Ken Burns on ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’

Bureaucratic officials slow-walked things, moved the goalposts, changed the rules, making it more and more difficult for refugees to come in.

Why?

Based on antisemitic, anti-immigrant sentiment. We’ve tended to see ourselves as sort of isolated from the Holocaust, something that happened an ocean away. But in fact, German jurists studied our Jim Crow laws to fashion the early discriminatory laws against Jews. Hitler was very pleased with the way we had isolated and mistreated the native populations and dispossessed them of their lands, and was planning to do the same with Slavic people to the east. He called it “the wild East,” like the Wild West, and he said the Volga will be our Mississippi, meaning we’ll cross the Volga and create a continental Reich that will last 1,000 years. There were many inspirational things to him about our eugenics pseudoscience that put a hierarchy between races and ethnicities, when, of course, it’s all fiction — there’s only one race, the human race.

Why did Americans fear immigrants?

Many people were convinced by very well-known antisemites like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin, who had an audience in the millions, that Jews were evil people. And refugees were changing the complexion of America. The great influx of refugees from 1870 to 1920 caused a backlash and helped create a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, who marched many thousands strong in full regalia on the steps of the Capitol and down Independence Avenue.

The Statue of Liberty is inscribed, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but not all were welcomed.

It’s a very complicated mixed bag. We start our film with Emma Lazarus’ poem, but we do have Thomas Bailey Aldrich — the editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, so he’s not some fringe kind of person — whose poem [“Unguarded Gates”] referred to the “strange tongues” that are coming in, “voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?” I mean, it’s pretty terrifying stuff.  

Add to that the eugenics, the idea that you could have a hierarchy of races and ethnicities, and you add the Great Depression, and authoritarians come out of the woodwork and suggest that these people will steal your jobs.

Why didn’t we bomb the tracks to Auschwitz? Couldn't we have saved some people that way?

The rail lines could be rebuilt overnight if they were successfully bombed. But you have to understand, 80 percent of all bombs dropped fell far from their intended targets. Auschwitz was accidentally bombed by Americans, when they were trying to bomb the IG Farben synthetic rubber plant more than five miles away, and they missed and hit Auschwitz. It’s a dilemma: Do you bomb Auschwitz? Do you kill prisoners to stop the killing? So this makes it problematic. FDR believes firmly that to win the war is to stop Hitler. And that if you make it for something else, the American public will lose heart. But it’s a very complicated thing. And in order for us to tell this story of the U.S. and the Holocaust, we had to present to our audience a clearer picture of what the actual Holocaust was.

Are there revelations in this story that are relevant to the present?

As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes.” In our film, the Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt says the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. I would say the time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.