The Us and the Holocaust

The American filmmaker Ken Burns has produced many excellent documentaries on subjects as diverse as the American Civil War, Prohibition, Vietnam, and individuals such as Benjamin Franklin, Hemingway and Muhammad Ali. Once of his latest releases is entitled ‘The US and the Holocaust', and looks at the destruction of European Jewry from the perspective of how much, or indeed how little, the Western powers did to help those fleeing the Nazis.

Although I have read, and viewed, an immense amount about the Holocaust I did not fully appreciate until watching this series just how many innocents died before the gas chambers came into full use, and how grudging was the reaction by the West when asked to take in these refugees from Hitler's insanity.

As always I am suffused with pity for the victims, and a contempt for the perpetrators. That the latter could cold bloodily murder men, women and children for belonging to racial groups that they considered sub human is almost beyond comprehension, and indeed show that it was the executioners themselves who deserved such a description. One can only regard with detestation those who tried to excuse the cruelty and utter lack of compassion for those they killed by claiming that they were only obeying orders.

When, following Operation Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen SS units killed thousands at such places as Babi Yar, these monsters often actually escorted the victims to the edge of the pits, even talking to them, before callously shooting them, while mothers carrying babies were forced to hold them in such a way that they could both be killed with one bullet. Later, the horrors of the extermination camps defy description, although one that particularly sticks in my mind is how, when the Germans at Auschwitz ran short of gas, they actually threw living babies and small children straight into the furnaces. I cannot understand how anyone who examines the evidence today can deny that this disgusting crime against humanity ever took place, and those that do are themselves beneath contempt.

The early episode concerns the period before the killing began, when the Jewish people were subjected to persecution in their daily lives. Can one imagine how it must be to be fired from one's employment. to be forced to hand over one's business without compensation to some Nazi, for the children to be humiliated in front of their classmates, to be banned from public transport, or swimming pools and libraries, for the supposed crime of being Jewish?

The majority of Jewish people are law abiding, hardworking, often more intelligent than the norm, and patriotic, yet they were treated worse than one might treat a dog because of the ingrained anti Semitism which has existed in European nations since time immemorial. The Nazis carried this foul practice to the ultimate conclusion, but history shows that it has disfigured societies, including our own over centuries. When Jewish individuals and organisations sought to obtain visas from nations such as the USA and the UK, they often met a brick wall, with limitations placed on a desperate people, and quotas applied which prevented more than a few escaping.

The documentary, largely concerned with the reactions in the USA, shows how politicians actively worked against allowing the victims of this persecution to reach safety, the US Congress being particularly obstructive. Individuals in the State Department (and also in the British Foreign Office), clearly animated by an anti Jewish prejudice, worked hard to prevent refugees being accepted, thus dooming so many to death.  Evil organisations like the German American Bund, composed of ethnic Germans living in the US, promoted a pro-Nazi, antisemitic, and US isolationist agenda, while Mosley's fascists in the UK held rallies aimed at the Jewish people. Special mention is made of Charles Lindbergh,  the aviator, who campaigned for the German regime until Pearl Harbour, although he later fought against the Axis.

In the final analysis the responsibility for this terrible crime against humanity lies with the Germans, but we and the Americans cannot evade the truth that we did not do enough to help these innocents when we could have done so. Eventually we expended thousands of lives to rid the world of the Nazis, but this documentary is a salutary reminder that it is not enough to deplore something, one must act.