The US and
the Holocaust
BBC4 | ★★★★★

The Holocaust doesn’t begin with crematoria and genocide. It ends there.” When David Simon wrote this in 2019 he was working on the TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s what if? novel The Plot Against America.

That the finished show was so haunting was down to how well it illustrated exactly this point, and so too now with the somewhat related documentary

The US and the Holocaust, except more so as it’s constructed from historical fact not fiction.
Six-hour documentaries about the Holocaust, although broken down to three parts on BBC4, might not seem that enticing: a cynic might even wonder how anything of worth could be added to the genre.

But by framing the events of Germany and Europe among rising antisemitism and other historical developments in America, the great filmmaker Ken Burns allows us to step to one side and cast our view anew on that terrifying panorama.

This isn’t about appointing blame, as it is carefully pointed out that American intervention helped turn the war, and the 225,000 Jewish refugees the US took in was more than any other country.

However, this was just a fraction of those desperate to escape the growing emboldenment of Nazi ideology being put into practice, and the reasons why so many were refused certainly damages US self-mythology as a haven for the huddled masses.

Indeed, that Hitler was able to look to so much of American history — the forcible movement of Native Americans, the eugenics fad and sterilisations, Jim Crow and restrictive immigration laws, Mexican forced repatriation — for inspiration and admiration may be eye-opening for some, as well as the scale of antisemitism within the US the itself: a 1938 survey found that two-thirds of Americans thought Germany’s ever-worsening treatment of its Jews was partly or entirely the Jews’ own fault.

This is perhaps the most difficult part to watch, and the most necessary, as the drip-drip of hateful Nazi rhetoric transforms into hateful action, and the options and desperation of Europe’s Jews decrease and increase in relation to one another.

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A Nazi party rally. The banner at the back reads: ‘Don’t buy from the Jews’

With methodically laid-out footage, photos, documents, and interviews with historians, family members, and witnesses, all tied together by incisive commentary, Burns gives us traditional serious documentary-making at its best, showing up the whizz and pageantry of recent developments to the form.

Of course, Jews are going to be highly affected watching this, hopefully anybody would be, but it’s not in the footage of the camps and crematoriums that we most see ourselves, but rather those ordinary families, trying to live their lives as best they can, except here the world conspired to make that impossible.

And it’s the queues outside consulates, the dread of incorrect paperwork or a hostile consulate worker, the life-saving addition of a stamp, the indifference of bureaucracy, that we can most relate to, before the unimaginable — and as such in most danger of being forgotten or dismissed — occurred.

There’s a lot to unpack here, about the Holocaust, about America, about modern and future immigration, about us all.

The conversation continues, as it needs to.