Oldvy

At 10, she was a lab rat for a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. Her parents and sisters were murdered there. 70 years later she took the hand of a man who worked in that camp, and he kissed her. He was convicted of helping murder 300,000 people. He got 4 years and died before serving a single day. Germany, 2015. Oskar Gröning was 93. His job at Auschwitz was to count the money taken from people who were sent to the gas chambers. Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam were injected with things nobody ever explained to them. She says the doctor looked at her chart and gave her two weeks to live. She survived. In 1995 she stood in Auschwitz and read out loud that she forgave every Nazi. “In my name only.” Other survivors at the trial protested. To them she was forgiving people who never asked for it. She said forgiving them gave her back the power they took from her. Gröning died in 2018. Eva died a year later, on her yearly trip to Auschwitz. Was she brave, or did she betray everyone who died there?

This is the most famous Bigfoot footage ever filmed. The man who shot it died without ever admitting it was fake. Now his own son calls him a liar. In 2022 a woman opened her dead father’s safe. Inside was a reel with another “Bigfoot” on it. Watch it turn its head toward him. For 59 years people studied every frame of this film. The stride, the swinging arms, the muscles moving under the fur. Nobody could prove it was a man in a suit. October 20, 1967. Bluff Creek, deep in the woods of Northern California. Roger Patterson was riding with his friend Bob Gimlin when his horse reared. He jumped down and ran with the camera still rolling. He swore it was real until he died in 1972. The man with the safe worked in a Boeing film lab back then. According to a new documentary, his reel was shot in 1966, a year before this one. A thinner creature walks through the trees the same way. Like a rehearsal. Patterson’s son Clint says his mother told him the truth years ago. When he wanted to go public, she disowned him. Nobody has independently verified the reel. A dead man’s safe and a family secret. Is that enough to call Patterson a fraud?

In 1946 this man told a court his unit had killed about 90,000 people in a year. Men, women and children. A year later he was on trial for his own life. Here he is, arguing over whether those 90,000 were really dead. In the video below, SS General Otto Ohlendorf corrects the judge. The 90,000 were only “reported” killed, he says, and some of the reports were exaggerated. From June 1941 he commanded Einsatzgruppe D, a mobile killing unit that followed the German army through southern Ukraine and Crimea. Before the war he had studied economics and law. In 1946 he testified that from the spring of 1942, Himmler ordered women and children to be killed only in gas vans. He justified killing children because they would grow up to be “a danger no smaller than their parents.” He was sentenced to death in 1948 and hanged on June 7, 1951. He was 44. He never believed he had done anything wrong. Was he a monster, or an ordinary man who did his job too well?

Six hours before he shot John Lennon, this man asked him for an autograph. Lennon signed his album and asked if he wanted anything else. That night he shot Lennon four times in the back, then sat on the sidewalk reading The Catcher in the Rye until police came. In the video below, Mark David Chapman tells Larry King about that autograph in 1992. He says Lennon was looking “into the eyes of the person that was going to kill him.” Chapman flew to New York from Hawaii. Inside his copy of the book he wrote “This is my statement.” He told King he didn’t know how to handle being a nobody. He pleaded guilty and got 20 years to life. In 2022 he told the parole board: “I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was evil, I knew it was wrong.” He has been denied parole 14 times. His next hearing is in February 2027. Most people convicted of murder in New York don’t serve 46 years. Is he still inside for what he did, or for who he did it to?

This man shot Robert Kennedy in the head in 1968. Twenty-one years later he sat down in prison and explained why: Kennedy had been his hero. On May 18, 1968, he wrote in his notebook: “Kennedy must die before June 5th.” He shot him just after midnight on June 5. In the video below, David Frost asks how Kennedy, “the friend of the downtrodden,” became the focus of his hatred. Sirhan answers: 50 Phantom jets Kennedy promised Israel. Sirhan Sirhan was born in Jerusalem and was 24. He fired at Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes after Kennedy’s speech celebrating his California primary win. Kennedy died about 26 hours later. At trial Sirhan said he killed Kennedy “with twenty years of malice aforethought.” He got the death penalty. In 1972 California struck it down, and he got life instead. Today he says he doesn’t remember the shooting. In 2021 a parole panel voted to release him. Two of Kennedy’s own sons supported it. Governor Gavin Newsom blocked it. Two of the sons of the man he killed wanted him free. Should he be?

A man in this crowd saved President Ford from a woman with a gun. A few days later, newspapers told the whole country he was gay. His name was Oliver Sipple, and he had asked reporters to keep it quiet. They printed it anyway. In 1989 he was found dead alone in his apartment. In the video below, Ford walks out of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, and agents push him into his car. The shots came from across the street, where you see police run into the crowd. The woman was Sara Jane Moore, 45. Sipple grabbed her arm as she fired, and the bullet hit a bystander instead. It was the second attempt on Ford’s life in 17 days. Sipple was a former Marine, wounded in Vietnam. Gay rights activist Harvey Milk believed a gay war hero could change how America saw gay people, and he was one of the people who told a newspaper columnist. Ford sent Sipple a thank-you letter. He was never invited to the White House. Sipple sued the newspapers for $15 million and lost. When police found him in 1989, the coroner estimated he had been dead for about 10 days. He was 47. Milk got his gay hero. Sipple never got his privacy back. Was Milk right to tell?

This was a real TV ad in the late 1940s. A doctor finishes his house calls, lights a Camel, and the narrator asks: what cigarette do you smoke, doctor? Camel claimed 113,597 doctors were asked. The survey was run by its own ad agency. Historians who went through the records later found that many doctors seem to have been asked right after they were handed free cartons of Camels. The campaign ran for about six years from 1946. This ad ends

This is what radiation looks like on camera. The man who made this film near Chernobyl’s reactor died of radiation sickness less than a year later. His crew had 30 seconds by the destroyed reactor. The film came back covered in white specks. The studio called it defective. Those specks were gamma rays hitting the film as it ran through the camera. In the video below, you hear it first, a detector crackling over the plant. Then the narrator asks you to look closely. Vladimir Shevchenko died in March 1987, weeks after Soviet censors finally let his film out. Would you have taken those 30 seconds next to the reactor if it meant the world got to see this?