 The release of the Auschwitz report is headline news throughout the country. These news reports explaining to the American people what Auschwitz was and what happened there are followed up by op-eds, by columns about Auschwitz and what America has to do in the wake of all of this information. Fully two-thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II in a systematic, relentless process that continues to exceed our ability to comprehend its origins and consequences. The final solution, which was the Nazi plan to exterminate all European Jews, wasn't implemented until 1942, but Hitler's government had begun openly dehumanizing, harassing and attacking Jews nine years earlier. Even when the Nazi death machine kicked into high gear, America mostly kept its doors closed to Jews, as filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein recount in the U.S. and the Holocaust a three-part documentary series on PBS. The anxieties about urbanization, about unlettered, untutored, relatively uneducated peoples coming in in large numbers, the sense that disease was a problem, all of these worries were amalgamated into a belief that immigrants caused these problems and thus immigration should be held down. Some lobbied to open the country to refugees in the run-up to war, but anti-immigration legislation, the economic devastation of the Depression, incredulity toward a press that had trafficked in false atrocity accounts during World War I, and deep-seated anti-Semitism, especially in Franklin Roosevelt State Department, combined to thwart those efforts. Reason talked with Burns and Novick about why a nation of immigrants remains so deeply ambivalent about newcomers and the lessons that 21st century America should draw from our country's response in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Lynn Novick, Ken Burns, thanks for talking to me. Thank you for having us. So the series begins in the early 30s, and it's actually, you're talking about Otto Frank, who is known to everybody as the father of Anne Frank and kind of the person who brought the diary to notice, but it's in Frankfurt, and Otto Frank is, what you're talking about is his plans, his worded plans to bring his family to America. Why is it so important that you start the series with this question of Otto Frank not being able to bring his family to the United States at the very beginning of the Nazi era? We started out to make a series about the United States and the Holocaust and what was our relationship to what was happening in Europe and what did we as Americans know and what did we do about it just collectively. And while we were working on the film, which has been many years in the making, some documents came to light that showed Otto Frank and Frank's father writing to friends in the United States asking for help to get here. And that was just extraordinary for us to recognize that the story of Anne Frank, we thought, I'll speak for myself, but I think most of us felt this was a story about the Holocaust that happened over there, had nothing to do with America. And here's one of the most recognizable stories of the Holocaust has a lot to do with America. So we decided to frame our film around that idea by telling the story of Otto Frank and his efforts to get to America to help our audience sort of see themselves in this story. And in 1933, it's the Depression. It's about a decade after the Johnson-Reed Act, which was the culmination of 40 years of legislative activism or activism to shut down immigration, particularly from Central and Southern Europe. Why is immigration, you know, what's going on with the way immigration was restricted a decade before during the roaring 20s? How does that factor into what's going on next? So there are two important things about immigration. One is symbolic, like, what kind of country are we? You know, are we the Emma Lazarus? Give us your tired, your poor nation of immigrants? Or are we an almost equal reaction to that? No, let us stop this. So between 1870 and 1920, millions and millions of people come from areas that are threatening to the Protestant majority and they want to figure out a way to go back to an earlier time, always impossible. And when it was a dominant, there was a fear was that these newcomers who were from Central and Southern Europe, Catholic and Eastern Europe, Catholic and Jews, would they be replacing us? And so the Johnson-Reed Act is an attempt to essentially set quotas from the countries, the minuscule quotas from the countries that are less desirable and bigger quotas of people from the Northern European things. Not ironically, but are not emigrating in the numbers where, you know, so Germany gets big quotas, but not that many people are coming and then places like Italy get very low quotas and a lot of people want to move here. That's exactly right. So what we have is a kind of, as the situation in Nazi Germany develops over the course of 30s, you get a terrible, terrible bottleneck, which is you have got a lot of people, particularly Jews, who are trying to leave the ever-expanding German area, Germany and then the Rhineland, then Germany, the Rhineland and Austria and then the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, and we are saying, no, you can't come in. And so you've got all this space to let others in, but you don't have space to let the people who most desperately need to get out. And so just our Johnson-Reed Act is going to contribute significantly to the fact that the United States isn't going to be able to do what I believe they should have done, which is let in 10 times more people than they did, and that would have been an important, important aspect. We could have absorbed them, we could have taken them, but it's also a depression. The demagogues are out there, anti-Semitic demagogues. People say, these people are here to take your jobs. They're already a conspiracy of Jews to control absolutely everything. The New Deal is not the New Deal, it's the Jew Deal. Franklin Roosevelt, who is for some people the enemy because he's anti-Semitic, is in fact called Rosenfeld because it's presumed he's a Jew by the anti-Semites. So you have a very tragic dynamic going on in the United States that is going to ensure that the place that is able to accept so many people is not going to do that and you compound the humanitarian crisis. And it's also the Johnson-Reed Act or the Immigration Act that were passed in the 20s are the culmination of a kind of mental map or a reimagining of American, not just American identity, but human identity. And you guys go over the work of Madison Grant, who's known for writing a book called The Passing of the Great Race, who comes up with this kind of crazy schema of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterranean, which then influences the laws in America that keep people out from undesired countries, but it also influenced Hitler and the Nazis. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I think he's looking at the United States and he's saying, look, you've handled your native problem so well. You've gotten rid of them or you've isolated them into essentially big concentration camps. He hasn't yet devised that system. He thinks the Johnson-Reed Act is terrific because it's favouring his ideal of an Aryan race. This is the absurdity of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian hoax that gets promulgated by Henry Ford. It's the insanity of eugenics, the pseudoscience and the insanity of Madison Grant that there is any kind of distinctions based on race or ethnicity or nationality between people. There's one race, it's the human race, and that's it. Everything else is an attempt by people to other somebody else. And for the United States, it's black people, it's native people, it's immigrants and Jews. And for most of the world, it's some variety of that, Catholics in some cases in the United States earlier, but it's also, Jews have had this experience because they are stateless for millennia. And they are always the groups that have come in and helped organize things in a civilized sense, but they run counter to the tribal sensibilities that people often return to in times of stress or under the influence of authoritarian demagogues. The question of refugees is also interesting, because from the inception, certainly of the Johnson-Reed Act, and there were refugee situations prior to World War II or prior to the 30s when people are looking to get out, particularly of Nazi-dominated parts of Europe, what was the attitude towards refugees, kind of the official attitude towards refugees, and where does that come from? Because it's a subset of questions about whether you're pro or anti-immigration, but we've had a, and we still struggle with this today, a very vexed relationship with the idea of refugees. Well, it was instructed for us to understand the distinction in our foreign policy between immigrants and refugees. So immigrants, we think of are people who are coming to live here, to move here, to resettle here. Refugees would be, in theory, people who were fleeing persecution or imminent peril, and we would take them in for a while, and then they would theoretically be able to go back to where they came from when the conflict was over. That was sort of the general idea. The United States did not have a refugee policy during this period. So there was just this immigration system that Ken was talking about with the quotas from country to country. There was a lot of talk in the press and in politics about refugees and that these people are desperate and they need help, but there was no special exception made in this sort of immigration policy for people who would just come here temporarily. And there was also, as the sort of situation devolved, a growing fear that immigrant slash refugees who came from Germany or from Nazi occupied Europe were a threat that they would undermine our national security. The fifth column. Right. So these are people who you let them in and then they sleeper cells, that kind of idea that we're familiar with. That was very much a fear then. And there were German spies in the U.S. for sure. And we had spies in other places. Spying is part of human conduct. But the idea that Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler would become the most dangerous threat to America. So that we had to essentially keep them out virtually completely. Keep everybody out. In other words, we can't let any of these people in because some of them might be spies. I think we appreciate the fear at the time. But there's also fear mongering. Right. No, and there's a dark, I mean, the Holocaust and certainly a lot of Jewish writing coming out of it is, you know, the darkest humor. But, you know, at the same time, we're worried about Jewish refugees, like Nazi spies coming in on them. There's a growing Bund movement, which is openly pro-Nazi, not even pro-German. This is the absurdity of all of that. And I think that they're historical antecedents because remember so many of the people in the big wave of immigrants were Catholic and Italian and Central and Eastern European. And they're often fleeing persecution or abject poverty and would qualify really in the kind of refugee as well as immigrant status, right? And they're now with regards to the Bolshevik revolution, they're now all communists. So what you have is... So you're fleeing communism, but you can't come to America because you're a communist. Right. And you're fleeing pogroms that have been taking place. But because you are Jewish and because communism is now being equated by the Madison grants and the Henry Ford's as equal, the Jews bringing communism, that they're responsible for the Soviet Union's collapse. You just have this conflating of all of that. And you have the poverty and the worry that people are just here. They're not like us. And that's the biggest distinction. And this is the Schrodinger's immigrant. This is a popular meme that exists today that immigrants are simultaneously coming here and they're just going to live off of us because they're lazy and they take welfare or they're coming here and stealing our jobs. May I tell you that in the middle of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin lamented the arrival in Pennsylvania of the Swarthi Germans. And that he wanted to keep Pennsylvania for the lovely white and red, meaning the people whose land we were already stealing and dispossessing and killing were now being romanticized along with the white race that should be there. And that somehow the Germans, who would later suggest that they were the epitome of the white race, were somehow swarthy and not desirable. He wanted to keep Pennsylvania. He may have been onto something there. History has revealed. So, well, it also brings up one of the antecedents. So, you have this immigration policy and a set of mindsets, plus the economic realities of the depression going on. Also, America's experience in World War I. That's also important and you talk about that as a precursor to all of this. By the early 30s, what were people thinking about World War I and America's relationship to it? And how did that affect how we thought about what was starting to happen in Europe? Well, I think there was a lot of anti-German propaganda during World War I to get people motivated to go over there and fight. And a lot of it was later proven to be untrue, grossly exaggerated talk of atrocities. And so there was that memory that we were lied to by the government, the government office that created this propaganda. So, that sets up a dynamic where people are very suspicious of the government wanting to get us into a war, especially after we've been promised we're not going to get into the war. For the first few years of World War I, Americans weren't told they weren't going to have to worry about it. Wilson won by saying he kept us out of war. Exactly. And then a year later, okay, now we have to get in. So, that's not that long ago when we're talking about the 30s. And there were even hearings, I don't remember exactly, but the late 30s about this war profiteering. So, the sense of corruption and being lied to and the government not being trusted to keep us out of war is very potent by the time. 70 or 80% of the think that World War I is a mistake. And so you've also got a large German population in the United States that's been villainized. You've helped to pass prohibition by making the German brewers the kind of the enemies. Along with the immigrants. The immigrants who want to drink, whereas us abstinious Protestants don't need that. We can give up the bottle. And what we're anxious about are Catholics with their sacrament, blacks with their bottle of booze, and the ballot. And so you're trying to regulate, eugenics is a perfect example of how you can, in a scientific way, justify these kinds of absurd theories. But what it does is it just creates others, people that aren't us, even though we're all us. And it becomes complicated as we move forward because World War II is a radically different war than World War I, right? I mean, there is a strong argument still to say, like, you know, the United States could have, it could have gone in equally on either side. And World War I. Yeah, World War I. And, you know, it really wasn't our fight. I mean, it's a more powerful argument. But that's very much in place. But not that those sentiments aren't there. There's great German sympathy, you know? Henry Ford is going to pass up a contract to make military things for the Brits and instead takes a contract with the Germans. People are interested in not, you know, choosing sides or favoring perhaps what they think is going to be the winner. Because more people are descended from Germans than any other ethnic group, I think still, but certainly at that point in America. Joe Kennedy, who's the ambassador to the Court of St. James, said it best. He says, you know, Britain is doomed, right? He's sure that Britain cannot survive the power of Hitler. So there's really a question of let's be on the right, let's stay out of this, but let's be on the right side if we, you know, at the end. And that makes this very, very complicated for a time. But this is a totally different war. Right. And this is a war based on, you know, they're both after German expansion, but the other one is based on these racial theories of finding the Liebenstrom, the breathing room, so that you have to treat the Slavic people as not people. Right. Stateless people whose territory, like Native Americans, this is not their land. They're just occupying it. There's no sense of a political entity that gives them. These are people that don't really deserve passports. And a passport is that piece of paper that identifies who you are. And so this is the area that we'll take. This will be our big bread basket that weaken the German people, minus the Jewish Germans and Austrians and everybody else. And one, just very quickly, one of the stats that you, it comes up at several points, but in Europe by the end of, by 1945, two thirds of Jews are gone from Europe. They've been murdered. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to add on to what Ken was saying to say that, you know, the, up until we got involved in the war, the country was, there were a lot of people here who admired Hitler. Right. And, you know, not just because the trains ran on time, certainly that the society was portrayed in the press. There's Christian Science Monitor and other mainstream publications saying, this is a very well run place. And yes, they sometimes go a little overboard, you know, with sort of being too violent or oppressive. But basically, you know, this is a good example for us to follow. And we have the Olympics and the kind of big sort of stage managing of that. They're incredibly brilliant with the propaganda. So we look back and we see the evil and the depravity and the barbarity. But at the time, you know, our nation wasn't 100% on board with that until the war kind of progressed. And that's also, I mean, America at the time was kind of a mess, right? I mean, you know, FDR did his bold, persistent experimentation, which kind of worked, kind of didn't. But there was a sense we needed some kind of structure and forward momentum that Hitler, Mussolini before him, and then Hitler was delivering. Like right in the 30s with the depression, you have the sort of collapse of the global economy of a certain order, right? So then is it going to be fascism? Is it going to be communism? Is it going to be democracy? Which of these systems is really going to prevail? And that's an open question in this country. We focus on the mythology of the only thing you have to fear is fear itself, which is if you think about it, not a really logical thing. It's an emotional truth and we get it and it was smart. But the real point of that speech is when he basically says, you know, I will ask Congress for the power to fight this economic emergency as if we were being attacked by a foreign enemy which causes Eleanor to go, whoa, what do you mean? So there's a sense in 1933 as FDR is coming to power that maybe a democracy, or the Western democracies as we understood are ill-equipped to face this economic crisis. And the example of Mussolini and Hitler, kind of brutal authoritarian regimes, are the way to go. And there are people who are urging Franklin Roosevelt to become a dictator and he's understanding that it's going to take bold powers to do something. And somebody said to Roosevelt early on, you're either going to be the best president or the worst president. He said, if I don't succeed, I'll be the last president. Let's dial in a little bit on the lack of trust in media and then a bit in government. But you were talking about the kind of propaganda stories that came out of World War I and then were later kind of debunked like, okay, we're being played here because the government and media is kind of telling a story that may or may not be true. How did that work out in the early 30s? Because there are a number of people who are sounding the alarm early on and this is also before certainly the mass killings began. That's later in the decade or even in the 40s. But how were people consuming media at the time? It's basically three elements. You've got a newspaper, you've got a radio, and you've got newsreels on the weekends when you go to the movies on Saturday or Friday night. Americans are reading newspapers. The argument is that we didn't know. We knew there were 3,000 articles about German treatment of Jews in 1933, the first year. I mean, there's coverage. I would not overplay the suspicion about it. It is there, but I think people trust it. It's hard time to believe and you're also distracted by so many other things. The Depression is the number one story of the 1930s. And so, while you could say, oh boy, that's too bad. When you hear about the train crash in India or the flood in Pakistan or whatever it might be, you're saying, how am I going to get food on the table? Who's going to do this? And if they want to come here, does that take my job? And people are accentuating that. There is alternative media in much the same way there is here. There's Father Coughlin, there's Henry Ford with the Dearborn Independent. Which is the place that actually published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So Henry Ford is a virulent anti-Semite. He believes the Jews are responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He buys the Dearborn Independent that grows to the second largest circulation. And he promotes this Russian hoax, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is just recounting the ancient sense of Jewish domination of everything, banking and whatever. And he prints it as the international Jewish conspiracy and over many, many weeks. And then publishes it a book. It's translated into languages, including German. So it has a kind of effect in the United States that I still think we hear the echoes and the reverberations of it today. In the way you can have the kind of disassociative thinking that comes along with anti-Semitism, that they are conniving and they're smart and they're bad smarts, as the scholar Deborah Lipstadt says. But they're also ugly and they're unattractive and they're mean-spirited. But they're also virile and they're going to take our women. But then they're also a feat and they hire other people to do their work for them. So you have all of these incredibly racist tropes about Jews that just aren't true. And they persist to this day in the sense of people just beginning to see it. You see it everywhere. You see it in the extreme left as well as the extreme right. And this is kind of an absurd question, but how much of the, in the run-up to a kind of American indifference to what was going on in Europe and to the beginning of the Holocaust and then it is that it's, well it was because it's the Jews and they're not that many of them and they really are different than us. Whether we're Catholic or Protestant who hate each other, but sometimes they can be like, well, but we are very different. We're categorically different than Jews. How much of it is just that if this had been happening to people in England or if it had been happening to the Irish, say, would we have responded the same way? That's a really good question. I don't know how to answer that. It is a little bit of a parlor discussion question. What if the South had won the Civil War kind of thing? I don't know. Jews have had a special relationship to humanity for a long time, people without a country until 1948. And so there is a sense of them bringing things that are unifying to connect other countries, a kind of globalist and internationalist thing, a sense of, as the scholar Peter Hayes says, they have brought the notion of fair play and the golden rule. They've brought lots of ideologies that are... They simultaneously bring Christianity but refuse to participate. They kind of have transnational things in them. And so they become a perfect scapegoat when you've got an authoritarian person who wants to scapegoat somebody or to blame the ills or to return to the more simplistic but self-destructive aspects of nationalism, of tribalism, and things like that. So it's hard to say. I think there would probably be more sympathy for the Irish. But the Jews have had this going on for millennia, literally. And I've heard all of this a million times, whether it's Father Coughlin or a thousand years before Father Coughlin, there's a reason why you have to get rid of the Jews now because they're doing something. I think it's hard to really generalize about the American public's response to all of this. And it does tie into the questions of how it was covered in the media. And people could be concerned. Kristallnacht, which was this horrible pogrom that happened out in the open on the streets of Germany, was front-page news. It was an outrage around the world. Roosevelt made a statement, there was a sense of, this is wrong. So it's not indifference, per se. It's more a sense of, well, this is really wrong. But like Ken was saying, it happened over there. It's another catastrophe, another humanitarian problem. We can't do anything. We have our own problems here. So there's just a sense of recognizing it's wrong. I think probably most Americans did. Even anti-Semitic Americans would probably recognize that, you can't just go around beating people up in the street and burning down their houses and taking their stuff for no reason. But it's not really our problem. Or we care, but we have our own problems. We tried the film really to unpack the nuances of this so that it helps, at least for us, to understand all the things we have to deal with today. Because we face the same challenges. The photograph of a Syrian child drowned on a beach is horrible. But what are we going to do? Can you talk about Rabbi Stephen Wise a little bit? He's a figure who comes up and is a central figure in kind of motivating Americans to kind of give a shit about this. Who was he and what were some of his most successful efforts to bring attention to what was going on in Europe? Well, I think that he is the most famous rabbi in the United States by far and apparently male came to him just rabbi in the USA. Yeah, you have that thing where the post office would deliver letters to rabbi. It would be like, oh, it's kind of... It would go to Stephen Wise. And he took on himself and he seemed to carry the burdens, it seems, of the great dilemma, which was for American Jews and Jews in the rest of the world, the dilemma of if you speak out, do you imperil the Jews that are still in Germany? If you don't speak out, are you complicit in what is happening to the Jews in Germany? And so you can see it etched in his face. He does have, because of his renown access to the White House, he's able to speak out. He's brought information about the earliest reports of the beginning of the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the killing centers in Nazi occupied Poland. It is buried by the State Department. It goes to a British member of parliament who gives it to Stephen Wise. He begins to go public with it. He becomes the face, the sort of vanguard of information about how bad it's actually going to be. And it's really hard for anybody to get their minds around it because nobody could actually believe. You can see the sort of... You can understand what happens in a pogrom, you know, of Kristallnacht. It's terrible and it's whatever. But the idea that a state would say, you know what, we've got 11 million problems, let's get rid of all of them and that they're successful with two thirds. I mean, they were successful. They essentially eliminated the Jews of Europe and those that survived got, for the most part, the hell out of there. So Stephen Wise, I think, is a way to understand one aspect of the American Jewish communities, anguish and their desire to try to do something, to figure out what was the best thing. And you have, I mean, Kristallnacht itself is interesting. It's not an American-sponsored moment, but you have a young, stateless, Polish Jew in Paris who kills a minor foreign service person in the German embassy and that's the pretext, right? There's an international conspiracy. See, we told you, they're out to get us, so we're going to get them. And this is when things begin to transit from making their life difficult and trying to get them to leave to beginning to say, maybe we just get rid of them. And this, I mean, is kind of at the heart of the series that, you know, at a certain point, Germany may have been amenable to just getting, letting or forcing Jews to leave, but they're not coming to the United States. They're not allowed in. They had all kinds of plans. That was really fascinating. Different schemes, you know, some of them completely preposterous. Madagascar and different things. We're going to just put people on boats and get them out of here just to deport them to different places. And then you recount, I mean, the famous story of the St. Louis, which is a ship of Jewish refugees that comes to the New World, comes to Cuba and America and has just turned away. Yeah, well, that's a story that has come down with some understanding and some misunderstanding about what was really happening there. There were lots of ships. You know, we did have this quota system and some people got here. So as more than any other sovereign nation, we led in 250,000. A lot of them came on boats. So there were boats coming across the Atlantic before America got involved in the war, you know, here. And they had people had to have visas and they had to have permission. It was really hard to get. So sometimes they would try to get to a different country and then hope to get to America. So the St. Louis was a ship of 900 and something refugees who had gotten visas to go to Cuba. And the idea there was you get to Cuba and then you wait until your number comes up and you come to the United States for most people. But you're safe. But you're safe. You're out of right. You're exactly. So they get to Cuba, but when they get to Cuba, the Cuban government decides, you know what? We don't really want you here and your visas don't count anymore even though you bought them. So now they're sitting there in Havana Harbor and you've got a whole media circus going on. You have relatives coming to the ship. It gets a lot of attention. It kind of symbolizes the whole refugee crisis. And here they're only 90 miles from them in the United States. So, you know, why don't they just come here? Well, they don't have visas to come here. There's a quota system. There's all this. You tell a heartbreaking story. It's hard to even put these in terms of a guy who saw the lights of Miami on the ship. And then ends up in the United States. And those points, I don't want to make too much art out of this story because that seems wrong, but the series is filled with those kinds of moments that are, you know, are just revelatory. You know, arguments don't work. You don't change anybody's mind. Stories, you do. Stories, you have a thing. And if you've got a little boy asking his dad what the lights are there in Miami and now as an American Jew, having survived all of this in great dramatic fashion, by the way, to have spent time in Miami and know what that's about is really important. What's missed in the St. Louis is what Lynn is saying. First of all, there's no way that it can stop in the United States because of this Johnson-Reed, this pernicious Johnson-Reed act. And, you know, FDR is not a king. He can't wave a magic wand. It's Congress that would have to change it. And they are in no mind to do it. The interesting thing, though, is that the St. Louis sails back across, heading to Germany. Its own German captain is thinking of running at a ground in a free country. And more importantly, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee comes up with the money necessary to essentially buy their entry into five nations, you know, Britain, France, Belgium. So those people go there. What's unfortunate and tragic is about a quarter of them are then killed when the Germans subsequently overrun their country of sanctuary. But it's an instructive story of how much these tropes of the Holocaust and the tropes of the Second World War get misunderstood. We presume that there is, therefore, an essential anti-Semitism inherent in FDR, who appoints more Jews than anyone else, that he doesn't help in this regard, but he's doing many other things. He's not... He's a cold and calculating politician at times, and that looks kind of... doesn't look so good in retrospect, but that there are other sort of mitigating factors. That's what's so interesting about it, is that you can take something in which people have a kind of superficial understanding of it and more often than not, huge parts of that are misunderstanding and complicate the story with what really actually happened. But let's complicate the story about the government too, because the State Department is absolutely... I don't... Is it ideological anti-Semitism, or... But there are people in the State Department... That's the correct way to say it. There are people in the State Department who are virulent anti-Semitism. Yeah, and talk a little bit about that, because that's part of the reckoning, right? That needs to be done if we're going to take American history seriously. Well, I mean, part of it is the culture of the State Department and the culture of official Washington and where it came from and who gets those jobs and sort of the power of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, we want to call it that, to run these institutions. And Roosevelt comes in and starts to shift things around, but still the State Department, as we say, is hidebound. It's sort of this old-fashioned kind of gentlemanly, courtly environment of diplomacy and all this kind of stuff. And the people running it are not focused on the refugee crisis. They're focused on international relations and not alienating the German government, for example, before America gets involved in the war. So it's from the top down. There's not a sense that someone, Cordell Hull running the State Department is saying, hey, job one is let's relax the rules to get as many refugees here, far from it. And then you have Breckenridge Long as the visa department, which is the part of the State Department that actually in the consulates around the world, you go in to apply, and they're the ones, the guy sitting in front of you at the desk is going to say yes or no. Do you have all the paperwork? Have you got everything in order? No. Do they have to follow the letter of the law to every single I dotted and T crossed? I mean... And he was yes, and he'd misrepresent it. He's the black hole where information about the impending Holocaust goes to die, where information about individuals happen of a bureaucracy that then begins to change the rules. Many of the German and Austrian Jews have connections to the Western democracy and to the United States, and they have means, and they are fulfilling this obligations that you not become a ward of the state that you've got recommendations that there's amount of money and Breckenridge Long and those of his ilk in the State Department are constantly changing the bar. So you will find somebody who's gotten all their stuff together, and then all of a sudden there's a new rule, and you kind of almost have to press reset and do that, and this is where the United States is incredibly... has to come to terms with it. And we didn't fill the quotas that we had even. This is the amazing thing. So we take in 225,000 human beings more than any other sovereign nation, but we got so much space. It would be in sports salary cap. We have so much space that we could have brought in at least five times that number. Following the rules that we had, had it not been for the kind of perfidy of the State Department, individuals in the State Department, and it's going to take a Treasury Department starting the War Refugee Board run by Henry Morgenthau, who is Jewish, and a friend of Roosevelt's to be able to do it, and even then, State Department kills that for months and months and months, and finally it happens and it becomes the most effective organization in saving Jewish lives in the story of the Holocaust. But finally it takes us so long and so late to get started that you've already lost more than three-quarters, probably more than 80% of the people who are going to be murdered in the Holocaust have already been murdered by the time the War Refugee Board gets started. One of the historians that's in the documentary fair around Peter Hayes talks about how the speed with which, the time when people were being killed is immensely compressed. It is. 18 months or 20 months or something like that. That's so shocking in a way. It's how easy it was for them to actually do this. How did people respond, or how did the American government and the American people respond once it became clear? The Vonsi Conference where the final solution is kind of promulgated is in the beginning of 1942. By the end of that year, people are taking it seriously. Or more so, what happened to get people to kind of say like, okay, forget the World War I propaganda. These stories which sound kind of similar, this is happening on a much greater scale. How did that perception flip? Yeah, that was what Ken was talking about, Stephen Wise, and there was the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland was collecting data or evidence from people who came out of the Polish Underground to describe what was happening. Remember, this is happening largely pretty far away from the Western world, right? Yeah, I think Hayes also talks about how a lot of where this was happening was not reachable by Allied forces. Yeah, but there's even more thing that Hayes brings up that's really important to understand to help set this in motion is that Hitler wants to get rid of the Jews. He wants them out of there. And in more than half of German Jews, 560,000, more than half of Austrian Jews, 190,000 do get out, right? But as he keeps assuming territory, he's got a huge problem which is as he's getting his breathing room in Poland, 3.3 million Jews and Lithuania and Latvia and Belarus and Ukraine and the Soviet Union, it's just astronomical numbers and then you realize we're not going to take over Britain right away. We can't take their navy and ship them all to Madagascar where we can starve all the Jews to death. Insane plan, right? We're just going to murder them. And so what happens is and what was a revelation for me was the Shoah by bullets in which there are 2 million Jews that are just shot in the head and put in pits all over Poland, Nazi occupied Poland and Ukraine and all of these places. And it's just, it's before anybody has mentioned the word gas. And so I think that when you say holocaust, you think 6 million, it's very opaque. You can't particularize as the writer Daniel Mendelssohn says in our film what that means, but he takes his own family, his great-uncle and great-aunt and their four daughters and finds out what happens to them. He spends a great deal of his professional life delving into what happened, going to Soviet records and things like that and only one of them, the mother is killed by gas. Everybody else is killed in another way, mostly in atrocities that are almost unspeakable when you think about these four teenage girls. So it's an amazing context to understand that the holocaust is really, we just don't have time to get them out of here. We can just kill them. And let's figure out the most efficient way to do that. And for the American story, all of that's happening before we have boots on the ground. Right. So essentially, what we could have done was to help people get out before all this happened. Right. Once it started happening, we the United States was not in a position militarily if we wanted to, not to say that we did, but even if we had wanted to, we're nowhere near these places. Our planes can't get there. We're not, we don't have, we're in North Africa when this is happening. So it's just, we have to line up all the information to kind of, if we want to critique our policy and our government's interaction, it's not about that. By the time that happened, it was out of it. And you could say, you can debate whether you should bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, whether the rail lines could be replaced overnight or do you want to make a mistake or imprecise bombing would have probably killed prisoners and did when we missed a plant five miles away, 80% of bombs dropped in Europe fell outside five miles from their intended target. Five miles. So five miles, 80% of all bombs, okay, let it go, is outside of the target for all the obvious reasons, imprecise calculations, but also fear and let's drop it and get out of here. Let's go home. Pilot crews were dying and the American public would probably not stand for the idea that you were diverting resources from winning the war to going to do what? Bomb the rail line to Auschwitz. But the most important thing is the War Refugee Board. That in the last places where the remaining Jews are that you can do something about in Hungary and Romania, that's where they have their thing. And so Raoul Wallenberg the celebrated Swedish diplomat feels that he's funded by the War Refugee Board and he feels that he's part of an American program as do others in the community, the international community in Romania and Hungary, particularly Hungary. And so it's a pretty interesting thing that the tens of thousands of lives that Wallenberg, we credit Wallenberg with saving and others, really important diplomats from other countries, Switzerland, notably, are basically being underwritten by the War Refugee Board which is an attempt to step outside the guidelines of the United States and flood the zone with money for forgeries and for bribes and for things like that. It's one of the few places where you can find the various committees like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the YMCA and the American Friends Service and the individuals who just pack up their lives and go to save other human beings. That's the points of light that exist in this story in the midst of what we consider the darkest moment in humanity's history. After the war is won and there's one of the final episodes or the final episode, you quote Eisenhower as saying like Eisenhower tours a couple of the death camps and he says to, you know, broadly to soldiers or saying something and I'm paraphrasing a bit, like you may not know what you were fighting for but you now know what you were fighting against. A soldier, a GI giggles nervously at the horror that they're looking at. What was Eisenhower, what does that mean so you might not know what you were fighting for? He said, we hear that the GI doesn't know what he's fighting for. At least now, maybe perhaps, you know what you're fighting against. He's talking about the Willie and Joe from Bill Malvin. The guys who were in the trench and you're just there for your buddies and you know that everything is foobar and snap food away and that the bureaucracy of the army is about as big as you can get but there's now, he's suggesting and Eisenhower is incredibly great on all of this and his writings, the formal writings, not just the anecdotal stuff are amazing. He insists that a congressional allegation comes. He insists that newspaper editors come and look for themselves. He insists the commanders send their troops in their off times to these camps and look and see and it has a profound effect on many, many Americans who visit there and begin to understand what it was about and it's to Eisenhower's credit I think that he sees. Absolutely. One of the things we found working on a film on the Second World War and now this project was what was told to the American public about what we were fighting for, the four freedoms. It was pretty abstract really. Nazism, fascism but I think when the camps were liberated it was kind of flipping to say, oh, that's what this means. It's not an abstraction. These people have been brutalizing, killed and tortured and we're fighting to stop this from happening. I think both in this and certainly in your series on World War II what's powerful about it is that it pulls back some of the gauze that has crept in with the whole Greatest Generation rhetoric where everything, everybody was united. We had a draft. First of all, we call that war the good war. Right. Give me a break. It's the worst war ever. We name our first chapter of that film a necessary war and that may be a better described by one of our pilots might be a better way of describing. Sometimes this is what human beings do and sometimes this is unavoidable. But once you have the evidence I think it's important to say that really galvanizes a lot of sense of purpose and it helps to set in motion I think some of the mythology and the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia and the Greatest Generation that has encrusted it. But let's also remember that the Americans seeing the newsreels of all of that, the proof now, the ovens and the concentration clients, the crematoria, all of that stuff, 5% of Americans want to add more refugees to the United States after it's over. There is a moment where you show a newsreel and they're showing, they're opening up ovens that still have bodies in them or corpses and the narrator says don't turn away. Don't look away. Look. Yeah. And I have to say I've been watching this stuff for decades because this is what you do if you're interested in history and the last 70 years and I was stunned by it because I was like, no, I want to look away. Yeah. What goes into, or what do you do with the fact that faced with this with the documentary evidence of this mass murder, unthinkable, that it really didn't move the needle in terms of like people saying like, oh yeah, let's, you know, we got lots of space here. Right. Let's bring some more people in. So it always seems possible that there's always something that trumps the larger humanitarian concerns. The better angels of our nature. Abraham Lincoln would say it's always maybe the economy's stupid, right? The war is going to end. We know that the spending is going to stop. We may be slipping back into depression. There's going to be lots of unemployment now. All true. And maybe we don't want to do that. But I think at the end you have to ask a much deeper question about who are we, what kind of people. I'd like to know a lot about those 5%, you know, that understood, you know, to me their moments more recently, and it always makes me cry, which is in Billings in 1993 in Billings, Montana, some idiot through a rock through the front window of a family that had displayed a menorah. And the Billings newspaper, I don't know what it's called, printed a full page picture of a menorah. I can't imagine there were more than five you could buy in downtown Billings. And people, Christians, put up thousands of menorahs in their windows. And that is that 5%. And we're interested in both understanding that those people exist, the Varian Fry, a writer in New York who goes and works with a vice council in southern France, Hiram Bingham III, to rescue Jews, you know, famous ones, Max O'Fall, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, but also so-called ordinary people. And that there are all these committees and people working anonymously. But there is a huge part of us not sensitive to the plight that have bought into in some way, shape, or form some degree of the sense of an other. And that we're not all part, there's only, you know, Madison Grant is wrong. There's only one race, the human race. And that's the only distinction we have between, that's it, just human beings. And there are people like Eleanor Roosevelt or famous Frida Kirchway from The Nation magazine, others who get it and understand what this is about and others that don't. And it may just be as simple as I'm worried about my job and that's why I'm not. Or it may be the fact that those elements of anti-Semitism, of racism, of nativism, of xenophobia have been here and will always be here and will manifest itself in some portion of the population. I think there's, I agree with everything Ken said. I think there's one other piece that I think about and it ties into this looking away is that it's a paradox, right? That we've seen millions of people dehumanized and treated as less than human and exterminated, killed and tortured and just everything. And then when you see the pictures it can double down on the dehumanizing. And so it can evoke sympathy but it can also evoke revulsion and horror. And it's a very complicated thing that's going on here. So on the one hand it's horrendous and we are, it's a tragedy and we feel sad. And on the other hand, do we really want the people that we've just seen staggering around, skeletal and brutalized to come here? And so it's very complicated not to mention the layers of anti-Semitism and other thing that's already happened that allowed this to happen in harmony and all the places that Hitler conquered. That toothpaste is out of the tube and getting it back is really a long process. And so that's the work we're trying to do as a nation, right? Is reckoning with all the things kind of saying and to kind of give people, restore people's humanity when it has, the whole point was to take it away from them and then the other pieces, the Cold War. So we did let in a lot of refugees after this, right? And the switch flips really quick and all of a sudden, Germany's not the enemy. The communists are the enemy. And we let in a lot of refugees from Latvia, Lithuania who were displaced people. So it's not like we won't let in any refugees. We let in quite a lot but not the Jewish refugees. And Truman has to intervene to get in maybe 50, 60,000 Jewish refugees after the war. So there's just, there are a lot of layers to this and we're still trying to figure out exactly what's going on. I think that's a hugely important point about the dehumanization means that the same opacity that we relate to the notion of 6 million which is an impossible thing, those bodies also become, those emaciated figures become kind of something that you can't deal with. And what's important, what engages the human heart and human sympathy and human action is a sense that they live a life as real as mine. That they care about their existence the way you and I care about our existence. And that is a step that is still to be taken by a majority of human beings in this world. And that's I think why we have literature, that's why we have art, why we have the ideals that we have and we have not lived up to them but that has to be what you want to aim for. There ought to be coming out of this a sense that as messy and as kind of screwing up as they are democracies are the way to go. Authoritarian governments kill more of their own people by far, by exponential magnitudes than do democracies and that freedom to vote and citizenship are a very meaningful thing because in fact at the heart of this the heart of the dehumanization is taking people who were human beings and saying they first were not citizens and therefore not entitled to any protections of any state and therefore we are now free. Yeah, one of the things that is amazing in the opening scene when you're talking about Otto Frank his family had been in Frankfurt since the 17th century or 16th century. Yeah, which is kind of amazing to think of. Well, there's generations of Germans who are Jewish who think of themselves as German first. Sure. And they're not practicing Judaism in a very serious way and their identity is as Germans. But unfortunately this story shows they don't get to choose. That's right. So to pull it back to the immigration question it seems like after World War II among other things fighting in World War II kind of granted equal status for many immigrant groups. So my grandparents were Italian and Irish. They were fully American after World War II because they sent sons to fight. And people like John F. Kennedy in the late 50s published a book called Nation of Immigrants. This was the narrative that I grew up with. I think we all did that somewhere and it served a Cold War purpose but it was also describing basic reality. We are a nation of immigrants. Everybody comes here and that makes America stronger. That narrative does not seem to hold anymore. We don't talk about immigration or I guess there's paradoxes going on. Ronald Reagan in the late 80s passed or signed off on legislation that immediately created hundreds of thousands of legal citizens mostly of Mexican descent who had been illegal. That's good. He was very pro-immigrant. The percentage of the foreign born population continues to grow. 1970 was the low point in terms of the census. So there are more foreign born people here. There is more anxiety about immigration in the 90s. The California Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives voted on Prop 187 to ban aid to illegal immigration. It was widely seen and I think properly understood as anxiety over immigrants. The dusky duskification of California. Donald Trump rose to prominence by talking about ending immigration, legal and illegal. At the same time, Gallup finds historic highs of people saying immigration is good for the country even as first Trump and even Biden now have reduced immigration. How do we deal with this and how does this tie into the larger themes of your series? It's a really important question and one thing that I've been thinking about which is not just an American story which is the ideology that Hitler took to the worst horrible conclusion to demonize a certain group of people Jewish people and other people too but that ideology is still with us and different groups can get slotted in and there's been this sort of the far right or the neo-Nazi or the alt-right, whatever words you want to use basically have kind of substituted immigrants for Jews in different ways. That's a powerful thing and that's happening in Europe, we see it all over Europe. Fear of immigrants and demonization and scapegoating. Sadly they don't have Jews to blame anymore but now they can say it's... Can I just go back and take a little longer view because it's the central question of our conversation which is the Johnson-Reed Act did not address immigrants from the Americas. It was presumed that the people in the Americas, mostly Mexicans and Central Americans would cross the American border for agricultural purposes and go back. What was interesting is that the corrective to the Johnson-Reed Act in 1965 suddenly placed limitations on those from the Americas while it was liberating the Johnson-Reed Act of its pernicious quotas and LBJ called it we were writing a cruel and enduring wrong. Now it did not say anything about refugees and it put on the problems I think it put on the Mexican and Central American and the American stuff that I think set the seeds for what's going on now. I don't think we would have all of these problems or perceptions had we just understood our relationship to the Americas. It's a kind of different kind of Monroe doctrine that got kind of obliterated as we began to be concerned once again with an othering. You said Dusky that brown people suddenly didn't seem to be as American as anybody else. It's very complicated and I oversimplified it a lot coming for the reasons of the brutality of dictatorships there and the poverty and the gang violence and we wish to come into the American system where they would enjoy much more freedom and privileges and support. So a lot of the fears are understandable. The problem is always in the othering. We don't see this as humanitarian issue we see it as a political issue. We see this as them not us. Humanitarian issues become all of our responsibility and that's where I go back to that post-war 5% wanted to let more refugees. You sort of have to begin with that 5% and I don't know how you build a majority but it's absolutely necessary for us to advance in a humanitarian fashion. Don't we also see that it's incredibly potent politically people have made careers on this. So it's striking into something that's very deep and whichever the group is that's being demonized and other people are gaining power by doing that. So that there's a dynamic a very long standing dynamic that we saw going back to Benjamin Franklin to now. So the laws and the policies shift but that process the lowest common denominator that path of least resistance is to demonize the other. When you listen to Father Coughlin doesn't sound too different than what you hear on some radio programs or some TV shows the virulent anti-Semitism in his case is replaced by an anti-immigrant Mexican in another place or whatever it might be or in fact rising anti-Semitism again. The ADL reports that the level of anti-Semitic incidents is at the same level it was in the 1930s. We're going to leave it there. Ken Burns, Len Novick, thanks for talking to reason about the US and the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you.