Still, the film is titled The U.S. and the Holocaust; the filmmakers put the “U.S.” first. And on this crucial U.S. component of the period, Burns lets his viewers down. For the series hammers away at an improbable narrative: the America of the 1800s was a kind of Statue of Liberty Eden, when immigrants flowed freely into our country. Then our bigotry overcame us, and we knew sin. Taking up eugenics or restricting immigration in the 1910s or 1920s—when Adolf Hitler was just a youth wandering Vienna, an insignificant corporal, or a jailbird with a Remington typewriter—was not merely wrong of us but also contributed to the rise of Nazism and to the Holocaust itself. And then, in the late 1930s and 1940s, we compounded our sins by failing to rescue Europe’s Jews. We were militaristic, not humanitarian, and so somehow the lesser.
To mount such a morality play, the filmmakers must rearrange both time and knowledge, pretending that politicians and governments in the first third of the twentieth century had access to facts and numbers that simply were not available in organized form until well after VE-day, or even decades later, as in the case, for example, of the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. The result is six-plus hours of such righteous and distorted history that high schoolers who view the film can be forgiven for taking away the impression that the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act caused the Holocaust. The film also discounts as risibly insufficient the 240,000 refugees from the Nazis whom the U.S. did admit. Burns and his colleagues downplay the military sacrifice that went into the effort of halting Hitler, a sacrifice made not only by the vets at Normandy or the more than 400,000 Americans who lost their lives in World War II. Throughout, the film darkens the story with a sepia overlay of regret. Closer scrutiny reveals The U.S. and the Holocaust as disconcertingly partisan. Through omission and emphasis, the filmmakers assign responsibility for bigotry or bad policy to Republicans and exonerate Democrats.