60 Minutes - 10/20/2024: Relief, NC, Navalny, The Swingiest County, The Cap Arcona

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Reporting from the Appalachian Mountains, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi surveys one of the hardest hit areas of Hurricane Helene, a category four storm that tore through six states more than three weeks ago. Alfonsi visits communities in rural western North Carolina where the search for the missing goes on as most residents endure life without water, electricity, communications, and passable roads. All are attempting to rebuild - most have no insurance. Months after anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, now the leading figure of his political movement, speaks with correspondent Lesley Stahl in her first U.S. interview about her late husband's posthumous memoir. Navalnaya discusses the book, Navalny's last act of defiance against the Kremlin, which chronicles his final three years behind bars under often brutal conditions, believed to be ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin. She details his clandestine operation for penning the memoir inside a high-security prison and then smuggling it out, why the couple decided to return to Russia after Navalny was poisoned, and her daring campaign for justice in the wake of his death. Correspondent Jon Wertheim travels to Door County, Wisconsin, a bucolic coastal community where political party loyalty is up for grabs and residents have successfully voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election this century. Door County is the only swing state county with this distinction. Wertheim travels to Door County to get to know its residents and look for the mystery voter who’s voted both Republican and Democrat successfully in every election since 2000. Bill Whitaker reports from Germany’s Baltic Coast on the bombing of the Cap Arcona, a little-known human tragedy in the closing days of World War II in Europe. Once a luxurious German ocean liner, the Cap Arcona was commandeered by the Nazis and, at war’s end, turned into a floating concentration camp. Thousands of prisoners were killed in the aerial attack. Whitaker interviews historians and Holocaust survivors who witnessed the bombing to bring this largely overlooked chapter of history to light. This is a double-length segment. 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

. Helene is the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina, producing tidal waves of damage in the mountain valleys of North Carolina. It sounded like it was at the ocean. It came up to the... Tonight, you'll meet the resilient citizens who are still counting their dead, helping each other clean up,

and clearing up conspiracy theories. The U.S. government did not geoengineer this storm. We have reported on Alexei Navalny since 2017. The fearless opposition leader to Vladimir Putin was beaten, poisoned, and then this year, at age 47, he died in a Russian penal colony. His secret prison diaries

will be published this week as a memoir. And his widow, Yulia, talks about how she is now leading the fight against Putin. It's a dangerous place to be. I don't care at all. Want a window into this upcoming election? Come with us to idyllic Door County. You say whoever wins Door County likely wins Wisconsin. You also just said whoever wins Wisconsin likely wins the national election. Not an exaggeration. Door County likely wins Wisconsin. You also just said whoever wins Wisconsin likely wins the national election. Yes.

Not an exaggeration. Door County, Wisconsin. Historically the case. Whoever wins in Door County is probably the next president of the United States. 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 Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on this special 90-minute edition of 60 Minutes. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt, did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those

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Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. In Florida, residents are once again beginning the slow process of recovery. Milton was the second hurricane to take aim at the state in as many weeks. Just 13 days earlier, Hurricane Helene hit Florida, then carved a 500 mile path of destruction north, killing more than 240 people, the deadliest storm to strike the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina. One of the area's hardest hit was western North Carolina, a region unaccustomed to hurricanes.

Residents were caught off guard when the Appalachian mountain range that hugs the border of Tennessee acted like a funnel for the remnants of Helene, devastating the communities below. Tonight, you will hear from survivors and about the enormous effort to bring relief to North Carolina. With the force of a tidal wave, water tore down the Appalachian Mountains, knocked over bridges, and sent homes and people downstream. We made our way 45 miles north of Asheville, snaking around the washed out roads and into the communities Helene tried to wipe off the mountain. 2,000 feet up, we saw what is left of Green Mountain, a town tucked above the gurgling North Toe River until the remnants

of Helene came roaring down the mountain with enough power to snap their concrete bridge in half. It sounded like you was at the ocean, and it looked like the ocean except it was dirtier, muddier. Was there stuff in it? We saw a house float down. In front of here? Yes, that way. If you've never been through it, something I never want to see again. And I hope and pray that nobody has to. Jane Whitson Peterson, her husband, and 96-year-old mother were trapped inside the general store the family has run for more than 60 years.

She took this video from the second floor. We have two doors down that way outside and then we have this back one and we tried to block them and you don't stop water and it busted through the back door and then it started coming in the front door. So the water's coming through the store? It came three different ways. So when we got up there and we stood on the steps and watched it come in, all we could do is just sit and watch it and pray that it didn't get no higher. It came up to the seventh step. This is what those answered prayers look like today.

Only the skeleton of the family's store is left. Her father's old cash register is clogged with mud, and her mother's home was destroyed. She's 96. She's raised seven kids and worked 16, 18 hours a day. It's really hard for her, but my mom got up the next morning singing. Singing? Singing. When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there.

A hymn about the expectations of a home in heaven. On her front lawn, 96-year-old Parzady Whitson shared it with us, surrounded by what's left of her home on Green Mountain. When the roll is called up, I'll be there. For so many, this was their slice of heaven, living in the hollers, the communities built in the valleys

of the Appalachian Mountains. What do you do next as a family? We keep going. It's what we've always done. I've not been a whole lot of places, but I would never go nowhere else to live. Everybody knows everybody. And if you need a hand, we're there.

We'll do anything we can to help you. This is home? This is home. I call it God's country. I know everybody says that because where they live, but this little piece of western North Carolina is just, the mountains are just, they're magical. Jeff Howe's family has lived in the area for seven generations. Is there a bridge up through here? Howe is the emergency management coordinator for Yancey County, an area that was hit hard by Helene. The devastation caught most residents by surprise. Western North Carolina hasn't seen anything like this

since the Great Flood of 1916, when two storms converged and pushed rivers over their banks. It's going to hit the pool though right here. Forecasters say this time the stage was set for disaster well before Helene roared in. Days earlier, a weather front stalled over the mountains. Some areas got more than a foot of rain. When Helene arrived, these mountains were already saturated. There had been three days of rain.

Creeks and streams rerouted and grew bigger and stronger. There was nowhere for all that water to go but down and it took everything in its path with it. We started getting the entrapments, the landslide calls, and the most worrisome thing about it is when the calls stopped because we had no radio communication, we had no cell phone, we had no Internet. You couldn't talk to anyone, and that was terrifying. Forty-five miles to the south, Asheville, which sits in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, acted as a catch basin for the water that funneled down the Appalachians,

triggering landslides along the way. The two rivers that intersect with the city swelled to the highest levels in history. The water was so strong it pushed homes off their foundations and lifted a 10,000-pound tractor-trailer into the treetops. Rescue crews wound through the city on boats. Radios, cell phones, and the Internet were knocked out. Up in Yancey County, they couldn't call for help or wait for it. We basically just abandoned the emergency operations center,

and our sheriff's department, they were already out doing rescues. But we would just go in, give me another name, and we'd take off and try to find these people and get them. A local firefighter and his wife were among those rescued. He and his wife were asleep in their house when the flood washed it off the foundation and they were floating down where the river became and it shoved them through the wall of their house. They hung on to a tree for two or three hours until they were found. But then the next day he was at work. His face was scratched all to pieces, bandaged

up, but that's the kind of people we had. I say we work our way this way up here. More than 70 search and rescue teams from across the country were dispatched to North Carolina. Locals helped guide them up the treacherous mountain terrain to look for survivors. Forest rangers and paramedics carried a man who broke his back in the landslide three miles down a steep slope in the dark. In the week after the storm, hundreds of people were reported missing. Some families couldn't reach their loved ones for days. Others couldn't reach them at all. Desperate to connect, some people posted messages on the porch outside

the Hotel New Ray, a cornerstone of the county for nearly 200 years. Boards filled with the names of the missing and heartbreaking updates. We are alive. House gone. Dinner is ready, everybody. Come on in, guys. The new Ray has been feeding hundreds of weary storm victims warm meals every day. This is very nasty, you guys. Donations and relief workers have poured in. FEMA set up more than 40 processing centers to be eligible for assistance. And says so far it has distributed more than $100 million to North Carolina victims.

Aid is arriving by helicopters, even mules, carrying loads of medicine to areas trucks couldn't reach. More than 500 roads remain closed, and more than 100 bridges need to be replaced. A patchwork of dusty routes now holds the region together. And these are the tents we got from the government. Jeff Howell, who fought with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now trying to get help to his neighbors. You hear the phrase, you can't get there from here? We have a lot of that. Part of the community, it's cut off

and they have to actually go around through Tennessee to get here, 60 miles one way. Did your time in the reserves prepare you for this? It did. It's unlike combat stress because in combat, you can shoot back. I can't do anything and that's very frustrating. But what I can do is, you know, working with the people around here and keep

the miscommunications down is the best thing I can do right now. But that's a struggle in itself. Jeff Howell is now dealing with a storm of disinformation. He told us conspiracy theories and false claims about the government's response to the flood have also made their way to the top of the mountain. I don't even know how they make it up. You know, stories about FEMA seizing trailers and draining tankers and going, that's just, that is really not happening. How does that impact workers on the ground? It takes their focus away from what they're supposed to be doing when they're having to debunk this sort of stuff and explain to people, no, the US government did not geo-

engineer this storm. But like I said, some people, they're going to believe it no matter what. The day after we spoke to Howe, a neighboring county was investigating reports of an armed militia, quote, hunting FEMA. One arrest was made. FEMA suspended door-to-door operations in western North Carolina for 48 hours. But the agency reports all operations have resumed. This is one of the areas still in need of help, a place curiously called relief. This is the old post office. You used to play in here? We did. James Warwick told us the area

was named after a medicine the town doctor sold in the 1800s that provided relief to its patrons. The main ingredient was alcohol. Warwick and his mother, Jewel, have lived in that same doctor's house for the past 55 years. Today, it is buried in mud. Less than 1% of residents in the hardest-hit areas of western North Carolina have flood insurance. What was it like before? Life was wonderful. It was wonderful. James and Jewel evacuated days before the storm and say they encouraged their neighbors to leave as well. But by the time they tried, it was too late.

There was a wall of water that came down the river that engulfed this area. And it's probably the same wall of water that took our neighbors with it. So we are the only two surviving people here in relief. Six of our neighbors have died. That is what's left of the car the couple next door and her two young boys tried to escape in. It was crushed by water so powerful, it twisted the train tracks in town. More than

three weeks after the storm, crews are still searching the debris along the rivers. In North Carolina, at least 125 people were killed by Helene. More than 50 are still missing. Across the Appalachian Mountains, the road to relief will be a long one. I'm still in shock. I mean, I carry on, and I laugh, and I joke, and I take my time in the moment of crying, but I'm not really let loose. But I have a strong family, and we have a strong community, and we're all pulling together. You'll stay here? I think so. This is mom's home. Yeah. This is my family's home.

The girls and James and the grandchildren, great-grand, yeah, we'll survive. You know, it's not giving up. We can't. There's hope. And when you have hope, you move on. The death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison in the Arctic this February sparked an outcry around the world.

He was compared to Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience. While behind bars, he completed a memoir documenting his three-year battle to survive the unspeakable prison conditions. This is our third story on Navalny, the first in 2017, when he stood up to Vladimir Putin by running against him for president of Russia. When he was arrested in 2021, Navalny's popularity as the most prominent leader of the Putin opposition was growing. Putin is a thief and the head of the entire corrupt system.

He was defiant, brave for taking on the all-powerful Vladimir Putin out in the open, denouncing him as a gangster. He refused to back down and paid the ultimate price. Three years in Russian prisons and then this year, death at age 47. His wife, Yulia, once her husband's silent partner, is now the leader of his opposition movement. She says Alexei's memoir, Patriot, represents his final act of defiance. It was his life. It was his every-minute job to fight with Putin's regime. And now he's fighting from the grave. I would prefer he would fight not from the grave.

And of course it's very tough for me to say like this, but we can say so. Over the summer, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for her. It's a dangerous place to be. I don't care at all. You're not afraid? No, not really. Why should I be afraid?

They could kidnap you. They could try to poison you. They could, but I don't want to live my life and to spend my life every day thinking about if they kidnap me today or tomorrow, if they are going to poison me today or tomorrow. You know who you sound like? You sound like Alexei. He would say the same thing. Of course, I've been living with him more than 25 years. In that time, Alexei, trained as a lawyer, became Russia's most famous anti-corruption activist and investigator, posting his findings online about bribes and kickbacks and evidence of the wealth Putin and his cronies had, as Navalny said, stolen from the Russian people. And you're goading them.

These are people who are trying to steal my country, and I strongly disagree with it. I'm not going to be, you know, a kind of speechless person right now. I'm not going to keep silent. He called Putin a madman who was sucking the blood out of Russia, and more insults, as he built a pro-democracy movement, opening offices all across Russia. It was a time when other Putin opponents were dying in suspicious suicides, a car bombing. Dissident Boris Nemtsov was shot out in the open near the Kremlin, and Navalny himself was subjected to multiple arrests and beatings, an attack with green dye laced with a caustic chemical, and in 2020, an assassination attempt that he recounts in the beginning of his book.

He writes that shortly before he boarded a plane in Siberia, he was poisoned with a Soviet-era military-grade nerve agent. He collapsed, moaning in agony, as his body began to shut down. While he was in a coma at a Russian hospital, Yulia waged a campaign to pressure Putin to release Alexei so he could fly to Germany for treatment. We met them in Berlin about two months after the attack. You have said you think that Mr. Putin's responsible. I don't think I'm sure that he's responsible.

He spent five months recovering in Germany. That's when he started writing the memoir. Then, in January of 2021, the Navalny's returned to Russia. When they landed, they were met by Russian police. He was arrested, said goodbye to his wife, and was led away. This is a question you're going to be asked, and was led away. This is a question you're going to be asked over and over and over, but it's almost the essential question.

Why did you decide to go back, the two of you? You knew the danger, for sure. And do you regret it now? You asked me about our decision. Like we were sitting together and discussing if he needs to go back or he doesn't need to go back. It didn't work like this. From the first day when I realized that he could recover after this poisoning, I knew that he would go back as soon as possible. So it wasn't even a debate? No. It just, when do we go back as opposed to if?

We didn't have any debates, and of course I would love to live all my life with my husband. But at that moment, I knew that there is just one decision which he could take. And it was his decision. And I knew how important it was for him. And I knew that he wouldn't be happy to live in exile. His arrest sparked protests across Russia. But far from disappearing in prison, Navalny managed to maintain a presence on social media. How, we've been asked not to say, but it enabled him to keep up his attacks on Putin. Meanwhile, his team of investigators

released drone footage of what they said was Putin's billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea. It was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube. It must have driven Putin insane that he locked him up, and he's still getting the anti-Putin message out. That's why his conditions were worse from month to month. Those conditions, Navalny wrote in his diaries, included sleep deprivation, punitive solitary confinement, almost no medical care.

And when none of that broke him, he was sent repeatedly to a concrete black hole called the punishment cell, where he would remain for up to 15 days at a time. Here's how he described it. He said it was a doghouse. And this is the place where prisoners were sent to be tortured and raped and sometimes murdered. I wondered how you read those passages. I was thinking of you when I read it and thought, what is she feeling? How are you reading this?

It's very tough moment for him to think about all these torturing place and torturing conditions and about him, how he was laughing at these people, even while he was there. Navalny thought of his life in prison as his work, surviving and staying positive his job. I know one thing for sure, he wrote, that I'm among the happiest 1% of people on the planet, those who absolutely adore their work. I have enormous support from the people, and I met a woman with whom I share not only love, but who is just as opposed as I am to what is going on.

Maybe we won't succeed, but we have to try. He wrote much of this book while he was in prison. He was under constant surveillance, cameras on him all the time, and he managed to get the pages out. Alexei was very smart, smart, very inventive. Let me read you what he says in the book, okay, about this. He says, I had to devise a whole clandestine operation to bamboozle the guards involving the substitution of identical notebooks.

And after that, we went to court where I was able physically to pass items to someone. It was very difficult. That's why we have diaries from the first year, much less from the second year, and not from the third year, because it wasn't possible. These are some of the diaries he smuggled out when he went to court, which was often, as he was tried and convicted several times on various pretexts. After each verdict, he was moved to a different prison with harsher conditions. Last December, he was transferred to this penal colony north of the Arctic Circle. This would be his final court appearance. He looked healthy and in good spirits, sharing a laugh with court officials.

The very next day, February 16, 2024, he was dead. Russian officials announced later that the cause was, quote, not criminal in nature and due to combined diseases. It was at the time that the negotiations over a prisoner swap were underway, and Alexei might be one of the prisoners who was to be released. Putin realized that Alexei is so big that he could be a new leader of Russia. He could encourage people to stand against Putin. And all these things just brought Putin to this understanding that it's not possible to let Navalny be free. You posted a message shortly after his death. You said, bravely I thought,

Vladimir Putin killed my husband. By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul. That's true. I can say now the same. Nothing has changed. Here's something else you said. You posted this on X. Please do not forget Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal.

His place is in prison and not somewhere in The Hague in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia in the same twothree-meter cell in which he killed Alexei. For me, it's very important. I think that for Vladimir Putin, he needs to be in Russian prison to feel everything, not just my husband, but all the prisoners in Russia. His political network inside Russia has been crushed. Yulia and their two children have been forced to live in exile. Many of his old team now operate out of here in Vilnius, Lithuania, and three of his lawyers are on trial in Russia. I'm so happy you're here. And Yulia is constantly on the road,

lobbying Western leaders to stand up to Putin. So the question is inevitable, painful, but inevitable. Has Putin won? Has he shut down the opposition to such an extent that it's over. But it's not finished. We continue our fight. He still has millions of supporters. We can see it by how many people go still every day to his grave. How many flowers on his grave. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or

wherever you get your podcasts. For all the polarization in American politics, everyone can agree that seven states hold the key to next month's election. These swing states contain a total of 513 counties, and among them only one has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election this century. Door County, Wisconsin offers a distinct shade of purple. Unencumbered by tribal loyalties, the citizenry is whipsawed from George W. Bush twice, to Barack Obama twice, to Donald Trump, and then to Joe Biden. Consider Door a window into this critical election.

Feverishly, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have been campaigning in swing states, especially Wisconsin, but neither has visited America's swingiest county. So we decided to. The Wisconsin Tourism Board could do worse than to anchor its next marketing campaign in Door County, a peninsula wedged between Lake Michigan and Green Bay, the water, not the home of the Packers. Nicknamed the Cape Cod of the Midwest, Door County and its coastline come embroidered with limestone cliffs, trees that blaze to life in the fall, and enduring traditions like the fish boil.

Boil over here! The population, 30,000, and no one knows more of the locals than 84-year-old Niles Weeborg, longtime fire chief. Tell me about Door County. How far you want to go back? My relatives landed here in 1851 from Norway. Weeborg has a handy way of placing Door County on Wisconsin's map. And this is where we're at. Door County is up the thumb of Wisconsin. And Green Bay is down here. Milwaukee is down here. And we're about right here on the peninsula.

So we got a Bayside and we got a Lake Michigan side. There you go. Tell me politically, what are people like? Well, politically, we were strictly Republicans. But then the transplants came, and now Door County is the ultimate political weather vane. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Door County by 292 votes, the tightest margin in any Wisconsin county. And it's not just the presidential elections. It's virtually every statewide election we seem to pick the winner. It's kind of weird. Republican Joel Kitchens represents Door County and the state assembly. What do you attribute that to? I think a lot of it is that we are just such a

cross-section of the state that we have a lot of people that came here from the cities and from the suburbs and retired. We have a strong agricultural community. We have heavy manufacturing. As you can see when you drive along the lakeshore and the bayshore, there's a lot of money here, but there are also a lot of people that are really struggling as well. On our road trip through Door County last week, we saw this firsthand. The county is 92 percent white, but politically diverse. In the rural south, abundant signs for Donald Trump and towering silos. 25-year-old Austin VanderTie is a sixth-generation dairy farmer. When you go into that voting booth first Tuesday in November, what is the one issue that's most going to impact how you vote?

Inflation. You know, inflation affects the cost of my feed, my fuel, my seed, my fertilizer, everything that it takes for me to grow a crop and feed it to my cows to get a good product. Like many of his neighbors, Mandur Tai is voting for Trump. But as we headed north, cows and deer blinds gave way to artists and rainbow flags. Near the top of the thumb in Door County, in the tourist town of Sister Bay, where red gives ground to blue, we met Emma Cox, who runs Kind Goods, a New Age boutique. For this election, what is going to be the issue that you're most concerned about? I think the issue that has been driving the work of activism that I've been doing for the last two years has been reproductive rights. Charming as her little pocket of America might be, she understands

Door County may be the leading indicator in this most contentious election. Well, it feels like all eyes are on us. All eyes are on Wisconsin. All eyes have been on Door County. And it feels like there's pressure for us to deliver. In as much as you can have a bellwether town within a bellwether county, Sturgeon Bay is Doar's gravitational and political center. Shipbuilding is the big industry here. Sensibilities vary from one yard to the next. Even the animals get into the act. Tell me who we have here.

Oh, this is Ziva. She's our dog for democracy. Out in November. We met Ziva, as well as her owners, John and Annette Vincent, who organized a pop-up rally, flanking both sides of the main drag in Sturgeon Bay, drumming up support for the Democratic ticket. And this is where shabby stereotypes come to die. I saw a truck with a gun rack honk,

and I saw Prius go by and give you a thumbs down. Isn't that interesting? It's more than just coincidental. We're so on the edge that we're... I mean, here comes the truck. Whoa! On two. We're purple.

On two. We are very purple. That is our impression from moving up here is that we are very, very purple. Now retired, they relocated from Chicago. They come three days a week, not just to rally, but to gauge the political winds swirling off the bay. What's a positive response look like? A positive response can be anything from just a nod of the head

to an enthusiastic wave, a horn honk, a solid horn honk, thumbs up. Do you have data on raised thumbs versus raised middle fingers? Well, that happens too. Oh, we get those two. But I would say, and I keep, you know, I have a pretty good sample size, and we run well over 80% positive to the negative. For a more scientific assessment of the entire state of Wisconsin, we turned to the director of the Marquette Law School poll, Charles Franklin.

His poll, widely considered Wisconsin's best, currently has Kamala Harris up four, but not so fast. What is it like being a pollster these days? It's challenging because we've seen polling errors in 2016 and 2020, and those were major issues. Memorably, in 2016 and 2020, most polls, CBS included, fell short when accounting for the Trump vote. There's something specific, particular to Trump that makes his support hard to capture. In these four most recent elections, the two big errors have both come when Trump's on the ballot,

and the two elections without him on the ballot, we've been as good or better than our long-term average. Say more about why you think that is. The people that Trump mobilizes to vote really do turn out for him, but they seem to drop out of the electorate in the midterm. My suspicion is it keeps the Kamala Harris campaign up all night long. That there's this cohort that hasn't been capturable. Correct. Brian Schimming, Wisconsin's Republican Party chair,

is shaking the trees to identify those hidden Trump voters and, crucially, get them to the polls. How many potential Trump supporters are there in Wisconsin who have never voted before? Well, I spoke at President Trump's rally the other day, and I said to the folks there, look, there are hundreds of thousands of people in this state who think like us, they act like us, they live like us, they believe like us, but they don't vote. And I truly believe that.

Is it risky to rely on this sector, these low propensity voters who have been so unreliable in the past? It's risky not to. Make sure that they get out to vote. For the Democrats, the strategy entails running up the numbers in Milwaukee and booming Dane County, home to Madison, the state capital and the University of Wisconsin, where Biden won more than 75 percent of the vote in 2020. Meanwhile, they'll try to stanch the bleeding in rural swaths that have swung heavily towards Trump. Are you ready to organize? Ben Wickler, state Democratic Party chair, thinks it's a complete jump ball right now for Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes.

So on election night, expect to stay up very late. And when you find out who won Wisconsin, which might happen at four in the morning, you probably know who won the presidential election. It's that pivotal. Wisconsin was the state that tipped the electoral college for Donald Trump in 2016. There is every possibility that Wisconsin could tip the presidential election again in 2024. Wisconsin was decided by less than 1 percent in the last two elections. But get this, around 80 percent of the state's counties were decided by a double-digit margin, which only magnifies Door County's uncanny distinction. I think in Door County, this election's almost

perfectly tied as well. I was just looking at the county-by-county data before I joined you today. Whoever wins Door County on election day probably wins the state of Wisconsin yet again. You say whoever wins Door County likely wins Wisconsin. You also just said whoever wins Wisconsin likely wins the national election. Not an exaggeration. Door County, Wisconsin. Historically the case. Whoever wins in Door County is probably the next president of the United States. It got us thinking, is there one person in Door County who's actually picked the winning candidate in each of the last six presidential elections? The county did collectively, but did any single voter?

If so, finding this mystery figure might provide a heck of a clue into how this presidential election will go. So we went on a search. This is your 5 o'clock news from the Door County Daily News. We started with an APB at the local radio station. If you or someone you know in Door County has voted for the presidential winner of every election going back to the year 2000, please reach out to 920. But no response. From the airwaves to the rooftops, Al Johnson's Swedish restaurant is best known for the goats that

graze on the grass roof. Inside, we found the locals, who beat the sunrise on the tourists, let themselves into the back door, and pour their own coffee. Do you know anyone that's voted for president six straight years now and gotten it right? No. No. We were told to go to another table and ask the guy in the hat. We got a hot tip. It was, uh, no, I had some of them. George H.W. was my book, but not his son. Next stop in our pursuit, the local watering hole. Do you know that person? I'm out. I do not. You have your work cut out for you. Then suddenly, a promising lead. I hear they found your voter. Seriously?

Right over there. Seriously. There, at the end of the bar, sitting before something called a badger melt and a tall glass of milk, trucker Joe Conlon. Bush, Bush, Obama, Obama, Trump-Biden. I came close. Five out of six. Five out of six? Yeah.

I heard votes are binding. Can I ask you how you're going to be voting this year? I think I'm going to be voting for Trump again. Three times in a row? Yes. We had come agonizingly close. Three numbers are 8, 9, 8. Our last stop, the Rotary Club of Sturgeon Bay. I'm curious, does anyone know someone, a voter, who actually voted for the winning candidate all six years?

Anyone? I think I did. You did? Yes, I think I did. Behold, our Door County unicorn. No the question. Yes, I think I did. Behold, our Door County unicorn. No, no, no, I didn't. Now that I'm thinking back.

You thought you had all six. I thought I did, but no, now I'm thinking back, I didn't. After scouring Door County, we came up empty, which shows the improbability of it all. But in our quest, maybe we stumbled across something even more rare. We found a place in America where family and community outrank party loyalty. In this divisive election season, we came to America's ultimate battleground, except there was no battle. As they say here with pride, we live above the tension line. What's your sense of how the tone in Door County compares to the tone nationally?

You don't want to alienate your neighbors. You don't want to alienate your fellow business owners. You all come together. Do you have family members that are going to vote differently from you? Oh, absolutely. Everyone invited to Thanksgiving regardless? Absolutely.

Politics is, if we can't talk about it, that means it's gone way too far in the wrong direction. You recognize that's not necessarily the vibe in the country at large. We're a little different in Wisconsin, I guess. We've got that Midwest nice going on. In keeping with the undulations of Highway 42, in Door County, Wisconsin, you swing back and forth and continue on down the road. Tonight, the last minute of 60 Minutes isn't the last word of our broadcast. Coming up on this expanded 90-minute edition, we'll tell you about a tragic yet little-known World War II story, the bombing of the Cap Arcona, an ocean liner packed with concentration camp prisoners.

On sunlit days, Germany's Baltic coast looks idyllic, but this beauty masks an unthinkable horror, one that's etched in the local memory and on this beachside marker bearing the name Cap Arcona and the German words for fear, panic and grief. It's so calm, so peaceful, and yet out there is a graveyard. You can come to a place like this and just feel the weight of the history. That important history lesson told by survivors and family members when 60 Minutes returns. Everyone knows the story of the Titanic, the opulent British ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank.

But it's likely you have never heard of the Cap Arcona, a German version of the Titanic. Before World War II, the vessel was a cruise ship for the well-to-do. By the end of the war, the Nazis had transformed it into a floating concentration camp. Packed with prisoners, the Cap Arcona was anchored in Lübeck Bay in the Baltic Sea, when an aerial attack just hours before liberation killed nearly everyone on board. The ship's improbable journey from luxury liner to deathtrap is one of the most horrific and little-known war stories we have encountered. On sunlit days, Germany's Baltic coast looks idyllic. But this beauty masks an unthinkable horror, one that's etched in the local memory and on this beachside marker

bearing the name Cap Arcona and the German words for fear, panic and grief. It's so calm, so peaceful, and yet out there is a graveyard. You can come to a place like this and just feel the weight of the history. British historian Bill Niven has spent much of his career studying the Holocaust. We met him at Lubbock Bay, where the memory of the Cap Arcona and a smaller cargo ship bombed on May 3, 1945, still haunts this shore. What is this place? This is a memorial, an honorary memorial,

to the victims of the two ships that went down with the loss of some 7,000 lives. It recalls all the nationalities that were victims of the sinking of the ships. There were Americans on the ships? Yes. There were Greeks, there were Italians, and the Jewish people, of course, represented here by the Star. Yes. There were Greeks, there were Italians, and the Jewish people, of course,

represented here by the Star of David. Most of the victims were on the Cap Arcona. Every year on the anniversary of the attack, a somber ceremony

is held at this site to remember those who perished and those who suffered. My father was one of the survivors of the sinking of the Cap Arcona. Bruno Neurath Wilson came to honor his father Willie, a political prisoner held on the Cap Arcona. Only about 400 prisoners survived the attack, including Bruno's father.

What's it like for you to be in this place? When we go to the place where the Cap Arcona sank, I try to imagine what happened. I really cannot imagine what happened on the ship. No one could have imagined this end for the Cap Arcona. Launched with great fanfare in 1927, the ship became known as the Queen of the Atlantic, transporting well-heeled passengers from Europe to South America in two weeks.

What was it like in its heyday? Well, it was one of the most beautiful ships the Germans had. It had its own tennis court. It had a heating swimming pool. It had the most wonderful restaurant where you could look out onto the sea. The most wonderful first-class cabins. It was a luxury cruise ship. It was a luxury cruise liner. Absolutely was. The Cap Arcona traversed the Atlantic dozens of times.

But in 1933, Germany underwent a sea change. Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1939, as German troops invaded Poland, the Nazis commandeered the Cap Arcona to serve as a floating barracks in the Baltic. Ironically, on one of its last trips before the war, the ocean liner carried some German-Jewish passengers who had bought tickets to safety in South America. But most Jews had no way to escape. We were rounded up and sent to the concentration camp. Just the three of us, my mother, I, and my younger brother. 94-year-old Manfred Goldberg was just 11 when the Nazis forcibly removed him and other Jews from his hometown of Kassel in central Germany. He would survive confinement in the Riga Latvia ghetto and four different concentration camps.

The cruel experiences during my young years between 11 and 15, they're firmly lodged clearly in my mind to this day. In Nazi-held Latvia, Goldberg, his mother Rosa, and other prisoners were forced to repair bombed-out railroad tracks during the day. When they returned to camp one night, they learned the SS had taken Manfred's little brother Herman and three other children. They were never seen again. They just disappeared off the face of the earth. The next morning, both my mother and I had to line up and go to work as though nothing untoward had happened. What did that do to you and your mother? I was nearly as heartbroken as my mother at the loss of her little baby, so to speak.

He was seven when he went into the camps, and nine the day he disappeared. Goldberg and his mother ended up in the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Another young boy, George Schwab, was imprisoned there too. The crematoria, burning of bodies all the time, gassing, terrible. Schwab is 92, but he was only nine when German soldiers invaded his hometown of Liepāja, Latvia. Schwab's father, a prominent physician, tried to protect other Jews in town. He noticed SS trucks were approaching, and he waved for fellow Jews to disperse. And they arrested him, knocked out one eye,

threw him down the cellar, and then killed him. Bruno's father, Willy Neureth, was not Jewish, but he actively opposed the Nazi regime. My parents belonged to the small minority of German people who fight against the Nazis. They didn't fight with weapons, of course. Fight with their words. Yes, fighting with papers, with printed papers. Willy was arrested for distributing anti-fascist flyers.

They brought them to Buchenwald, and from Buchenwald they brought him to the concentration camp Neuengamme by Hamburg. The Neuengamme work camp mostly held political prisoners. Inside this massive warehouse, historian Bill Niven told us, prisoners like Willy Neurath made bricks. What does it feel like to walk in here? It feels like a factory of death. You can sense what went on in this place.

But this was not a death camp. This was a work camp. It's a very, very slim distinction. In the course of this work, they die. They die in droves. Willie Neurath managed to survive. But as fate would have it, he, Schwab, the Goldbergs, and the Cap Arcona all would end up at Lübeck Bay,

one of the last Nazi defensive positions. In 1945, as the Allies were closing in, the Cap Arcona, now rusted and battered, was repositioned to Lubbock Bay. At the same time, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the evacuation of concentration camps. Why were they trying to clear these places up? There is an order by Himmler that no prisoner is to be delivered into the hands of the enemy alive. But I think the main concern was to get rid of evidence, because prisoners are evidence. They can talk, they can tell, they can speak to those atrocities that were committed by the Nazis. So getting rid of the evidence meant getting rid of human beings.

Thousands of prisoners were sent to the Nazi holdout at Ljubik Bay. Willy Neurath was forced north from Neuengamme, about 50 miles. From Stutthof in the east, Manfred Goldberg, his mother, and George Schwab were sent to a nearby town aptly named Hell and put on barges. What were the conditions? Oh, terrible. Just beyond description. No toilet facilities, hardly any food. You could hardly sit. You could certainly not sleep. Sounds like hell. Hell. Hell on earth. Absolutely. The barges, each packed with about a thousand prisoners,

were towed by tugboat for six days, about 400 miles across the Baltic, to where the Cap Arcona was positioned. The Cap Arcona arrived in Lubeck Bay on April 14, 1945, two weeks before Hitler killed himself and three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. It was anchored out there, about two miles offshore. With its engines barely running and little in the way of food and water, the former Queen of the Atlantic, a playground for the rich and famous, was about to become a floating concentration camp.

With nowhere to hold the amassed prisoners, SS guards jammed more than 4,000, including Willie Neurath, onto the Cap Arcona. And one must remember this is a ship that's meant for 1,500 people. It's not meant for 4,000 to 5,000 prisoners. Do we know what the Nazis intended to do with the prisoners on the ship? I think they intended them to die. Prisoners already were dying on the barges fleeing Stutthof, carrying Schwab and the Goldbergs. Once in the bay, the SS guards uncoupled the tugboats, leaving the prisoners adrift. They just abandoned you. Abandoned. We were left alone, supposedly on minefields. Schwab and Goldberg told us, mixed in with the concentration camp victims, were a few prisoners of war. They had been better fed and better treated,

and they seized the opportunity. They managed to prise loose some very long floorboards and began using these planks of wood as oars, and they rode in that manner into the night. Shortly before dawn, the barge ran aground. Norwegian prisoners on George Schwab's barge took advantage of the wind blowing toward shore. They came and collected the blankets that we had and made sails, and we managed to sail towards land. Near death but desperate to live,

Schwab and the Goldbergs found the strength to climb out of their barges, only to be intercepted by the SS and German troops on the beach, who shot and killed many prisoners on the spot. And we felt practically certain that we would be shot next, but instead they lined us up into a column. We were told that we were going to be shipped to a liner by the name of Cap Arcona. And while we stood there, we saw quite a large number of bombers, airplanes, moving overhead. The Cap Arcona was in the bombers' sights. The war was nearly over, but the prisoners' ordeal was not. That part of the story, when we come back. At the beginning of May 1945, the war in Europe was all but over. Adolf Hitler was dead, German forces were in retreat, and the Third Reich was crumbling. One of the last Nazi defensive

positions was at Lübeck Bay in the Baltic Sea, where German ships fled, seeking safe harbor, including the Cap Arcona, a luxury ocean liner commandeered by the Nazis for the war effort. As the Allies closed in, the SS evacuated concentration camps and packed thousands of prisoners onto the Cap Arcona. Around noon on May 3, 1945, 13-year-old George Schwab was ordered to line up to board the ship. But the Caparcona could not come close to shore because it was a large, big ship. So we were going to be transported to the Caparcona by another ship. I was in the back of the line. I was in no hurry.

You purposely got to the back of the line? The back of the line, I was in no hurry. You purposely got to the back of the line? The back of the line. He was at a dock near this German naval base where Manfred Goldberg and his mother were lined up too. And it is while we stood there that we witnessed bombers and fighter planes coming along. Could you see any markings on the plane? No, we had no idea what nationality they were.

You could see the planes coming in. Oh, you could see the planes clearly. You could see the bombs dropping. Can you remember what it sounded like? There were some pretty powerful explosions, and there were quite a few. The Cap Arcona was hit. With more than 4,000 prisoners on board, the floating concentration camp became a fiery tomb.

In a hard-to-believe turn of events, the attackers were British typhoon fighters like these, part of the Allied forces moving in to finish off the Nazis. The British came to liberate these prisoners. They did, yeah. And ended up killing thousands of them. It's like horror on top of horror. It is, and yet some of them did survive, to remember it. Bill Niven is a British historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He told us the mistaken attack on the Cap Arcona and a smaller ship

is one of the most wrenching tragedies of the war. The prisoners knew that the war was nearing its end. I think a lot of them probably had hopes that they would survive, and that gave them the strength and the courage to hang on. At the Cap Arcona Museum in the town of Neustadt by Lübeck Bay, he described the attack. British typhoons struck in waves. The Cap Arcona was hit around 3 p.m.

Do you have any idea how many bombs were dropped on the ship? Some people say 60 or over 60. You can imagine the panic and the horror that broke out when the bombs hit the ship, especially for those concentration camp prisoners who were in the very lower decks of the ship, and they were unable to get up to the top because of the flames. Is this the worst case of friendly fire in the Royal Air Force's history? Quite probably, yeah. Sebastian Cox is chief historian for Britain's Royal Air Force, the RAF. He blames the incident on the fog of war.

Why was the Cap Arcona targeted? Because the Allies believed that there was going to be an attempt to flee by certain Nazi elements across the Baltic to Norway and essentially continue the war. Did the British military have any idea that concentration camp survivors were on the Cap Arcona? If you mean did the pilots have any idea, absolutely not. But other members of the British military did know. What we learn from the records, that the British were handed two opportunities very close to the 3rd of May in regards to the placement of prisoners on board the ship.

Concentration camp prisoners on those ships. Indeed. Daniel Long wrote his PhD history thesis on the attack on the Cap Arcona. We met him at the British National Archives in London, where he showed us these fragile war documents. This is the only official investigation that was carried out into the tragic sinking of the Cap Arcona. Shortly after the bombing, a British war crimes investigator interviewed the intelligence officer for the squadrons that attacked the Cap Arcona and other ships in the bay. The intelligence officer admitted on two occasions that a message

was received on the 2nd of May, 1945, that the ships had been loaded with concentration camp prisoners. That intelligence came in the day before the attack. Which then leads to suggest that there was ample time to warn the pilots on the planes. That information did not make it to the RAF pilots? That's correct. The report does not say why the intelligence officer failed to inform the pilots, but it did blame RAF personnel for the error and called for further inquiry.

The report strongly urged that there be a follow-up investigation. That has never happened, has it? Not to my knowledge. Why not? Attempting to, you know, conduct a detailed investigation would in many respects be a little pointless. What are you going to conclude? To find out what went wrong, what mistakes were made.

We know what happened. The RAF made a mistake. An individual made a very tragic mistake, and we know the consequences. About 7,000 prisoners perished when the ships were bombed in the bay. Of the more than 4,000 on the Cap Arcona, only about 400 survived. Bill Niven told us several survivors later wrote accounts of the hell they endured at sea. BILL NIVEN, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United States of America, In the room, there were thousands of prisoners, like herrings, together. Thousands of prisoners were packed

together like herrings. They stretched their arms up and shouted, I want out, I want out. So they stretched their arms up and they cried out, I want out, I want out. This is really quite terrible to have to read this. The fire suddenly got more and more intensive, and this was because the flesh of the prisoners was burning so strongly, it made this intensity happen. It's distressing to read. Bruno Neurath Wilson's father, Willie, a political prisoner, was trapped on the ship when the bombs hit.

My father managed to go to the back of the ship where it was not burning, and there he survived because he couldn't swim. He survived because he couldn't swim. He couldn't swim because he did not jump into the water. And prisoners who jumped into the water were shot by the SS. When the British realized their mistake, they dispatched rescuers, who plucked Willie Neurath and others from the listing deck of the Cap Arcona and took them to shore. This is the stretch of beach where your father came ashore? This front of the beach, yes.

Bruno told us in an improbable twist of fate, his mother Eva, a naval staff assistant, had been transferred to the naval base at Lubbock Bay. When she saw the bombing, she was drawn to the beach. She had only one hope, to know where is my husband. Is he still living? And maybe my husband is on the ship. How did they find each other? She came from this direction and she saw a man coming towards her. She didn't recognize the one person she wanted to see. He must have been thin and weak. And dirty from the burning. But he came over to her and called his nickname he had for her, Muppel.

What does Muppel mean? Muppel means something like, I love your round face. She recognized his voice by this one word, Muppel. What does Muppel mean? Muppel means something like, I love your round face. She recognized his voice by this one word, Muppel. That ship was a graveyard for so many people, but yet it brought your parents back together. Yeah. I don't know if there are hidden meanings in life, but one meaning can be that I am alive now and can tell you about

this story. As for George Schwab, he pulled inspiration from the horror. This is a prize for having helped Latvia get into NATO. The native of Latvia moved to New York, earned a Ph.D. in political science, and had an illustrious career as an academic and peace broker. Here I'm with King Hussein. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton.

Dr. Schwab, I think you knew everyone. Somewhat. Manfred Goldberg and his mother settled in London. She passed away in 1961. Goldberg married, started a business, and a family. In 2017, he returned to the Stutthof concentration camp with the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He has made it his life mission to share his story. I consider that part of my revenge on the Nazis. They wanted to exterminate us, and here we are, not only having survived, we are now great-grandparents.

That's your revenge? My revenge on the Nazis, yes. The Cap Arcona lay half-sunken in Lubbock Bay for four years before being dismantled. But the story has lain beneath the surface, little known beyond this Baltic coast. It's now tradition on the 3rd of May for families of victims and survivors to sail to the site where the ship was bombed. They want the world to remember. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.