An uneasy relationship: U.S. and the Holocaust

Sep. 16—In one of the more darkly enlightening segments of the six-hour PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, hundreds of Nazi sympathizers assemble in public without shame or fears of condemnation.

The location isn't World War II-era Berlin. It's 1930s New Jersey.

Other nations have been happy to let Germany take all the blame for the extermination of 6 million Jews and the proliferation of a hateful, racist, and imperialistic ideology that has fallen out of fashion but never faded away. For some of Germany's neighbors, that's easier than acknowledging their own residents turned Jewish neighbors in to authorities for personal gain. In the United States, it's easier than accepting that the poisonous dogma ever gained a foothold here or that the nation could have done far more to help Jewish would-be emigrants.

That's part of the point of producing a Holocaust documentary with an American perspective, says co-director and producer Lynn Novick. The other co-producers are Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns, the latter renowned for previous works focusing on topics such as baseball, the Dust Bowl, national parks, and the Civil War. Novick and Botstein have worked with Burns on numerous projects, covering subjects such as jazz, the Vietnam War, and Prohibition.

Another reason is urgency: A person who was 18 years old when World War II officially ended in Europe in May 1945 would be 95 now. And hearing people's stories secondhand isn't the same, Novick says, as a story from a person who lived it.

"I find when we're asking someone to recall particularly intense experiences, they don't just tell you what it was like or how they felt," she says. "You can see that they're actually feeling it again, whatever they felt at that time."

And today's interviews can lay the groundwork for future discoveries or understanding, Novick says.

"It feels to me that important events need to be revisited in every generation, so I hope other filmmakers and storytellers will re-examine all of this in the future," she says. "I'm sure they'll bring different thoughts about what it all means, depending on what happens to us right now."

By "us right now," Novick refers to the precarious state of democracy in the United States in 2022, as states move to restrict voter access and former President Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election fuel anger and violence. Given Trump's oversized role in the undermining of democracy here, Novick says, one could logically assume the documentary is at least partly a response to his presidency.

That's not the case, Botstein says.

"We decided to make the film in 2015. We couldn't have imagined where we are [now], both domestically and around the world."

Work began in earnest on the project three years later.

"The drumbeat just got louder and louder about why this story needs to be told now," Novick says. "And, you know, rhetoric was coming out of the White House about building walls and America first and who's a real American, and what kind of immigrants are good immigrants and what kind of immigrants are bad immigrants and all of this, you know, sort of toxic stew. Not to mention fake news, propaganda, and sort of delegitimizing democracy. These are all things that were there in 2015."

As such, Novick cautions against solely blaming Trump.

"That kind of far-right, proto-Nazi ideology which has all kinds of euphemisms like white nationalism, in my adult lifetime, it's been steadily moving into the mainstream. And people are saying things and not being called out and just keep on saying more and more explosive things."

The liberal use of black-and-white film can create the illusion that events in the documentary are of another place and time, Novick says.

"It makes it farther away and safer in the past," she says. "Every once in a while we find color footage or a color picture and you're reminded, holy [expletive], those Nazi flags are bright red and the swastika is black. We have a photograph of a building with Nazi flags at night and torches, and it's in full color, and it's shocking. And you're reminded that this was a full-color world. We only get to see it in black and white."

Grisly pictures of emaciated bodies piled up at concentration camps emerged following World War II, giving a stunned world a look not just at the Nazis' wartime atrocities, but humanity's capacity for crushing cruelty. The extent of the persecution came as a surprise, Novick says, because Nazi Germany kicked journalists out of the country and made covering the war difficult.

In the United States, some news outlets dramatically downplayed the war. Novick suspects that was the result of ignorance, not a deliberate effort to misinform.

"I find also shocking — and again, I don't think I should — Charles Lindbergh's rhetoric around why we should stay out of the war. And how he's got these crazy conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes that he's pulling out, and people are clapping wildly, and he's hugely popular. So he's not some weird outlier on the fringe. He's right in the center of America. And, you know, a very serious threat to democracy."

Lindbergh, famed for piloting the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris in 1919, spoke against U.S. involvement in the war and repeatedly made the case that those of European descent are superior to those of other races. He was popular among many Americans for his pioneering flight, series of books, and anticommunist stance.

Americans have long been resistant to accepting immigrants, despite the nation's roots in immigration, says Botstein, who is Burns' daughter. Before World War I, the nation had no limits on the number of people who could relocate here. Congress passed laws in 1921 and '24 that capped the total number of new immigrants each year, as well as the number from each "national origin." The laws went unchanged in the 1930s, as Jews were desperate to emigrate from Nazi Germany.

"We've hidden behind this notion that Americans didn't know it was happening, which is not true," Botstein says. "There was reporting. If you were an engaged, interested citizen, you knew the Jews were being persecuted, and it was hard to get" to the United States.

Botstein adds that even in the years after the war, once the scope of the atrocities had come into clearer focus, Americans were still opposed to letting more refugees in.

"We are afraid of refugees, of immigrants, of 'Others,' and that is a real theme in American history that I think we don't explore," she says. "So we're constantly kind of giving and taking away and not embracing what has, I would argue, made our country so great."

While that's frustrating, Novick says, research for the series also revealed powerful lessons about the human spirit. She marvels at people's capacity to live daily life despite suffering tremendous losses, and to live robust lives as a tribute to those they have lost.

Taking on a project about the Holocaust, the documentary's co-directors knew they were in for gut-wrenching reminders of humanity's capacity for evil. Still, there were surprises — including the New Jersey imagery.

"I kind of knew that there were Nazi sympathizers in America and certainly anti-Semitism in America," Novick says. Still, "seeing the color footage of the German American Bund, which was a pro-Nazi organization, having a picnic in New Jersey with people dressed up in what looked like Boy Scout uniforms and other people doing the heil Hitler [salute], and they had the American flag and the swastika ... I found that shocking, but I really shouldn't have."

Botstein contemplated a key component of the photographs and video that's never revealed.

"One thing I hadn't thought about until making this film is, Who's taking the picture?" she says. "And there are lots of people just standing around while these Jews are killed."

It haunts her, but Botstein admits she'll never know.

Novick's key takeaway from the hundreds of hours of research conducted for the series: democracy is fragile.

"I don't think that we're living through the exact same thing that happened in Nazi Germany, by any means," she says. "We have a different society. We live in a different time. But you can see by what happened [in Germany] and how America responded to it, how quickly a society can go from all the things we think are important to democracy to them being gone. You have to really be on guard against that."

details

—The U.S. and the Holocaust

—Episode one: The Golden Door (beginnings through 1938), 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 18, repeating at 9:12 p.m.

—Episode two: Yearning to Breathe Free (1938-42), 7 and 9:20 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 20

—Episode three: The Homeless, The Tempest-Tossed (1942-present), 7 and 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 21

—KNME-TV, Channel 5.1; with free streaming Sept. 18-Oct. 15 on PBS Video App, and pbs.org