Published: 7 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
DAN COLEMAN discusses the new documentary series by Ken Burns that examines America’s historical ambivalence towards Jews and its ambiguous response to the Nazis’ atrocities.
It is strange, having grown up a Jew in New York, not far into the post-war era, to recall how little we learned of the Holocaust. My mother taught us the phrase “never again” and the number “six million”. We knew there had been gas chambers, but that was about it.
Decades later, having studied the rise of the Nazis and their increasingly horrific treatment of Europe’s Jews, having seen Shoah and Son of Saul and Schindler’s List, even now there is much to learn in Ken Burns’ three-part documentary The US and the Holocaust, not just for Jews and students of history, but for anyone grappling with the question of our moral responsibility to aid those suffering violent oppression, even if oceans away.
Burns is the pre-eminent documentarian of US history, his topics ranging from the Civil War to baseball to jazz. His work has received 15 Emmy nominations with five wins, as well as two Oscar nominations.
Burns co-directed and produced The US and the Holocaust with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. Botstein, whose grandparents lost much of their extended family during the Holocaust, told the New York Times that she was surprised by “how little I knew or understood of the family history until I made this film”.
The series belies the commonly held notion, that while the Nazis were a force of evil, the Americans were good, the victors over tyranny. The reality is much more complex.
Still, for a Jewish audience there is much that is familiar in Burns’ telling: the rise of the Nazis, the details of Kristallnacht, German expansion across Europe, and more. What is eye-opening is the depth of information on attitudes and political realities in the US through the 1930s and into the 1940s: the bigotry, the fear of refugees, the restrictions on immigration – a history that echoes across the 21st century in America and Australia alike.
The series belies the commonly held notion, that while the Nazis were a force of unrelenting evil, the Americans were good, the liberators of the oppressed, the victors over tyranny. The reality is much more complex.
Going back to the 19th century, The US and the Holocaust documents that American attitudes towards immigrants and refugees were always deeply ambivalent. Exemplifying this, on the one hand, was Emma Lazarus’ 1883 poem for the Statue of Liberty, “Give us your tired, your poor …” On the other, a poem by Thomas Aldridge asking, “oh Liberty, white goddess, is it well to leave the gates unguarded?”
The Immigration Act of 1924, passed with more than a two-thirds majority in Congress, shut the door on half a century of open immigration that brought tens of millions to the US. Now there would be strict quotas for all but northern Europeans and a drastic curtailing of immigration from the eastern European nations that would provide most of the Nazi’s victims.
As historian Peter Hayes commented: “Exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie”.
As the narrative moves into the 1930s, Burns chronicles the popularity of Father Charles Coughlin, “the radio priest” who broadcast a message of antisemitism nationwide to millions, and of aviator Charles Lindbergh, an ardent opponent of US intervention, who did the same in the political arena.
A myth that The US and the Holocaust debunks is that in the 1930s, Americans did not know what was happening to the Jews of Europe. To the contrary, in the first year of Hitler’s reign, over 3000 articles on Nazi mistreatment of Jews appeared in US newspapers.
A myth that series debunks is that in the 1930s, Americans did not know what was happening to the Jews of Europe.
But America’s own antisemitism ran deep. The stories were not believed and, when they were, a government with its own fair share of bigots refused to act. President Roosevelt himself was wary not to frame any policy as an explicit effort to save Jews lest support for his administration diminish.
A debate plays out in The US and the Holocaust over whether the US could have lessened the toll of the Holocaust by bombing the rail lines and bridges that led to the camps in eastern Europe. The allies’ goal was to win the war and the Roosevelt administration maintained that such bombings would be ineffective and a diversion of resources.
Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt insists bombings should have been carried out “not because it would have rescued a major portion of the six million, but as a statement, as a message to the Germans: we know what you are doing”.
But Lipstadt is hardly qualified as a military strategist, and one might imagine that General Eisenhower had more important priorities than making symbolic statements to the Germans.
It was Eisenhower who, in April 1945, horrified by the revelations from the liberated concentration camps, took military officers, a Congressional delegation, and a group of newspaper editors and reporters to tour Buchenwald. In his broadcast, CBS correspondent Edward Murrow said grimly “I saw it, but will not describe it.” At last, the message circulated without dispute, but US refugee policy did not change until years later.
If there is a flaw in The US and the Holocaust, it is its inclusion of parts of the story that have been well told previously and, in some cases, often.
Amidst all this history, Burns interweaves the stories of many hitherto unknown: children who, hope against hope, escaped, now, as octogenarians, telling their tales. He unearths personalities from the mass graves of eastern Poland who, narrator Peter Coyote tells us, were not statistics but people with lives that mattered, even if only to themselves and their loved ones.
If there is a flaw in The US and the Holocaust, it is its inclusion of parts of the story that have been well told previously and, in some cases, often. Leaving out familiar aspects of the rise of the Nazis, the life of Anne Frank, details of the torments of Auschwitz, or the development of the World War II would have resulted in a leaner documentary that might garner more viewers.
Nonetheless, Burns and his collaborators have done a great service in providing a history that many seek to deny, revealing the insidious threat of the forces of hatred, and the perseverance, courage, and resilience of those who oppose them.
A fitting coda to The US and the Holocaust is found in the story of Joseph A. Wyant, a GI who was sent to photograph Dachau in 1945. Wyant wrote to his father “this particular crime has been uncovered, Pop, but a worse crime seems to be the spreading of the thought that leads to this type of thing.
“It has happened in mass proportions here in Germany but who knows how far the ideas have spread or where else it may break out? I tell you, Pop, even more important than punishing the criminals here is stamping out of their philosophy. This is not a war between nations but humanity’s struggle for the right to exist.”
The US and the Holocaust can be viewed on PBS in the US until October 16. An Australian release has yet to be announced.
