The US and the Holocaust review – unmissable Ken Burns doc reveals how Hitler was inspired by America

You know what you are getting with a Ken Burns documentary, and The US and the Holocaust (BBC Four) is cut from the film-maker’s familiar cloth. (I say “Ken Burns” as a sort of cultural shorthand – this is co-directed by Burns and his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein.) These films are long, detailed patchworks of archive photographs and historical footage, cut with interviews with historians and people who were there, all held together by the authoritative voice of Burns’ regular narrator Peter Coyote.

The three-part series explores the US response to the Nazi persecution of Jews, but, at six hours long, has enough room to extend its remit to other countries’ attitudes towards immigration and refugees (the UK is not spared). The first episode, The Golden Door, is bookended by both the Statue of Liberty and Anne Frank’s family. In 1934, the Franks fled Germany and moved to Amsterdam, along with hundreds of other Jewish families. Their intention was to reach the US. Coyote recounts solemnly that they found that “most Americans did not want to let them in”.

This paints an unflattering and complicated portrait of the US, a country consumed by the idea that it is a land of immigrants, but with a historical reality frequently at odds with its self-image. It reminds viewers of Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem The New Colossus, fixed on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, with its exhortation to “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, and contrasts that with the work of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wrote the virulently anti-immigration poem The Unguarded Gates in 1892: “O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well / To leave the gates unguarded?” According to the historian Peter Hayes, one of several talking heads on hand to offer sombre analysis, exclusion is “as American as apple pie”.

It examines several ideas that are often held as broad truths and painstakingly unpicks them. In 1933, there were nine million Jews in Europe. By 1945, at least two-thirds of them had been murdered. The notion that Americans did not know the extent of what was happening during the Holocaust is refuted, again and again. It was on the radio, in magazines, on newsreels. We hear the words of journalists, particularly Dorothy Thompson, who reported on the horrors of Nazi Germany and was expelled from the country in 1934. She interviewed Hitler in 1931, describing him as “the very prototype of the little man”. The little man held a grudge.

There are fascinating details about the complicity of most Hollywood studios, for whom Germany was a big market. About 80 million Americans went to the movies once a week in the 30s, but when they were there they would hear nothing against the Nazis. In 1938, a poll asked Americans if they felt Jews were to blame, partly or entirely, for what was happening to them in Germany. Two-thirds of respondents said they were.

This is a story of an increasingly hardline approach to immigration in the US in the early 20th century, which was popular among government officials and the population at large and made no exceptions for refugees. It connects the dots with astonishing precision, suggesting that Hitler found inspiration in the US – in its Jim Crow laws, in Henry Ford’s rampant antisemitism, his views printed and distributed widely, in its mass deportations repackaged as “repatriation”.

The accounts given by historians are smart, thought-provoking and never sugar-coated or simplified, which is refreshing in an age of soundbites. But it is the memories of survivors that stick in the mind – the accounts of the Jewish children, now very old men and women, whose communities turned against them. The shock of their neighbours and friends joining Nazi parades, refusing to play with them, calling them names and smashing their windows and homes, is palpable, even now. “From one day to the next, their attitudes changed,” recalls one woman, as if still dazed. She was nine when the Nazis marched into Vienna.

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The temptation to find modern parallels is strong; there is a persistent sense that we are no longer learning from history that is not so far away. Conspiracy theories, populist thugs, isolationism, economic turmoil, unstable governments – none of this is as distant as it should be. You always leave a Burns documentary feeling battered by the volume of information. By the end of the first episode, which clocks in at more than two hours, war has not yet broken out in Europe. But this is unvarnished history that attempts to scratch away the surface myths – and it is well worth your time.