Last night I attended a preview of the latest Ken Burns documentary about the U.S. response to the Holocaust and the discussion afterwards with Burns and his two co-directors Sara Botstein and Lynn Novick, moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine. Daniel Mendelsohn, a scholar and author who lost family members in the Holocaust, was also on the panel. The event was held in the Lisner auditorium at George Washington University, and the clips we saw were powerful and highly disturbing (Jews being shot and buried in mass graves etc.), and I could hear people on either side of me gasping in horror. Yet it was also obvious that some in the 500 plus audience didn’t know the degree to which our political leaders at the time, acutely aware of Americans’ isolationist sentiments, restricted the immigration of Jewish refugees, turning them away even when they knew Jews were being persecuted and killed. As Ken Burns noted, even after newsreels of the concentration camps came out, just five percent of Americans wanted to loosen immigration quotas. While several progressive legislators in Congress introduced a bill in 1939 that would have allowed 10,000 Jewish children from Europe into the United States every year (on top of the restrictive quotas then in place), antisemitic and isolationist forces, like the German American Bund, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Catholic societies and others lobbied to prevents its passage and the bill was ultimately withdrawn. As the acclaimed historian Deborah Lipstadt said in one of the clips we saw, “History will not redound to our credit.”
But what struck me most about the evening was not the way our own country looked the other way while millions of European Jews were being shot and gassed by the Nazis as they marauded through Europe — sad to say, I knew most of this sordid history already — but the parallels that the panelists drew between the Germany of the 1930s and the United States of today.
Jeff Goldberg stoked this explosive topic by asking the panel what the lessons of the Holocaust were. As one of the panelists noted, to understand why the Holocaust happened, we have to understand the root causes — in other words, how a functioning democracy became a fascist dictatorship under Hitler’s leadership. Only by understanding this can we prevent another holocaust. Which makes what is happening in our own country all the more frightening. We have a former president who repeatedly flouts the rule of law by fomenting a violent insurrection and stealing classified documents. Trump continues to espouse violence in support of a lie — that he won the 2020 Presidential election — and he continues to spout racist and white supremacist sentiments that echo Hitler when he came to power in the early 1930s.
Mendelsohn cut right to the heart of the matter when he said, “What we’ve seen in the last five years was straight out of the Hitler playbook.” It beggars belief that anyone who is a student of history can still support Trump and the MAGA Republicans. All we can hope for is that some of Trump’s followers will view the Ken Burns documentary when it airs on PBS Sept. 18-20 (the six-hour documentary can also be found on PBS’ streaming app), so they can see the disturbing parallels for themselves. I realize that’s not too likely a scenario, but hope springs eternal. After all, Mendelsohn’s own great-uncle continued to believe that if he kept writing letters to then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he, his wife and two young daughters would be saved. Instead, they all perished in the gas chambers.
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