Ken Burns documentary explores America’s response to the Holocaust

never again two simple but very powerful words that mean so much especially to the jewish people and so many after the atrocities of the holocaust our next guests are out with a new documentary looking at that part of the story that we really rarely see and how the u.s turned its back at times on hundreds of thousands of desperate jews seeking refuge from the nazis take a look the nazis persecuted the jews was undeniable but the notion that the nazis were now preparing to kill them all was simply impossible for many in the state department to believe state department officials decide that this is not good information and and this is crucial they say even if this were true there's nothing that we could do about it they believe that they are doing all they can to assist the jews and that any sort of rally or petition or protest asking them to do more would be diverting resources from the war effort many of these people were also racist and anti-semitic and nativist and so you have to wonder whether some of their um concerns some of their annoyances have to do with the fact that they're being asked to help jews the documentary is called the u.s and the holocaust coming from ken burns and sarah botstein who join me now with more thank you both so much for taking the time to be with us thank you phil for having us absolutely ken i'm going to start with you americans some americans might be surprised to learn about what the us did and didn't do to help victims of the holocaust we all like to think that america is a nation of immigrants and in many ways we are but why do we see this intense anti-semitism in the u.s and why did the government turn its backs at times when those suffering needed it the most well let's just be very clear that we have nothing to do with the holocaust uh itself there's no complicity in that we did bring in 225 000 refugees more than any other sovereign nation but phil we could have done five times that much and still just fulfilled the horrifically small quotas we just didn't do enough when it was important and the reason why is because much of the animating ideas of hitler's regime are also held by many americans we are a nation of immigrants we do believe in welcoming people for a long time we did welcome people but there was a backlash to that we'd let in too many catholics they said uh too many jews there was a danger that they would replace us and so you see in america in the 1930s beset by a depression but also susceptible to authoritarian and media figures who are blaming everything on the jews that the jews are controlling the roosevelt administration and the media and that they shouldn't be duped there's a great deal of racism there's a great deal of xenophobic nativist anti-immigrant uh fever and so you end up with a kind of toxic brew that makes it incapable for this incredible nation to act in its best interests and in the best interest most importantly of those people desperately trying to flee the the monstrous regime of the nazis who are bent on murdering all the jews of europe and let's just say they did a pretty good job of it there were 9 million jews in europe in 1933 in 1945 two out of three of them had been killed that's the six million number we get but it's about individual human beings each one of those people you see in these photographs are real human beings who are his lives are as important as ours and and at a critical moment we failed to do a good job mainly because we thought for some reason they might have been responsible for their own mistreatment or that we couldn't believe the numbers or that we had people in our government who were sabotaging efforts to get jews here we begin our film with the story of anne frank's father who is desperately trying to get his family to the united states and he has everything he needs friends wherewithal money does every eye and crosses every t and still he cannot get here so when we think of the holocaust many people remember the story of anne frank we could have gotten her here you know i heard a lot of this growing up in a jewish household myself but i think it's not widely spread over america as people were growing up sarah america tends to gloss over some of the more problematic parts of its history why was it so important for you to tell this story in this way well i think deborah lipstadt the great historian of this subject makes the point in the film that we want to learn from our past to do better in our future and to understand some of the tensions that the film explores about what kind of a country we are what did we do when did we do it how did we think about the plight of the jews who were being persecuted overseas and i think for us to take this subject that so many people have read about have seen films about think they know about to try to humanize the experience of the six million which is an overwhelming number as ken was just saying to think about american politics american foreign policy americans role in the world as these two crises the crisis of the second world war and the humanitarian crisis facing the jews were coming to fruition in the late 30s and early 40s and what is our role what was our role then and how to think about ourselves ken in your last answer you talked about jews replacing people years ago you know and i think to charlottesville just a few years ago that chance jews will not replace us we all saw that with the torches xenophobia anti-semitism prevalent throughout american history what parallels do you see between the 30s and 40s and say what's going on today phil way too many in fact you know this is a project begun in 2015 in a much more different america a much more different world now one beset by a movement towards authoritarianism uh divisions within the united states that have eroded confidence in the basic bedrock institutions of justice and the courts and elections and peaceful transfers of power and so we've accelerated this production to get it out to be part of the conversation to say that the echoes of what uh are are of what happened back then are happening right now and we have to be mindful of it and again you know refugees are on our minds all the time this is the question it isn't just immigration but it's also those people fleeing persecution who are urgently in danger of losing their lives uh that we have to bring um to bear i mean this these people purport in charlottesville to be part of a christian uh you know desirous of a christian nation what could be more unchristian than not trying to take care of our fellow human beings there's not you know back in the 30s there was a pot in the 20s there was a popular pseudo-science called eugenics which was attempting to create a hierarchy of the races right and of course putting the white northern europeans at the top of the list there's it was a complete fiction that only races the human race and if we make an other of somebody else whether it's you know the jews in the 1930s or venezuelans today we are making a mistake it's only us this is why we're on this planet it's only us and there's no them and if somebody tells you there's a them move away seen that as you mentioned time and time again over the years let's talk a little bit more right now about what the u.s could have done but decided the times not to do let's look at another clip the state department has been deliberately obstructionist they have been delaying relief money that could go to jews in occupied europe and lying about it so that people would stop rallying they'd stop protesting and they'd stop asking the government to do more sarah how much of this surprised you when you set out to make the film i actually will say honestly a lot of what we discovered surprised me i think i knew a fair amount about the history of the holocaust on the one hand but in really drilling down on what americans knew when we knew it what we did about it and what was happening to the jews of europe at the same time we were very surprised to learn that even as early as 1933 there were thousands and thousands of newspaper articles and reports of what was happening and that was true all the way through the rise of hitler the rise of fascism and what was happening in germany so we read a lot about it in the newspapers we saw a lot of um we didn't see sorry we heard a lot about it on the radio and even though we didn't see a lot of the images until later we did have evidence that something terrible was happening and i think it became important for us to show and include evidence of not just the more familiar images of the liberation of the concentration camps and killing centers at the end of the war to show what had happened but also to include a section in our second episode about what is known in the jewish community as the showa by bullets where thousands and thousands and then more than two million jews were rounded up and killed at point blank range and and sent into ditches uh in a period of 20 months before american soldiers were on the ground in europe and i think we often teach the military story of the war and the humanitarian crisis in different ways and we were trying in the film to tie them together so that americans could have a clearer understanding of what happened and when it happened and what we knew about it sarah bostian ken burns thanks for what you're doing here and also for spending some time with us today on the show and be sure to catch the u.s and the holocaust on your local pbs channel part one premieres sunday september 18th at 8 pm eastern hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to download the abc news app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching

Channel: ABC News

Views: 80,443

Keywords: ABC News, ABCNL, America, Jewish, News, Update, WWII, crisis, documentary, history, holocausts, humanitarian, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-89977128, response, humanitarian crisis

Id: pc3PpMesvg4

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022