Why Ken Burns is Wrong on FDR and the Holocaust

The latest film from Ken Burns, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” has aroused controversy with its claim that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did his best to help save Jews from the Nazis. As Donald Harrison notes in his October 5 column, Burns contends 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.”

Each of those contentions by Burns is a myth.

Public opinion did not determine U.S. government policy; President Roosevelt did. And the State Department did not make up its own policies; it implemented the president’s decisions. There was no “Deep State Department” conspiring to defy FDR. If any State Department officials violated his directives, he could have fired them. He never did.

The “isolationist Congress” didn’t determine Roosevelt’s policy toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Congress didn’t force FDR to maintain friendly diplomatic and trade relations with Germany; that was his choice. Congress didn’t compel FDR to support U.S. participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; that was his choice. Congress didn’t make Roosevelt delete anti-Nazi references from speeches by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes (on three separate occasions); that was his choice.

As for the notion that Roosevelt was unable to help the Jews because of “his need to accomplish other objectives,” that, too, is a myth. The premise is that FDR couldn’t admit more Jews because it would have angered anti-immigration Congressmen, whose votes he needed for New Deal measures. But the reality is that there were several ways Roosevelt could have admitted many more Jews without ever clashing with Congress:

— Filling the Quotas: America’s quota for immigrants from Nazi Germany was filled in only one of Roosevelt’s twelve years as president, and in most of those years it was less than 25% filled—because the Roosevelt administration piled on extra requirements intended to discourage and disqualify visa applicants. Over 190,000 quota places sat empty during those years. The quota could have been filled without any public debate or controversy; all FDR had to do was quietly admit the maximum number of immigrants that the existing law permitted, instead of suppressing immigration below what the law allowed.

— Temporary Haven: The president could have admitted refugees temporarily, either to the United States or to U.S. territories such as the Virgin Islands. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, the governor and legislative assembly of the Virgin Islands offered to open their doors to Jewish refugees; yet FDR rejected the proposal. An April 1944 Gallup poll found 70% of Americans supported giving “temporary protection and refuge” to Jews fleeing Hitler; yet the president admitted just one such group of 982 refugees.

— Rabbis, Professors, and Students: The existing law permitted the admission, outside the quotas, of members of the clergy, scholars, and students. Only a few hundred such visas were issued during the Holocaust years. Had Roosevelt quietly instructed the State Department to be much more forthcoming with such visas, many Jews would have been saved. There were obviously many Jews in Europe who fell into those categories. And since it would have taken place within the existing immigration law, there would have been no fight with Congress.

Giving credit where credit isn’t due

Donald Harrison’s column also included references to four actions that defenders of Roosevelt claim he undertook to rescue Jews. None of the four hold up under scrutiny.

— Cuba:  There is no evidence that Roosevelt lowered U.S. tariffs on Cuban sugar in 1938 in order to persuade Cuba’s leader, Fulgencio Batista, to admit Jewish refugees. This theory first appeared in a 2013 book by Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, but even they stated only that Cuba’s president visited Washington in 1938 to discuss the sugar issue, and that one newspaper columnist speculated Cuba might accepte some refugees. They did not cite any evidence of an actual deal. In fact, some Jewish refugees were admitted to Cuba prior to the non-existent deal, and some were admitted after it. Obviously if there had been any such deal, the Cuban government would not have turned away the refugee ship the St. Louis—as it did, in May 1939—since that would have violated the deal.

—Bolivia: There is no evidence that Roosevelt was responsible for Bolivia’s admission of 20,000 Jews. Prof. Breitman et al discussed this in an earlier book, published in 2009. They did not present any evidence that Mauricio Hochschild, the German-Bolivian Jew who organized the immigration, received any assistance from the Roosevelt administration. In fact, the authors specifically quoted U.S. officials expressing concern about Jewish refugees in Bolivia “making their way to the United States” and said they were “more than skeptical” about the idea of Jews settling there.

— Tourist Visas: After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Roosevelt said he would extend the tourist visas of Germans (not all of them Jews) who happened to be in the U.S. at that time. The president said he thought the number of German tourists affected was between 10,000 and 15,000. However, the U.S. commissioner of immigration subsequently said the correct number was 5,000. Compare that to the British response to Kristallnacht: they admitted 10,000 German Jewish children on the Kindertransports, and an additional 15,000 young German Jewish women as nannies and housekeepers, thus saving their lives.

— The War Refugee Board. In the Ken Burns film, FDR is portrayed as establishing the War Refugee Board, in 1944, as soon as he learned the truth about the Holocaust. In reality, the Roosevelt administration knew—and publicly verified—back in December 1942 that the mass murder of the Jews was underway. Yet when Jewish groups and sympathetic Congressmen introduced a resolution in November 1943 to create a government rescue agency, the administration fought it tooth and nail. It even sent Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to Capitol Hill to testify against the resolution. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board only because of strong election-year pressure by Jewish rescue advocates, the U.S. Senate—which was poised to pass that resolution—and his own Treasury Department. The proof of FDR’s disinterest in the Board is that he gave it only token funding; 90% of its budget had to be supplied by private Jewish organizations.

Crucial omissions

Of course, America’s response to the Holocaust is a big subject and obviously Burns could not fit everything in his film, even though it stretched for more than six hours. Nonetheless, there are a number of major aspects of the subject that Burns simply omitted. It is inconceivable that a historian writing a book about America and the Holocaust could have left these subjects out; likewise a responsible filmmaker would have included at least some brief mention of them:

— The Bermuda Conference. In 1943, the American and British governments held a conference in Bermuda to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis. The delegates came up with no significant rescue plans. The Bermuda Conference was one of the era’s most vivid demonstrations of the Roosevelt administration’s abandonment of the Jews, as well as a pivotal moment in stimulating stronger American Jewish protests against the Holocaust.

— James G. McDonald. As the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany during 1933-1935, and then as chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, the scholar and diplomat James G. McDonald arguably was one of the most prominent refugee advocates in the United States. McDonald’s unsuccessful efforts to solicit FDR’s assistance conflict with the Burns theme of Roosevelt wanting to help the Jews. Perhaps that explains the omission of McDonald from the film—but it doesn’t justify that omission.

— The Virgin Islands. When Burns discussed the voyage of the St. Louis, he made it seem as if there was nothing FDR could have done. He neglected to mention that at the time, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. raised the idea of letting the passengers stay temporarily in the U.S. Virgin Islands—but President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull shot down the idea. Shouldn’t Morgenthau’s effort have been at least briefly mentioned by Burns?

— Empty Ships. Roosevelt administration officials claimed at the time that no ships were available to bring refugees to America. In reality, thousands of U.S. cargo ships, known as Liberty ships, brought supplies to Allied forces in Europe and North Africa, but when they were ready to return to the U.S., they were sometimes too light to sail, so they had to be filled with ballast –rocks and chunks of concrete– to give them added weight. Jewish refugees could have served the same purpose. But nobody watching the Burns film would know it.

Bombing Auschwitz

Finally, there is the question of bombing the railways and bridges leading to Auschwitz, or the gas chambers themselves. The commentators Burns presented tried to pour cold water on the bombing idea, claiming that the railways could be quickly repaired, and that bombing the gas chambers would have risked harming the inmates. Both claims are disingenuous.

The Germans were sometimes able to repair railroad tracks relatively quickly. But that didn’t stop the U.S. from constantly bombing railways throughout Europe. Bridges took much longer to repair—if they could have been repaired at all. Damaging the railways and bridges would have interrupted the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. At a time when 12,000 Jews were being gassed to death every day, any interruption could have saved lives. The only commentators that Burns presented who were at all sympathetic to the bombing idea said it would have been a good “symbolic gesture.” The Jews in Auschwitz were not interested in symbolic gestures; they wanted the railways and bridges bombed because it would actually have slowed down the mass murder process.

As for bombing the gas chambers, the Roosevelt administration officials who rejected those requests never claimed that they were worried about harming the inmates. That would have been absurd; the U.S. bombed oil factories in the Auschwitz industrial zone in broad daylight, knowing that some inmates might be harmed. They also bombed the V-2 rocket factory at Buchenwald in broad daylight, and killed several hundred inmates. But they considered that an acceptable price to pay.

Just a few weeks before PBS aired the  Burns film, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer hosted a special about the Holocaust which included a previously unseen interview with his late father, an Auschwitz survivor, discussing the bombing issue.

David Blitzer remarked:

“The biggest puzzle for me is that they did not bombard the railroads leading to the crematoria. This is the biggest puzzle. We saw the airplanes—in 1944, we saw airplanes bombarding cities. We were laughing, we were happy, we were even praying to God—we could get killed from those bombs, but we couldn’t understand why they did not bombard—every day, thousands of people were burned and gassed in the camps, only because they had the possibility to bring those trainloads of people. If those rails had been bombarded, they couldn’t have done it so perfectly.”

The airplanes to which the elder Blitzer was referring  were the American planes bombing those Auschwitz oil plants, less than five miles from the gas chambers. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was one of the pilots who bombed those oil targets. In a postwar interview, McGovern said: “There is no question we should have attempted…to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

McGovern added: “Franklin Roosevelt was a great man and he was my political hero,” he said in the interview. “But I think he made two great mistakes in World War II.” One was the internment of Japanese Americans; the other was the decision “not to go after Auschwitz.…God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.”

The various proposals to save Jews are not just hindsight–they were all requested by Jewish organizations or other rescue advocates at the time. Yet President Roosevelt chose to turn away from one of history’s most compelling moral challenges. The problem was not that helping the Jews would have involved political risk or undermined America’s war effort; it would not have. The problem was that FDR was not seriously interested in taking even minimal steps to rescue them. How strange that Ken Burns chose not to share these important historical facts with his viewers.

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Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.