This episode takes you through the full, unflinching story of the Holocaust — from the ancient roots of antisemitism that made it possible, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in a broken and humiliated post-World War One Germany, and into the systematic, industrialized murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy of life. We walk through the ghettos of Warsaw, where hundreds of thousands were starved behind walls and barbed wire. We follow the Einsatzgruppen death squads across Eastern Europe, where entire Jewish communities were marched to ravines and shot. We step inside the machinery of the death camps — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec — where human beings were gassed by the thousands and their bodies burned in crematorium ovens running around the clock.

But this episode is not only about death. It's about resistance — the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, and the countless small acts of defiance that kept the human spirit alive in the darkest of places. It's about the Righteous Among the Nations — people like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Irena Sendler, and Chiune Sugihara — who risked everything to save lives when most of the world looked the other way.We cover the liberation of the camps by Allied forces, the Nuremberg trials, the hunt for escaped war criminals, and the founding of the State of Israel in the shadow of genocide.

We address Holocaust denial head-on, dismantling the lies with the overwhelming mountain of evidence left behind by the Nazis themselves, by survivors, by perpetrators who confessed, and by the Allied soldiers who walked through the gates of hell and documented what they found.

And we examine the generational trauma that continues to shape the descendants of survivors — the silence, the anxiety, the emerging science of epigenetic inheritance that suggests the wounds of the Holocaust may be written into the very biology of those who came after. 

This is one of the most important episodes we've ever produced. It is not easy to listen to. But it is necessary. Because the last survivors are dying, and when they're gone, it falls to us to carry this memory forward.

Listener discretion is strongly advised. This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence, genocide, and human suffering. Never forget.