Ken Burns Explores America’s Inaction During the Holocaust

It highlights the racism and antisemitism that was laced through the nation’s purportedly democratic institutions and led to their inaction in response to Germany’s persecution of Jews. Modern footage points up how these failings stubbornly endure. This includes clips from the 2017 white-supremacist rallies at Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, where rioters sported pro-Nazi emblems like a much-discussed Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt.

“It’s been very eerie to see the past echoing louder and louder throughout the time that we made the film,” said Lynn Novick, who co-directed and produced the film with Burns and Sarah Botstein.

The film also foregrounds parallels between America’s past and present hostilities toward immigrants and refugees.

“We remind people that it’s important that these impulses are not relegated to a past historical event,” Burns said in a telephone interview. “It’s important to understand the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of our civilized impulses.”

True, as the documentary chronicles, for a good portion of its history the U.S. took in millions of Irish fleeing famine, Jews fleeing pogroms and Italians fleeing poverty. But a fierce backlash against unrestricted immigration arose in the late 19th century abetted by a specious eugenics movement that downgraded entire nationalities and racial groups as potential pollutants of the American gene pool.

The story is enhanced by many trademarks of the Ken Burns aesthetic: haunting and substantiating film clips and photographs, plaintive music, lucid reflections from scholars, testimonies from engaging witnesses, personal letters read by actors like Meryl Streep. The erudite script was written by Geoffrey C. Ward.

The stories by survivors who were children in the 1930s are particularly poignant, told with an air of lingering disbelief that such horrors could happen in the 20th century.

Guy Stern, a 100-year-old scholar of German literature, recounts how, as a teenager, he was sent by his desperate German-Jewish parents to St. Louis, where he lived with an aunt and uncle while he searched for someone willing to sponsor the family’s entry into the country, a requirement of immigration laws at the time. The one person who agreed to put up the necessary $5,000 was a gambler, so immigration authorities rejected him as financially unstable. At the war’s end, Stern learned that his parents, brother and sister were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto and died there.

The filmmakers sought to emphasize the story’s ambiguities and complications, Burns said. For one thing, the U.S. let in more Jewish refugees than any other country — roughly 200,000 between 1933 and 1945 — the result partly of efforts by rule-benders like journalist Varian Fry and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose clandestine dealings were financed by the War Refugee Board, under the direction of John W. Pehle.

The documentary, which was inspired by an exhibition on the same topic at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, also softens somewhat the unfavorable portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt drawn by many historians for having done little to rescue Jews and stop the slaughter.

Focusing on two of the better known critiques, it suggests Roosevelt was restrained from admitting the more than 900 Jewish refugees on the passenger ship the MS St. Louis because of the quotas legislated by an immigration-resistant Congress. And drawing up plans to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz would have been wasteful, one featured historian contends, because bombing was highly inaccurate and the Germans were able to replace damaged tracks overnight.

Despite pleas from his wife, Eleanor, and from Jewish leaders, Roosevelt chose to devote his attention to defeating the Axis.

“The U.S. and the Holocaust” undermines the frequently heard rationale that Americans in the 1930s did not know how ugly the persecution of Jews had become. It offers newsreels and newspaper headlines that trace how Americans saw or read about random attacks by Nazi thugs and punitive laws that targeted Jewish-owned business and denied Jewish citizens access to parks and theaters. It notes that the restrictions emulated Jim Crow race laws in the American South.

But the majority of Americans, encouraged by antisemitic voices like those of radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, automobile magnate Henry Ford and the lionized aviator Charles Lindbergh, scarcely altered their views, even after Kristallnacht — the brutal “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938 — during which 1,400 synagogues were torched, hundreds of Jewish businesses ransacked and at least 91 were killed.

Americans continued to oppose loosening immigration even as Hitler overran Europe and herded Jews into ghettos, then turned to systematic murder with so-called Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads — and human slaughterhouses like Treblinka.

The film includes a radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow, from December 1942, that described the campaign in plain language. “What is happening is this,” he said. “Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.”

But such revelations failed to sway most Americans or their government. Two of every three of Europe’s estimated 9 million Jews would perish.

Even after the war ended and newsreels showcased American liberators stunned at encountering walking skeletons and piles of corpses, antisemites in the State Department and Congress continued to resist. As a result, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors idled in spartan displaced persons camps into the 1950s even as Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were admitted because they were considered dependably anti-communist.

Making the film left its creators with feelings of both anger and sadness. Burns reflected on “all the symphonies that weren’t written, all the great literature that wasn’t written, all the children that weren’t raised right with love.”

Botstein is the daughter of Leon Botstein, the orchestral conductor and president of Bard College, whose parents lost most of their relatives in the war. She was surprised by “how little I knew or understood of the family history until I made this film.”

(Author: Joseph Berger)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)