60 Minutes - 05/19/2024: Pope Francis, Cuban Spycraft, The Album

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Norah O'Donnell meets Pope Francis for a rare and historic interview at his home, the Santa Marta guest house in Vatican City, a week before the Catholic Church hosts its inaugural World Children's Day. The 87-year-old, Argentinian-born pope - the first named Francis and first from the Americas - is known for his dedication to the poor and marginalized, and for being the most unconventional head of the Church in recent memory. He spoke candidly with O’Donnell about the wars in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, and the migration crises around the world and on the U.S. southern border. The wide-ranging conversation also touches upon the Church's handling of its own sexual abuse scandals; Francis' deep commitment to inclusiveness within the Church; the backlash against his papacy from certain corners of U.S. Catholicism; and an exploration of his thinking on surrogate parenthood. For decades, prolific Cuban spies working in the U.S. government, serving in high profile positions with top security clearances, have evaded American intelligence officials. Correspondent Cecilia Vega reports from Washington, D.C. and Miami on the stories of two such undercover agents, former U.S. Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha and onetime Pentagon official Ana Montes. Cuba continues to supply one of the most dangerous exports to American adversaries around the world: American secrets. When a photo album depicting Nazis socializing at dinner parties and picnics arrived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, historians weren’t sure what to make of it. After an extensive investigation, it turned out to be a rare personal scrapbook of a high-ranking Nazi officer who helped run the daily operations of Auschwitz, the concentration camp where more than a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered. Correspondent Anderson Cooper tells the story behind the album and why acclaimed theater director Moises Kaufman decided to turn it into a new Off Broadway play called HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. What's it like to have a long conversation with the Pope? You're about to find out. When you look at the world, what gives you hope? Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things.

A wide-ranging interview with Pope Francis on 60 Minutes. Tonight, the story of two Americans with top security clearances and how they spied on behalf of Cuba, which bartered and sold America's secrets to its enemies around the world. Do you think there are other Anamanteses in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans are still penetrating our government with individuals

who are loyal to them and not to us. The most dangerous animal in the world is man, because other animals will hurt you if they're hungry or it's their nature of hunting. But man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. A unique new play with lessons from the past that pose a warning for today. To this image. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Francis is the first Pope from the Americas.

The first of his name, and more than any other Pope in recent memory, has dedicated his life and ministry to the poor, the peripheral, and the forgotten, all while leading the Catholic Church on difficult, sometimes controversial issues that not everyone supports. We were granted a rare interview at the Vatican and spoke to him in his native Spanish through a translator for more than an hour. Not lost in translation was the 87-year-old's warmth, intelligence, and conviction. We began by discussing the Church's first World Children's Day. Next weekend, Pope Francis will welcome tens of thousands of young people to the Vatican, including refugees of war. During World Children's Day, the UN says over a million people will be facing famine in Gaza,

many of them children. JOSE FRIEDMAN, President of the United States of America, Not just in Gaza. Think of Ukraine. Many kids from Ukraine come here. You know something? That those children don't know how to smile. I'll say something to them. They have forgotten how to smile, and that is very painful. Do you have a message for Vladimir Putin when it comes to Ukraine? Please, warring countries, all of them, stop. Stop the war. You must find a way of negotiating for peace. Strive for peace.

A negotiated peace is always better than an endless war. What's happening in Israel and Gaza has caused so much division, so much pain around the world. I don't know if you've seen in the United States big protests on college campuses and growing anti-semitism. What would you say about how to change that? All ideology is bad. And anti-semitism is an ideology, and it is bad. Any anti is always bad. You can criticize one government or another, the government of Israel, the Palestinian government.

You can criticize all you want, but not anti-a people, neither anti-Palestinian nor anti-Semitic, no. I know you call for peace. You have called for a ceasefire in many of your sermons. Can you help negotiate peace? What I can do is pray. I pray a lot for peace. And also to suggest, please stop, negotiate. Prayer has been at the center of the Pope's life since he

was born, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in Argentina in 1936 into a family of Italian immigrants. Before entering the seminary, Bergoglio worked as a chemist. His own personal formula is simplicity. He still wears the plain silver cross he wore as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, though it's not what Francis wears, but where he lives that set the tone for his papacy 11 years ago. Instead of a palace above St. Peter's Square, he chose the Vatican guest house, Casa Santa Marta, as his home. We met him there under a painting of the Virgin Mary. Surrounded by the sacred, Francis has not forsaken his sense of humor, even when discussing serious subjects like the migrant crisis. My grandparents were Catholic, immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1930s to the migrant crisis. My grandparents were Catholic, immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1930s to the United States, seeking a better life.

And I know your family, too, fled fascism. And you have talked about, with migrants, many of them children, that you encourage governments to build bridges, not walls. Migration is something that makes a country grow. They say that you Irish migrated and brought the whiskey, or that the Italians migrated and brought the mafia. It's a joke. Don't take it badly. But migrants sometimes suffer a lot. They suffer a lot.

I grew up in Texas, and I don't know if you've heard, but the state of Texas is attempting to shut down a Catholic charity on the border with Mexico that offers undocumented migrants humanitarian assistance. What do you think of that? That is madness, sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there, that is madness. The migrant has to be received. Thereafter, you see how you're going to deal with them.

Maybe you have to send them back. I don't know. But each case ought to be considered humanely, right? A few months after becoming pope, Francis went to a small Italian island near Africa to meet migrants fleeing poverty and war. Your first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, where you talked about suffering. And I was so struck when you talked about the globalization of indifference. What is happening? Do you want me to state it plainly? People wash their hands. There are so many Pontius Pilates on the loose out there who see what is happening, the wars,

the injustice, the crimes. That's okay, that's okay, and wash their hands. It's indifference. That is what happens when the heart hardens and becomes indifferent. Please, we have to get our hearts to feel again. The heart hardens and becomes indifferent. Please, we have to get our hearts to feel again. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of such human dramas. The globalization of indifference is a very ugly disease.

Very ugly. Pope Francis has not been indifferent to the church's most insidious scandal, the rampant sexual abuse of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide for decades. You have done more than anyone to try and reform the Catholic Church and repent for years of unspeakable sexual abuse against children by members of the clergy. But has the Church done enough? It must continue to do more. Unfortunately, the tragedy of the abuses is enormous. And against this, an upright conscience,

and not only to not permit it, but to put in place the conditions so that it does not happen. You have said zero tolerance. It cannot be tolerated. When there is a case of a religious man or woman who abuses, the full force of the law falls upon them. In this there has been a great deal of progress.

It's Francis' capacity for forgiveness and openness that has defined his leadership of the church's nearly 1.4 billion Catholics. He put them and the world on notice during an impromptu press conference on a plane in 2013, when he spoke on the subject of homosexuality. If someone is gay, he said, and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge? And he did not stop there. Last year, you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples. That's a big change. Why? No, what I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament.

I cannot. The Lord made it that way. But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. For everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person? Why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this, but why? Everyone, everyone. AMY GOODMAN- You have said, who am I to judge? Homosexuality is not a crime. No, it's a human fact.

AMY GOODMAN- There are conservative bishops in the United States that oppose your new efforts to revisit teachings and traditions. How do you address their criticism? You used an adjective, conservative. That is, conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude, as one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account,

to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box. Pope Francis has placed more women in positions of power than any of his predecessors. But he told us he opposes allowing women to be ordained as priests or deacons. Francis's devotion to traditional doctrine led one Vatican reporter to note that he's changed the tune of the church, but the lyrics essentially remain the same. This frustrates those who want to see him change policy on Roman Catholic priests marrying, contraception, and surrogate motherhood.

I know women who are cancer survivors who cannot bear children, and they turn to surrogacy. This is against church doctrine. In regard to surrogacy. This is against church doctrine. In regard to surrogate motherhood, in the strictest sense of the term, no, it is not authorized. Sometimes surrogacy has become a business, and that is very bad. It is very bad. But sometimes for some women it is the only hope. It could be.

The other hope is adoption. I would say that in each case, the situation should be carefully and clearly considered. Consulting medically, and then morally as well. I think there is a general rule in these cases, but you have to go into each case in particular to assess the situation, as long as the moral principle is not skirted. But you are right. I want to tell you that I really liked your expression when you told me, in some cases, it is the only chance. It shows that you feel these things very deeply.

I think that's why so many people have found hope with you, because you have been more open and accepting, perhaps, than other previous leaders of the church. You have to be open to everything. The church is like that. Everyone, everyone, everyone. That so-and-so is a sinner. Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone.

The gospel is for everyone. If the church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the Church of Christ. Everyone. When you look at the world, what gives you hope? Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things.

You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live, people forge ahead, and people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink.

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Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side. Or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Last month, a career American ambassador pleaded guilty to spying for the intelligence service of Cuba. Victor Manuel Rocha served his country in positions that required the highest levels of security clearance. For 40 years, he was a covert agent. Before Ambassador Rocha was exposed, there was another prolific Cuban spy named Ana Montes, a Pentagon official who was the lead analyst on Cuba policy.

She spied for 17 years. But Cuban spycraft isn't just a relic of the Cold War. It's a real and present danger to U.S. national security. It turns out Cuba's main export isn't cigars or rum. It's American secrets, which they barter and sell to America's enemies around the world. It was 1999, and then First Lady Hillary Clinton danced with the president of Argentina at a state dinner.

President Clinton also danced the tango across the White House ballroom. There in front, wearing glasses and the airs of an aristocrat, stood Victor Manuel Rocha. He was the number two diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, with an impeccable reputation as a senior statesman on Latin America. He served on the National Security Council and became the ambassador to Bolivia, seen here alongside that country's president. All that time while having the highest top-secret security clearance with access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence. But last December, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Rocha's arrest. He was charged with spying for Cuba for his entire career.

This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent. In 2022, a man claiming to be a Cuban intelligence officer contacted Rocha and asked to meet. Rocha agreed. He had no idea the man was an undercover FBI agent. Over three meetings in Miami, the FBI recorded Rocha with a hidden camera. And according to the complaint, Rocha bragged that he got away with decades of spying by memorizing the secrets he stole. Rocha told the agent, What we have done, it's enormous, more than a grand slam. He called the U.S., quote, the enemy.

What do you think is the extent of damage that he did to national security? Manuel Rocha did enormous damage to American security. Brian Littell was the CIA's top Cuba analyst at the height of the Cold War. He says in the 1980s, Rocha cold-called and struck up a professional relationship. They remained friends for decades. You think he approached you to get information out of you, ultimately? Yes. He never got any. Did you see any signs that he was leading a double life?

None. None? None. What can you tell me about the tradecraft that Cuba uses? They do it very, very well in mostly rudimentary fashions. The Cubans are not flying satellites anywhere in the world. Nearly all of their ability and success has been in the dimension of human intelligence. Their officers, their intelligence agents and officers are very,

very good. They know their tradecraft. They practice it with great skill and with discipline. And when they recruit, they're very careful about how they recruit and how they communicate. And what does Cuba do with the information it gets from all these spies? They have no scruples about sharing the information or perhaps marketing it, selling it to other countries. The Russians, maybe the Chinese. If they collect information about U.S. intentions, policy intentions toward Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, it would be of interest to those countries. That was this man's job when he was a Cuban intelligence officer,

decoding messages intercepted from the U.S. Jose Cohen defected in 1994. Cuba shared that information with enemies of the United States, he told us. Countries like the Soviet Union for years, countries like North Korea, countries like Iran, had information about the operation of the Defense Department. You say Cuba may not have the weapons, Cuba may not have the arms, but they sell these

secrets to the enemies of the United States. The strongest enemies of the United States. All of that was what made me realize this is a battle between good and evil. Cuba was at the service of all the enemies of the United States. After Jose Cohen set foot on U.S. soil, he shared a vital piece of information with the FBI. That led to the investigation of more than 100 suspected Cuban agents and illegal officers, and ultimately one very important spy. Cohen handed over an encryption key like this one, used by Cuban spies to send and receive secret messages with Havana.

Three nights a week at 9 p.m. and then again at 10, a series of numbered codes was broadcast out of Havana. The signal could be heard for most of the 1990s up the East Coast as far north as Maine, but the coded messages were only meant to be decoded by their agents, including a Pentagon analyst named Ana Montes, who lived in this quiet Washington neighborhood. This is where she did all of the business, all the spy business. Exactly. I mean, she would listen to the high-frequency messages upstairs Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday night.

She would type up her messages on her computer in her bedroom right up here. This is the area that she lived in, camouflaged, the fact that she was committing espionage right here. He says... Peter Lapp is a retired FBI special agent who was on the team that led the Montez investigation. How'd she do it? She went to work, memorized three things every day, went home and all classified, and they would write them up or type them up. And then every two or three weeks, she would meet in person at lunch, broad daylight, two to three hours over lunch.

Maybe I've seen too many movies. When I think spies, I'm thinking Dark of Night, Park Bench, secret cameras, fancy gadgets. That wasn't her. Everyone who works for the intelligence community goes home with classified information in their head, and you can't stop that with guards and technology. It's just, it's undefeatable. Lapp wrote a book on the FBI investigation into Montez.

He told us Havana doesn't pay its spies, so Americans who spy for Cuba don't do it for money, but rather are driven by ideology. Ambassador Rocha was recruited in the late 1970s, influenced, he now says, by the radical politics of the day. Montes was a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the 1980s and was outspoken about her anger toward U.S. policy in Latin America when she was recruited by a Cuban intelligence officer. Montes' father was a U.S. Army doctor and her siblings worked for the FBI. One of her first jobs out of graduate school

was as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. So Ana Montes was already a full-fledged Cuban spy from the moment that she set foot inside the Defense Intelligence Agency. She walked in fully recruited, day one. Only went to DIA for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. And when you think about the other folks that have been arrested for espionage, most start loyal. They take the oath. They intend to abide by that oath. But then something happens and they flip. And Ana's unique in the sense that she walked in from day one and was an insider threat

and only went for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. How does a Cuban spy walk through the doors of the DIA and get a job? She didn't have to take a polygraph? They did not have a polygraph program at the time. Over the course of her career, she became such an expert that she was known in the intelligence community as the Queen of Cuba. All the while, she was exposing national secrets to Havana. The FBI surveilled her for a year before her arrest as she walked to work and called her Cuban handler. By that time, she had revealed the existence of a top-secret satellite program used by the U.S. to spy on other countries. She also gave Havana the names of 450 American intelligence officials working on Latin American issues,

including four undercover officers stationed in Cuba. And she got away with it for 17 years, until she was arrested in 2001 at her office by FBI Special Agent Peter Lapp and his partner Stephen McCoy. She didn't fit the profile of a typical spy. No. Being a woman is incredibly unique, so it doesn't fit that typical what we would look for in a spy, which is mostly men. Montes pleaded guilty to espionage, and in exchange for not spending the rest of her life in prison, she agreed to tell the FBI everything she had done. I wouldn't mind at all meeting two Fridays a month.

Through a public records request, we obtained this footage, seen here for the first time, of Montez wearing prison stripes, speaking with FBI investigators. Citing Montez's right to privacy, the FBI denied our request for the recorded audio of their interviews. But we obtained a declassified transcript of the first day where Montez described how deep in she was. She said,

Ever since I started helping the Cubans, there's been no halfway. I don't really know how a person does it without feeling morally bound. It's a full commitment, mentally, physically, emotionally. I feel that what I did was morally right, that I was faithful to principles that were right. Montez told the agents her only regret was that she was forced to cooperate with the FBI as part of her plea deal. It's tearing me up, she said, but if the only way I'm going to see my family again, it's the only way. Agent Lapp sat across from Ana Montes in the

interrogation room for seven months. He said one of the most sobering moments was when she said how far she would have been willing to go for the Cubans in the week after 9-11. She said, if the Cubans asked me to provide them with intelligence about what we were doing in Afghanistan, I absolutely would have done that. And if men and women were killed as a result of my intelligence in Afghanistan, she told us that's the risk that they took. What was the extent of the damage that she did? I do think she's in that tier of some of the most notorious spies in American history,

and I think the damage that she did was incredibly significant. After serving 20 years in federal prison, Ana Montes was released in January 2023. She's now living in Puerto Rico, where she has family and has been celebrated by some as a hero, seen here recently receiving an award from supporters. Through a lawyer, Montes declined our request for an interview. Last month, former ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha told a judge he was deeply sorry and pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of the Cuban government. At age 73, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is currently cooperating with investigators.

Just how many state secrets he gave to Cuba, we may never know. Nearly all the details of his spycraft remain classified. Ana Montes has yet to publicly express any remorse. Do you think there are other Ana Montes' in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans and the Russians and others are still penetrating our government

with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song. With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. By the time a new play opened last week off-Broadway by acclaimed writer and director Moises Kaufman, it had already been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It's based on the true story of a photo album from Auschwitz that was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007. Museum historians weren't sure what to make of it at first,

but the album turned out to be the scrapbook of a Nazi, an SS officer who helped run the day-to-day operations of Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945. The album doesn't show any prisoners or gas chambers. What it does show are some of the most notorious killers in history seemingly enjoying themselves. That's what museum officials found so chilling and what Moises Kaufman spent 14 years creating a play about. When I first saw the photographs, I got goosebumps. And I remember thinking, you know, many of the people in my family died in Auschwitz. And these are the people who were doing it.

And they don't seem to have any remorse. Seeing that in a photograph so clearly articulated is terrifying. This is terrifying because they all look so much like us. The photographs may appear unremarkable at first. SS officers at dinner parties, drinking, socializing, flirting with their young Nazi secretaries. But when these pictures were taken, the Germans were losing the war and exterminating more Jews in Auschwitz than at any other time in the Holocaust.

Several images show an SS officer giving his secretaries blueberries while a man plays an accordion. The inscription reads, Here there are blueberries. Moises Kaufman picked that for the title of his play. I wanted the audience to have the experience that we had looking at the photographs. What was it about the series of the women eating blueberries

that so struck you? That there were just, you know, teenage girls who were secretaries. Everyone is showing the photographer their empty plates, but there's one of the women who's pretend crying. So she's so sad because she's run out of blueberries. And outside of the frame, there's 1.1 million people who are being killed.

So how do you lead your daily life and at the same time participate in one of the largest killing machines in the history of mankind? The caption says, rain from a clear sky. Kaufman's play is centered on the museum historians who worked with survivors and even descendants of Nazis themselves to uncover what the album was. The images appear to be straight out of a holiday scrapbook. No one had ever seen images like these before. There are few photos of Auschwitz because the Nazis worked hard to conceal their crimes.

I count 116 photographs. Kaufman's main character is Rebecca Erbelding, a historian at the Holocaust Museum, played by actor Elizabeth Stahlman. This is when the album becomes an obsession for me. The real Rebecca Erbelding received the album from a former U.S. counterintelligence officer. He said he found it in 1946 in an abandoned apartment

in war-torn Frankfurt while hunting down Nazi war criminals. He donated it to the museum, but wanted to remain anonymous. How did you go about finding out who made this? I didn't see any trains. I didn't see anything I recognized. It was maybe the third time flipping through it, and that's when I saw Joseph Mengele. No pictures of Dr. Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz had ever been found before. To see the album, we went to a high-security, climate-controlled facility in Maryland, where the original pages are stored.

That's Dr. Mengele. That's Mengele, and these are still the only known photos of Mengele while he was stationed at the camp. Mengele was known by prisoners at Auschwitz as the Angel of Death. He conducted gruesome medical experiments, mostly on children, and often stood on the platform when trains arrived, selecting who would be sent to work and who would die immediately in gas chambers. Not only is it Mengele, these are some of the most infamous officers at the camp. So you see there's Bayer. Richard Bayer is on the album's first page. He was the last commandant of Auschwitz.

That helped historians identify his deputy, Karl Hocker. And it turned out this was Hocker's personal album, his cherished memories behind the scenes of a massacre. May 1944 is when Hocker got to Auschwitz. Yes, so this is the entirety of his time at Auschwitz. Before the war, Hocker had been a struggling bank teller. Becoming an SS officer at Auschwitz was considered a big step up. He had been staffed at the Majdanek camp before this,

and so he had experience with prisoners arriving, with selections, with gas chambers. He signed receipts for Zyklon B, the lethal gas that was used for killing people. He is a crucial cog in the Nazi killing machine. The 116 photos in the album show Auschwitz as Karl Hawker wanted to remember it. Wow. It's a mix of like candid things and really officials. This is his dog, his dog's name is Favarit.

I mean, what's so stunning about them is how... Normal? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who hasn't taken a photo of them shaking their dog's hand? Mm-hmm. So this is Yule Fire 1944, which is Nazi Christmas. They know that the Soviets are coming.

They are not far. They can probably hear the bombs. And they're lighting Christmas trees. Yeah. The album reveals something else museum officials hadn't seen before. The Nazis built a vacation resort at Auschwitz. It was called Sula Huta. These pictures show a gathering of top SS officers there in July 1944. Rebecca Rebelding believes it was a party. They were congratulating themselves for successfully

murdering more than 350,000 Hungarian Jews in just 55 days. This looks like they're singing. They are. And this front row is really what the director of the museum, Sarah Bloomfield, calls the chorus of criminals. So you have Hucker, you have Otto Moll, the head of the gas chamber section. There's Rudolf Hoest. The former commandant of Auschwitz. The former commandant of Auschwitz.

Mengele is here. They're celebrating the successful slaughter. The successful mass murder, yeah. Then, you know, it was somebody labeled it a metropolis of death. And that's what it was. It worked like an assembly line factory. Irene Weiss got to Auschwitz the day after Karl Hawker started working there. She arrived when she was 13,

on a train packed with Jews from Hungary. Separated from her parents and four of her siblings, she says she found herself on the platform holding her younger sister Edith's hand as they approached Dr. Mengele. And everything was in a matter of seconds, you know, that stick came down between us. He held life and death with that stick.

All of a sudden, I was alone. She didn't know it at the time, but that moment was captured by a Nazi photographer documenting the arrival and processing of Hungarian Jews. It appears in one of the only other albums of Auschwitz. This photo has been colorized. This is the group already going to the gas chamber. Where are you in this picture? Well, I am right here.

This is you? That's me right here. So this is the moment after you've been separated from your little sister, Edith? The very moment, yes. That's what I'm looking at. I can't leave. I left her. Irene Weiss never saw Edith, her parents, or her brothers alive again. What she has is this photo.

That's her mother, Leia, sitting on the ground just behind her brothers, Gershon and Ruben, at Auschwitz. After this picture was taken, they were led into a gas chamber. They had to kill the children so there will not be a new generation. And they discovered that if they also killed the mothers, They had to kill the children so there would not be a new generation. And they discovered that if they also killed the mothers, then they didn't have to worry about the chaos that that would create, separating. The children wouldn't be upset by being separated.

And the mothers wouldn't be upset. Weiss spent the next eight months working outside one of those gas chambers. She sorted shoes and other belongings of the dead. We saw these columns of women, mothers and children, and going into the door there, talking to us, and they're told they're walking into a bathhouse, you know. They're asking questions, where are you from? And a half hour later, the chimney is belching fire. And that went on day after day and night after night. So you saw thousands of women, children,

walking into gas chambers. And you talked to some of them. Absolutely. In the last seconds of their life, minutes of their lives. Yes, but we couldn't cry. It was an amazing thing. This is beyond crying. Tears are for normal pain.

That kind of brutality from fellow mankind is so deep that, you know, people say broken heart. The heart keeps working, but the soul never forgets. Irene Weiss wasn't surprised by the photos in Karl Hocker's album, but when they were released publicly, they made headlines around the world. Tillman Taub read about them online in Germany while on his lunch break. And there was an article, new photos from Auschwitz have appeared. I thought, this is interesting. When he looked at the photos, he was surprised to see his grandfather, Dr. Heinz Baumkotter.

On the first picture, it wasn't 100% clear, but then I flipped two more pictures, and it was absolutely 100% clear that that was him. Taub knew his grandfather was head physician at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and had done medical experiments on prisoners and sent thousands to be killed at other camps. But Taub wasn't sure why his grandfather had gone to Auschwitz. He connected with Rebecca Rebelding and soon discovered just how deeply involved his grandfather was in the Holocaust. When you see the picture of your grandfather, does that feel like your grandfather? For me, strictly speaking, it's two different persons.

The grandfather that I knew was a rather normal grandfather. And the SS officer is a different person for me. It's impossible to reconcile the two. It is difficult, difficult, really. Taub now helps the museum search for more photos and documents by reaching out to other descendants of Nazis. Of course you want to be part of some kind of movement that helps preventing things like that from happening again.

You know your grandfather, and you know what he did. Does it make you think differently about human beings, what we are all capable of? Absolutely, absolutely. How could highly educated physicians, people whose entire professional purpose was to heal, become systematic killers? The play about the Hawker album by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronick, his co-writer

and longtime collaborator, raises difficult questions, not just about our past, but about ourselves. When we look at these pictures, we're looking through the lens of how they saw what they were doing. Why is it important to see Auschwitz through their eyes? Because they didn't wake up each morning thinking, I'm an evil monster, I'm going to do evil monstrous things. They woke up each day and they went about their lives

filled with justifications and beliefs in what they were doing. It makes all of us ask the question, well, what am I capable of doing? I think that's what's happening. When the audience comes in, they sit here and they go, who would I have been in that picture? The most dangerous animal in the world is man because other animals will hurt you if they're hungry or it's their nature of hunting but man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission.

As soon as permission is given from higher-ups, from government, it accelerates. Even a hint of permission that it's okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group, it's happening. It's never stopped. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap,

biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. Tonight, a farewell to our 56th season and to Frank Devine, who made 60 Minutes better for 35 years. Frank is retiring as a senior producer who improved the writing of every 60 Minutes story. As a producer for Steve Croft, Frank explained the 2008 financial crisis, introduced us to an unknown Illinois senator named Barack Obama,

and produced an almost unheard of interview with then Charles, Prince of Wales. Now we must return our colleague to his family. We will remember Frank for his generous and learned presence, and our audience is in the debt of a journalist who believes facts are facts and writing fills them with meaning. We may not see his byline, L. Franklin Devine, here again, but his inspiration endures. Thank you, Frank. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back in September with a brand new season of 60 Minutes.