- [Jim] Two diplomats with ties to St. Louis played key roles during the Holocaust.

One was in Europe risking his life to save Jews from the death camps.

- Perhaps they underestimated what he was actually doing.

- [Jim] While in Washington, the St. Louis born and raised Assistant Secretary of State was working to block the entry of refugees, and historians are still debating just what motivated Breckenridge Long.

- I think if you read Breckenridge Long's personal diaries, he comes off as a very unlikeable person.

(laughing) - [Jim] It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(relaxed upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr here at the new Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum in St. Louis County.

It's not finished yet, due to open in November, and we're gonna learn a lot more about what's inside coming up later in the program, but we thought we would stick with the theme, in part, because of the upcoming Ken Burns documentary, "The U.S. and the Holocaust."

It's about what the country knew and when it knew it and what it did or didn't do in response.

The local angle?

Well we have stories of a couple of people tied to this city whose names you can find in the history books.

One of them risked his life to save others, but we start with the story of a Saint Louisan who, well, fair warning, does not come out looking like much of a hero.

And yet if you read the 1958 obituaries in national and local papers for Breckenridge Long, they just recount his career in the U.S. State Department.

He was an ambassador to Italy.

He was Assistant Secretary of State.

It wasn't until later when historians started digging into declassified documents, and Long's own diaries, that he would be seen as having been on the wrong side of the Holocaust response, a key figure in keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States.

- You think about November 1943, when he testifies to Congress and basically talks about all of the reasons that the United States does not need to do anymore to rescue Jews.

- [Jim] Rebecca Erbelding is a historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the author of "Rescue Board: "The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews."

- I think if you read Breckenridge Long's personal diaries, he comes off as a very unlikable person.

(laughing) Even, even- - [Jim] Samuel Breckenridge Long was born in 1881 in St. Louis and was about as upper crust as you could get.

He was a member of the prominent Kentucky Breckenridges.

He went to Princeton, got a law degree at Washington University, and started a legal practice in St. Louis.

In 1912 he married into even more money.

The society pages called the upcoming wedding one of the most important of the summer nuptial events.

It described the bride, Christine Graham, as having been "one of the belles of St Louis' most exclusive set."

Her grandfather was former Senator Frank Blair, who now has a statue in Forest Park.

Her mother gifted to Washington University Graham Memorial Chapel.

When they got married, the Longs moved into the Graham Mansion on Lindell Boulevard and spent $200,000 building a private art gallery.

That was just for the building, not for the art.

And it was big cash contributions to the Democratic Party that got Breck Long into the inner circle of Democratic politics.

He supported Woodrow Wilson, nominated for a second term at the convention in St. Louis in 1916.

Wilson had been one of Long's teachers at Princeton.

And in 1917, Breckenridge Long was appointed Third Assistant Secretary of State.

He was tall, distinguished, looked good in a top hat and tails, and might be described by the less than flattering term for a diplomat, a cookie pusher, because he spent much of his time greeting, escorting, and entertaining important visitors.

When a British delegation arrived in the U.S. during World War I, they stayed at the Long's impressive residence in Washington, D.C. That same year, a French delegation came to St. Louis, and they stayed with the Longs on Lindell Boulevard.

Breckenridge Long set his sights on the Senate, and twice in 1920 and '22, he unsuccessfully ran to become Senator from Missouri, and with Republicans in power in Washington, well, he went back to practicing law, but in 1932, Roosevelt was elected, and Long got a new job, ambassador to Italy from 1933 to 1936.

And in 1940, he would be back in Washington at the State Department, this time as Assistant Secretary of State.

When it came to dealing with people trying to get into this country, he was the gatekeeper.

He didn't make the rules, but he made sure they would be tightly enforced.

This is the classic scene of immigration from the early part of the 20th century, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but after World War I, that golden door was nearly slammed shut with tighter and tighter restrictions on immigration.

And they were still enforced in the 1930s as the world was facing a new crisis.

The world was changing, but American laws were not when Breckenridge Long moved into his new office in charge of visas.

- And so his sensibilities and his department in Washington's interpretation of these immigration laws, that has a real effect on the ability of Jewish refugees, and really anybody, trying to immigrate to the United States on their ability to get out.

- As more and more Jews sought to escape Nazi-occupied Europe and reports of extermination camps increased pressure from some in the U.S. to let more in, Long instructed embassies and consulates to maintain the tight restrictions.

He and others argued that this was about national security, that there might be spies among those trying to get in.

You can find in his diaries evidence of antisemitism, but he wasn't alone.

Such attitudes of varying degrees, including so-called country club antisemitism, accepting or embracing quotas or exclusions of Jews from clubs, neighborhoods, and in hiring.

This wasn't uncommon among the wealthy WASP upper class.

Is that perhaps part of the Washington establishment, as well as perhaps Breckenridge Long's own personal life?

- I think that kind of cultural antisemitism or societal antisemitism really is playing a big role in Washington at the time, but that is a thing that is starting to change.

Part of that is the New Deal.

The New Deal expands the federal government.

It brings more people into the federal government.

And so the State Department is basically the old guard, more genteel, potentially more kind of country club antisemitism, and antisemitism and nativism is openly tolerated.

Prejudice is openly tolerated in the State Department.

You can say things out loud there that you may not be able to get away with saying in the Treasury Department.

I struggle with whether he is motivated by antisemitism or motivated by nativism, the dislike of all immigrants.

So Roosevelt's gut instinct is to defend Long, but I also think that the president is not super involved in what the visa division is necessarily doing.

- Eventually under pressure from others in the government, President Roosevelt agreed that more needed to be done and created the War Refugee Board in early 1944, taking the responsibility for refugees away from Breckenridge Long.

After the War Refugee Board was created, he says, in his diary, "What they can do that I have not done, I cannot imagine."

- [Rebecca] Mmhmm.

- [Jim] How wrong was he?

- He is very wrong.

The United States, especially in 1943 and 1944, as it's clear that Nazi Germany is losing the war, there is a lot that the United States can do.

The War Refugee Board tries to do it in 1944, but there are things that the United States could have been doing in 1943 to protest more, to get more material in the hands of the resistance, to publicize what the Nazis are doing.

Those are things that Long absolutely could have done and did not do.

And to me, I think Long's overwhelming motivation, beyond nativism, beyond antisemitism, is that he wants to be left alone.

He wants his job to be easy, and this refugee crisis is making his job more difficult.

And so over and over again, for me, what you see is Long trying to get rid of problems, not trying to deal with them, either positively or negatively, just trying to make them go away.

And the War Refugee Board was the exact opposite.

The War Refugee Board ran running towards solutions.

- He also said after the War Refugee Board was created that it seemed like a good move politically, because it would make Jewish voters happy.

This is how he viewed the Jewish refugee crisis.

- It was all politics.

It was all politics.

He felt that way about letting Jewish refugees in, too.

You have to let some of them in so that you can get that vote in 1940.

That is not...

It's so much bigger than that.

(laughing) It's so much more important than that.

And he was not someone who wanted to sacrifice votes or political power for doing the right thing.

- [Jim] Yeah, he strikes me as the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

- [Rebecca] I think that's a really good assessment.

- Breckenridge Long's career had taken him away from his hometown of St. Louis years before.

He retired to his estate in New Hampshire and raised horses, never feeling that he had deserved the criticism he had received, and not living long enough to see just how bad it was going to get.

(gentle piano music) Our next profile by Brooke Butler is of another diplomat who was working on the other side of the ocean and the other side of the issue.

Carl Lutz and Breckenridge Long, they had St. Louis in common.

That's about it.

(water gurgling) (gentle music) - Now, one of the things that would happen in Budapest at this time in late 1944, what they would do is they would take groups of people down to the Danube River, and essentially would line them up and stage a firing squad.

They would shoot them and push them in the river.

Sometimes they would tie people together, shoot one of them, push them in the river.

So there was this one day, there's a story about Carl Lutz and his driver, they're driving through the city, and they passed the Danube River.

This had just happened.

One of these incidents had just happened, and a number of people had been killed and pushed into the river.

But Carl Lutz is looking, and he sees this woman bobbing up and down in the cold waters of the Danube.

And it turns out that she had been shot, but the water was so cold that it had slowed the blood flow.

And so Carl Lutz, in all of his nice suit and hat, jumps into the waist-high water into the Danube, pulls this woman out, turns around to the Arrow Cross, and tells them, "What are you doing?

"I am the Swiss Vice Consul.

"You have no right to do this."

And they're so taken aback.

He is allowed to take this woman and seek help for her and actually saves her life.

But as you can probably guess, Carl Lutz didn't know this woman.

He didn't know who she was, but he was driving by and he saw an opportunity to help someone, and he took it.

- [Brooke] We've heard stories of heroic rescue efforts from the Holocaust, but having taken place nearly 80 years ago, we're bound to feel a disconnect, a decline in momentum for sharing these powerful accounts.

One story, however, that seems to have only gained attention in recent years, is of a man who may be the only name you would find within the righteous among the nations and in an old St. Louis phone book.

His name was Carl Lutz.

During the Second World War he served as a Swiss diplomat in Budapest, Hungary.

You might not recognize his name, but if you're familiar with the more famous chronicles of Raoul Wallenberg or Oskar Schindler, Lutz's efforts were similar.

They utilized loopholes in their positions of authority in order to protect the lives of Jewish people.

during World War II.

The major difference, however, is that Lutz led what is now considered the largest civilian rescue mission of the Holocaust.

And although it might be a stretch to call him a famous St Louisan, his time spent here shaped the trajectory for his heroic actions.

- Carl Lutz spent about 10 years, about a decade in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

- [Brooke] Amy Lutz is a local historian, and also works with the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

And as far as her family can tell through ancestry records, there doesn't seem to be any relation to Carl Lutz.

However, researching Lutz's story is what motivated her to pursue a career in history.

- Like I said, he was born in Switzerland, but he came here at the age of 18, not knowing a word of English, was looking for more opportunities that he didn't have in his small town.

So he ended up in another small town, actually Granite City, Illinois, right across the river, for a few years.

Worked there to save up some money.

And then around 1918, 1919, he enrolled in Central Wesleyan College.

- [Brooke] Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton closed in 1941, but this was where Lutz first embraced an important aspect of his personality.

Having grown up in a devout Christian family, he explored the possibility of becoming a pastor.

- But unfortunately he realized pretty quickly that that was not gonna be the path for him.

He was kind of a little soft spoken.

He wasn't really a great public speaker.

He was also a perfectionist, held very high standards for himself, and realized that was not gonna be what he did.

And so around that time, he had an opportunity for a summer job with the Swiss Legation, Washington DC.

And that is where he got interest in diplomacy.

- [Brooke] Lutz graduated from George Washington University in 1924, and then spent the next decade in appointments around the United States.

His last appointment in the country landed him back where he first started, in St. Louis.

From about 1933 to 1935, the hotel behind me was where Carl Lutz lived.

Then it was the Statler Hotel, and right down the street was where he worked in the offices above the now demolished Ambassador Theatre.

It was there where Lutz met his wife, Gertrud, who was also a Swiss native living in the city.

But the people of St. Louis embraced them as locals, so much so that when Lutz accepted a new position in Palestine, the St. Louis Star Times dedicated an entire page article detailing their recent move.

(gentle music) - So during the later part of the 1930s, Carl Lutz with his new wife, Trudy, ends up in Palestine, which is a British mandate at the time.

The state of Israel is not yet founded, but the first couple years they have a great time.

He is a devout Christian.

He's close to Bethlehem, he's close to Jerusalem, but while he is there, a few years later, 1939, the war breaks out.

- [Brooke] This led to a couple of key elements that would later influence Lutz's rescue efforts.

First, because Palestine was under British control, any German citizen in the country now found themselves essentially in enemy territory.

In this wartime scenario, a neutral nation will be brought in, in this case with their infamous neutrality, Switzerland represented the interests of those German citizens, and Lutz was praised for negotiating their safe release back to Germany.

Another major discovery was something called Schutzpasses, or protective papers.

These papers protected anyone who possessed them from having their property seized or from being displaced.

They were a commonly sought after item, particularly for Jewish people, during the war.

- But another thing happens while he and his wife are there.

They're standing on the roof of their apartment one day while they're in Palestine, and they see a man or a couple Jewish men lynched in the streets, and they feel completely powerless that they're unable to do anything.

And so the next day, Carl Lutz writes a letter to his brother in which he says, and I'm paraphrasing, "As I was watching this, "I was watching the stabbing and the beating, "I made a promise to myself.

"I made a promise to myself that I would speak up for them, "speak up for the Jewish people."

In this case, in Palestine, who were facing a lot of violence.

But the long term promise comes into play a few years later when he is in Budapest, Hungary.

(gentle music) - [Brooke] When Lutz arrives to Budapest in 1942, instead of representing German interest, he's now Vice Consul and responsible for the Allied Nations, including the United States and Great Britain.

Under British authority he's still distributing Schutzpasses, and between 1942 and 1944, Lutz is able to secure the immigration for about 10,000 Jewish people, mostly children, from Budapest to Palestine.

- Then things change on March 19th, 1944.

Within a course of a few weeks, Germany takes over Hungary, and between mid may and early July 1944, in about six weeks, 440 Hungarian Jews are sent to Auschwitz, and somewhere between 70 and 80% are killed upon arrival.

So where is Carl Lutz in all of this?

- [Brooke] In an effort to cast a wider safety net, Lutz, in partnership with several other nations, put a series of about 76 buildings under diplomatic protection, called the International Ghetto.

This was a place where Jewish people could take refuge.

- Now, Carl Lutz is able to do this in part because the German authorities remember the work he had done in British Palestine and respected his work as a diplomat.

Perhaps they underestimated what he was actually doing.

- [Brooke] Lutz and his wife made frequent visits to the International Ghetto, where they would issue as many protective papers as possible.

Because, even though by this point, the Swiss foreign minister put an end to the Schutzpasses, Lutz still had about 7800 documents left.

That 7800, however, turned out to shield the lives of many thousands more.

- We find out pretty quickly that there's 10 number tens, there's 15 number fifteens.

What would happen is that the people creating these papers, once they got to 7800, they would start again and just keep writing them, because they knew if there was a 9000 out there, it would be an obvious forgery.

- [Brooke] Lutz, and his staff headquartered this work in an old glass factory called The Glass House, where crowds of people would line up in hopes to receive papers.

And it was through this work that Lutz was able to save tens of thousands of lives, but of those thousands, two people in particular stood out.

(gentle music) - I remember very well the first meeting with the man who later became my stepfather.

- [Brooke] Agnes Hirschi was six years old by the time Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.

Being born in Britain to Hungarian Jewish parents, her mother wanted to protect Agnes any way she could.

And by then, Carl Lutz had developed a reputation for providing such protection.

- And my mother explained to him our situation.

She was 33 and a beautiful woman, and Carl Lutz immediately became attracted to her.

That was good luck for us.

(laughing) He said he would try to do more for us than just provide us with a letter of protection.

- [Brooke] Lutz invited Agnes and her mother to stay at his personal residence in Buda, where her mother worked as a housekeeper and Agnes got to continue a somewhat normal childhood, at least for a little while longer.

- But I have very vivid memories of those terrible times, especially the two months we spent in the bomb shelter.

I celebrated my seventh birthday in the bomb shelter, and Carl Lutz was very nice.

He even had kept some chocolate for me, because he knew I would have birthday, and I was very happy with that.

And after New Year, the situation became even more dramatic, because the house, the residence of the Lutz family, was hit by 20 fire bombs.

The house caught fire and burned for 48 hours while we were down in the bomb shelter.

But, we managed to survive.

He really ruined his health there in Budapest, because he was day and night, he cared day and night for the people under his protection, and often he had to go out at night, and he had no quiet moments.

- [Brooke] His quiet moments did come after the war when Lutz made his way back to Switzerland, where, instead of acknowledgement for his heroic actions, he was scolded for acting outside of his authority.

- He was very disappointed that the Swiss government didn't even take notice of what he did, you know?

They didn't even listen to what happened in Budapest, and they had no idea how war was, how terrible all this was.

- [Brooke] That's why Agnes has dedicated so much of her life to sharing her stepfather's story.

And while it was for her mother that Lutz left his first wife, Agnes explains that he wouldn't have been able to do the work without Gertrud.

- His stay was very short in St. Louis, but it had a positive outcome.

It's there where he met an attractive young Swiss lady, and that was Gertrud Fankhauser.

- So Carl Lutz's time in St. Louis and Missouri ends up being very important for what he does later on.

At least for us listening to his story, it revealed some personality traits.

It revealed some habits that end up becoming helpful later on.

Carl Lutz's story is a question.

For me, it's a question of what would I have done?

Would I have done the right thing?

And so I hope people who learn this story have that same, to be honest, that same struggle, that same debate.

Heroes like Carl Lutz deserve to be recognized, because they show us the best versions of ourselves and tell us what we really are able to do, and we're able to do great things.

- Finally, a look at the progress on the new Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum here in St. Louis County.

Ruth Ezell stopped in to see what they've got in store for us.

- So I love the way you're taking us on a journey, walking into these different areas.

- Certainly, and every room is telling its own story.

- [Ruth] Helen Turner is Director of Education for the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

She walked us through an exhibition that's at the core of the museum's expansion, and we will detail the scope of that expansion in a moment.

First, Turner explains the choices the design team made for the exhibition and how the color scheme plays a key role in the storytelling process.

- You'll notice as you go through the exhibition, that there is a gray line that begins very high in the beginning and slowly descends with you as you get further and further into the Holocaust narrative.

When you hit sort of that main focal point, the, what we're calling the geography of mass murder, the heart of the Holocaust, you're really at the lowest point in the exhibition and the darkest color scheme.

And then as we get a resurgence back to life, as we go through liberation, the displaced persons camps, our survivors are coming to the United States, and specifically St. Louis, you see the colors change again, and that gray line go up as we see a rebirth.

So every light fixture, color, photograph, even angles of the rooms, has been incredibly well thought out.

- [Ruth] Also thought out were selected quotes of Holocaust survivors who settled in the St. Louis area, of resistance leaders fighting for freedom, of veterans who liberated the concentration camps as soldiers, and other figures.

Turner says prior to the museum's official opening, there will be a private tour of the exhibition for survivors and their families.

- We know that this is deeply personal, and I can't imagine walking into a museum and seeing myself or my story represented there.

So we wanna give them the time and the space to really digest that, and also to have a real support network around them while they do that.

It's a deeply emotional topic.

And for many of them to see these photographs, to read their own quotes in a museum will be very empowering, I think, that they're telling their story, but I'm sure will also bring up a lot of memories.

- [Ruth] During our visit, the rest of the expanded museum was still a construction zone, but when it opens to the public, the 35,000 square foot facility will include an Impact Lab to explore issues of bias, stereotyping, hate crimes, and moments in history that pertain to the Holocaust.

The museum will host special exhibits, film screenings, and guest speakers from around the world.

What began in 2017 as an idea for a modest renovation is transforming into a world-class museum Helen Turner says is urgently needed.

- Sometimes people ask me, "Why talk about the Holocaust?

"It happened a very long time ago."

And my answer is really, number one, this is a story that has to be told, because it's about all of us.

It's about how we treat human beings.

But the second is that we are seeing it used more and more in political discourse.

We're seeing a rise in extremism, not only in the United States, but around the world.

And the Holocaust is being used and weaponized.

And that's why education on this topic, understanding the true gravity of what we're talking about, is absolutely at the fore of what we do every day.

(somber music) - And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time.

- [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, the Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(gentle rock music)