witnesses the death of his family in gas vans. He writes about this in a letter. The leader of the guard detail was a high ranking SS man, an absolute sadist and murderer. He ordered that eight men were to open the doors of the lorry. The smell of gas that met us was overpowering. Out of my family of about 60 people, I was the only remaining survivor. I was left alone in this world. Now the war against the Jews is about to take an ominous turn as the Nazis build additional killing centers and devise new methods to destroy a people. December 1941. A villa overlooking Lake Wannsee in Berlin is the location for a gathering of officials representing different parts of the Nazi regime. The organizer of the conference is Reinhard Heydrich. The topic is the Jewish question, but the conference is postponed.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

The conference of Wansee was initially scheduled on 9 December, but it had to be postponed because of course, on 7 December 1941, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Pearl Harbor.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

Punishment against Pearl Harbor. The American Pacific Fleet is in this port, the pride of the usa.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Three days after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

The Fuhrer called for revenge on the warmonger and hypocrite Franklin Roosevelt.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Hitler has long predicted a world war, and now he has brought it about. In a speech, he accuses the Jews of manipulating the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

[Jewish Community Representative]

We have this.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

We know the power behind Roosevelt. It is the same eternal Jew that believes that his hour has come. So it was that the Jews, in all their satanic baseness, gathered around this man and he relied on them.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

At a briefing on December 12, Hitler summons Nazi party leaders. In his diary, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels writes, what is the Fuhrer is determined to make a clean sweep. The world war is here. The destruction of Jewry must be the inevitable consequence. On January 20, 1942, Nazi officials arrived at Lake Wannsee for Heydrich's rescheduled conference.

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

The SS officers are in their full formal uniforms. They're being served cognac and canapes. It looks like a very civilized gathering, but of course, what's being discussed at the Wannsee Conference is anything but civilized.

[Holocaust Historian]

The Wannsee conference is a coordination meeting. It is not a meeting to decide whether or not to kill the Jews of Europe. It's a meeting to determine how that's going to take place and what the responsibilities are of all of the bureaucratic elements of the Nazi state in achieving this goal.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

At the conference, Heydrich lists the number of Jews to be exterminated by the Final Solution. The list includes the Jews of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Jews in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavian countries. It also includes Jews in countries fighting alongside Germany, such as Italy, Romania and Hungary. Even Jews in undefeated Great Britain and neutral Ireland are included. Grand total over 11 million. The Nazis now have a plan to implement the Holocaust.

[Military Historian]

The Germans had succeeded in taking France as well as Holland, Denmark, Norway and so on, which meant that they suddenly had control over other massive populations of Jews. The fact that basically the whole of Europe outside Britain was now part of Hitler's Nazi empire gave a feeling that things could be done which had never been done before.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Across all of Europe, a whole people are targeted for annihilation.

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[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

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[Jewish Community Representative]

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

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[Jewish Community Representative]

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[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

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[Jewish Community Representative]

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[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Following the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis are working on the construction of killing centers where people, most of them Jewish, will be sent to die. The majority are from Eastern Europe and Soviet territory. The Nazis also begin to target the Jews of Western Europe.

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

The Holocaust begins as an Eastern phenomenon, but soon it extends to every single corner of German controlled Europe. Amsterdam in the Netherlands and France and Italy, and as far north as Scandinavia. Jews are being shipped to these various new establishments in the east and murdered.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In the spring of 1942, Himmler visits Amsterdam to address a police battalion specially trained to round up and deport the city's Jewish population. A few weeks after his visit, one Jewish father, Otto Frank, decides his family must go into hiding. His daughter Anne writes in her diary, our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. Escape is almost impossible. In France. Many Jews who fled Germany early earlier now find themselves threatened along with the country's large French Jewish population. Helene Bear, a young French Jewish woman, writes, a wave of terror has been gripping everybody else as well these past few days. It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that terror must follow. Over the next months, Jewish families are deported by German forces and their collaborators. They are informed they are being resettled in Eastern Europe and told to bring belongings and valuables with them. Instead, they are being sent to the new Nazi extermination centers. They are crammed into airless, lightless railway cars and transported hundreds of miles without food or water.

[Military Historian]

Modern bureaucracies and trains enabled the movement of people across Europe in huge numbers which had really never been seen before.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

There are four major extermination centers. Helmo, Treblinga, Sobo, Bor and Belzec. There are two Additional extermination centers which also serve as forced labor camps. Madonnik and Auschwitz. All of these centers are located in Poland. In the centers, the Nazis design methods to kill as many people in as short a time as possible, including using diesel engines.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

The Nazis pumped carbon monoxide from these engines into the chambers themselves. They killed a lot of people. That doesn't necessarily mean that they were as kind of efficient in that process as is somehow supposed. These were very crude places. They were very improvisational places. And they were spaces of extraordinary and appalling suffering.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

At Auschwitz, the Nazis use a pesticide called Zyklon B. Zyklon B is a

[Holocaust Survivor/Expert]

cyanide derivative originally for exterminating vermin. For killing rodents in your house. It's a blue crystal. You open the can and it emits a poison gas.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

They also begin construction on an extension to Auschwitz in the neighboring village of Birkenau. The site is solely dedicated to extermination and has several gas chambers. When Jews arrive at Auschwitz Birkenau, they are sorted into two groups. Those who are determined fit for forced labor and those who are not. Mendel Yakubovi is deported from the Polish ghetto to Auschwitz. He describes his arrival. The SS people were walking up and down. I stood at attention on my toes. Finally, after a while, I was chosen to the right, some of my friends to the left. Mendel is selected to join a work battalion. His family is sent to the gas chamber.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

The people who were being brought into the gas chambers would be separated into men and women and children. They'd all be herded into this room. They told them that they were going there to be showered. They would be given fabric ties to tie their shoes together. Under the ruse that it would be easier to find their pair afterwards.

[Holocaust Historian]

The Nazis want to cram as many people into the gas chambers as possible. Because that generates this environment of high heat and humidity which creates the hydrogen cyanide gas.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

The scenes that followed after that defy imagination. Quite often you would find families or loved ones that were clutching each other so tightly that it was impossible to pull that arms apart from each other.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

The victims are cremated. A perpetual pall of death hangs over the area.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

It was generally the case that people sent to death camps were murdered within about 45 minutes to two hours of arrival.

[Holocaust Scholar]

The creation of the extermination camps is Hitler's first final solution to the Jewish question. An industrial scale system to mass murder. Human beings in their thousands every day. Just the pinnacle of evil.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

This is murder on an industrial scale. But each Death is uniquely suffered. In the summer of 1942, Himmler visits the extermination center at Auschwitz Birkenau. He watches enslaved prisoners working in a chemical plant and sees train cars of Jews arriving to be murdered. Himmler later attends a dinner party where he explains that the Nazis have murdered 2 million Jews and will continue to do so. His boasts make their way to a Western intelligence agent who passes the information to a German exile living in neutral Switzerland, Gerhard Rigner.

[Jewish Community Representative]

Gerhardt Rigner, who worked for the World Jewish Congress, learns from a German businessman that the Nazis have a plan. They are trying to round up, deport and murder the remaining Jewish communities of Europe.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Shocked by what he hears, Rigner attempts to get this information to Rabbi Stephen Weiss.

[Rabbi Stephen Wise]

Rabbi Stephen Wise is the head of the World Jewish Congress and maybe the most influential American rabbi and maybe one of the most influential American Jews at the time. He has a relationship with President Roosevelt.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

Rigner's message gets to the US State Department, but officials treat it like a war rumor and don't pass it on.

[Rabbi Stephen Wise]

The State Department refuses to send this information to Rabbi Wise. They call it an unreliable war rumor and they bury it.

[Jewish Community Representative]

Why are we going to get people riled up about this if it's just probably a war rumor? There's no way that the Nazis are actually doing this and so they shelve it.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

But Rigner persists. He reaches a British Member of Parliament who contacts Rabbi Wise by telegram. The U.S. state Department now investigates the report, but the Roosevelt administration is not ready to take it public.

[Jewish Community Representative]

They had a feeling that American soldiers would not agree to fight if they believed that they were being asked to fight for the rescue of European Jews. We're fighting for these ideas of democracy and idealism. We're not fighting for the Jews.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

After their investigation, the State Department allows Rabbi Wise to share the information about the mass murder of the Jews. The news spreads around the globe and Jewish communities react. The world is beginning to learn the truth.

[Jewish Community Representative]

At the beginning of December, there's a day of mourning, not just in the United States, not just in Britain, but internationally. There are vigils, there are ceremonies and services in synagogues across the Western Hemisphere. And Then finally on December 17, the allied governments issue what is called the Allied Declaration on Atrocities. And they are condemning in very strong language what the Nazis and their collaborators are doing. They are using phrases like cold blooded extermination and bloody atrocities.

[Eyewitness/Testimonial Narrator]

Roosevelt particularly is very concerned and Churchill is appalled as well. He says the best thing that we can do to help Europe's Jews is to win this war as quickly as possible. And we need to divert all of our resources in service of doing just that.

[Military Historian]

They knew that these mass killings were happening. I don't think they could imagine quite the scale of the infrastructure that Nazis had devoted to this. I think that the leaders have not quite grasped the extent of it.

[Narrator (Tom Hanks)]

In 1933, Hitler's perverse vision was to explain expel the Jews from Germany. By 1942, he is on the verge of exterminating the entire Jewish population of Europe. After two years in hiding, Anne Frank and her sister are discovered by Dutch police officers and sent to a Nazi extermination center. They eventually die of typhus. Just weeks before the end of the war. Alain Baer is deported from Paris to Auschwitz and then to Bergen Belsen, where she also dies from typhus. April 1945. Shloma bear wiener writes a report about the gas fans at Helmo hoping to bring the truth to the world world. But he is found by the Nazis and deported to Belzec where he is murdered in the gas chambers. Mendel Yakubovic survives Auschwitz and moves to the United States. After the war. He changes his name to Mike Jacobs and founds a scrap metal business in Dallas, Texas. The Holocaust, the Shoah will continue until Nazi Germany is defeated and the Third Reich is completely destroyed. In 1942, the Allies gather their forces for a massive assault on the Wehrmacht in North Africa.

[Tom Hanks (World War II Narration)]

World War 2 with Tom Hanks is produced by Nootopia Ltd. A E Factual Studios, Playtone Productions and Back Pocket Studios in association with Motion Entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd. Additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler for Playtone. Executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman for for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.