Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan team up to help elect William McKinley to the U.S. presidency by paying for his 1896 campaign, to avoid a possible attack on monopolies. However, fate intervenes when McKinley is suddenly assassinated, and vice president Theodore Roosevelt assumes the presidency and promptly begins dissolving monopolies and trusts in America. Meanwhile, Morgan buys out Carnegie Steel to make Carnegie the richest man in the world, and Henry Ford designs an affordable automobile with his Model T and starts his own business, Ford Motor Company, which sets a new business model for companies to follow.

The Nazis had relentlessly persecuted German and Austrian Jews, reducing their rights, expropriating their property, choking off their livelihoods, declaring them parasites, not citizens and on the evening of November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Hitler unleashed Nazi mobs on Jews in cities and towns all over the newly expanded Germany, beating, burning, raping, killing, hoping to drive them all out of their country. Hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews were now desperate to escape the Nazis. They knew their only hope lay in flight into friendly European countries or across the ocean to the United States.
As WWII begins, Americans are divided over whether to intervene against Germany. Some individuals and organizations work tirelessly to help refugees escape. Germany invades the USSR and secretly begins the mass murder of European Jews.