This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people coming to you from the city where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from

the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Henry G. Plitt returned from World War II

a hero, not just to everyday Americans, but especially to Jewish Americans. He had been one of the

first soldiers on the ground in Holland

during Operation Marketcarten and in Normandy as a parachuting pathfinder. And he later

captured Julius Stryker, the founder of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturma, who had been

advocating for the extermination of Jews as early as 1933.

Here's the late Brigadier General with the story of his service,

and we'd like to credit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

for preserving and publishing this audio.

Let's get into the story.

Music Let's get into the story. I was in law school in St. Lawrence University, Brooklyn, and at this time, I was getting close to

1940. It was in 38 and 39, and my family managed

through an organization called HIAS to bring into this country some of my relatives

who were in the German occupied areas.

And when I heard their story, I just made up my mind that all this was, one man was

responsible for all this, and his name was Hitler, and somehow or other I wanted to kill him.

Now that sounds terrible in the light of today's world, but at that time when you heard those horror

stories, you couldn't do anything but want to destroy this person who was responsible for.

...