Pros and Cons of Ken Burns’ Holocaust Documentary

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – During September, a three-part documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and Lynn Novick on the United States and the Holocaust was aired over Public Broadcasting System (PBS) stations, delving into such questions as “How much was Hitler influenced by American racism and antisemitism?” “Why didn’t the United States offer sanctuary to more Jewish refugees?” and “Should President Franklin Roosevelt have ordered the bombing of Auschwitz and other Nazi killing centers?”

If you haven’t seen the seven-hour-long series, you still can by clicking on this website: The U.S. and the Holocaust | KPBS.

In San Diego, a preeminent Holocaust scholar is Lawrence Baron, the retired Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies at San Diego State University.  Baron, who is also the founding president of the Western Jewish Studies Association, developed an academic specialty in how the Holocaust is portrayed in cinema, writing Projecting the Holocaust Into the Present, and editing The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema.

Many readers of San Diego Jewish World know Baron via his political satire columns, but I asked my colleague to put his hat back on as a Holocaust scholar to assess how well the documentary had covered the subject.

“It is a big subject and you obviously can’t get everything in it and all the emphases that some people would like,” Baron responded.  But that is not something the filmmakers really can be criticized about.  When Baron taught courses about the Holocaust, “I never felt that I did a great job with 15 weeks and 40 lectures.  There was always stuff that got left out that I wished that I could have covered.”

Scholars have long been debating whether Roosevelt turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering, Baron noted.  “If you are someone who believes that the U.S. didn’t do enough, or that we are complicit, there are things that were left out of the documentary, like Peter Bergson,” who militated during World War II for a direct U.S. response to the Holocaust. On the other hand, “I thought the documentary basically did a balanced job, pretty middle of the road.”

Some fellow scholars were uncomfortable with the documentary’s emphasis on American racism, which included the U.S. record of chattel slavery and post-emancipation segregation in the South; the embrace in the United States of eugenics theory calling for weeding misfits out of the gene pool, usually by sterilization; and the antisemitism of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Catholic Radio Commentator Fr. Charles Coughlin, and other prominent Americans.  Baron said that while all this undoubtedly was true, it long had been preceded by home-grown European racism and antisemitism, including the czarist forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Ford basically recycled in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent.

On whether Roosevelt could have and should have done more to save the Jews, Baron said that the documentary seemed to skew toward the position that FDR would have liked to have done more, but was blocked by antisemitic public opinion, an isolationist Congress, and his need to accomplish other objectives.

“On some of these things, Roosevelt needs to be taken to task,” Baron said, “but overall politics is the art of the possible.  He had a coalition that agreed on a lot of the New Deal’s economic and social legislation, but it consisted of large numbers of isolationists, large numbers of immigration restrictionists and nativists, and he didn’t buck it.”

Baron suggested that “if you view these problems strictly with a humanitarian and moral lens, you are going to be really negative to Roosevelt. If you start introducing all the political consideration, which I think the filmmakers tried to do, it is not so black and white.”

An example, he said, is the case of the SS St. Louis, on which more than 900 Jews sailed in 1939 from Germany to Cuba, for which the majority had purchased transit visas from various Cuban officials.  The president of Cuba invalidated the visas and turned the ship away as did the United States and Canada, until it had to return to Europe, where a third of the passengers subsequently were killed in the Holocaust.

“Two days after Kristallnacht in 1938 Roosevelt met with General Fulgencio Batista who wanted the U.S. to lower its tariffs on Cuban sugar” and Roosevelt persuaded him in return to accept refugees from Hitler’s Germany.  Cuba subsequently admitted 5,000 Jews prior to the arrival of the St. Louis, and “there were all kinds of corrupt officials selling visas to Jews to make money, and there were huge demonstrations.  Forty thousand people gathered in Havana to oppose Jewish emigration.”  Subsequently, Baron noted, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee negotiated with England, France, Belgium, and Holland to accept the St. Louis passengers. Those who went to England were safe, but the others were in countries that would subsequently be overrun by the Nazis.

Hampered by the Congress, which had passed Neutrality Laws, Roosevelt needed to be circumspect prior to the war in his opposition to Nazi Germany.  However, “behind the scenes he tried to get other countries, mostly in South America, to take in refugees and he succeeded in some cases.  Bolivia took 20,000 Jews, partly because it had a very important German Jewish industrialist who ran mines there, who helped organize this – Moritz Hochschild.”  In all, approximately 40,000 Jews immigrated to Latin America, Baron said.

Following the Anschluss, or merger, of Germany and Austria, Roosevelt lumped together the immigration quotas from the two countries, allowing to come to the United States a full quota of 27,000 people in 1938 and 15 slots shy of a full quota in 1939, the year World War II began.  Additionally, Baron said, there were 15,000 German Jews on tourist visas when Kristallnacht occurred, and Roosevelt allowed them to remain in the country.

On the other hand, said Baron, when the Wagner-Rogers Act came before Congress, to take 20,000 children into this country, similar to the Kindertransport that brought children to England, “Roosevelt never spoke out. He didn’t take a position one way or the other.  So, is he at fault?  Yes.“

“From 1942 until the beginning of 1944, there was not much that could be done after Germany closed emigration entirely. There was really only one port in Europe that was open—Lisbon, Portugal.” Then came the Allied invasions of the European continent, first through Italy, and later through France with the D-Day landings.  At that point, American air power might have been used against the concentration camps and the rail lines leading to them. Shouldn’t such bombings have been ordered?

“I tend to come down with Deborah Lipstadt (a well-known Holocaust historian who was interviewed extensively in the documentary) that would not have stopped the killing, but would have been a symbolic gesture,” Baron said.  He pointed out that even before the Nazis had gas chambers, they successfully murdered millions of people via mass shootings, poison gas vans, and death marches. “They (US forces) actually bombed one of the crematoriums, but it was an accident; they were flying in that area. Martin Gilbert (another well-known historian) has these photos taken by the Allies as they flew over Auschwitz showing people being marched.  So, there is no question they had the information what was occurring there.”

Did Roosevelt disapprove of such a bombing campaign?  “With Roosevelt, there was a problem, he didn’t keep a diary; he didn’t write many letters, he wrote very few memoranda, and he didn’t allow notes in his Cabinet meetings, so everything we have on him is second-hand,” Baron said.  That includes a statement by John J. McCloy, who was an assistant secretary of war during World War II.  “When he was older, he said Roosevelt disapproved of bombing Auschwitz but he never said that earlier,” said Baron. “I felt Burns should have featured interviews with scholars like Rafael Medoff who have been more critical of FDR to provide more balance on such controversial issues. ”

That would have entailed more about the Bergson Group’s campaign for a more proactive American response or about Roosevelt’s seeming blindness to his friend Breckinridge Long’s antisemitism.  Of course, that would mean cutting other parts of the documentary.

As far as Baron was concerned, the extensive footage about Holocaust diarist Anne Frank could have been excised because her story is so well known except for the part about Otto Frank’s efforts to procure American visas for his family.

Baron’s own interest in Holocaust studies developed during his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where his mentor was George Mosse, an immigrant from Nazi Germany whose father had owned Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt.

Baron moved on to a teaching position at St. Lawrence University, where he became interested in the refugee camp at Fort Ontario, about 130 miles away, that had served as the only shelter established on American soil for a group of predominantly Jewish refugees.

Josiah DuBois, an official in the Treasury Department, authored a report in early 1944 that the State Department under Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long had been actively blocking all efforts by the United States, including some authorized by Roosevelt himself to ransom Jews from countries allied with or occupied by Germany. The report prompted Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board, which was charged with helping refugees find safety.  Its most successful project recruited Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg for his rescue mission in Budapest, Hungary.  Another was to bring nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees in 1944 to Fort Ontario, near Oswego, New York, where they were permitted to stay only until the war was over.  (President Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, subsequently agreed to let the refugees to remain permanently.)

Baron interviewed some of the Oswego refugees nearly 40 years after their experience, wrote an article based on those interviews, and served as the consultant and researcher for a public radio documentary on Fort Ontario that won an Ohio State Award for educational broadcasting.

In 1988, he was hired by San Diego State University as a Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History and director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies, named for local philanthropists Bernard and Dorris Lipinsky.  There had been a minor in Jewish Studies at San Diego State since 1970, but budget cuts resulting from Proposition 13 had forced the cancellation of most of the courses in it.  Pressure from the Campus Jewish Center (Hillel) and Jewish students and faculty led the university to begin fundraising efforts to enlarge the Jewish Studies Program.  When the Associated Students invited Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan to speak on campus without regard to his virulent antisemitism, Bernard Lipinsky protested to SDSU’s President Thomas Day. Day defended Farrakhan’s appearance on the grounds of freedom of speech, but  he suggested that one way the Jewish community could combat antisemitism and educate students about Jews and Judaism was to help underwrite an institute designed with such purposes in mind.

Lipinsky accepted, and after several interim directors (including future Congressman, Mayor, and Sex Offender Bob Filner), Baron took over the position.  “Part of its mission was to do outreach to the community,” Baron said. “I took that seriously.  I inherited a weekly lecture series that was on campus every Wednesday.  It was a lot of work, especially if you were bringing in people and taking them around, but I did that for years.  We eventually changed to holding the lectures every other week.  The Glickmans and the Galinsons created the annual symposium on Israel, and then Paula Siegel created the Siegel Lecture. I also worked with the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and we took busloads of students up to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. We would always have a Holocaust Survivor from San Diego’s New Life Club aboard. They would answer the students’ questions going up there and back.  I designed a survey for their teachers to measure the impact on Holocaust knowledge that resulted from the units the teachers devoted to the Holocaust.”

With his many administrative duties, Baron felt that he couldn’t do research on a topic that would require him to travel too far and too long from San Diego State University.  But Hollywood was just up the road along with “the best film archives in the world, so that was where my research went.  If you ever want to go to a great place, the library that the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) runs – the Margaret Herrick Library–is an amazing archive.”

Among resources he found there were the self-censorship codes imposed upon film studios by the Production Code Administration.  According to Baron, Joseph I. Breen, the chief censor, “didn’t want to draw too much attention to Jews because there was a lot of antisemitism and people seeing such movies might find their prejudices fortified.  More importantly, he worried that pro-Jewish or anti-Nazi movies would offend Hitler who adopted a policy to withdraw all the movies from any studio that criticized his country and policies. The studios did not want to lose the profitable German market.”

Warner Brothers was the most adamant in resisting the codes. Before making Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, it helped fund the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and broadcast its programs on its radio station.  Moreover, it produced several movies that condemned historical and contemporary movements that stoked ethnic, racial, or religious intoleranc.e  Since the  The March of Time newsreels were considered journalism and not entertainment, they did not fall under the jurisdiction of the PCA enabling the franchise to release highly critical reports about Nazi Germany and the refugee crisis following Kristallnacht in 1938.”

Baron’s experience bringing other professors from nearby cities to San Diego State University led to his founding of the Western Jewish Studies Association which held its first conference in San Diego in 1995 and thereafter in other Western States cities.  The older Association for Jewish Studies used to hold its conferences only in Boston since Jewish Studies programs initially were concentrated on the East Coast.    “I didn’t want to go to Boston,” Baron recalled.  “I surveyed all the Jewish Studies faculty in Western States whether they would like to have a regional association in which we could network.  The answer was overwhelmingly positive, except for the Association for Jewish Studies which didn’t want the competition.”  The AJS eventually alternated the locations of its conferences among eastern, midwestern and western locations.  This coming year the Western States Jewish Studies Association will meet in Las Vegas.

Although now retired from his professorship, Baron continues to lecture about the Holocaust and about Jewish film subjects to a variety of community groups.  He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com

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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com