CBS News
As a boy he survived the Holocaust — then fell in love with the daughter of a Nazi soldier. They’ve been married 69 years.
In the weeks before Valentine’s Day, CBS News will feature three stories about love that has not only survived but thrived despite daunting challenges. We call this series Love, Against All Odds.
On Saturday, Jan. 27, Werner and Martha Salinger celebrate their 69th wedding anniversary — a quiet moment to honor the determination that has kept their marriage together for so many decades. The couple hasn’t gone out much since they moved into an assisted living home in Wayland, Massachusetts, as Martha, 90, suffers from arthritis and is in a wheelchair, and her husband with great care tends to her needs.
It was a union some predicted wouldn’t last — but it endured, the 92-year-old Salinger said, in part to heal “the results of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.”
As a boy, Salinger escaped the genocide. He returned to Germany as a young adult and fell in love with Martha, the daughter of a Nazi soldier. Their anniversary, Jan. 27, happens to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Their story is based on love, “and respect for each other’s opinions and beliefs” — and how it can survive, against all odds.
“I never saw my mother again”
He remembers mostly a happy childhood in Berlin, Germany — until Kristallnacht, when Nazi-organized anti-Jewish riots destroyed homes and businesses overnight starting Nov. 9, 1938. An only child, Werner Salinger lived a comfortable life in the city’s center. His mother, an orthodontist, had a practice in their apartment, and his father was an attorney specializing in labor law.
Across the street were upscale stores owned by Jewish proprietors, and Salinger, then 6 years old, said he vividly remembers “glass shards on the streets and bodies in the street” that night and “acrid smoke rising from the synagogue” just a block away.
Getty Images (Historical)
Just over a year later, on Jan. 12, 1939, Salinger and his family left Germany, arriving in New York two months later.
Three and a half hours south in Hof, a mid-sized German city not far from the Czech border, Martha lived with her four siblings and parents. Her father worked for the German tax authority, she said and joined the Nazi party when he was told he would lose his job if he didn’t.
He was sent to fight in France and then Russia, Martha said, and then when the war ended he came home “and he was never the same person again.” The war ended when Martha was 12 years old and she remembers there “not being enough to eat.” She worked at a department store that used to be owned by a Jewish family; her mother said they went to America.
Meanwhile, the Salinger family’s troubles were not over. Werner’s mother contracted tuberculosis on the ship to America and died a few months later. “The last time we saw each other was the day after my 7th birthday, and then I never saw my mother again,” he said. “I never got to say goodbye.”
Werner Salinger
He was sent to live with relatives in Princeton, New Jersey — just a few blocks from Albert Einstein, whom he remembers playing the violin — while his father got back on his feet.
Einstein loved children, Salinger said, and when they visited his home he used to take him by the hand and walk him through his garden, “which was a beautiful garden.” Einstein would then walk back to his studio, take his violin off his wall and “then play it for me.”
Salinger would take the train from Princeton to New York City to meet up with his father. Eventually, his father got a job in medical supplies sales, remarried another German Jewish refugee and moved to Baltimore. Salinger joined him in Baltimore through high school and some college, until the Korean War began in 1950. Salinger enlisted in the Air Force, and “that’s when I headed back to Germany.”
“Cupid came along”
Fluent in German, Salinger was sent to the country, where he collected intelligence from 1951 to 1955.
It was just six years after the end of World War II.
As the Soviet Union and America entered the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent the many German prisoners of war captured during World War II back to Germany. Salinger was sent to interview the former POWs, who had spent years in the Soviet Union and knew copious amounts of information. “When the supply of German POWs ran out,” he said, he would “interview defectors.”
Assigned to a unit in Hof, Salinger worked alongside German soldiers who might have had a past in the Nazi party. “I wondered what I was doing there. I was apprehensive about meeting Germans, especially men who had worked in the S.S. or other places.”
The work was intense, however, and Salinger said he soon developed friendships with Germans: “The collegial work and friendships developed were more important than the history.”
Salinger had a 1938 Plymouth car, and at the time he was stationed in Beyruth, a town 40 minutes from Hof, and would drive up to Hof a few times a week — especially on a Saturday, when everyone would gather at a castle in the middle of the city to dance.
He was looking for a pretty German woman he could travel around Europe with — then “Cupid came along.” That’s where he met Martha.
Martha remembers seeing a young man in a suit, who spoke fluent German but had a crew cut — something unusual for Germans at that time.
“That’s how it all started,” he said. That night after dancing, he drove her and a girlfriend home. He asked her for a date the next day.
“He was very persistent,” Martha recalled, and she said the “romance was exciting.”
They quickly fell in love. American soldiers weren’t allowed to marry German women until two weeks before their tour of duty ended. At that time, Salinger said, he didn’t think much about it, because he had at least a few years left in his service — but “as they fell deeply in love,” they wanted to marry.
He didn’t tell Martha he was Jewish at first. “I’m going to have something to tell you something you might not like — it might break this relationship apart,” he remembers finally saying.
Martha said he was so worried to tell her that she knew it could only be because he was Jewish. She recalled he said to her, “I’m going to tell you something and you’re not going to love me any longer.”
She wasn’t bothered though by the news, she said, nor was her family. Martha said her family was very liberal and her father joined the Nazi party because he was forced to‚ not because he hated Jews. She wasn’t surprised Werner was Jewish and says it “wasn’t a deal-breaker.” Werner said he never viewed his wife’s family as Nazis — and “they just accepted me as their son-in-law.” It was not an issue for them or Martha.
His father-in-law was a decent human being, said Salinger: “I love him and he loved me.” Clergy tried to dissuade them from marrying, but Martha got pregnant, making nuptials urgent.
Werner said he felt very strongly he had to go back to Baltimore and face his family. They knew he had a girlfriend in Germany he was serious about, but they didn’t know he wanted to get married. Martha was more worried about the reaction of Werner’s family to her history. He said he told his father and stepmother, “You can either choose to accept Martha or not, but if not, it’s your loss.”
Create a family and keep it together
The first year was a testy one, said Werner. Martha arrived in the United States in August 1955, a few months after their marriage. The couple rented a small apartment in Langley Park, Maryland, the first year. Martha didn’t speak any English, and says, “I was very worried whenever someone came up the stairs because I would have to talk to them.” She said she learned the language because her “husband was a good teacher.” Every day she would write down in English what she did for the day, and then Werner would review the writing and words with her.
The couple moved to Albany, New York, where they purchased their first home for $15,000 on a Veteran’s Administration loan. They invited their parents to stay with them that Christmas. His stepmother sent a letter saying she wouldn’t go to a house with a Christmas tree.
His stepmother came from a religious Jewish family and her parents, who survived the Theresienstadt and Dachau concentration camps, lived with Werner during his high school years.
Werner wrote a strongly worded letter, reminding his father he was an only child, and that they would have no other grandchildren. The following year, he said, his parents surprised them at their house for Christmas. Werner and Martha also celebrated the Jewish holidays, but since they both weren’t religious, they decided to join the Unitarian community. “We choose our own religion,” Martha said.
They went on to have four children: three daughters and one son. The children didn’t respond to requests from CBS News for interviews. They also have six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, with another soon expected.
Werner worked for most of his career in international development and often traveled to Central America to work with the communities. After many years working in computers and raising her children, Martha bought a store in Rockport, which she ran for 14 years, Werner said, and every night “she had a home-cooked meal” on the table.
For Werner, as he’s grown older he’s gotten more involved in Jewish causes, and his parents’ advice echoes strongly in his successful marriage. His father once told him, “the most important thing in anyone’s life is creating a family and keeping it together.”
And that’s what they’ve done, decade after decade — keeping that advice in mind because, Werner said, he knew just how quickly one can lose their family. He feels his mother, whom he said he misses terribly, “would be extremely proud of the life I have lived.”
When Michael Adams was researching health insurance options last year, he had one very specific requirement: coverage for prosthetic limbs.
Adams, 51, lost his right leg to cancer 40 years ago, and he has worn out more legs than he can count. He picked a gold plan on the Colorado health insurance marketplace that covered prosthetics, including microprocessor-controlled knees like the one he has used for many years. That function adds stability and helps prevent falls.
But when his leg needed replacing in January after about five years of everyday use, his new marketplace health plan wouldn’t authorize it. The roughly $50,000 leg with the electronically controlled knee wasn’t medically necessary, the insurer said, even though Colorado law leaves that determination up to the patient’s doctor, and his has prescribed a version of that leg for many years, starting when he had employer-sponsored coverage.
“The electronic prosthetic knee is life-changing,” said Adams, who lives in Lafayette, Colorado, with his wife and two kids. Without it, “it would be like going back to having a wooden leg like I did when I was a kid.” The microprocessor in the knee responds to different surfaces and inclines, stiffening up if it detects movement that indicates its user is falling.
Alana Adams
People who need surgery to replace a joint typically don’t encounter similar coverage roadblocks. In 2021, 1.5 million knee or hip joint replacements were performed in United States hospitals and hospital-owned ambulatory facilities, according to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ. The median price for a total hip or knee replacement without complications at top orthopedic hospitals was just over $68,000 in 2020, according to one analysis, though health plans often negotiate lower rates.
To people in the amputee community, the coverage disparity amounts to discrimination.
“Insurance covers a knee replacement if it’s covered with skin, but if it’s covered with plastic, it’s not going to cover it,” said Jeffrey Cain, a family physician and former chair of the board of the Amputee Coalition, an advocacy group. Cain wears two prosthetic legs, having lost his after an airplane accident nearly 30 years ago.
AHIP, a trade group for health plans, said health plans generally provide coverage when the prosthetic is determined to be medically necessary, such as to replace a body part or function for walking and day-to-day activity. In practice, though, prosthetic coverage by private health plans varies tremendously, said Ashlie White, chief strategy and programs officer at the Amputee Coalition. Even though coverage for basic prostheses may be included in a plan, “often insurance companies will put caps on the devices and restrictions on the types of devices approved,” White said.
That means that a patient’s costs can also fluctuate significantly, depending on that person’s coverage specifics, the plan’s restrictions and even geographic cost differences.
An estimated 2.3 million people are living with limb loss in the U.S., according to an analysis by Avalere, a health care consulting company. That number is expected to as much as double in coming years as people age and a growing number lose limbs to diabetes, trauma and other medical problems.
Fewer than half of people with limb loss have been prescribed a prosthesis, according to a report by the AHRQ. Plans may deny coverage for prosthetic limbs by claiming they aren’t medically necessary or are experimental devices, even though microprocessor-controlled knees like Adams’ have been in use for decades.
Cain was instrumental in getting passed a 2000 Colorado law that requires insurers to cover prosthetic arms and legs at parity with Medicare, which requires coverage with a 20% coinsurance payment. Since that measure was enacted, about half of states have passed “insurance fairness” laws that require prosthetic coverage on par with other covered medical services in a plan or laws that require coverage of prostheses that enable people to do sports. But these laws apply only to plans regulated by the state. Over half of people with private coverage are in plans not governed by state law.
The Medicare program’s 80% coverage of prosthetic limbs mirrors its coverage for other services. Still, an October report by the Government Accountability Office found that only 30% of beneficiaries who lost a limb in 2016 received a prosthesis in the following three years.
Cost is a factor for many people.
“No matter your coverage, most people have to pay something on that device,” White said. As a result, “many people will be on a payment plan for their device,” she said. Some may take out loans.
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a rule that would prohibit lenders from repossessing medical devices such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs if people can’t repay their loans.
“It is a replacement limb,” said White, whose organization has heard of several cases in which lenders have repossessed wheelchairs or prostheses. Repossession is “literally a punishment to the individual.”
Adams ultimately owed a coinsurance payment of about $4,000 for his new leg, which reflected his portion of the insurer’s negotiated rate for the knee and foot portion of the leg but did not include the costly part that fits around his stump, which didn’t need replacing. The insurer approved the prosthetic leg on appeal, claiming it had made an administrative error, Adams said.
“We’re fortunate that we’re able to afford that 20%,” said Adams, who is a self-employed leadership consultant.
Again, out-of-pocket costs – even if the patient has health insurance and a doctor’s prescription – can be cost-prohibitive because of the plan’s co-insurance requirements as well as coverage caps or other limitations.
Leah Kaplan doesn’t have that financial flexibility. Born without a left hand, she did not have a prosthetic limb until a few years ago.
Growing up, “I didn’t want more reasons to be stared at,” said Kaplan, 32, of her decision not to use a prosthesis. A few years ago, the cycling enthusiast got a prosthetic hand specially designed for use with her bike. That device was covered under the health plan she has through her county government job in Spokane, Washington, helping developmentally disabled people transition from school to work.
But when she tried to get approval for a prosthetic hand to use for everyday activities, her health plan turned her down. The myoelectric hand she requested would respond to electrical impulses in her arm that would move the hand to perform certain actions. Without insurance coverage, the hand would cost her just over $46,000, which she said she can’t afford.
Working with her doctor, she has appealed the decision to her insurer and been denied three times. Kaplan said she’s still not sure exactly what the rationale is, except that the insurer has questioned the medical necessity of the prosthetic hand. The next step is to file an appeal with an independent review organization certified by the state insurance commissioner’s office.
A prosthetic hand is not a luxury device, Kaplan said. The prosthetic clinic has ordered the hand and made the customized socket that will fit around the end of her arm. But until insurance coverage is sorted out, she can’t use it.
At this point, she feels defeated. “I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” Kaplan said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
Martin O’Malley has the kind of experience that would typically benefit a Democrat who wants to guide the party’s future after devastating losses in the last election.
He’s a former governor, former mayor and a 2016 presidential candidate who until recently was serving in President Joe Biden’s administration. Yet O’Malley is facing a difficult path in the race to try and become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee as the party reckons with the reality that key pockets of voters turned against it.
Vital to O’Malley’s attempt is a campaign platform, first reported by CBS News, that calls for reconnecting the Democratic Party “to the kitchen table of every American family.”
“We suffered a very bad loss,” O’Malley said in an interview, urging Democrats “to learn from it in order to win the next battles ahead.”
His vision is centered on a 57-state and territory strategy along with plans to give campaigns “world-class AI tools for voter outreach, research, communications, and financial management, eliminating barriers to effective campaigning.” O’Malley’s pitch is also focused on “re-investing in direct voter registration,” as part of his pledge for the party to make “voter protection and registration the pillars of the change we need to win.”
Democrats weathered a chaotic election cycle in 2024, punctuated by the push within the party to convince President Biden to end his reelection run after a dismal debate performance in June. While Mr. Biden eventually ended his bid in July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket, the 107-day sprint that followed resulted in Democrats losing the White House and Senate while failing, albeit narrowly, to win control of the House.
Now the party is essentially leaderless and preparing for an emboldened Donald Trump to return to Washington, where he’ll be able to benefit from Republicans’ unified control of Congress and the White House. Those dynamics will be well in play at the time of the election for DNC chair on Feb. 1 given the unease among Democrats that has been abundantly clear in the weeks following the presidential election.
“I want to see someone who doesn’t come from the Washington circuit, who actually has been out there in the tissue of the country,” Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a battleground district Democrat, said of the DNC chair race.
Failure can mean opportunity. The party’s struggles means O’Malley, as well as other ambitious Democrats, have a chance to become the next chair and carry wide ranging influence during a critical time for the party as it looks to regain ground in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. For all his apparent vulnerabilities, Trump was far more successful in this election than ever before, winning all seven presidential battlegrounds. Whether what happened in 2024 will become a tangible turning point for Democrats is likely to loom over the chair race in the coming weeks.
“That’s the big shift that’s happened with this election going the wrong way on us,” O’Malley said. “We’re now in a mode of needing a changemaker, not a caretaker.”
Among those running for chair, Ken Martin, the leader of Minnesota’s arm of the Democratic Party and a DNC vice chair, as well as Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, are seen as frontrunners. Martin has deep relationships within the DNC and can boast a statewide winning streak for candidates in Minnesota, while Wikler carries the political gravitas of helping lead the party in one of the nation’s seven presidential battlegrounds.
Earlier this month, Martin announced a framework which includes his drive for a “Democratic infrastructure in all 3,244 counties,” across the country, as well as taking on the branding problem evident from the 2024 election results.
“The majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites,” Martin said in his framework. “It’s a damning indictment on our party brand. We must be willing to dig deep and recenter the Democratic agenda to unite families across race, age, background, and class.”
During a brief pitch to party leaders at a meeting in Washington D.C. last week where Martin and O’Malley also spoke, Wikler told his fellow Democrats “we need to build the battle plan to change how we communicate, so we show what we mean when we say we fight for working folks.”
This isn’t the first time O’Malley has been linked to leading the party. Days after the 2016 election, he posted on social media that despite encouragement, he would not run for chair. Eight years later, he’s navigating a short window to make his case as he emphasizes his lengthy career in politics.
O’Malley served as mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007 and went on to win two terms as governor of Maryland, which included a stint leading the Democratic Governors Association. His political power has faded since then however, illustrated most notably by the struggles he faced during his campaign for president in the 2016 Democratic primary. Before announcing his run for chair, O’Malley spent nearly a year working in the federal government as commissioner of Social Security.
That experience is intertwined in O’Malley’s platform, which also calls for creating “a feedback loop for our local and state elected officials to ensure that they can help inform our messaging and tactics.”
“We all know we need to restore our credibility,” O’Malley said. “We need to learn from our failings, as well as our candidates who succeeded. But only one of us [in the race for DNC chair] has actually proven an ability to effectuate a rapid turnaround like we need to do right now in order to win the next election.”
contributed to this report.
In the final days of his administration, President Biden has set a new climate goal for slashing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. However, it comes as his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, has signaled he is not interested in global climate negotiations.
The U.S. formally submitted its new goal Thursday to the United Nations. It calls for a 61% to 66% reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 compared to 2005 levels, the White House said, with an overarching goal of achieving net zero emissions by no later than 2050.
The new goal is part of the Paris Agreement, under which member nations must update their emission cut targets — known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs — every five years.
The Paris accord requires countries to set voluntary targets for reducing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The only binding requirement is that nations accurately report on their efforts. First signed in 2016 by nearly 200 nations, it seeks to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The new climate commitment “marks an ambitious capstone to President Biden’s climate legacy,” the White House said in a news release, adding that it will help grow a new clean energy economy focused on investment, innovation, and jobs.
“The United States’ new climate commitment offers a clear path forward for states, cities, businesses, and other leaders dedicated to ramping up action over the next four years,” said Debbie Weyl, U.S. acting director for the nonprofit environmental group the World Resource Institute, in a statement. “Even though the Trump administration may not lift a finger to deliver on this plan, it sets a north star for what the U.S. should be aiming for and could help guide the federal government’s priorities once Trump leaves office in 2029,” Weyl said.
In 2017, then-President Trump announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, a process which took until nearly the end of his first term to complete. However, Mr. Biden fulfilled a campaign vow by rejoining the Paris Agreement on the first day of his own administration in early 2021.
Trump has long championed the fossil fuel industry, questioned the science of climate change and weakened other environmental protections.
This year, his campaign said Trump would pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement a second time.
Last month in Azerbaijan at the annual United Nations climate summit known as COP29, participants adopted a $300 billion annual deal that will go towards helping developing countries wean themselves off coal, oil and gas, and help them adapt to future warming and pay for the damage caused by climate change’s extreme weather.
Mary Cunningham and
contributed to this report.
Health insurers limit coverage of prosthetic limbs, questioning their medical necessity
DNC chair candidate Martin O’Malley says Democrats need to learn from “very bad loss”
Biden sets new climate goal for slashing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions
Health insurers limit coverage of prosthetic limbs, questioning their medical necessity
DNC chair candidate Martin O’Malley says Democrats need to learn from “very bad loss”