The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 3: "The Homeless, Tempest-Tossed" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS aired the third and final episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Sarah Botstein mega-documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, though my comments on the previous episode aired on Tuesday failed to mention one of the most fascinating figures in the history of America’s maddening slowness to respond to the Holocaust: Charles A. Lindbergh. Until the late 1930’s Lindbergh was one of the most beloved celebrities in America, best known for his pioneering 1927 nonstop flight from New York to Paris and the tragic kidnapping and murder of his infant son, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932. Then in 1935 Lindbergh visited Germany on the personal invitation of Hermann Göring, second-in-command of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s personal choice to head Germany’s rebuilt air force, the Luftwaffe (which literally means “air weapon”). He came away convinced that, in the words more recently used on Star Trek: The Next Generation, “resistance is futile.” Lindbergh was sure that Germany would win the world war they were obviously preparing for, and as he toured toe country giving speeches both live and on the radio he became bolder and started sounding as if he thought not only that Germany would win the next world war, but it should win. Lindbergh was chosen as the principal spokesperson for the America First Committee, a nationwide organization formed to keep the U.S. from entering World War II, and the script by Geoffrey C. Ward (Ken Burns’ usual collaborator) claims it was the largest anti-war movement in U.S. history. (Having been at a lot of the big anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations and rallies in the 1960’s, I find that very hard to believe.)

Lindbergh gave his climactic speech on September 11, 1942 (a date which will live in infamy, and not just because of the events of 2001!) at Des Moines, Iowa in which he said, “"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish [sic] and the Roosevelt Administration." In a passage that raised “yes, but-ism” to an art form, he said of the Jews, “No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.” Lindbergh also said of the American Jews, “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” I first heard of Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech in Philip Roth’s counter-factual history novel The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh wins the 1940 Presidential election and aligns the U.S. with the Axis in the war, and he published the Des Moines speech as an appendix to show that the real Lindbergh had been just as foul an apologist for the Nazis as Roth’s fictional one.

There were plenty of heroes and villains in part three, too, including Gerhard Riegner, who interviewed Jews who had fled the Nazis and made it to neutral Switzerland in 1941 and 1942. Riegner assembled their accounts into a report to the U.S. government that was the first intimation most American officials had that the Nazi policy of the Jews had hardened from persecution to outright elimination. Riegner’s repurts found their way th the Department of the Treasury, whose head during the war was Henry Morgenthau, the first Jewish-American ever appointed to a Presidential Cabinet in the U.S. A 30-year-old official named John Pehle, whose parents were immigrants and whose father had migrated from Germany, saw the reports and became determined to do whatever he could to enable Jews to escape the Holocaust and find refuge in America. Eventually he became head of the War Refugee Board, founded by an executive order of President Roosevelt in January 1944. Pehle had to wait for months for the State Department to clear his request to spend American funds in occupied countries, and he ran into a months-long roadblock from Roosevelt’s immigration commissioner, Breckenridge Long, whom we already met in part two (given that he was named after a Confederate war hero, it’s no surprise that he was a racist who did everything he could to keep Jewish refugees out of the U.S.).

Even after Roosevelt founded the War Refugee Board and put Pehle in charge of it, there was an interesting contradiction between the bribes Pehle and other War Refugee Board officials had to pay to corrupt border guards in Nazi-occupied countries and the U.S.’s official policy against paying bribes. Pehle solved it by what would now be called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, going ahead and paying bribes when he needed to in order to get people out of harm’s way. The show also discussed the ideological conflict between the most prominent Jewish political leader in America, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Peter Bergson, who formed a more militant rival Jewish organization to agitate for a more aggressive response to Nazi persecution. (In a sense, Bergson was Malcolm X to Wise’s Martin Luther King, Jr.) Though the third part of the series takes place after the U.S. had definitively entered the war against fascism, resistance to rescuing Jewish refugees and bringing them to the U.S. remained great, as fear of competition for scarce American jobs (at a time when there was a labor shortage caused by the war!) combined with long-standing anti-Semitic attitudes in the U.S. to keep most people opposed to letting large numbers of Jewish refugees into the U.S. There were also interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Eva Geiringer, who matter-of-factly described the tortures to which she was subnected in the camps. Geiringer’s father and brothers all died in the Holocaust, but her mother survived and ultimately married Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father: a moving tale of love between a Holocaust widow and a Holocaust widower.

The film touched on the stories of Raoul Wallenberg from Sweden and a lesser-known diplomat, Karl Lutz from Switzerland, who made major efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust – though the show didn’t mention Wallenberg’s still mysterious disappearance after the war. The best evidence is that he was kidnapped by Soviet authorities when they invaded Hungary in early 1945 and held for two years before finally being put to death by the Soviets. One of the most significant points made by the program is that the sheer scope of the Nazis’ crimes ironically made it more difficult to get people to believe they were happening; even people who were aware of the Holocaust when it was going on (and there were surprisingly few) grossly underestimated its death toll. And the series ended, as Ken Burns had promised it would when he appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show September 19, with an epilogue detailing instances of anti-Semitism and racism in general today. It showed the familiar footage of the Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” rally on August 11 and 12, 2017; Dylann Roof’s massacre of African-American parishoners at a Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina on July 17, 2015; and the mass murder of Jewish worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue (including, with grim irony, several Holocaust survivors) by a white supremacist on October 27, 2018. Though the show didn’t include any footage of then-President Donald Trump, including his infamous comment that “there were good people on both sides – on both sides” in Charlottesville, they did show footage of teh Charlotttesville white supremacists marching and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” – a traditional rallying cry of European white supremacists at least since the 1920’s.

One surprising thing hs that Burns, Novick and Botstein chose to show only domestic parallels to the Nazis and not foreign ones – which struck me especially as I watched Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba being interviewed by Stephen Colbert September 21. It was impossible to escape the grim irony that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, who claimed to have started his “special military operation” (i.e, war) against Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it, time and time again has resorted to Hitler’s playbook. Not only have the Ukrainian soldiers who have retaken parts of their country formerly occupied by Russia hae fond mass graves where Russian soldiers had buried Ukrainians they had massacred willy-nilly, they are staging the kinds of phony “plebiscites” Hitler and Nazis did when they invaded and took over Austria in 1938. A recent report on the CNN Web site, https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/europe/russia-protests-partial-mobilization-ukraine-intl-hnk/index.html, reports that the Russian government is responding to national anti-war protests by not only arresting the protesters but drafting them into the Russian army. And they’re having the same sorts of manpower problems that Hitler had in the later stages of the war, when he started enlisting both the very young and the very old into his army. Putin has announced that he’s not only calling up 300,000 reservists but he’s expanding the military age to 60 and barring any males under age 65 from leaving the country. For those of us who thought the human race would get a break from psychopathic world leaders of major countries after the deaths of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, we already have Vladimir Putin and soon we may again have Donald Trump!