Dan Snow's History Hit - The US and The Holocaust

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, thousands of German Jews facing systematic persecution wanted to flee the Third Reich but found few countries willing to accept them. For refugees fleeing the Nazis, America’s immigration quotas, established in the 1920s and sustained by popular and Congressional support, made it extremely difficult to enter the United States.Ken Burns and Lynn Novick join Dan to explore America's response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history. They discuss the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the context of global antisemitism and racism, the eugenics movement in the United States and race laws in the American south.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Very, very proud to have history legends back on the podcast. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, they need very little introduction indeed. They have been making the world's best history documentaries for decades. If you love history, there's a very good chance that you love it because of the work that Ken Burns, Lynn and their team have produced over the years. For me, it was the US Civil War series, which changed history broadcasting in the 1990s. You've heard them on the podcast here before, we talked about Hemingway. Ken Burns came on to talk about the remarkable life of Franklin, the founding father, scientist. They're back now to talk about a project that's been very, very central to them over the last seven or eight years. And that's a big new series about the Holocaust,

particularly about the USA and the Holocaust. How did the US, in some ways, I suppose, contribute, but certainly not do enough to ameliorate the horror that was unleashed in the late 1930s and 1940s? It's a very difficult subject, this one. When I was growing up and learning about the Holocaust, it was easy to compartmentalise it. It was easy to talk about an evil state, an evil mechanism elsewhere. The more I've learning about the Holocaust, it was easy to compartmentalize it. It was easy to talk about an evil state, an evil mechanism elsewhere. The more I've learned about the Holocaust, particularly the wonderful books of Mary Fullbrook, the professor here in the UK, and many other works, it's clear that actually the Holocaust is something much more dangerous,

much more insidious, much more international, much more ubiquitous. And that's what we talk about in this podcast is Lynn Novick and Ken Burns. Lynn and Ken, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's great to be with you. Our pleasure. Lynn, I'm very struck. You could have made a show about the Holocaust, but you chose to make a show about the kind of Americans.

Talk to me about the journey that you obviously went on to come up with that, make that decision. Thank you for asking that. It's a very important distinction for us in that there's been so many wonderful, brilliant, powerful, heartbreaking documentaries and books about the Holocaust. And we felt it was important to take a look at America's response to this catastrophic humanitarian crisis. And we were inspired in part by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which was planning an exhibition on that topic. And they approached us in 2015 to say, would we be interested in also working on a documentary? So that's how come we've been working on this for seven years. And it was instructive and revelatory for us to think about the questions from an American perspective. What did Americans know? When did they know it? What did our government do? What

was the American nation's action and lack of action in terms of the catastrophe as it unfolded? So we really dug deep into trying to find the answer to those questions, which frankly, we didn't know at the beginning of this process. What are the starting points, the wellsprings that you guys looked at? Long before Hitler comes to power, there are forces at work in the United States to limit immigration. And so that sets the stage for how difficult it's going to be is to get into the United States. Before 1924, we had open borders, and people could come here, and millions did. And in 1924, our nation decided to severely restrict immigration. And so that is under Calvin Coolidge's presidency. But that movement to restrict immigration starts

much earlier. We begin with the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s and this rising drumbeat of a question about who is worthy of being a quote unquote real American, who belongs here, who should we keep out? And this, you know, very strong growing groundswell among the public, but not by all means everybody. Many Americans felt we don't like what our country is becoming with so many immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. So we need to just turn off the spigot and try to go back to how we were before these waves of immigration. It's sponsored by, you know, deep-seated racism, deep-seated anti-Semitism, deep-seated nativism that appears in everywhere in the world. But all

of that, as Lynn is saying, plows together to create the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which is following on an earlier piece of legislation in 21 that is just going to set just impossible quotas, particularly for those countries who are going to experience in the 30s and the 40s, the full force of the discrimination against Jews and the desire to eliminate all the Jews of Europe. And they're pretty successful. Two thirds of them are killed. When I was growing up, it was convenient to think the Holocaust, something absolutely terrible that happened in a different country and how terribly wrongheaded and evil and awful that administration was and the people that carried out those mass murders. As I read more deeply and learn from people like you guys, it becomes even more uncomfortable, doesn't it?

Because it's pan-national. There were riots in here, anti-Semitic riots in the UK through this period as well. Is it an international phenomenon? Unfortunately, so it seems, yes. The United States and certainly also the United Kingdom did not perpetrate the Holocaust, as you said, but we had an obligation to try to help. And we turned our back for the most part. The US admitted more refugees than any other sovereign nation. So we can be grateful for that. But as Ken always says, we should have admitted many, many more. And there's a conference in 1938 to discuss the refugee crisis after Hitler has absorbed Austria.

And there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people trying to get out. And every nation basically says, you know, this is terrible, but we don't want them. And so it's the whole world turning its back. It's not just the United States. And there's so much modern resonance. It's impossible to be dispassionate and to separate ourselves from what's going on at the moment. And there's that quote in your show where Senator Robert Reynolds in North Carolina said, if I had my way, I'd build a wall. The story of the developing Holocaust and then the Holocaust itself is the story of

supposedly good people acquiescing in the face of bad events, and they just get worse. That is the signal to dictators that they can get away with it, right? We're going to try this. And if you're okay with that, and you're not protesting too much, we're going to do this times two, and then times four, and then times, you know, 16. And it is an exponential explosion. I mean, if you wanted to be, Dan, in the most cosmopolitan place in the world in 1930 or 31 or 32, where things are happening in cinema and in architecture and in music and in painting and in intellectual discourse, Berlin would be the place you would go. It was as vibrant as any place on earth. And then it wasn't.

And literally, it feels like a switch is flipped. That's what happened. And we have to, I think, be mindful of the fragility of the institutions we tend to take for granted. The conservatives who installed Hitler, who by no means had a majority, they were certain that they could control him. And within a few months, they were dead or controlled themselves. Well, I can't think of any example in recent history with a parallel for that. And you have the same thing happening with authoritarian impulses that are taking place in Great Britain, they're taking place in France, they're taking place in Italy, they're taking place in the United States. Those impulses

are there. And they have been given to our great surprise and great concern, a certain amount of voice in the years that we've been working on this film. And so we felt it was incumbent to get this film done. We talked about the antecedents of America, its interest in eugenics, the anti immigration sentiment, the prevalence of antisemitism, the racism, the treatment of Native Americans, all a part of the lead up to our understanding of what happens in the 1930s and 40s and Hitler's admiration, at least initially, for our taking care of the Indians and our limiting immigration. But by the end of the film, we felt compelled to actually say, this doesn't end when the Johnson-Reed Act is revoked and there's a new immigration law, a little bit better in 1965.

In fact, it goes right up to the present. When I was in the 90s studying history, studying by watching your shows, I should say, I was often asked, like, why are you studying history? What's the point of history? And we hear both sides of the Atlantic, humanities are kind of under assault from people who think we should all be learning about engineering and coding. And yet, when we have these discussions, stopping genocides is like the most important job we have really as citizens. And therefore, this feels like a time for history. This feels like a time when these kind of programs and projects are as important as building bridges and laying super fast broadband and doing all

the other things we know that we should do as a society. Yeah, we absolutely agree. That's why we get out of bed in the morning is, you know, to try to help further that awareness and understanding of our history and our shared collective history and in a pluralistic, diverse society with many different ideas about what our history should be and what stories we should tell and what's okay to talk about and what's not okay to talk about. It's not simple to kind of figure out, put these pieces together, especially a story as complicated as Ken was saying as this one. And yet, as we put the pieces together, there's a moment when it kind of clicks into place and you begin to see the patterns and

the sort of structures of the history. And it does help us understand where we are right now, because there are forces that have been throughout our history of racism, anti-Semitism, nativism. And there's also an impulse towards advancing our democracy. But these things are in conflict, and that's at the core of the American story anyway. And, you know, which direction we're heading right now, we could go either way. But if we don't understand how we got here, we're really truly lost. History and humanities are central now to our survival. Scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, unless they have a humanistic side, will not be responsible for the solution. They are often responsible for the problem itself. They are often responsible for the problem itself.

The inhumane application of science and technology is part of what the mechanics of the Holocaust are about. It requires the humanistic, the artistic, all of those things that are supposedly out of fashion and not useful and don't provide big salaries for their majors, right, are in fact critical to our survival as the only race there is. I mean, all of this story is about the distinctions people have made throughout history between other people, othering them and creating different distinctions and hierarchies that just don't exist. It's all BS. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers

uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British, see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race, I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Have you guys noticed in your work the Overton window shifting have you had to have conversations that you wouldn't have believed you'd have to have 20 years ago and i mentioned this because a friend of mine works in a museum in the states where they used to have a voter registration drive in the foyer in the lobby and that in the last election was now seen as a partisan activity and that's something that's changed so So have you guys had interactions like that? Of course, of course we have, you know, I mean, if you go back to Germany, it was the conservatives who allied themselves with Hitler did not agree with everything he believed, but

they were certain that if they did not move away from democracy, that democracy would provide, I guess you'd say the left left the majority, which is as it is in this country. I mean, there's been one election in which the right has won the popular vote since 1988. There's been one other year, 2004, in which the right has won the popular vote. And the handwriting on the wall is so obvious that there are those so interested in clinging to power that they will take all the things that they used to in a bipartisan way support like mail-in voting and early registration and lots of time to vote and kind of registration drives and subvert that process and subvert the court process and subvert

the legislative comedy that's necessary for compromise and to get things done. All of those things are under assault, which is exactly the playbook of authoritarianism. That's it. If we're going to be out of power, let's make sure that the levers of instrumentalities of a democratic society get altered in such a way that we will ensure, despite being a minority, our dominance. I agree completely. And it's really terrifying. And making this film has been sobering. And the other piece of this that I think just weighs on all of us is the conspiracy theories and the scapegoating and the rhetoric, call it whatever you want, white nationalism,

the scapegoating and the rhetoric, call it whatever you want, white nationalism, alt-right, far-right, but it's really the same ideology that we saw from the Nazis, just maybe slightly different configurations and different words. And that was the fringe in my early adult life. And now it's moving sort of toward the mainstream and that kind of norm of what people say and don't get called out on. And then they keep on saying it and just building more fear, more fear mongering, more scapegoating. That adds fuel to the fire for what Ken was just talking about. So it's a multivalent problem that we have. I obviously don't want to reduce anything to obvious historical parallels, but it's interesting that the Biden-led coalition to support Ukraine at the moment against Russian invasion, atrocities, some have described as genocide, seems to be working

pretty well. There's been huge amounts of aid going to Ukraine that their military is certainly putting to good use. When you talk to your wonderful stable of historians, what did they point as to what the US could have done differently around the rise of Nazi Germany? Should there have been a more robust response in the 1930s, do you think, to German aggression? Is that what you found? Monday morning quarterbacking, as we say here, is so easy. You have a Great Depression going on, and it's really just the question of feeding people and your family's survival, whether you can get a job, hang on to the job you have. And these are all pressures that

actually play to the extremists who can say, you don't want to bring in any Jews because they're going to take away your job. And you can amplify, as the 30s did, the othering that Lynn was talking about, the making of the scapegoats. And so I just believe that the United States of America, talking about, the making of the scapegoats. And so I just believe that the United States of America, which at least until recently has had in its mythology, emphasis mythology, that we're a nation of immigrants. And we are, everybody here except Native Americans are immigrants. And they even came over 22,000 years ago across the land bridge that connected Asia to the Americas, North and South. We're all kind of visitors here in some way, shape, or form. But once established, you think you're it. You want to shut the door as soon as you're in. And what we didn't do, and what we should have done,

is relax the quotas, yelled a lot louder than we did. And the United States is the only Western nation that withdrew its ambassador in protest from Nazi Germany. We did a lot of stuff. It was Roosevelt who tried to get people together for the Avion Conference that Lynn was mentioning, which everybody said, including Britain, I can't do anything. And when we say we let in more than any other sovereign nation, there are places on the earth like Palestine and other places where Jews were seeking sanctuary. We could have made it a lot easier to get people out. At the same time, there were forces happening in Germany and plans for the expansion eastward that basically kept taking territory that added more Jews. And finally,

instead of saying, we hope to drive these people away, we realized that we are not able to do that. away. We realize that we are not able to do that. So we are going to kill them all. There were people, there were reporters in Germany, American reporters and others who sort of saw the evil of it. But I don't think anyone was capable of fully predicting the magnitude of the evil that would be perpetrated against the Jews of Europe. What's it like personally making a show like this? You know, for this one, some of the people we talked to had such harrowing stories to tell. It affected all of us very deeply. And we really tried to be as disciplined, Dan, as we could in not sort of becoming pornographers of the horror, right? You have to calibrate what you show. You

can't show the very worst or basically you contribute to the numbing and the abstracting of it. These are all human lives. You say 6 million, it means nothing. Each one of those represented a human potentiality and we don't know what was lost. We don't know what cures for diseases weren't developed. We don't know what symphonies weren't written. We don't know what gardens weren't tended, what children weren't developed. We don't know what symphonies weren't written. We don't know what gardens weren't tended, what children weren't raised with love from all of those individuals. And so as the writer Daniel Mendelsohn says in our film, it's really important to try to particularize what happens. So you don't just say 6 million and kind of walk away because that's

just a kind of opaque, impenetrable number, but to put human faces and human stories on it. And some of the things in the film, you know, where there's a letter from a guy to a friend saying, I just want the world to know, he knows it's going to die. I just want the world to know that someone named David Berger lived. There are three of those kinds of letters in it, because when more than half of the 560,000 German Jews escaped, more than half of the 190,000 Austrian Jews escaped. But once you invade Poland and you move into Latvia and Lithuania and Belarus and Ukraine, same territory we're fighting over today, you have 3.3 million Jews in Poland.

And they don't have as many connections to the West. They don't have as many connections to the West. They don't have as many relatives there. And the ones that they do are more powerless to help get them out. And they're far enough away that there's no way. Three quarters of the people killed in the Holocaust are killed before there's a single American allied boot on the ground in Western Europe, meaning Sicily, Italy, right? With British and American forces. And it is just an unbelievable catastrophe in which you're required, you're obligated to animate those lives, to say that these are people who live lives as full as we think our

lives are, and that they were snuffed out and humanity does not have the benefit of understanding what they could contribute. And more importantly, just who they were, what out and humanity does not have the benefit of understanding what they could contribute and more importantly, just who they were, what they loved, how they felt, how they sang, those things. And I think it was our job to try in this to return a measure of dignity to them at the same time you're enumerating the catastrophic geopolitical evil that is taking place. Yeah, there's a lot of ground to cover there. Thank you very much, as ever, for producing such extraordinary documentaries for us all to watch and learn from. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.

Great to be with you. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work out.