information:highlighting
Activism

During a 1946 press conference in Washington, D.C. for the promotion of the play Joan of Lorraine, she protested to the newspapers regarding racial segregation after seeing it first hand at Lisner Auditorium, the theater where she was working. This led to significant publicity and some hate mail. A bust of Bergman has been placed outside the Lisner Auditorium, in recognition of her protest, and as a reminder of the venue's segregated past.

Bergman went to Alaska during World War II to entertain US Army troops. Soon after the war ended, she also went to Europe for the same purpose, where she was able to see the devastation caused by the war. She arrived in Paris on 6 June 1945 with Jack Benny, Larry Adler and Martha Tilton where they stayed at The Ritz Hotel. Bergman's performance was rather limited; she couldn't sing, she couldn't play an instrument and she didn't have Jack Benny's humour. In Kassel, she ran offstage in tears. When they went to see a concentration camp, she stayed behind. After the onset of World War II, Bergman felt guilt for her initial dismissal of the Nazi state in Germany. According to her biographer Charlotte Chandler, she had at first considered the Nazis only a "temporary aberration, 'too foolish to be taken seriously'. She believed Germany would not start a war." Bergman felt that "the good people there would not permit it". Chandler adds that she "felt guilty all the rest of her life because when she was in Germany at the end of the war, she had been afraid to go with others to witness the atrocities of the Nazi extermination camps ".