Mo News Premium: A Conversation With Ken Burns On America And The Holocaust

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Hi everyone,

This month marks 77 years since the end of WWII. Decades after the Holocaust, we continue to learn new details about the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and other victims by the Nazis. What led to it, what more could the world have done to stop it, and how can we prevent another similar tragedy?

In this premium edition of Mo News, we spoke to documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his co-director Sarah Botstein, who have produced some of the most highly-acclaimed historical documentaries.

We discuss their newest, three-part documentary, "The U.S. and the Holocaust" - which casts a critical light and looks at lessons from America’s actions (and non-actions) in the lead up and in response to one of history's greatest horrors.

Key quote from Burns: "If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. And if you're just painting this pollyannish, rose-tinted version of yourself, you're destined for second or third rate status."

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

• ⚠️ Caution… Rate Hikes Ahead: The Federal Reserve is expected to fire off another three-quarter point rate hike today – the third similar increase a row – as inflation shows no signs of slowing. ~ CNBCSome economists fear the hike could be even higher – possibly a full-percentage-point – in an effort to combat the worse-than-expected August inflation report. ~ BloombergFlashback: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell bluntly warned in a speech last month that the Fed’s drive to curb inflation by aggressively raising interest rates would “bring some pain.”But what could be even more telling into the state of the economy will be the Fed’s projections for the coming months. Along with its rate hike decision, the Fed will also release new forecasts on inflation, the economy, and the future path for interest rates.The projections will help give us an idea of just how high the Central Bank could continue to hike interest rates – and thus, how much worse they think inflation could get.Here is what the increase means for your money. ~CBS News

• 🚨 Shattering records: Brand new data from Customs and Border Protection revealed just how serious the crisis at the U.S. southern border is. ~ CBP2.1+ million migrants were taken into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this fiscal year. That’s the most in history.It was largely driven by an increase in asylum seekers from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.12 individuals on the FBI's terrorist watch list were arrested at the southern border in August.That brings the total number of suspected terrorists arrested at the border so far this fiscal year to 78. That’s triple the amount of the previous five years combined.Suspected terrorists arrested at the southern border, per CBP:FY17: 2FY18: 6FY19: 0FY20: 3FY21: 15Total = 26FY22 so far = 78Cocaine seizures increased 193%Fentanyl seizures increased 6%

• 🇺🇳🌏 Day 2 of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the largest annual gathering of world leaders, kicked off in New York City this week ~ New York TimesPresident Biden is slated to speak today at 10:30 am ET. He's expected to discuss the war in Ukraine and imminent threats from Iran and China.About 157 heads of state and representatives of governments plan to deliver speeches from Tuesday through Sunday. Here’s the speaking schedule.Some highlights from Day 1:In his opening remarks Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres emphasized that the world is in peril, driven by deepening geopolitical divides. "We cannot go on like this," Mr. Guterres said. "We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction."Officials from around the world, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, worked to find solutions to global food security.Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro was the first head of state to speak. He spent much of his time summarizing his accomplishments, ahead of Brazil’s election.

Now, to our interview with esteemed filmmaker Ken Burns and his co-director and producer, Sarah Botstein.

We take a microscope to what WWII-era Americans, including politicians, journalists, and citizens, did know about the atrocities of the Holocaust happening under Hitler's rule in Germany... and ultimately, how it shaped American history.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The full conversation about the film is available via the Mo News Podcast. Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

MOSH: Ken and Sarah, I've always been fascinated by the subject because of my own family history. My maternal grandfather was born in Breslau, Germany. His father and him initially were able to get to Palestine in 1935 and then eventually the U.S. in 1939, just before the war. I went to the Ellis Island website as I was preparing for this and I found the manifest of him and his father arriving at Ellis Island in January of 1939.

It was eerie watching the documentary, as you talked about the "St. Louis" story (a ship with hundreds of Jews that was turned away from the US in 1939). I think I took for granted how lucky they were, to be able to make it in. About 20,000 or so German Jews were let into the US that year, but there were 10 times that number on a wait list. Many would go onto be murdered in the Holocaust.

KEN BURNS: That's the story we're telling. The story of the St. Louis is one that's turned away from Cuba. They were headed there and anti-semitism in Cuba made it It made it impossible for them to enter, except for a handful. Then to the United States--which couldn't let them in because of the Johnson-Reed--I want to say 'Immigration Act.' But it really was an 'anti-Immigration Act' passed in 1924. The law had set such minuscule quotas and such strict requirements, that everybody aboard the St. Louis would have had to put their name in to apply to the United States many years before. And there is a dramatic scene of them going up and down the US coast and then having to return to Europe. That's part of the really complicated story that we tell.

Americans like to divorce themselves from any rights and responsibility--and they don't have any responsibility. But when we could have let in people in the years leading up to what we now call the Holocaust--and we did let in more than any other sovereign nation (about 225,000)--but we could have easily let in five times as many (with existing laws), and we did not. And it's not just on the administration and the executive. It's on the legislative branch. And, more importantly, it is on the American people who were overwhelmingly opposed to letting anyone in and overwhelmingly anti-semitic in the character of their objections. The idea that Americans didn't know anything about what was happening in Germany we prove is materially false. There were 3,000 media articles done in 1933 alone, detailing the beginning of the repressive nature of the Nazi regime. That's the year that Adolf Hitler came to power.

MOSH: I feel like growing up in America, we always got this impression that we didn't really know what was happening over there. And you guys make a point very early on in the first part of the documentary of stating that statistic--that 3,000 articles were written in the first 100 days of Hitler's regime in 1933. Where did this impression we didn't know what was really happening develop? Is it something we told ourselves to make our selves feel better?

SARAH BOTSTEIN: Thank you for asking that question. I think that's a central myth that we hope to puncture and explain in the series. In 1933 alone, there were thousands of articles in newspapers all over the country. So this notion that Americans didn't understand the horrific conditions that were beginning, and then throughout the 1930s, first on German Jews, and then German-Austrian Jews, and then European Jewry, at large, is a myth.

We're not responsible for the Holocaust AND we were the great military might that helped win the Second World War and defeat fascism. Both of those things are extremely important to say upfront.

But we also have a deeply complicated history of anti-semitism here at home, of an anti immigration, anti refugee sentiment and a tension here about what to do when a country on the other side of the ocean is in crisis, or a people are in crisis. I think those are complicated tensions in American history.

KB: We tend to sanitize these things anyway, I think after the fact, which is when we write our history. It becomes the second world war becomes the good war, right? It's the worst war ever, ever, ever.

MOSH: We like to see our history in black and white. Good guys and bad guys. And it turns out, there's many shades of gray.

I was struck during a visit I made to Berlin several years ago. They have these small plaques in the sidewalk. They call them stumbling stones, or stumbling blocks. There's tens of thousands of these plaques in the ground. And if you're in central Berlin, you might look down across the street and see the name of a Jew or someone else killed in the Holocaust. And they make a point of using the word 'murdered.'

And they have a museum and Memorial to the "Murdered Jews of Europe" in a central location there. And it just so interesting that Germany takes this very unique approach to the sins of their past. How does it compare to the way that Americans like to tell our history?

KB: We think we're the greatest country on Earth and that we're the most exceptional country. In many cases, there's some really good arguments why that is so. You would think, therefore, we would be toughest on ourselves. That we would be disciplined the way an exceptional athlete would be.

It is so interesting that the perpetrators of arguably the greatest humanitarian crime in history have done a much better job at self reflection and self understanding.

We don't do that. We just presume the best. Even now, there's a movement afoot to limit, even further, what stories we tell about ourselves. And you can't tell an inaccurate story without leading yourself down the road toward a kind of an authoritarian, you know, like pravda story. Like, 'here's our glorious American past!' It is, but it also isn't.

SB: Isn't the point of critical thinking to look back at our failings and figure out ways to make the world better. I'm so fascinated that we are now in a culture where we want to do the opposite. It is deeply undemocratic, not going to help us move forward in the future, and not going to combat these notions of kind of authoritarian, one-note notions of how your history is taught.

MOSH: I love this comparison to athletes. The best athletes are the ones that watch the game tape afterwards. Even if they performed incredibly well, they ask, 'why didn’t I get that one rebound?'

KB: Or coaches, right? I mean, suddenly, you're gonna say we can't teach about slavery, because that makes people uncomfortable. But, at the same time, you were terrible today in baseball, or football or basketball...and here's what you did wrong on the field.

If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. And if you're just painting this pollyannish, rose-tinted version of yourself, you're destined for second or third rate status.

MOSH: You set the table (in the documentary) of what America looked like in the 1920s and 30s. There was an obsession with eugenics, business leaders and celebrities with overt, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment, the immigration limitations, the first visas, right-wing/isolationist media outlets...

Especially coming off of what was several decades of mass immigration into the US in the late 19th century and early 20th century. What happened to America in the 1920s and 30s?

SB: Well, I think one of the reasons we found ourselves in the situation we were in, in the 20s, and 30s, is because of those big waves of immigration. I think what happened is that Americans were beginning to confront and deal with these large waves of immigrants, people who didn't look and sound like themselves, who had different cultures, who had different ways of thinking and different ways of living. People, particularly American and I think around the world, we like to rank ourselves. One immigrant group does well and they put another immigrant group down. Somebody looks different than you and you kind of "other them."

We have this very, deeply upsetting way of wanting to have some kind of racial purity--which is why eugenics was so popular during this time. There was this weirdly utopian notion that you could breed people the way you breed animals. And this is totally against the kind of great teachings of how humans should treat one another, and what it means to be a human being.

So Americans were reacting in the 20s and 30s to all kinds of new people, all kinds of new technologies, all kinds of new ways of living. And there was a deeply resistant population saying 'no, we want a different type of America.' The Ku Klux Klan was ascendant in the 1920s. And they were as anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, as they were anti-Black and anti-Jewish. So we really have to confront this deeply central part of American life, which is to be xenophobic, white-supremacist, nativist, anti-semitic and racist. And that's real. And that's part of our history. And it was very, very, very popular in the 20s and 30s. Charles Lindbergh is as popular as the President of the United States at the time, (one of the) American icons who are championing the notion of an isolationist, "America First" and deeply anti-semitic country.

KB: The great fear (then) among the white Protestants, who were the majority, were that they were going to be replaced. That is echoed, of course, in the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, in 2017. So you have these historical 'echoes' or 'rhymes,' as Mark Twain might say, that are pretty disturbing. And, they occur everywhere, not just in the United States. There's currently an increase in sort of the attraction and the flirtation with authoritarianism, at home and abroad.

MOSH: I find the Henry Ford story to be fascinating. He's blaming Jews for everything from changing his favorite candy bar to killing Abraham Lincoln. He controlled a major newspaper. Give me a sense...of how prominent Henry Ford was, his worldview and his impact in the 1930s?

KB: It is just huge. He's the most celebrated industrialist, certainly car manufacturer--essentially taking mass production and putting it on the grandest possible scale. I mean, River Rouge, the Dearborn Michigan plant was a spectacular achievement. He bought a newspaper called 'The Dearborn Independent,' and he turned it into a newspaper with a second-largest circulation in the United States. And he took that Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a completely virulently anti-semitic track which you can go online and find is still the bible of the anti Semites, and he just gave it another oomph. The Russian disinformation of the 19th century had done that, (saying) Jews were responsible for everything bad in the world. And so you know, this was Henry Ford taking the baton in the relay race of anti-semitism, and handing it on.

If you were to step back and think about the contribution of the Jewish people who did not have a state for thousands of years, until 1948, and what they were able to bring (to society). How they brought the notion of fair play and democracy, and the golden rule, the idea of broad, humane ideas to the world. And so it's no accident that when those who wish to stay in power, or take power in various places, always isolate the Jews and say, 'It's about us. Our tribe, not theirs. (Jews) are the bad ones.'

That is even though they have brought us great gifts, all the way through. And this is not even speaking about contributions in arts and sciences and architecture and film. Jews have brought to us these great gifts--something more than a tribal relationship to who I am. Not a nationalist, not a nativist, not a just 'our tribe,' but the fact that we are part of this larger humanity.

MOSH: I was struck by the way that you document FDR, and the challenge that he had dealing with where the country was at. He takes office in 1933. He had a pretty good gauge for where the country was at in terms of isolationism, its anti-immigrant sentiment and rampant anti-Semitism. Talk to me about how FDR had to tiptoe in throughout the 1930s and then, even as World War 2 starts, in regards to the Jews and the Holocaust.

KB: It's a very complex and very nuanced thing. It is easy to sort of blame it on FDR. 'He's the head of America. Why can't he do these things?!' It's so interesting, because he appointed more Jews to his administration than any other previous president.

You're defined in some ways by your enemies. The virulent anti-semites in America called him, Franklin D Rosenfeld, they insisted that he was under the power of the Jews and called his signature domestic program to lift us out of the depression "The Jew Deal." So Roosevelt has got a really complicated thing.

Did he do enough? No. Could he have spoken louder? Yes. But, he is dealing with a basically isolationist and deeply anti-semitic country. He knows that the Congress, which has passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, is filled with members of his own party -- conservative, southern committee chairman. They have been in place for years and years. He's not going to be able to change these things. He has to understand that there's a bigger picture, if you can imagine.

And it looks to us, in retrospect, incredibly heartless. But, we have to put his lack of what we want him to have done in the context of what he could have gotten done, how much political capital he had, and where he was going to spend it. And, so we certainly hold his feet to the fire at very appropriate places. He sounds cold and heartless. He looks cold and heartless. But there are other times when you realize, 'oh, my goodness, if we had not had him, where would we be as a country?'

And I think in the end, having brought in more refugees, not enough, but having helped create the War Refugee Board, was a small little drop in the bucket. But he has to also prepare a country, which at the time had an army the size of Bulgaria, for war. We can't believe why the humanitarian thing wasn't central to him. And, it may have been in his heart. But, he was trying to revoke the Neutrality Acts, that kept us from helping our allies. Had he not been able to do that...who knows? We may be speaking German in this country. He is the most masterful politician of the 20th century.

But more importantly, having transformed American manufacturing, which is probably the single greatest factor in winning the war, having been allied with the Soviets, who had more human sacrifice than anybody else, and having in America and other allies sacrifice on the western part of the European theater of war. That's what stopped the remaining 3 million Jews out of the 9 million that were initially there, when Hitler took power, from being killed as well. (6 million were killed)

MOSH: You bring up multiple polls of Americans throughout the 1930s and 40s. And the numbers struck me. Even following Kristallnacht in 1938, two-thirds of Americans polled say the Jews brought the attacks upon themselves. There is a Fortune Magazine poll that you mention the documentary, that even in 1939, 54 percent of Americans want to help both the Nazis and the allies. Only 20 percent of Americans want to only help the democracies there. This is the country that FDR was governing.

FDR couldn't even, as the war was taking place and the country knew what was actually going on, couldn't make it about ‘let's save the Jews.’

KB: We're saving democracy. We're not saving Jews. We're saving freedom. We're not saving Jews. Nobody's saying that out loud. But, by shifting it to Jews, it could have, even within the war effort, ignited a firestorm of controversy. And there was a worry about morale of the troops, if you were being sent (to help Jews).

One of the riskiest things was to be a member of a bomber crew. And if you knew you were going, not to bomb a factory, not to bomb a munitions thing, but you were going to what bombed the rail lines at Auschwitz? (By the way) that was the only option we had. It was closest to our airbase.

(Also) 80 percent of the bombs dropped in Europe by Allied forces fell outside of five miles of their intended target. So you're going to land on a railroad track? And even then, it could be replaced. Or, do you bomb Auschwitz itself? And what kind of moral questions does that raise?

MOSH: You debate it in the documentary and you don't come to a clean conclusion on it. This has been a mantra for many, many years. Why didn't we bomb concentration camps? Why didn't we stop what was going on? Take me through that debate at the White House. How much of a debate took place about bombing those concentration camps?

KB: It was impracticable. That was the recommendation. First of all, three quarters or more -- 80% of those people who are perishing in the Holocaust have already been murdered before we had an airbase in Italy that would have allowed a plane to go to Auschwitz and back on a single tank of gas. Auschwitz being in southwestern Poland. And then, what do you do when you get there? If you can't bomb the railroad tracks--that can be replaced overnight? Do you bomb the camps?

By this time, the Germans are going to lose the war and they know it. So we're just, we're waiting. It's really the calculus. Or the Russians are going to come in from the east and liberate it, which they actually do Auschwitz. Do you do it instead? And so we permit this debate, because that's one of the tropes and one of the sort of conventional superficial conventional wisdoms about the war.

First of all, if we could hit them, which is probably completely unlikely, they could be replaced overnight. If we could hit them, we would probably be losing air crews, which would have meant people were going to find out that the war had been redirected to (save the Jews). Who knows what the political calculus would have been that. And then if you if you move into the idea of bombing Auschwitz to stop the killing, that means you're killing inmates before they're killed. Right?

MOSH: So by the time we could have done it, it was 1944, the majority of Jews in the camps had already been killed.

KB: That's not an excuse not to save all the remaining Jews of Europe. But you are ending up with just a huge question. It is just you, you're ending up with a big huge question---one of the big moral questions I think we've ever encountered. And that is why we permit two of our most distinguished scholars in the film--Deborah Lipstadt, arguably the most important Holocaust scholar ever, and Rebecca Erbelding--to sort of have a conversation together in which that kind of lose lose aspect

SB: I actually have come, personally, to be more sympathetic to the older generation of Jews who I speak to. I think one reason this becomes such a central question is because they wanted Americans send a message to the Nazis: 'We know what you are doing, and it is not okay.' There was something symbolic for the remaining Jews, who were in the camps and symbolic to the Jews around the world, for Americans to make some kind of a statement there.

MOSH: Let's speak about the dark side of American history. You discuss how Hitler looked at American history--Jim Crow laws, our history with Native Americans, even our immigration quotas, fondly.

Explain how Hitler viewed the U.S. in his years leading up to taking power, writing his book, and then in power. How did he view the United States as he looked at how he would execute his policies?

KB: Yeah. So, sit down. Don't be standing up for this. He admired what we'd done to our native populations. That's what he wanted to do to his wild east. He didn't consider the Slavic people, real people. He didn't consider the Orthodox Christians, real people. He didn't consider the Jews, obviously, real people. This is just a place to get the breathing room that he felt that the Third Reich needed. So, in contemplating this, admired what we had done with to our native populations---the necessary murder and then isolation of the survivors into cages...meaning reservations...meaning concentration camps, I guess.

He loved our Johnson-Reed Act. It showed our virility, you know, that we were willing to sort of favor Nordic, Northern European (immigrants) he would say arian populations and have miniscule quotas. They are going to help contribute, a decade and a half later to the horrible, to the inability of the United States to rescue more Jews. And, later German jurists, I have no idea whether it's under his direction, but German jurists studied our Jim Crow laws.

By that time, then he was souring on the United States. He saw us as weak. And he considered us under the sway of black culture--meaning jazz--and under the sway of Jews, because the Roosevelt administration was clearly dominated he felt by it. A lot of the anti-Roosevelt stuff that was distinctly anti semitic was also generated by the Germans.

And, in some ways, the misreading of us is a really good turn in history. Because one of the big mistakes I'd say the biggest was invading Russia, but that's on his mind all along. He makes the pact (with Stalin) and then he reneged on it and fails to take Russia.

But his second big blunder was declaring war on us after the Japanese attack. Franklin Roosevelt declares war on Japan (following Pearl Harbor). But on 11th of December, Hitler and Mussolini declare war on the United States. And so this is the greatest gift that Franklin Roosevelt would have. I mean, we're talking about the horrible beginning of our part of the greatest Cataclysm in human history. But it allowed us to have the Nazis be our enemy, and not still have people saying, 'well, you know, they're not so bad.'

MOSH: In the final episode, you take us up until the present day and concerns you have here in the US. Berlin was a very vibrant, progressive, advanced place leading up to the 1930s. It seemed to have flipped overnight, or seemingly overnight.

Lets compare the US to the Weimar Republic (pre-Hitler German government). We've had a democracy for several centuries here and they were just this nascent democracy. Are there major differences between the US and 1930s Germany?

KB: Well, I think that's a super good point. It's a really good point. But you know, if you wanted to be in the greatest, most vibrant place on Earth, and 30, and 31, and 32, you look no further than Berlin in arts, music and culture and ideas and in science, everything. Cinema. Painting. It's spectacular, and then it wasn't. So I think that's what you have to take seriously.

The problem is, we've been hamstrung for a long time with Holocaust discussions because you don't want in any way equate anything that's going on with the Holocaust. It's nothing. It is singular, and we hope it remains singular in this stuff. Even though other genocides have taken place in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina and Syria, and with Uyghurs more than a million imprisoned in China and with Rohingyas in South Asia. The world has not learned the 'never again' slogan. But, something of this magnitude, of this industrial scope, we cant. The comparisons become specious and completely unfair.

However, what brings us to that moment are sets of authoritarian actions. And there's a drip, drip, drip, that happens in the course of it, our scholars remind us again and again again, and our survivors remind us. It is little bits and bits. As Deborah Lipstadt says in our film, the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. I would say, and the reason why we brought things up to the present, the time to save a democracy is before it's lost.

MOSH: There's a Winston Churchill quote, that Americans will always do the right thing only after we've tried everything else.

KB: Exactly. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. And I'm not talking to any political party, just good people. We cannot be susceptible to the empty promises of authoritarians. This is the big, big challenge of today. And why it is a crisis.

My last film was on a Benjamin Franklin who said, you know, 'a republic, if you can keep it.' And for 246 years, we've done a pretty good job of keeping it. But now institutions that we thought were bedrock--that survived the Civil War, that survived the Depression that survived World War Two-- are now in question. The notion of free and fair elections, the idea of a peaceful transfer of power, the idea of an independent judiciary, free of political motivations and political influence, instead of just the law, the idea that one person could be above the law.

All of these things are tremendously worrisome and are points along the line of the continuum of what we've watched in this film, but also that takes place throughout human history. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that human beings are susceptible to accepting the yoke of tyranny. That suggests that democracies require an extra effort on the part of people of civic engagement of voting, which people don't do in the United States. We're leaving money on the table by not voting. And, so I think we've got an obligation to say that if you wish to save democracy, you gotta get going. Because these things evaporate very quickly. Just ask the residents of Berlin.

[Top Banner Photo Credit: Getty Images]

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