While magazines and newspapers around the country provided frequent and vivid accounts of rising Nazi brutality in Europe, Americans focused inward in the 1930–40s. Still in the grip of the Great Depression, national confidence was eroding under the weight of record unemployment and the looming threat of Hitler’s authoritarian regime. During this program, step back in time with United States Holocaust Memorial Museum experts to explore headlines, sentiments, and artifacts from your local community. How did residents of your community learn about Nazi actions? And how did community leaders react in the face of the threat?

Photo: People look at Washington, DC, newspapers on September 1, 1939—the day Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Harris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress