FDR Presidential Library
America’s top television historian, Ken Burns, is back with a new three-episode documentary. The prolific, five-time Emmy Award winner, who has previously chronicled the Civil War, the Depression-era Dust Bowl, World War II, the Vietnam War, and more, is now releasing what is arguably the most heartbreaking, powerful, and poignant production of his forty-plus-year career.
Co-directed with his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, The U.S. and the Holocaust explores in devastating detail the mass genocide of Europe’s Jewish population and the United States’ response to the fascist atrocites that occured under the Nazi regime.
According to Botstein, “At the center of our narrative is the moving and inspiring first-hand testimony of witnesses who were children in the 1930s.” In telling much of their story through intensely personal accounts and describing the mundane daily details of life under Nazism, in the ghettos and forced labor and death camps, Burns and his co-filmmakers reveal what the true human cost of the Holocaust was.
Today, as controversy sweeps school boards and beyond over how to depict the past of the United States, Burns’ team boldly exposes the tragic flaws of America’s reaction to the Hitlerian deluge—as well as the heroic actions of the persecuted and those who helped fight for their liberation. Burns keenly realizes that history is much more than a mere accumulation of dates, events, and famous names, but is primarily a matter of context.
Q: The U.S. and the Holocaust is bookended by Anne Frank’s story. I’ve been to her home and read her famous Diary of a Young Girl. But you reveal details I hadn’t known before, such as the fact that her family had applied for visas to be relocated to America?
Burns: They, like hundreds of thousands if not millions of people trying to flee Nazi Germany, were limited either by the quota system and a very uncaring, unfeeling bureaucracy in the United States that didn’t want to accept them. Or, in the case of the Franks’ application, it was burned in flames when the Nazis threatened to bomb Rotterdam—where the applications were—unless the Dutch surrendered. And they surrendered and the Nazis bombed it anyway, and included was the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam [where] 300,000 or so applications went up in flames.
Q: In your film, one of your interviewees, historian Peter Hayes, asserts that “excluding people is as American as apple pie.” Given that the United States was founded by European immigrants, why is excluding other would-be residents so commonplace throughout much of America history?
Burns: It’s commonplace throughout most of world history. “Othering” is an incredibly common human thing. We make “thems” out of people we don’t like [for] various reasons—racial fear, the idea that a new immigrant might take a job or they’re different because they don’t have the same religion or customs and won’t assimilate. None of these things have been true or proven true, but there is periodically “nativist,” anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiments in the United States and lots of countries.
Q: What did the Nazis learn from the United States?
Burns: They learned lots of things. Hitler was very impressed with the way we had eliminated or isolated on reservations the Native population. He was extremely pleased by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which after decades of kind of open borders, restricted [immigration through] pernicious quotas to this country from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe where there would be a majority of Catholic or Jewish people attempting to come to the United States. It was an attempt to only bring in more Northern Europeans, who were consistently Protestant and white.
The Nazis looked to [the] Jim Crow laws to help fashion some of their early discrimination laws. They were impressed with America’s embrace of the pseudo-science eugenics, that held there was a hierarchy of races and nationalities. They took that to a barbarous extreme. By the time Hitler came to power, he began to see the United States as weak and “susceptible” to Jewish influences and to the influences of American Blacks. So, Hitler was misguided in every sense.
Q: Franklin Roosevelt was president during almost the entire period of the Holocaust. How would you describe FDR’s private and public stance during the 1930s and 1940s vis-à-vis the Holocaust?
Burns: He was appalled by it. There were many ways he wanted to help but could not—some by political realities, the popular sentiment in the country, [and others] by laws Congress had passed that made it impossible to alter the [immigration] quota system or receive the St. Louis ship, turned away from Havana [Cuba], due to antisemitism. He was a calculating politician. He could have done a lot more.
But to accuse him in any way of antisemitism is ridiculous. He named more Jews to his Administration [than any previous President] and had a Jewish cabinet member, in [Henry] Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury. Roosevelt had read Mein Kampf in the original German, knew what a madman Hitler was, and realized that the only thing he could do was just defeat him. Peter Hayes makes a very good point: We can look back and wag our fingers, but if he hadn’t been able to successfully get rid of the Neutrality Acts [that outlined an isolationist U.S. approach of foreign policy and forbade arms sales to “belligerent nations”], we might see him a lot differently as an abject failure. Not having been able to meet the threat to Adolf Hitler as he did, and magnificently.
Q: Members of the Roosevelt Administration took different stands on Jewish immigration. Tell us about the role played by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long?
Burns: Assistant Secretary of State [Samuel] Breckinridge Long was a former ambassador and then a major contributor to Roosevelt’s campaign from Tennessee. It turns out he was an implacable foe of immigration and probably antisemetic. He did everything he could to vigorously enforce the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and to slow-walk proposals that might have helped European Jewry or others get out of Europe. He also impeded and raised the bar on some of the requirements [so] that those who had spent years trying to overcome these great obstacles found that there was yet another obstacle in front of them.
“Some of the letters were buried in metal milk cans when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place and were discovered afterwards—testaments, drawings, art, but also just the sense that ‘I was.’”
Most important for the course of history, he basically was trying to let die a Treasury proposal by a young guy named John Pehle for a refugee board, which when the Treasury found out about [Long’s attempts to block it], they went to Roosevelt, who had already approved it, and it was pursued. The War Refugee Board probably did more than any other group or institution to save the lives of the remaining Jews of Europe than anything else.
Raoul Wallenberg, the celebrated Swedish diplomat who was operating in Hungary and is credited with saving more than 100,000 human beings, was funded in large part by the War Refugee Board. And he saw his own mission as carrying out an American program.
Look, the United States of America let in more [World War II refugees] than any other sovereign nation. But if we had done twenty or twenty-five times that, it would still not be enough, it would be a failure in my estimation.
Q: What role did Charles Lindbergh play?
Burns: Lindbergh was in virulent opposition to America’s entry into any possible coming world war. He was an isolationist. He was the public face of the America First Committee, which was made up of well-known antisemites, isolationists, nativists, and anti-immigrationists. He had cozied up to the German regime, admired their order, and believed there was a worldwide Jewish “problem” that the Germans were trying to address. Lindbergh was a celebrated hero who was probably second only to FDR in fame in the United States. He was . . . amazingly bad in regards to this story of the U.S. and the Holocaust.
The America First Committee was huge, [it] had many campus and civic organizations behind it… After Kristallnacht, when it was evident there was a systemic attempt to rid Germany of its 560,000 Jews… they were also perfectly happy to persecute them physically and every other way. Eighty-six percent of American Protestants, 85 percent of American Catholics, and 25 percent of American Jews were not willing to let in any more [refugees].
Q: What are some examples of the rules and treatment Jews were subjected to during their everyday life outside of the concentration camps?
Burns: In the beginning, there were modest laws passed that limit Jews’ mobility and their ability to participate in certain trades—lawyers, doctors, things like that. Kids were shunned at schools. This, of course, progresses; they’re not permitted to go to different parks, sometimes their businesses are boycotted. Then, of course, this escalates. The policy of the Nazis initially is just to get rid of the Jews. Have them leave and go. Make life so miserable that they’d leave.
They had their property confiscated. They could take only a small amount of things when they left the country. It was just getting steadily worse. Then at Kristallnacht in November 1938, there was a wholesale attack on them. As the Nazis expanded, as Hitler sought the lebensraum [the space to live] that he thought the German people were entitled to, there was an essential contradiction that scholar Peter Hayes points out in the film. . . Hitler’s inheriting more and more Jews [through his invasions of neighboring countries]. There are 560,000 in Germany, less than 300,000 in Austria—but in Poland, which he invaded on September 1, 1939, there are 3.3 million Jews. It’s very clear you’re not going to get them out—and at that point they begin to say there should be the wholesale slaughter of them.
What people will perhaps find surprising or new to them is how many people were actually killed before anybody whispered or shouted the word “gas” as a way of exterminating . . . the Jews of Europe. So, probably 2 million Jews are killed by what we call “Shoah by bullet.” Shot in the head by rifle in firing squad manner and dumped in pits or they’re already standing in pits . . . . Like at Babi Yar, and many, many other places . . . . This is before the killing centers are created.
Q: Your film also provides chilling details of what the daily everyday existence was like in the forced labor and death camps.
Burns: At the killing centers, some people were put to death right away. And others were put to hard labor and the idea was you’d just work them to death, and they’d die from disease or starvation or despair or whatever. It’s a gruesome, gruesome, gruesome business that’s really so depraved and wantonly inhuman that you are surprised human beings are even capable of it. But, as the writer Daniel Mendelsohn says, “They hit the bottom of human depravity.”
Q: Some of your interview sources are noted historians, academics, and authors. But who were some of the ordinary people who are interviewees in The U.S. and the Holocaust?
Burns: We interviewed several survivors. We tell the story of Guy Stern, [formerly known as Gunther], from Hildesheim, Germany, who is sent by his parents . . . to the United States hoping he can get them out. He’s unable to do that. He joins the U.S. Army and is part of the liberation of Europe, and he’s in intelligence and the interrogation of prisoners. We have Joseph and Susie Hilsenrath; their parents sent them to France and then they escape to the United States after the Nazis invade Paris . . . Ben Ferencz was a young lawyer who helped prosecute [at] Nuremberg. Eva Geiringer survived Auschwitz. She was an Austrian Jew and her family had gotten out to Amsterdam and lived in close proximity to the Franks, and she became a friend of Anne Frank. And she survived Auschwitz. There are folks who were on the St. Louis [the 1939 ship carrying Jewish refugees that was not allowed to land in a U.S. harbor] and were turned away, and eventually did get to the United States.
We’re trying to show a variety of experiences that people had. Not just the people on camera who survive today, but the letters, journals and diaries of people who were involved. Some of the most poignant of the Eastern European Jews, who are basically sending out these existential letters, writing to a friend, “I just want to write to someone because I want the world to know that David Berger”—meaning the writer of the letter—“exists.” Some of the letters were buried in metal milk cans when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place and were discovered afterwards—testaments, drawings, art, but also just the sense that “I was.” To most Westerners, anonymous Eastern European Jews were sent to their deaths.
Q: As the Black Lives Matter movement puts it, “Say their names.”
Burns: It’s absolutely right. This is what we have to react against, the opacity of the phrase “six million.” It doesn’t let you in; it allows you to bounce off. But each one of those [who died in the Holocaust] was a human being. Daniel Mendelsohn, the writer, does an amazing job of bringing six of those six million people alive by following their stories, painstakingly researching the fate of his great-uncle… It’s really important to have a bottom-up sense of this. When you get to a number like six million, everything just turns off and shuts off. But if you say “there were nine million Jews in Europe in 1933”—by 1945, two out of three are dead. You’re looking at three Jewish Germans, you can understand the calculus, that you have to imagine that footage with two of those three people missing. That’s a much better way of expressing what six million is.
Q: What relevance does your film have for today?
Burns: Unfortunately, when we began this film in 2015, we were anxious to tell the story knowing that antisemitism exists, racism exists, nativism exists . . . and we’d be telling a story that might “rhyme”—as Mark Twain would say—or echo with various things today. But over these seven years, we’ve seen America be threatened more than it’s ever been threatened in its existence by the same kind of dark forces that overtook Germany. We don’t know what will happen, but there’s an incredible relevance to the story that we’re telling today and the need for us to tend our gardens, to get the weeds out of this garden, to restore it to its previous glory.
The U.S. and the Holocaust premieres on September 18, 19 and 20, at 8:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS Video app.