President Franklin Roosevelt, in a moment of fury and exasperation a year before the United States entered World War II, confided to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. “If I died tomorrow, I want you to know this,” FDR said. “I am absolutely convinced that Charles Lindbergh is a Nazi.” That’s one of the many shattering moments in “America and the Holocaust,” a gripping seven-hour PBS docuseries directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein.
This is an incredibly complicated, convoluted, and frustrating part of the story, and as directors, you seem to really go for its maddening quality. Is that accurate?
KEN BURNS It’s very frustrating to watch because you can understand how, with hindsight, the glib among us might say, “The Holocaust happened and there must be an American responsible.” So a lot of the blame is on FDR when, in fact, FDR was doing a lot more than most people. And also not to do things, because I knew the political factors. He had a Congress against him and a State Department full of anti-Semites. And many of the Americans did not want to fight the war.
LYNN NOVICK The movie probably isn’t as complicated as the actual story. But the most gratifying comment we get from the public, ironically, is “This makes me really uncomfortable.” For us, that inconvenient truth is right in our sweet spot.
BURNS And while we may find heroes in the cracks of light amidst all this darkness, it’s still a sobering story. The United States was not responsible for the Holocaust, but we know that ideas travel very fast, good and bad. We have a long history of dispossession of natives and grazing on reservations, which Hitler knew all about and certainly approved of. We have an incredible history of anti-Semitism, which is a worldwide phenomenon. And we have our history with slavery, Jim Crow and race.
There is a motif in the series about Otto Frank’s failed attempt to flee Europe with his family. That’s not a story where we think he has an American connection.
sara bostein Anne Frank is for most people, all over the world, the gateway to this moment in history. And it came to our attention that the Frank family had desperately tried to get to the United States. And not only had they tried, but they had the means and the connections and all the things they needed. They couldn’t get here. That set us on a path to explore Frank’s story in a newer way and allowed us to deal with Auschwitz and think about what people Anne’s age experienced.
BURNS And the story of Anne Frank is connected to us. To myself, I’m like, “Wow, if we had let Otto Frank and his family into the US, Anne Frank might still be alive today.” She would be 90 years old, maybe she became a writer, maybe not. But she could be here, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Then you realize that we are talking about lost human potentiality. The loss to humanity is almost unbearable to contemplate.
The United States hosted 225,000 human beings fleeing the Nazis, more than any sovereign nation in the world. And we helped end the war. But we could have easily let in five or maybe ten times that number, and then you’re talking about subtracting a million or two million from the number of deaths in the Holocaust.
We see Holocaust survivors still alive, who finally made it to America, who were children at the time. How important were those perspectives?
botstein The most important. One of the great privileges of our work is that you can tell this vast epic of an incomprehensible story through the experience of one person. And here we are dealing with childhood memory, childhood trauma, and generational trauma. That’s why we take talking to people about the big and scary moments in their lives very seriously.
It is well known that Charles Lindbergh was an anti-Semite, but what surprised me the most was hearing his voice in the series.
BURNS It’s so irritating, isn’t it? That sanctimoniousness, that certainty, that arrogance and that prejudice in his voice, oozes from every sentence.
NOVICK And being able to hear his voice really sealed the deal for us. We had a lot to choose from with Lindbergh, let’s put it that way. He was also the great foil to FDR and they really hated each other. Lindbergh was an American hero for flying across the Atlantic, but what struck me the most was how popular he remained. Eventually, his anti-Semitism damaged his reputation, but we have this interesting relationship between a hugely popular person, hateful beliefs, and the public.
At the end of the series, he shows recent clips, including from the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
BURNS We could not ignore the present. We accelerated the production schedule for this series. It was supposed to air in the fall of 2023, but two or three years ago I said, “We have to do it sooner.” Sarah and Lynn, quite rightly, were a bit unsettled by the workload. But we had to be part of the conversation long before. We wanted to remind people of the fragility of the institutions we take for granted.
NOVICK And we are not equating the United States of today with Nazi Germany. The sense of authoritarianism and threats to democracy, in the Nazi era, were taken to such grotesque proportions. But speaking for myself, I had to wonder what it would have been like if I was living then. And then the connection to the past, which is our ultimate goal, becomes much more visceral and meaningful.
Read more of The Race Begins issue here.
