Americans & the Holocaust

JOANNE: Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. 2017 saw the largest increase in anti-Semitic incidents on record. More and more fascists and neo-nazis parade their violent ideology, as we saw last summer here in Charlottesville.

NATHAN: In Europe, many sites of the Holocaust have been turned into museums, and we often hear the phrase “never again,” associated with remembering the genocide. But in the United States, the history is starting to get a bit hazy. Americans, in recent years, have taken to reopening old debates about how many Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps. And many have forgotten the name Auschwitz altogether.

BRIAN: But there is some good news. While basic details are receding from memory, 96% of Americans believe that the Holocaust occurred, and 93% believe that all students should learn it in school. Educating the public about the genocide and its relevance to today is the mission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The museum has a new exhibition. Americans and the Holocaust, which explores the reaction of the US public to the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

I recently took a trip to DC with one of our producers to check it out. We arrived on a Friday morning, and I was pleased to see just how many people were there.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank you.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank you.

BRIAN: Hi, I’m Brian Balogh.

MALE SPEAKER: Hi, Danny Green, great to meet you.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

FEMALE SPEAKER: –nice to meet you.

MALE SPEAKER: Nice to meet you, too.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank you so much

MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for coming.

BRIAN: Our guide for the day was curator Daniel Green.

DANIEL GREEN: Come on in this way, because it will give you a sense of where we want people to be at the beginning of the exhibition. You hear it a lot louder in the gallery, but we’re trying to attract people down the hall.

BRIAN: We walked up to a video screen showing a series of photographs and newsreels from the 1930s– people standing in breadlines, a lynching– Green says that these images put America in its historical context.

DANIEL GREEN: We see xenophobia, racism, violence, anti-Semitism in the United States, and we see the economy fall apart and Americans hungry and looking for jobs. Those insecurities and those fears are going to shape our response to Nazism, almost all the way along.

BRIAN: What do you expect people will be most surprised to learn from this exhibit?

DANIEL GREEN: I think they’ll be surprised to learn how much detailed information Americans had about the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe in real time.

BRIAN: The first part of the exhibit focuses on how the American media covered Nazi Germany in small towns in large cities across the United States.

DANIEL GREEN: Here, what you’re seeing on these magazines our coverage of Nazism in Time Magazine, Vanity Fair. Americans are very interested in Hitler as a new world leader. And anti-Semitism is not hidden. Joseph Goebbels on the cover of Time magazine July 10th, 1933, the tagline is, “Say it in your dreams. The Jews are to blame.”

MALE REPORTER (VINTAGE RECORDING): –as brutally as it did five years ago, is Goebbels’ persecution of the Jews. Sign posts, the city limits bear the legend, Jews not wanted. Jews keep out.

DANIEL GREEN: You see anti-Semitism in Germany. Americans going to the theaters could have seen this. In this theater, you’ll see Father Coughlin ranting against what he called Jewish communism and says, pledge with me to restore America to the Americans, elected representatives blaming America’s unemployment problem on immigration. And if only we shut down immigration, we wouldn’t have unemployment problems. So the themes are resonant today.

BRIAN: In November of 1938, Americans were immersed in coverage of Kristallnacht. Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and synagogues were vandalized en masse in territories controlled by Germany.

MALE REPORTER (VINTAGE RECORDING): President Roosevelt, in a statement without precedent, speaks out against the persecution of minorities in Germany. He says he could scarcely believe such things could occur. Acting on presidential instruction, Secretary of State–

BRIAN: The American press reports Kristallnacht as a nationwide terror attack by a government against its own citizens. And you see the banner headlines, we show how the president, Roosevelt, responds to Kristallnacht. We show how Congress responds to Kristallnacht with the idea of a child refugee bill that can’t make its way out of committee onto the floor for a vote. And we focus on these two polls in two weeks after Kristallnacht, one which shows that 94% of Americans disapprove of the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. And then, they’re asked whether we should have let in more Jewish exiles in that same week at the end of November. And more than 7 out of 10 say no.

MALE SPEAKER (VINTAGE RECORDING): This rise of intolerance in Germany today, the suffering being inflicted on an innocent and helpless people, grieve every–

DANIEL GREEN: We want visitors to ask hard questions as they come through this exhibition. A hard question is, why is there a gap between disapproval of atrocities abroad and a will to action on behalf of the victims.

BRIAN: I can see from where we’re standing in a series of public opinion poll questions. I hope the answers are on the back.

DANIEL GREEN: They are.

BRIAN: And it looks like they’re intended to guide us through this exhibit.

DANIEL GREEN: Right, and we decided early on that we wanted this to be Americans and the Holocaust, not the US government and the Holocaust. And so we thought, how do we get to what all Americans were thinking about. And the science of polling is imperfect. And it’s even less perfect in the ’30s and ’40s than it is now. But you see these major trends of isolationism, of fear of another depression, of reluctance to let in exiles, desire not to go to war consistently in all of these polls. And we hope that visitors who come through will say, oh, this is what was on American’s minds.

CHARLES LINDBERGH (RECORDING): The danger of the Roosevelt administration lies in its subterfuge. While its members have promised us peace, they have lead us to war, heedless of the platform upon which they were elected.

DANIEL GREEN: And here we show the America First Committee– the anti-war movement founded in 1940. Charles Lindbergh becomes the most popular spokesman of this. When he goes to Nazi Germany in October 1938, he’s awarded the service cross of the German eagle. This is the service cross that he was awarded– that Hermann Goering handed to him.

CHARLES LINDBERGH (RECORDING): If any of these groups– the British, the Jewish, or the administration– stops agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement.

DANIEL GREEN: We focus on this infamous speech he gives in Des Moines on September 11th, 1941, where he caused the Jews war agitators and he threatens them. He says their status in America will not be as secure if we go to war to fight Nazism.

MALE SPEAKER (VINTAGE RECORDING): December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

BRIAN: The United States does enter the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. And although many Americans were horrified by the treatment of Jews in Germany, America’s response to Pearl Harbor was to round up our own citizens with Japanese ancestry into what are called, at the time, concentration camps.

DANIEL GREEN: The contrast of these two magazines was really interesting to me. This is The Crisis. This is the NAACP’s magazine. The article is, “Americans in Concentration Camps,” September, 1942. And they say color seems to be the only reason why thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry are in concentration camps. In contrast, Life Magazine is writing about Manzanar, which they call “a scenic spot of lonely loveliness, where Japs are settled comfortably.”

BRIAN: The headline says, “Mountain Camp.”

DANIEL GREEN: Right, right. And Americans are for– and this poll was asking whether we’re doing the right thing rounding up Japanese aliens and removing them from the Pacific Coast, and 93% of Americans say yes. The question is asked about aliens, not about citizens, even though 2/3 of the Japanese-Americans were rounded up are citizens.

Also in America in 1942, Americans learn about what the Nazis called the “final solution,” the plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. And we asked in this last section of the exhibition within the context of war, which is the story, what do we do about the fact that we know this? There were no American reporters on the ground. So very often the tone of those articles is, we’ve been told that. It’s been said that two million Jews have been murdered.

But we don’t see, for the most part– there are a few Soviet photos that leak out– evidence of the atrocities that we think about today when we think about the Holocaust until after mass murder is over. It’s April and May of ’45. One of the things that I think about is, as Americans are going to the newsreels in April of ’45 to watch this newsreel Nazi murder mills, it’s also the moment that the president has died– the president for 12 years. As this information is leaking out, we’re celebrating the defeat of Nazism.

BRIAN: There’s a lot going on.

DANIEL GREEN: There’s a lot going on.

BRIAN: What would you like people to take away from this exhibit?

DANIEL GREEN: We want people to think about their roles and responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. One way to look at this exhibition is, what do we do when a democracy falls apart? What’s our responsibility to refugees? When should we enter a war that a lot of Americans consider a foreign war? When we learn that a population abroad is targeted for murder, what should we do about it?

I think you often see Americans blamed for not knowing history, sometimes made fun of on late-night programs right for not knowing history. But it’s our job to teach them this history. The challenge of putting together an exhibition and the challenge of public history is it’s the same content, but it’s got to mean something to an eighth grader and an 80-year-old who lived through it. If visitors, especially high school and college students, can understand that these questions also have a history in America, for us, that would be a great outcome.

BRIAN: Daniel Green is a historian at Northwestern University and curator of Americans in the Holocaust, an exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Joanne, Nathan, Ed. I just want to underscore what Danny Green believed to be the purpose of this whole exhibit– is for people who visited to do something with the information that they encounter. But what is it that they should do?