Episode 1: Trip 19 36:40

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Good morning, all. This is the NBC Newsroom in New York. His name is Ernest Lundin. He's a United States senator from Minnesota, and Senator Lundin is at work, even though it's Labor Day weekend. Today, Saturday, August the 31st. It's Saturday, August 31st, 1940. Senator Lundin gets to work early that day, even before his secretary arrives.

When she gets in, she finds him already there, already at his desk. But something is definitely wrong. He's not sitting at his desk like usual. He's slumped there. He's got his head down on his desk. His head is buried in his arms. He doesn't appear to be sick, though. What he appears to be is emotionally distraught. He's crying. The secretary asks him what's wrong. He won't explain. He's got tears streaming down his face.

But all he'll say to her is, I can't talk about it. And I've gone too far to turn back. She doesn't know what this means. She doesn't know what has made him so upset. Now, the reason his secretary had come into work that Saturday of the holiday weekend is because the senator had asked her to drive him to the airport.

He's due to fly that day to Pittsburgh. Then he's due to change planes in Pittsburgh for connecting flights all the way back home to Minnesota. Senator Lundin is planning to see his wife and get some home time. Then on Monday, on Labor Day, he's got a big speech that he's planning to deliver. On that Saturday morning of the Labor Day weekend, despite the fact that he is so visibly upset that he is inconsolably crying in his office, the trip is still on. He's still planning to travel.

He and his secretary leave the Capitol building. They drive to the airfield for him to catch his flight. Senator Lundin's secretary will later tell the FBI that they didn't talk at all for the whole ride. The senator just cried. He wept the whole way. No explanation. They arrive at the airfield. There's a storm rolling in, but the flight is cleared for takeoff after a slight delay. The senator's secretary stays to make sure that he's safely boarded the plane.

And then she leaves to drive back to D.C. Then as she makes it back to the Capitol, the news comes through. This is the National Broadcasting Company. In this country now, in the nation's capital at Washington, Senator Ernest Lundin, reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane, was the second member of the United States Senate to die in an airplane crash. Senator Lundin was 62 years old.

The plane Senator Ernest Lundin was on crashed in rural Virginia, less than 40 miles from where it took off in Washington. When she hears the news, Senator Lundin's secretary decides she's going to go there to try to find him. She races to the scene of the crash. But what she finds there leaves no room for hope.

Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19, a brand new Douglas DC-3, had come down with such velocity that its engines were driven six feet down into the earth. There'd been 25 people on board that plane, including the crew. Everyone was killed instantly. It was terrible. It was one of the worst things I ever looked at. Even decades after the fact, eyewitnesses to the crash were just haunted by what they saw that day. We walked through this corner for you and...

Parts of bodies were strung on the corn stalks and everything like it. And I ran across this one walking around. It was just from the middle of her stomach, her head and everything. That was it. I said, I got to get out of here. I can't take no more of this. The evidence of human loss across the hundreds of yards of the debris field from the crash, it was just devastating. Shoes neatly tied together.

That's John Flannery. He lives about 10 minutes from where the plane went down.

A few years ago, he decided he would interview some of the last living eyewitnesses, people who were actually there that day in 1940 when the disaster happened. When I spoke to them, it was clear as a bell. It was riveted in their mind. Some people went into the field, the younger people, and then were discovering things they could never forget.

One local farmer told a wire service that the human remains, quote, were so badly mangled, I don't see how they could ever be recognized. But there was a passenger manifest from the airline, and that passenger manifest confirmed what Senator Lundin's secretary already knew. Ernest Lundin, 62 years old, had been on board that flight, and he was among the dead. A sitting U.S. senator, gone in an instant, in a plane crash that from the very start...

was a real mystery. Why did this plane go down with these experienced pilots and a seemingly good airplane in a storm that planes go through? The plane that crashed was a new DC-3. It was in perfect repair. It had passed all its checks. Pennsylvania Central Airlines had never had a crash in its entire history as an airline. The pilot was very experienced. He had a spotless record.

There was a federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board. That investigation found that while there was bad weather, there was thunder and lightning and some heavy rainfall in the area, there was nothing so unusual about the storm that the plane shouldn't have been cleared to fly. The investigation found that there was no evidence of a fire onboard the plane, no evidence of an explosion. There was no evidence that the plane had been struck by lightning.

Its engines certainly weren't knocked out. Witnesses say, in fact, they heard the engines roaring full tilt right up until the moment of impact. And all of a sudden, all we heard was, whoo, that's when it nosedived. The Aeronautics Board report concluded that the multiple witnesses who described abnormally loud roaring engines right at the time of the crash, those witnesses were onto something.

The two engines of the DC-3 actually had been at wide open full throttle when the plane slammed into the ground. The board also concluded that neither the pilot nor the co-pilot were actively controlling the plane when it crashed. The report said, it is possible that for some reason the pilot and co-pilot were prevented from effectively operating the controls. That's what the report said, prevented from effectively operating the controls. Prevented by what?

When Lundeen's secretary raced to the scene of the crash that afternoon to learn the fate of her boss, one report from the Times says she met a policeman at the scene of the crash who told her something strange. He told her there was a fight on board the plane. Now, of course, there were no survivors of the crash to tell anyone anything about what had happened on board the plane.

But that supposed report from the policeman, it was not a totally incongruous detail. In fact, the senator's secretary herself had reportedly witnessed something along those same lines. When she dropped her boss at the airfield for the flight, the senator's secretary, according to some accounts, had noticed through the open doorway of the plane that something was happening between the passengers. Some of the passengers were locked in a struggle of some kind.

And it looked to her like her boss, Senator Lundeen, might have even been among the people involved in that struggle. But she couldn't be entirely sure. The reports of a possible physical altercation among the passengers on the plane, those reports would never be fully verified. And the mystery of what caused that crash, that mystery has endured. We still don't know what caused it. We certainly don't know if something weird happening between the passengers somehow brought the plane down.

But there was even more that was strange about Trip 19 as it came to be known, including who else was on board, along with Senator Lundin, when the plane crashed, and what exactly the senator was carrying with him when he stepped on board that flight. Why was he so upset before he got on board? That one we think we know, and it only makes the mystery of the plane's crash all the more confounding.

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He was on the run for not only his political life, but his actual life. Allegations already circulating that he might be pro-German, if not pro-Nazi. They're both trying to figure out how much reporters have found out about what's going on. Speculation that perhaps the flight was tampered with. We are being urged on by insane hysteria. As a way to end Lundin's life unnaturally. I think that the coincidence defies the probabilities. Reasons.

We seem to be bereft of reason.

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At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex.

of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 1, Trip 19.

Well, we're standing at the top of a ridge, if you will, and we're at a location which, if you were to take some of the witnesses, 750 feet above us, a plane is roaring over our head, and it's headed toward this field, and it doesn't appear to be able to avoid it.

John Flannery is giving us a tour of the exact location where Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19 met its end. It's a big empty field that's been taken over by weeds and lots and lots of bugs. There's no plaque, there's no marker designating it as the site of a deadly plane crash. But John Flannery has lived in the area for almost 20 years. He knows which windy country roads to take in order to find it.

Here he is with producer Kelsey Desiderio. So obviously we don't know exactly where the plane came down, but we have any rough idea in terms of where we're standing? Well, from where we're standing, it's between us and the Short Hill Mountain. Some people talk about it as the sacred land, you know, baptized in blood and destruction and hurt.

In the hours and days that followed the crash of Trip 19, which killed Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundin and 24 other people, there were a range of reactions across the country. Most immediately in Washington, there was shock and grief from Senator Lundin's colleagues in the Capitol. In Washington, the flags are at half-staff today.

Washington hears Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada mourning the death of his senatorial colleague, Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, who died in that crash. Sitting senators just don't drop dead on a regular basis. The sudden, tragic nature of Lundeen's death was just shocking to the whole Congress, to all of Washington. There was also a more general horror among the public over what, up to that point, was the single deadliest civilian air crash in U.S. history.

But soon there was also something else, something close to confusion over the emerging reports about all these odd circumstances surrounding the crash. There was that official government report on the crash, which frankly left many more questions than it answered. The report is just full of unsupported exploration of possibilities that they have no basis in fact. They have no basis in science. And they just say these things.

John Flannery, who gave us the tour of the crash site, he also happens to be a former federal prosecutor. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York for years. John Flannery didn't only talk to the surviving witnesses to the plane crash, he's also made a real study of the Aeronautics Board report into the crash. And to him, something about it doesn't add up.

The more I looked at it, the more it seemed that at least the government agency didn't ask the right questions or find out very much. So it's not very useful. As a recovering federal prosecutor, you would throw somebody out of your office if they came in and they said, "This is our finding." Really?

Separate from that report, there was Senator Lundin's strange behavior in his office right before he and his secretary left for the airport. The tears streaming down his face, his comment to her that he'd gone too far and he couldn't turn back. There were also those reports of an altercation that took place among the passengers on board the plane. What the secretary reportedly saw before takeoff, what the policeman reportedly told her. There was reportedly a scuffle between

Whatever that means. Is that a fight? Is that an argument? Did people lose their seat? Among all of the strange circumstances surrounding this crash, there was also a note. A reporter for the Winchester Evening Star in Virginia filed a story from the crash scene that day for the Associated Press. He reported that he came across a charred, partially burned piece of paper lying on the ground about three miles from the scene of the crash.

He said it was signed by the lone flight attendant on board. Her name was Margaret Carson. And her note, right above her signature, it said, "Going down." Whatever had happened on board the plane, the flight attendant apparently had both the presence of mind and the time to dash off that note before the end. What could have been happening on board that plane that made her know the plane was going down? Perhaps most intriguing though, was something found in the passenger manifest from the flight.

Because it turns out that in addition to U.S. Senator Ernest Lundin of Minnesota, that manifest showed, and the press soon reported, that the other passengers on board Trip 19 included a special agent of the FBI, a second FBI employee, and a prosecutor from the criminal division at the U.S. Department of Justice. Now, there were only 25 people total on the plane, three people from the Justice Department and the senator among them.

The presence of those three individuals from the FBI and the Justice Department on the flight that day, along with the senator, that could have been happenstance. Could have been just a coincidence that they were all on the same flight. Could have been. Might not have been. I think that the coincidence defies the probabilities. What were those FBI and Justice Department personnel doing on board that flight? Were they there because Senator Lundeen was on board?

Just who was Senator Ernest Lundin?

Lundin sort of creates a gadfly reputation for himself. That's historian Bradley Hart, who's studied and written about Lundin's tenure in Congress. Ernest Lundin, I think, is one of the more fascinating figures in this period. Lundin's political career had a bit of a bumpy start. He was sworn into his first term in the House of Representatives in 1917, just a month before Congress took a very fateful vote on whether the U.S. would enter World War I.

Lundin, again, just a month into his first term in Congress, he voted no. He voted no to the U.S. joining the Great War. And although he certainly wasn't alone in that vote, it was a controversial vote. And he managed to stand out even from his other peers who voted no like he did. That vote, that stance, it stuck to him.

When American troops are actually in combat, virtually every member of Congress, every politician sort of makes a show of supporting the troops and even goes over to visit the trenches of the Western Front and things like that. Lundin doesn't do any of these things. He sort of refuses to support the war effort. At one point does try to visit the troops and is turned away by the military because he's seen as an almost unpatriotic figure. Lundin's constituents back home in Minnesota were also pretty peeved with him at the time. He was in his first term in Congress when he took that vote against the war.

When he ran for re-election after his first term, they voted him out. And they didn't just run him out of Congress. They ran him out of town on a rail. Literally on the local railroad. He was on the run for not only his political life, but his actual life. Historian Nancy Beck Young has done extensive research on this fight in Congress and in the streets. Angry crowds came out to protest him and

His safety was in question on more than one occasion. He had to escape one such angry crowd hidden away in a refrigerated train car. Hidden away in a refrigerated train car.

Yeah, just a few months after he lost his seat in Congress, Ernest Lundin went to Ortonville, Minnesota, to give a speech on foreign policy. But this angry crowd turned up and force-marched him out of the venue after he'd only spit out about two sentences of his speech. They force-marched him to the local rail yard, threw him in the refrigerator car of a train that was just pulling out of the station, and then locked the door, locked him in.

The train crew heard him yelling about 20 miles down the tracks. They let him out of the cold car. They let him ride in the caboose to the next station. So Ernest Lundin knew the cost of taking an unpopular stance in elected office. That one term he served in Congress back in 1917, it was a political disaster. But he still wanted more. He still had the itch for elected office.

After more than a decade biding his time, building up the support and the war chest he would need to try again, Lundin made another run for office. And the good people of Minnesota forgave him, apparently. They did return him to Congress, and then to the United States Senate. Instead of the program originally scheduled for this time, we bring you a talk by Senator Ernest Lundin. In his first stint in Washington, Lundin had opposed the U.S. getting involved in World War I.

Now, as he was sworn into the U.S. Senate in the late 1930s, the U.S. was weighing getting involved in the Second World War. And Ernest Lundin threw himself headlong into the effort to try to stop that, too. Fellow Americans, America prepares to take the last step before entering another world war. I call upon the youth of America to put a stop to these un-American, pro-European doctrines.

The people should make known their protest. Write your congressmen and senators. Telephone them. Wire them. Come to Washington to see them. You must do this now. Immediate protest will block the way to militarizing our nation.

With the world steaming toward world war as Hitler stormed Europe, picking off country after country, U.S. Senator Ernest Lundin quickly became one of the loudest and most confident voices invading against the U.S. joining the fight. We are being urged on by insane hysteria. Reason. We seem to be bereft of reason.

Senator Lundin knew from experience that his stance against the U.S. joining the war in Europe might be politically unpopular. It might even get him run out of town on a rail again. But he was determined. He pressed his case on the radio and on the Senate floor and at home with his constituents. When Senator Lundin boarded that doomed Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane in August 1940, remember that his final destination was back home in Minnesota, where he was slated to deliver a speech on Labor Day weekend.

That speech was also a speech against America getting into the war.

But it turns out it wasn't your average Ernest Lundin stump speech. This is a speech that's sort of unlike most that Lundin gives. He pours months of effort into this speech. I mean, the sort of background notes for this go more than 100 pages. It wasn't just the length of time it took to prepare that speech that set it apart. This really was a different kind of speech. It was a speech that was full of praise for Germany under Hitler.

It's one thing to be not excited about the U.S. fighting Nazi Germany. This really was something else. The archival records suggest that possibly some, if not pro-Hitler, sort of pro-peacemaking with Nazi Germany type content. Lundin's speech that he planned to give on Labor Day 1940, it extolled the great contributions of German culture to American life.

It stressed, essentially, that we Americans had more in common with them, with Germans, than we had with our allies, who Germany, at that moment, was busy invading and conquering. That's the speech Lundin was heading home to give on Labor Day weekend when his flight crashed on its first leg out of Washington. Now, somehow, miraculously, the physical draft, the hard copy draft of that speech, survived the plane crash.

You can see it in Ernest Lundeen's archives at Stanford University. There's a note pinned to the front describing how the pages of the speech were found 100 yards away from the epicenter of the plane crash site. When the FBI agents who are sent to the scene recover his body, they find a draft of the speech that he was going to give just a few days later. It's kind of creepy to hold, right? Because you realize what that document, you know, went through. It's absolutely an incredible artifact.

Beyond the apparent indestructibility of that speech in surviving a plane crash, beyond its pretty remarkable content, there was something else notable about that speech. The really important thing to know about that speech is who wrote it. That speech had been ghostwritten for Senator Lundin.

Ghostwritten by a senior paid agent of Hitler's government operating in America. A man to whom Senator Lundin had grown very close. And Senator Lundin, of course, he never delivered that speech. The plane crash made sure of that. But the senator did have reason to be concerned while he was on the plane that day. And for that matter, while he sat in his office with his head in his hands just before leaving for that flight.

The reason for him to be concerned was that there was a good chance the feds were on to him, on to his relationship with that Nazi agent. And Senator Lundin knew it. That's next. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes of Morning Joe and the Rachel Maddow Show ad-free. Plus ad-free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, Ultra, Bagman, and Deja News.

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Senator Ernest Lundin's last two weeks on Earth were stressful. As weird and mysterious as his death in an inexplicable plane crash would prove to be, his last two weeks before the crash were fraught with anxiety, even panic.

Because two weeks before he got on that plane, he suddenly found himself the apparent subject of a blockbuster newspaper expose. There's a publication called PM, which is a left-wing tabloid, a muckraking left-wing paper in New York City, which happens to do incredible reporting.

A newspaper called PM had published an exposé describing a scheme in which sitting members of Congress were helping an agent of Hitler's government distribute German propaganda in quantity all over the United States.

Now, the expose did not mention Senator Lundin by name, but the newspaper's description of the scheme, it was spot on when it came to describing the nature of that relationship, the nature of the activities that Lundin was up to with that German agent. Between when the article came out and the plane crash, Lundin's papers show he received a letter from the German agent telling him to not worry about the press being onto them, telling him the whole thing was, quote, a witch hunt.

That letter from the German agent that he was working with, it apparently did not ease the concerns of Senator Lundin. They're both trying to figure out how much reporters have found out about what's going on. Lundin very clearly starts sweating about this sort of relationship.

So, the senator seems to have been in a near panic about being exposed in the days leading up to him stepping on board that flight, a flight in which he quite literally was carrying a speech that was written for him by a Nazi agent who had just been exposed in the press. He was in tears leading up to that flight, according to his secretary. He told her he'd gone too far and could not turn back.

And the flight that he was about to board also happened to include multiple Justice Department personnel who would be flying alongside him, a flight that none of them would survive.

In this country now, in the nation's capital at Washington, Senator Ernest Lundin reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane. You can imagine how this strikes the country that this man who had been seen already as an outspoken anti-war figure, allegations already circulating that he might be pro-German if not pro-Nazi, has suddenly died dramatically.

After the crash of Trip 19, Senator Ernest Lundin was given a state funeral in Minnesota. He lay in state at the state capitol. He was buried in a military cemetery. But 10 days after his burial, all hell broke loose over the legacy and death of Senator Lundin because of another newspaper report, September 13th, 1940. And this one most certainly named him. Dateline Washington. Headline, G-men were shadowing late senator. Here's the lead.

If federal authorities probe deep enough into the crash of the Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane which carried Senator Lundin to his death in Virginia, they may find some highly interesting facts regarding Nazi activities in the United States. What most people do not know is that Senator Lundin was under investigation at the time of his death. A G-man, meaning an FBI agent, a Department of Justice attorney, and an FBI secretary were on the plane with him, and all were killed.

The Department of Justice probably will deny that they were shadowing the Minnesota senator, but the fact is that at least one of them definitely was. This was crusading, controversial columnist Drew Pearson. Drew Pearson is arguably the most powerful journalist in the country in this era. Drew Pearson plays this incredibly important role in blowing the lid off of this. This was just days after Senator Lundin was buried, and Drew Pearson just drops this bombshell.

He says, "Justice Department agents were attempting to find out the extent to which Berlin was definitely hooked up with any members of Congress when Lundin's plane crashed. Whether certain foreign agents figured that they were about to be exposed, whether G-men on the plane tangled with Lundin in flight, or whether it was an act of God and the weather may never be known." The question has never been put to rest. Maybe it was just bad weather.

There has been speculation that perhaps the flight was tampered with. Speculation, but no proof. Speculation, but no proof one way or another. Just as the journalist Drew Pearson predicted, the cause of the crash of Trip 19 has remained a mystery indefinitely. We still don't know.

There have been relatively recent reports that the FBI's investigation of the crash technically remains an open case. We tried to confirm those reports one way or the other. We couldn't.

But another thing that Drew Pearson was definitely right about in his reporting was his prediction that the Justice Department was going to deny that Senator Lundin was under investigation. In fact, they did deny it. In the weeks after the crash, the attorney general emphatically rejected the suggestion that Lundin was under active investigation when he died. In a letter sent to the senator's widow, the attorney general wrote that law enforcement officials were on that plane with the senator by pure coincidence.

That denial from the Justice Department, as emphatic as it was, it didn't hold up because the Justice Department's own prosecutors would soon reveal in court voluminous evidence that they had in fact collected about Senator Lundin. Evidence that Senator Lundin was involved in a criminal conspiracy, a conspiracy to subvert American democracy on behalf of a hostile foreign power.

When we talk about the DOJ's response after the crash, in addition to saying those agents were on the plane by coincidence, they also deny that Lundin was under investigation at all. What do you make of that? Well, they call that consciousness of guilt. When you deny something,

that's true. So when the Department of Justice says he wasn't under investigation, and we know he was, then they're concealing that he was under investigation. And it's being asked in the context of a plane crash, and so you have to scratch your head. It means they know something they don't want us to know.

In the wake of the Trip 19 plane crash, the Justice Department said there was nothing to see here. No one was under investigation. It was all just a coincidence. But soon, the story of Ernest Lundin colluding with a hostile foreign power, the involvement of a sitting member of Congress in what would soon be charged in court as a wide-ranging, seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, that story would play out in ways that nobody would expect.

And that was in part because it would not end up being just Senator Ernest Lundin who was caught up in it. This is a story about politics at the edge.

A violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships. Support for that movement among serving members of Congress, who prove willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to protect themselves, to throw off the investigation. Violence against government targets. Plots to overthrow the United States government by force of arms.

and a criminal justice system trying, trying, but ill-suited to thwart this kind of danger. We have a number of the biggest figures in American politics in this period. They all fall under the spell of this sort of Nazi propaganda operation. This group of people, if they were anything first, it was their own political success and careers first. If they could advance their career first,

By playing footsie with Nazis? So be it. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, the leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers. ...delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee in Madison Square Garden in New York City. He thinks reporters and newspapers who have helped to indict the defendants are engaged in a dirty business.

and predicted that the day will soon come when they will all regret it.

I do think that some of the members of Congress who were involved probably didn't know how deep they were in it. This is a moment of great political danger, I think, for these men. I was told that I could make public any evidence of Nazi penetration that I might find. And why did he change his mind? Because 24 congressmen are mentioned in this report that I've prepared. Now, do you think that's a sufficient basis to keep these facts from the American public?

This is a story of treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who were elected to defend the Constitution, but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to undermine it.

A plot to end it. He wants to build an American version of fascism. His followers are armed. They are violently committed to this mission. They don't call themselves right-wing fanatics. They're patriots who are saving America. Perhaps most importantly, this is also the story of the Americans, mostly now lost to history...

who picked up the slack in this fight, who worked themselves to expose what was going on, to investigate it, to report on it, ultimately to stop it. And there's a reason to know this history now, because calculated efforts to undermine democracy, to foment a coup, to spread disinformation across the country, overt actions involving not just a radical band of insurrectionists, but actual serving members of Congress working alongside them, that sort of thing is...

That's a lot of things. It's terrible, but it is not unprecedented. We are not the first generation of Americans to have to contend with such a fundamental threat. Lucky for us, the largely forgotten Americans who fought these fights before us, they have stories to tell. Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra is a production of MSNBC and NBC News. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The

The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Jamaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klapchen. Sound design by Tarek Fuda. Our technical director is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Corey Nazo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Madeline Herringer is our head of editorial.

archival radio material is from NBC News via our beloved Library of Congress, with additional sound from CBS News. A special thanks to John Flannery for providing us with his incredible interviews with the eyewitnesses of the Trip 19 plane crash. You can find much more about this series. You can even see the copy of Senator Lundin's Nazi speech that survived the plane crash at our website, msnbc.com slash ultra.

Mr. Painter's older brother walked into the field and he saw teeth and there was a gold tooth in there and he threw it at the ground and broke out the gold tooth and he kept it. And he didn't just keep it for a day, he kept it the whole rest of his life. He was about 15 at the time. And I asked his surviving younger brother,

Mr. Painter, why do you think he did that? And he didn't know. That piece of gold, that became like a talisman, I think, for him. He didn't sell it. He didn't ever try to get money for it. He kept it for himself. He hung on to that tooth until his death as a contemplation of the duality between the notion of immortality and the death that was everywhere contradicting it. It was powerful stuff.

Sunday on MSNBC. One night, two documentaries. At 9 p.m. Eastern, To Be Destroyed. The story of one community's fight against book banning. My book, along with four others, was pulled from the shelves. Followed by It's Okay, a short film about embracing differences in small-town America. Can I share some stories with you? It's okay.

Okay. To be different. Back to Back Documentaries, Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.