Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

MH: The documentary series that filmmaker Ken Burns calls his most important ever… this week on Firing Line

BURNS the important thing is to remove the opacity from the six million and make these people an amputated limb that we still feel…

He’s the renowned documentary filmmaker who’s tackled subjects including the Civil War, the Vietnam War, baseball, and jazz. Now Ken Burns, along with Sarah Botstein and their team, are examining one of the darkest moment in History: the Holocaust, from a perspective they say every American needs to know. The new series, “The US and the Holocaust,” examines what the US did and didn’t do as Hitler murdered 6 million Jews….

Narrator: No more refugees outside the limited quotas would be offered even temporary shelter.

And asks important questions: What did the US Government and ordinary Americans know about the horror? Why didn’t the US take in more refugees? Have we learned the right lessons? What do filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein say now?

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Fairweather Foundation, Asness Family Foundation, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button, Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the
Pritzker Military Museum and Library, The Marc Haas Foundation, corporate funding is provided by: Stephens Inc.

INTERVIEW HOOVER Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, welcome to Firing Line.

BURNS Thank you. BOTSTEIN Thank you.

HOOVER You have, along with your director and producer Lynn Novick, come out with a three-part documentary series called The US and the Holocaust which premieres this Sunday. There are at least 100 documentaries about the Holocaust. So why did you need to make this film now?

BURNS We decided to do this in 2015, it was a far different environment in 2015 and it’s taken us seven years to do it. So there’s not a sense of now. We are just drawn to topics authentically. And it’s not that

there’s 100 films or a thousand films or no films about them, it is just that we have to feel like we’ve got an angle to pursue it. In this case, for us it was really important to re-see the Holocaust through the lens of what the US involvement is in terms of what we knew and when we knew it, what we didn’t know, what we did know, what we did, what we didn’t do, what we should have done, all of these sorts of myriad questions that had beset us as we approached myriad other projects.

HOOVER The series was originally set to be released in 2023. And Ken, I’ve heard you say I will not work on a more important film than this. And so I wonder, Sarah, was there no urgency in moving up the date?

BOTSTEIN Well, there definitely was urgency in moving up the date, and I will put that squarely on the man to my left here who I think realized as we were making the film and these themes that we were exploring felt more and more urgent as things were happening while we were editing the film in real time and he turned to us and said, ‘I think we have to accelerate this broadcast, I don’t want to wait a year.’ And we all kind of gulped and said, okay, we’re going to really try to make that happen. And he was right.

HOOVER The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking antisemitic incidents since 1979 and has noted that they have reached an all time high. Does the rising prevalence of antisemitism in our country today influence the way you approach this?

BURNS No. It’s really important to understand that there’s not a film that we’ve worked on, and I’ve done more than 40, in which you’re not aware while you’re working on it that it has a resonance in the present. And it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker, unless you’re a different kind of filmmaker, to ignore that. And so we are trying to faithfully tell our story, not point arrows at it or neon signs saying, ‘isn’t this so like today?’ But we realized we sort of had an obligation to the story and to ourselves and to the people, our audience, to bring it up to the present. So in a very short, few-minute, impressionistic, no narration, there’s a sense of gathering some of the things that the ADL is documenting: the killing of people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, rising xenophobia and nationalist sentiment, the anti-immigrant thing, the racism, the anti-Semitism, which seems to have a new flowering. And so we had obligations, not so much as filmmakers, but as citizens, to sort of say, and this is happening. There’s a moment in the film when the great Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt says the time to stop a genocide is before it happens, to which I would add, in my own modest way, the time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.

HOOVER Do you think we’re there now?

BURNS I think that we’ve had three great crises leading up to here: the Civil War, the Depression, and the Second World War. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was asked what he created, a monarchy or a republic, and he said, “a republic, if you can keep it.” And I think that through more than 245 years we’ve been able, in the midst of those crises, to keep those institutions well, that we’ve had the free and fair elections, that we’ve had the peaceful transfer of power, we’ve had the respect for institutions. The courts have remained independent for the most part. But right now, I think we’re in our fourth great crisis, and the institutions that have been the bulwark of the success of our democracy and the peaceful transfer of power are all under assault.

HOOVER I’ve heard you say you believe this is one of the most challenging times in our history. BURNS Yes.

HOOVER You can understand from many people who came to know you through your series on the Civil War that that lands very strongly. Is this more important and more serious than the Civil War?

BURNS I don’t think it’s more important or more serious. I think that it has the capability of being subtle enough in its manifestations that we can miss the ultimate seriousness. You know, there was an election in the middle of the Civil War, and there was a peaceful transition of power. And we got to have the second inaugural address, which is one of the most beautiful speeches in history because of that.

HOOVER Ken, you have said that – I’m paraphrasing – every film you do is about the same thing, that it’s about us. It’s about us as a country, us as a people. What did you learn about us in making this film?

BURNS It’s very hard to put your finger on it quite precisely. I think it is the fact that we have with the Holocaust conveniently hid behind the skirts that we didn’t know anything, and that therefore we are disconnected by an ocean and a continent from these events that took place. When in fact we knew and we chose not to do more to help the people who were, throughout the 30s and then into the 40s trying to escape, you know, this cataclysm. And that is on us, I think.

HOOVER You you go into this long tradition of xenophobia and, frankly, also isolationism, but you deal with our treatment of indigenous groups and black Americans as a starting point for that. And then you dive into how Hitler himself was actually inspired by some of these darker chapters in American history. Sarah, tell me more.

BOTSTEIN Well, you know, as Nell Painter says we have to confront Native American genocide to understand our history. But Hitler understood that about us. And he said, you know, our Mississippi must be the Volga. So he wants to move east. And what is in his way are these populations of Jews.

HOOVER The film really dives into how Hitler took inspiration from the American legal system and how it treated black Americans in the context of our Jim Crow laws.

BURNS I think Hitler admired most our ability to subdue and sort of eliminate the native population and to isolate them into reservations, read concentration camps. German jurists did study our Jim Crow laws to fashion the first discriminatory laws against Jews. And in fact, they were less harsh than ours. So after that happens, there’s a hue and cry about many of the things he’s done, and protests against them. And, you know, the invariable answer to our protests against the treatment of the Jews in the developing 30s is “Mississippi.” The scholar Peter Harriet Hayes says in our film, you know, you consider these people inferior and you pass laws to limit their abilities. We consider these people inferior, and that’s all we’re doing. How dare you talk to us about it?

ROOSEVELT

HOOVER Public opinion in the United States was often not in favor of helping the Jewish people. And, you know, the actions of the United States federal government, led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often reflected that public and popular opinion. So by the end of the Holocaust, the United States had admitted 225,000 Jewish refugees, more than any other sovereign took in, but still only a fraction of the six million Jews who perished. Why did the US not do more? Ken and then Sarah.

BURNS Well, you know, there’s rampant anti-Semitism in the United States. It’s been fired up by authoritarian figures in the media, not dissimilar to today. Father Coughlin, the radio priest, preaching hatred about Jews to millions. Henry Ford, the industrialist, has bought a newspaper and republished one of the most vile hoaxes about Jewish power called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You have a lot of people dislocated by the Depression who are susceptible to scapegoating, and that’s what human beings do. They make others of other people. There are implacable racists and anti-Semites in the State Department who slow walk. I mean, if we had just followed the quota system, the restrictive quota system, we could have let in five times as many Jews. And we didn’t. So people would change the rules. We start our film with the story of Otto, Frank, Anne Frank’s father. He spends most of the 30s trying to get to the United States. Can you imagine? Most people’s entrance into the story of the Holocaust, particularly schoolchildren, is through the story of Anne Frank, in which we think we have no responsibility. But the fact that she could be living among us today, that her children could be here, and we didn’t want them in there. There is a higher kind of moral place that we could have arrived at. Franklin Roosevelt could have been more vociferous in his opposition to it. We could have rid the State Department of its anti-Semites. But we could have at least yelled louder about what was happening to European Jewry at the time and we did not do that. And because of that we failed. And had we let in five times as many people, I suggest we still would have failed.

ST. LOUIS

HOOVER One of the utterly tragic incidents that you recount in the film is that of MS St. Louis. This is the ship that was carrying over 900 Jews that left Hamburg, Germany, and was not permitted into Canada or the United States. 254 of its passengers later perished in the Holocaust. Some scholars have argued that FDF, there are things he could have done, and that it was apathy towards the Jewish refugees that came to characterize his approach.Fair or not fair?

BOTSTEIN So the St. Louis happens before the Second World War has begun. It’s the spring of 1939. We’re not in the war. The war in Europe hasn’t happened. Do I think the United States could have done more around the St. Louis, and it is on our country and the Roosevelt administration that we didn’t? Absolutely. I don’t feel comfortable, I think, saying that it’s a symbol of some kind of larger apathy. I think Roosevelt is extremely complicated when it comes to this subject. And one of the things we have to always remember is the circumstances that were happening here. So he understands that we have an army smaller than that of Bulgaria at this time, that he has a humanitarian crisis that is real and he needs to deal with, and the St. Louis is a symbol of that, he also has a huge world war brewing.

BURNS I think it’s completely unfair, and unfair for a lot of reasons. This is a person who has named more Jews to his administration than any other president before him. The scholar Peter Hayes in our film says that we would think in retrospect that the humanitarian issue would be the most important thing, but

he’s trying to revoke the neutrality acts. And if he hadn’t revoked the neutrality acts, we might – this is me speaking – be speaking German. And that’s not a joke. The other thing is, is that this is a red herring. This is–

HOOVER How so?

BURNS – a posthumous looking back at Roosevelt to try to find an American villain in this. The anti-Semites and the anti-immigrationists called him ‘Frank D Rosenfeld’. They called his main program The Jew Deal. He helps give the go ahead to the single most important creation of the United States, which is the War Refugee Board, which will save more human beings than any other agency in the course of the war. Late, to be sure. Not enough to be sure. I already said there’s a failure. But our film is called The US and the Holocaust. It could easily be ‘us’ and the Holocaust. We have to realize that the main agent of this insensitivity are the American people in their totality. He is aware of that. He knows what he can and cannot get. He’s not perfect, by no stretch of the imagination. And we don’t let him get away with stuff and we hold his feet to the fire where we think it’s appropriate. But this kind of wholesale painting of somebody who is sympathetic to this situation is, I think, unfair.

HOOVER But he could have let them in. He could have found a way.

BURNS While he probably could have spent a great deal of political capital and perhaps let the St Louis in, what he might have had to sacrifice in order to do that might have been the difference in revoking the neutrality acts, which I would suggest trump all of that.

HOW MUCH DID AMERICANS KNOW?

HOOVER Your film lays out what Americans did and didn’t know about what was happening to the Jews in Europe in the early 1940s.

NARRATOR American newspapers had reported that Jews were being deported to ghettos in Poland and labor camps in the German-occupied Soviet Union. But their readers had no way of knowing that the Nazis had already begun the mass murder of Jews, that they were actually determined to eliminate all the Jews of Europe, and that they had found a new, more efficient method of doing it: gas.

HOOVER I was shocked to learn that three quarters of Holocaust victims were murdered in a span of 20 months before a single U.S. troop got to Europe.

BURNS That’s right.
HOOVER And that’s one of the power of the film is to put this in chronological order for us. How much

did Americans actually know in the early 1940s?

BOTSTEIN Once Hitler invades the Soviet Union and they want to move east, they murder, in a span of 20 months known as the Shoah by bullets, mostly shooting Jewish men, women, children, elderly people

into pits. There is some reporting in 1942 about that, but a lot of it happens in secret. And we don’t know all of the information. And Roosevelt actually is quite careful once the information is out because he is worried about American anti-Semitism and sending an entire army to save Jews of Europe. So he’s wrestling. But he did understand that American anti-Semitism was real. European anti-Semitism was real. And he had to be very careful how he messaged that.

AMERICAN ANTI-IMMIGRANT SENTIMENT

HOOVER There are parallels throughout the film between anti-Semitism and prejudice that fueled the Holocaust and anti-immigrant and pro-authoritarian sentiment in the United States today. Take a look at this clip from your series.

NARRATOR By 1910, New York would be home to more than a million Jews, more than a quarter of the city’s population, far more than any other city on earth.

PETER HAYES The anxieties about urbanization, about unlettered, untutored, relatively uneducated peoples coming in in large numbers, the sense that disease was a large problem, all of these worries were amalgamated into a belief that immigrants cause these problems. And thus immigration should be held down.

NARRATOR Many white Protestant Americans came to fear they were about to be outnumbered and outbred by the newcomers and their offspring, that they were being replaced.

HOOVER You say that you try to avoid contemporary motivations in your films, but it’s hard to miss references from the 20th century that resonate really strongly in this century. There’s the speech from a senator about building a wall around the United States. There is Charles Lindbergh’s involvement in the isolationist America First Committee, a phrase that we’ve heard over and over in the last six years. How do you explain these resemblances?

BURNS The Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament, says, what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun. History has never repeated itself, never, ever repeated itself. But there are things that human beings continually do, good and bad. And this film, as we were working on it, we began to realize, as the ADL has noted, that the increase in anti-Semitic incidences is just off the charts. You know, they think it’s back to the level of the 1930s.

BOTSTEIN I think the rhetoric that seems shocking to us when you watch the film is not only not shocking to audiences today, I think it’s much more acceptable.

HOOVER Sarah, your father, Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College, appeared on the original Firing Line with William F Buckley Jr, more than a dozen times. In 1995, he debated against a resolution that stated “all immigration should be drastically reduced,” and in that debate brought up one of the central themes of your film. Take a look.

LEON BOTSTEIN In 1933 if you had given a poll of Americans whether they should open the doors, or in the late 30s, 1938, to the Jews of Europe, would you have thought that was an adequate answer, that they didn’t want more Jews in the United States, and therefore our restrictive quota policy led indirectly to the death of millions of Jews. What would you say about this?

STEIN This is called the St. Louis gambit. The suggestion is that we should have moved six million people–

LEON BOTSTEIN It’s not the St. Louis gambit. I’m the descendant of one of the few survivors. STEIN: Well, but the point is that at that point in time, or even today, we cannot accept everyone

who wants to come here.

BOTSTEIN I mean, it’s sort of incredible, actually. I had not seen that clip. You know, my father came here in 1949 on the USS America as a three year old boy to the Bronx. I think my family, my grandparents, their friends, the people that I knew, all took great advantage and contributed. And I think the refute to him is that I think our immigrants and refugees have made this country a place worth living in.

MORE RECENT GENOCIDES

HOOVER I can’t not get your take on this. In China, there are millions, millions of Muslim ethnic minorities, including the Uighurs, who are being detained, placed in internment camps where they are beaten, prohibited from practicing their religion. And of course, the United States State Department did declare the treatment of the Uighurs as a genocide.

BURNS Yes.

HOOVER The term genocide, as your film notes, was coined in 1944. The Biden administration has taken some executive action on the matter. But do you see any indication that our leaders or our country have learned from genocides in the past?

BURNS I don’t see how we can be positive in this regard. We said at the end of the Second World War about the Holocaust, never again. And we have had genocides in Rwanda, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We’ve had them in Syria. We’ve had, as you pointed out, among the Uighur minority in China, among the Rohingyas in Southeast Asia. It seems to be a perpetual human thing. We’re now in the midst of a war in Ukraine, which is covering the same territories, the same towns that are in our film. And you find human beings back, as Ecclesiastes recognized millennia ago, that there is nothing new under the sun.

HOOVER Your film ends with a montage of imagery, including Charleston’s Emanuel Church shooter, Dylann Roof, neo-Nazis rallying in Charlottesville, scenes from Pittsburgh after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and scenes from January 6th. Have a look at this clip.

GUY STERN We have seen the nadir of human behavior, and we have no guarantee that it won’t recur. If we can make that clear and graphic and understandable, not as something to imitate, but as a warning of what can happen to human beings, then perhaps we have one shield against its recurrence.

HOOVER Sarah, do you see this film as a warning?

BOTSTEIN I do think that the film can be a warning, that human beings are capable of doing horrendous things to each other so bad that while they’re happening they can’t believe it’s happening, that democracies fall quickly, that institutions crumble quickly. And for me, that is the thing to push against. That I still believe, having made this film and worked with Ken for as long as I have, that America is a very special country. It is a great land of opportunity, that we are very privileged to live in a pretty much working democracy, and that we can push against, use the system to make it better.

HOOVER Ken you said in a recent interview, quote, “There’s so much capacity for evil, human nature doesn’t change.” What gives you hope then?

BURNS Well, I think that we are still the nation of immigrants. Right. Even though we are also a nation that does not believe in that. And so for me, it’s about the acceptance of using facts to tell complex stories in which a thing and the opposite of a thing, as Winton Marsalis said to us in Jazz, could be true at the same time, that you could contain with a Franklin Roosevelt someone disposed to help and at times unable and unwilling, perhaps, to help. This is what we like: big, huge, complicated sagas in which nobody is perfect. And at the same time, out of that, in this film, which we haven’t talked about, are all the heroic individuals who sacrifice life and limb to save other human beings. We have turned the number of 6 million into an opaque figure that means nothing, and it is important, as we have tried to do in this film, to personalize and dissolve that opacity by making real the individuals. That’s the important thing about the Holocaust. And at that time, Americans cared or they didn’t care. But the important thing is to remove the opacity from the 6 million and make these people an amputated limb that we still feel. What cures were not discovered because they’re not here. What symphonies weren’t written? What gardens weren’t grown. What children weren’t raised well? That’s the only thing that really, really matters. And so I think I’m optimistic in that these stories all have as broad relief the positive things that we human beings do and still can do and I’ll say again that the time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.

HOOVER The series is US and the Holocaust. It starts this Sunday. Congratulations to you both, and thank you for the contribution.

BOTSTEIN Thank you for having us.