(Jewish Group) What did the U.S. know about the Holocaust and when did we know it?
In every generation, America struggles to explain itself as a nation. In “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein provide an insight into the horrors of the 20th century, how America related to them at the time and how it should relate to them now.
Over three episodes, lasting six hours, the team tells the story of a major economic power and developed country that believed in its manifest destiny to conquer and colonize a continent. Its ideology stretched to transporting and slaughtering those it deemed degenerate while segregating or subjugating those it deemed merely subservient. The genocide of the former and the socially engineered cull of the latter, the leaders believed, would be forgotten, overlooked or seen as necessary for progress as the state marched from one success to the next.
Early on in this extensive documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” explains how American history inspired Hitler and the Nazi regime. The nascent Third Reich embraced and distilled American ideas of social Darwinism and eugenics, Western expansion, Native American genocide, Jim Crow segregation and American antisemitism. Though we generally understand the Allies to be the “good guys” of World War II, it took only a little distillation and redirection of ideas from America and Western Europe to motivate Germany’s Eastward expansion, Jewish genocide, Slav enslavement and the creation of a Nazi-occupied Europe to parallel United States-occupied North America.
Those hoping for another documentary answering “What did Americans know?” and “Did Roosevelt do enough to save the Jews?” will be adequately satisfied. Though the subjects are not conclusively closed, the topics are deliberated from various points of view and addressed. Spoiler alert: They knew a lot, though it was hard to believe. The State Department was reprehensible, full of antisemites and small-minded racists; on the other hand, the War Refugee Board, belatedly set up and funded in January 1944 to carry out the official American policy of rescue and relief, was an agile, creative organization that saved tens of thousands of lives.
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