“The U.S. and the Holocaust” Looks into the Mirror and the Abyss

You know how this story ends. Six million murdered. Nothing will bring them back. 

But the exhortation is that we never forget, so the terrible tale is told and retold, partly to honor the victims, partly in the belief that George Santayana is right: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But only the known can be remembered. As if Trump and COVID haven’t highlighted clearly enough the extent of American ignorance, in 2020 “the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z” found that “63 percent of […] respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent thought that ‘two million or fewer Jews’ were killed during the Holocaust,” with “nearly 20 percent of Millennials and Gen Z in New York feel[ing that] the Jews caused the Holocaust.”

Clearly, then, Ken Burns and co.’s The U.S. and the Holocaust could not be written off as a needlessly redundant addition to the copious pool of material on the Holocaust — easily the most widely documented/discussed crime/phenomenon of the 20th century — even if the three-part series didn’t take a deep dive into the U.S.’s role/reaction to Nazi Germany’s efforts toward “the annihilation of Jewry.” But that it does — and even those of us far from ignorant of what transpired in Europe between 1933 and 1945 are likely to learn much about what took place within our borders. Spoiler alert: mostly it ain’t good.

Episode 1: “The Golden Door” (Beginnings–1938) opens with Otto Frank walking down the street in his native Frankfurt. It’s just two months after Adolf Hitler came to power, but already Frank is planning to flee to Amsterdam. He’s the father of Anne, history’s most famous Holocaust victim, so we know how this microplot is going to end, too; but starting us off with a less well-known Frank and weaving this thread throughout all three episodes (we don’t hear directly from Anne until Episode 3) is an effective way to take us into a story we know while priming us to accept and incorporate unfamiliar information.  

Much of that comes in the form of American personages both well-intended and wicked. We hear the words of the Emma Lazarus poem emblazoned at the base of the Statue of Liberty (“‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, …”), followed by an anti-immigration counterpoint by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of The Atlantic Monthly:

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, 
And through them presses a wild motley throng […]
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? […]

Much of Episode 1 concerns this nativist, racist fear of the other, directly confronting the (to quote one of many historians who serve as talking heads) “national mythology” that the United States has always welcomed immigrants. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, that welcoming trend went into retreat, with the U.S. increasingly defining itself as much by who we excluded as by who we took in. We hear of the pro-eugenics beliefs (e.g., forced sterilization of “undesirables”) of Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie; and the virulent anti-Semitism of Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent (which in the early 1920s had the second-highest circulation of all American newspapers) ran 91 separate editorials under the general title “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” In 1924 comes the Johnson-Reed Act, which sets immigration quotas requiring 85% of all immigrants to be from White, Protestant countries and bars all Asians — a category that includes Jews.

Across the Atlantic, Hitler — still in prison for his part in a failed coup — was pleased and inspired by the American example, just as he was by the way Americans expanded our Lebensraum via segregation and slaughter of native peoples. Just a few years later his Nuremberg Laws would be modeled on the Jim Crow laws of the American South.

Despite 3,000 American newspapers articles documenting Nazi violence against Jews during Hitler’s first 100 days in power, the American capitalist machine continued doing business in Germany uninterrupted. And why not, when American public opinion was such that polls found roughly two-thirds of Americans believing Nazi persecution was partly or entirely the Jews’ own fault? Even after Kristallnacht, which was widely reported in newspapers around the world, polls showed that only 10% of Americans favored raising immigrant quotas for refugees, and 50% wanted the U.S. to continue doing business with Nazi Germany. 

Throughout The U.S. and the Holocaust we are, if not bludgeoned by, at least punchy from a litany of such statistics, all of which point to a deep-seated anti-immigrant bias in general, nowhere more focused than in the desire to keep Jews out regardless of the Nazi slaughter — though to be fair (as the filmmakers attempt to be), the average American had trouble imagining the scale. Part of the problem — and this is where Burns and co. report details of which the average Holocaust-aware viewer is least knowledgeable — was that government officials generally worked to suppress dissemination of known facts, as well as going to great lengths not only to bar Jews from entering the U.S. (in 1941, for example, new immigration rules denied the issuance of visas to anyone in/from Germany or any country the Nazis had annexed) but even from allowing money expressly earmarked for refugees and partisan organizations overseas from being delivered. When a group of Treasury Department officials became aware of their colleagues’ behavior, they wrote a January 1944 memorandum intended for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Originally entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews” and making claims borne out by evidence, just a few lines are sufficient to give a sense of the travesty: 

[I]t appears that certain responsible officials of this Government were so fearful that this Government might act to save the Jews of Europe if the gruesome facts relating to Hitler’s plans to exterminate them became known, that they not only attempted to suppress the facts but, in addition, they used the powers of their official position to secretly countermand the instructions of the Acting Secretary of State ordering such facts to be reported. We leave it to your judgment whether this action made such officials the accomplices of Hitler in this program and whether or not these officials are not war criminals in every sense of the term.

This memo led FDR to create the War Refugee Board, one of the relatively rare shining lights in the American response to the Holocaust. But FDR is neither hero nor villain in The U.S. and the Holocaust, but a pragmatist attempting to walk a tightrope between his internationalist leanings and the generally isolationist, largely anti-Semitic Congress and American populace. A chief embodiment of the demons with which FDR had to contend was aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, whose velvety tones we hear extolling the need to preserve “the White race” and sounding the alarm about Jewish control of the press and film industry.

 “You and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt,” Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, wrote in 1943. “If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the two million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler’s other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe…. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it — or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we lifted just one cautious hand, encased in a tight-fitting glove of quotas and visas and affidavits, and a thick layer of prejudice.” At that time, the dead actually numbered 4 million, and it would be 2 million more before the killing was done. 

Needless to say, no serious work touching upon the Holocaust can avoid the grimness of reviewing the industrial-scale, incomprehensible Nazi cruelty. Much documentation comes from the Nazis themselves, who kept meticulous records of their evil deeds, including an untold number of “trophy photos,” clearly proud of the suffering and death they were dealing. Combat-hardened American soldiers regularly “wept like babies” as they came across the mass graves and death camps. Even what they’d seen and suffered on the battlefield could not prepare them for this. 

Starting in 1945, finally the full scale of Nazi atrocities was brought home to Americans from coast to coast. Nonetheless, the filmmakers tell us, in the immediate post-war years only 5% of Americans favored raising the quotas to allow more of the “homeless, tempest-tost” survivors and refugees into the U.S., while around 33% thought the number should be reduced. This highlights a key theme in The U.S. and the Holocaust and is undoubtedly primary motivator in the creation of this series: the anti-immigrant sentiment in today’s United States is part of an unbroken tradition. Today’s Americans are the same as those who rejected the “wretched refuse” of the Nazi genocide.

The last five minutes of The U.S. and the Holocaust makes explicit this tie-in between then and now by featuring clips of recent footage that’s all too familiar to anyone with a television and even a passing interest in our current Zeitgeist: torch-bearing White nationalists marching on the University of Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” Charlottesville. Donald Trump. January 6. “If we’re going to be a country in the future, then we have to have a view of our own history which allows us to see what we were — and we can become something different,” historian Timothy Snyder tells us here. “And then we have to become something different if we’re going to make it.”

But Snyder misses the mark. Nazi Germany didn’t fall because it was racist, exclusionist, White supremacist, and cruel: it fell because the Axis powers’ ill-conceived aggression against the U.S. and U.S.S.R. brought crushing military might down on their own heads. For all we know the Third Reich might have lasted a thousand year if the Axis had been prudent enough not to pick fights with someone their own size.

The U.S. and the Holocaust doesn’t tell us anything about our fate. It can do no more than remind and educate us about this greatest of atrocities, and in so doing it tells us something about who we’ve been and who we (still) are. This may not be enough to change the hearts and minds of Americans who are keeping the anti-immigrant flame burning yet think they’re somehow different from their counterparts of yesteryear; but it’s worth a try.

Stream The U.S. and the Holocaust anytime or check your local PBS listings.