“The U.S. and the Holocaust” is a three-night production that builds on Ken Burns’ legacy of elegant historical fare for PBS. It is documentary filmmaking with a purpose, connecting underlying currents of American society that influenced the featured decades to persistent strains of White supremacy and anti-Semitism. As history, it’s intriguing, but as contemporary events, it’s depressing.
The six-plus hours, which were directed by Burns and frequent collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, painstakingly link US isolation and xenophobia to the barbarism occurring in Europe. Historians detail — to borrow a well-worn phrase — what Americans knew about Nazi atrocities and when they knew it.
Humanitarian issues were undoubtedly important to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But they were overshadowed by the more urgent battle against Hitler, first in the form of his covert assistance for England and then in the form of America’s involvement in the conflict.
Before the Holocaust, anti-immigrant prejudice that persisted through the 1920s, auto mogul Henry Ford’s violent anti-Semitism, and interest in eugenics and racial supremacy must be considered in order to understand the US’s role during the Holocaust. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Hitler praised the cruelty used to expropriate Native American territory and described it as “The way that racial superiority is supposed to work.”
The first chapter, which is divided into three sections, covers prewar times; the second, 1938–1942; and the third, the end of the war and its aftermath.
Only a limited amount of American support for Jews was shown. The Congress still rejected a proposal to admit more refugees, including calls to take in 10,000 children per year, after the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938 made plain that there was little hope for those left in Germany.
At the same time, the filmmakers tell the tales of ordinary Americans and public servants who tried to save thousands of lives by assisting Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.
As is customary with Burns productions (again written by Geoffrey Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote), the expertly chosen clips—such as Charles Lindbergh addressing an audience in support of his America First agenda or footage of the German concentration camps—get augmented by leading actors speaking for important historical figures. Liam Neeson, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, and German filmmaker Werner Herzog are among those who lend their voices to the effort.
The necessity to present these stories, warts and all, at a time when how to teach US history is hotly contested, as well as how complicated the history is—a mix of bravery and callousness, horror and hope—comes through in the end.
With images from the January 6 uprising, the Charlottesville Unite the Right event from 2017, and a participant wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie, the filmmakers effectively drive home that point at the conclusion.
Nell Irvin Painter, a historian, mentions a torrent of White supremacy and anti-Semitism that has permeated US history in response to such contemporary occurrences.
Few have done more to make such history marketable than Burns, whose extensive contributions to public television have continued with amazing regularity since “The Civil War” in 1990, including more recent productions focusing on Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, and Benjamin Franklin.
The documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust” (which will be supported by a student outreach program) emphasizes the value of documenting history in all its complexity and messiness, even though that kind of impact is elusive in today’s world. We need to have a perspective on our past that enables us to understand who we were, as Snyder puts it.
