Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The U.S. And The Holocaust’ On PBS, A Ken Burns Docuseries About The U.S. Government’s Policies During The Reign Of Hitler

The U.S. And The Holocaust is a 3-part series directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, that traces how U.S. policies with regards to immigration and other matters left many European Jews with nowhere to go as Hitler rose to power in Germany and started targeting the Jewish population for elimination. Even after World War II started, the country still had issues with accepting refugees who managed to escape Germany and other European countries that the Nazis annexed.

THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A black and white home video of Frankfurt in the 1930s. Narrator Peter Coyote explains that on a day in 1933, businessman Otto Frank shot a a picture of his family, including his daughter, Annelies.

The Gist: The first episode takes viewers to 1938, right before Germany went to war with England and the Soviet Union. But Burns and company actually start the story in the late 1800s, when the U.S., which until then had mostly open borders, started enacting immigration policies that restricted the number of people coming from countries in southern and eastern Europe, fueled by racist misinformation about these immigrants, and the spread of suspicious “science” like eugenics.

Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party started gaining power in Germany, finding their opening when the latest democratic government that took over in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I started to crumble. Between that and the worldwide depression that started in the U.S. in 1929, Hitler came to power in 1933 via a conservative government that felt they could use him as a puppet. However, he defied those expectations and easily pushed through his anti-Semitic agenda, creating laws that banned Jews from holding most jobs and imprisoned political enemies — most of which were also Jewish. Meanwhile, the SS and Gestapo threatened and beat Jewish business owners and their families.

Some families, like the Franks, managed to get to countries like the Netherlands, ones that at the time were more friendly to refugees. Little did they know that Hitler had designs on invading other countries and annexing them to create a new German empire. And because of continued American anti-Semitism, fomented by prominent people like Henry Ford and Madison Grant in the early part of the century and continued by figures like USOC chief Avery Brundage in the ’30s, the U.S. continued to turn its back on the vast majority of European Jews seeking a safe refuge.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The format of The U.S. And The Holocaust is classic Ken Burns, with celebrities like Paul Giamatti, Adam Arkin, Joe Morton, Bradley Whitford and more reading passages and quotes from various historical figures, mixed with archival footage and stills and historian interviews. Here, Burns and company also talk to people who were kids when their parents were threatened by the Nazis in the ’30s.

Our Take: Burns, Novick and Botstein do exactly what they set out to do with The U.S. And The Holocaust; they wanted to lay out exactly how the government saw the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, and how the “country of immigrants” set up a situation that eventually gave Jews that were persecuted — and eventually murdered — by Hitler nowhere to find refuge.

Much of this is not what we learned in our history books, and while the parts of the first episode that talk about how Hitler came to power and spread his anti-Semitic agenda through Germany was chilling — especially because there are lots of scary parallels between how Hitler brought rank-and-file Germans to his side to how things are going in the U.S. now — it’s stuff that most people who have studied that time period know well. But how the U.S. and their immigration policies likely made things much worse for European Jews isn’t as well known, and it’s a fascinating topic to explore.

There are also heavy parallels between the U.S.’s immigration policies in the late 1800s and the early decades of the 20th century with the policies that have sparked such fierce debate now. Both movements are driven by misinformation, blatant racism and demagoguery. But they are both mostly driven by fear that the makeup of the country will change and put the majority in the minority. All of the parallels that Burns and company show should give any viewer pause, and realize that things might get a lot worse in the present day before it gets better.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Stacks of folders are shown as Coyote explains how Otto Frank added his family’s names to the growing list of Western Europeans and Czechs that wanted to further distance themselves from the Nazis and come to America. And yes, Otto Frank’s daughter Annelies is better known as Anne Frank, who hid from the Nazis for years in Amsterdam before finally being sent to a concentration camp.

Sleeper Star: All of the interviewees who, while they were children during the Nazis’ rise to power, still have vivid memories of how tough things got for Jews in Germany even before they all started getting rounded up and sent to die in concentration camps.

Most Pilot-y Line: That being said, all of the interviewees look much younger than how old they would be in 2022, namely in their 90s and 100s. It’s likely that these interviews were done 15 or so years ago, so they were at an age where those memories were still vivid.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s not an easy watch, of course, but The U.S. And The Holocaust points out an aspect of this country’s history that isn’t just one that hasn’t been taught in schools, but shows scary parallels to the state of the U.S. now.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.