Posted on 09/19/2022 7:52:15 PM PDT by TigerClaws
If you’re going to make a documentary film about America’s response to the Holocaust, shouldn’t you at least know how many Jewish refugees were admitted to the United States during those years? Surprisingly, filmmaker Ken Burns appears to be unaware of that basic information—or is for some reason seeking to misrepresent the facts.
Burns has announced that his forthcoming film will challenge the “myth” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned Europe’s Jews. That remarkable assertion flies in the face of the historical record that numerous scholars have thoroughly documented. Nonetheless, in recent interviews, Burns has claimed that during the Roosevelt years, the United States “accepted more refugees than any other sovereign nation.” That’s simply false.
Start with 1933, the year Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany. America’s immigration laws would have permitted the entry of 25,957 German immigrants. But the Roosevelt administration suppressed immigration far below what the law allowed. That year, only 1,324 German nationals were admitted to the United States. Smaller numbers came from other European countries—961 Poles, 864 Hungarians, 236 Rumanians (and not all of them were Jewish refugees.)
By contrast, the British government in 1933 admitted over 33,000 European Jews to British-ruled Palestine, plus thousands more to the United Kingdom itself, and small numbers to other British controlled-territories.
In the years to follow, the contrast between the Roosevelt administration and the British government was even more stark. In 1934, the U.S. accepted 3,515 German citizens—less than 14% of that year’s quota—while the British admitted about 50,000 Jewish refugees to the U.K. and British territories (mostly Palestine).
Later in the 1930s, the British began reducing Jewish immigration to Palestine in response to Arab terrorism—but they still took in more European Jewish refugees than the United States did.
And it wasn’t just the British. Consider 1938, when the Roosevelt administration admitted 17,872 German and Austrian refugees. Both the British and the Japanese rulers of Shanghai each took in a similar number that year. France, too, accepted more Jews than the U.S. that year.
During the years 1939-1941, the overall picture changed, but the United States still did not accept “more refugees than any other sovereign nation,” as Ken Burns erroneously claims.
From 1939 to 1941, the Soviets took in an estimated 300,000 Jews fleeing from Nazi-occupied Poland, according to the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. That was far more than the number of Jewish refugees the Roosevelt administration admitted during those years.
In 1942, the numbers admitted by the American and British governments were similar. In 1943, however, there was a significant gap between the two. That year, the United States admitted just 1,286 German immigrants. The British, by contrast, admitted 8,507 Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1943, as well as small numbers to other British territories. Those trends continued in 1944 and 1945.
Obviously these immigration numbers do not change the cruel reality of England’s White Paper policy, which blocked most Jewish immigration to Palestine; nor do they change the facts about the Soviet regime’s mistreatment of the Jews in its territory. But the numbers show that Ken Burns is seriously mistaken when he contends that the Roosevelt administration’s record on refugees was better than that of any other country.
None of these immigration statistics are a secret. They all appear in publicly-available Immigration and Naturalization Service charts, which historians have been quoting for decades. If Burns has not seen the charts—or has not read any of the many history books that cite them—that’s cause for concern. If he knows the true figures but is choosing to distort them for partisan purposes, that’s even more troubling.
Sheer numbers aside, there is the problem of the moral relativism inherent in the argument that Burns is making. The Roosevelt administration’s response to the Holocaust should not be minimized or excused just because other countries also did much less than they could have.
Moreover, is it really impressive if the president of a country claiming to represent high ideals of humanitarianism was slightly more generous in admitting refugees than, say, the military juntas ruling in South America? Is that the moral standard by which we as Americans judge our country and our leaders?
In fact, the rulers of the tiny South American country of Bolivia—which is only 424,000 square miles—took in more than 20,000 Jewish refugees during the Nazi years. What does that say about the United States, which is nearly 3.8-million square miles?
Translating Burns’s point into more contemporary terms, is it really a badge of pride that America’s meager response to the Darfur genocide was slightly better than the response of, say, Peru or Lithuania? We have a right to expect better from our country.
We also have a right to expect better from our filmmakers. While a full assessment of Burns’s film must await its release, the inaccurate statements that he has been making about the historical record are cause for concern.
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.
Ken Burns is a dishonorable Democrat propagandist.
V8 head smack. How could I have not noticed.
But then…
When has Ken Burns ever NOT distorted any historical topic he has worked on?
“BASEBALL” was rife with “WHITE MAN BAD” guilt trip themes.“
Indeed!!
I could tolerate it back in the 1990’s because I loved baseball, but I can’t watch it at all now. Every last episode has to include a prolonged segment of how evil and inferior white people were to the REAL great players (blacks)
“And I have read that FDR appointed more Jews to judgeships and cabinet positions than any previous president.”
How many of them spoke up about the ship that got sent back to Europe?
FDR’s administration wouldn’t let the Jews on the St. Louis ship into the US.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/voyage-of-the-st-louis
Democrats are never wrong in Burns’ world.
“Nonetheless, in recent interviews, Burns has claimed that during the Roosevelt years, the United States “accepted more refugees than any other sovereign nation.” That’s simply false.”
You contend this is false then focus on Jewish refugees; is it possible that during “the Roosevelt years” (13 years), we did in fact take in more refugees (of any faith) - from China, Ukraine, Spain, for example, in the 1930s, and Europe, Philippines, etc. in the early 1940s?
Just thinking out loud; it was a long presidency with problems around the world (before Nazism perpetrated its own).
makes you wonder what else he has fabricated and lied about.
Burns reminds me of Jimmy Carter.
The old school Southern Democrat that views Israel as an enemy of Christianity.
Not very common anymore but remnant is still there.
I recall in a retrospect of The Civil War series, Burns took as his own the most profound comment made by Foote or anyone one else during the entire series. The Civil War made us into an “is” instead of an “are”
ping
If you are thinking or the two who escaped from Auschwitz with their detailed report about it being genocthat wasn’t until early 1944.
If you are thinking or the two who escaped from Auschwitz with their detailed report about it being genocide that wasn’t until early 1944.
Anti-Semitism was pretty much de rigueur throughout Europe at the time Hitler came to power. But Krystallnacht was a severe escalation, and should have driven home that the Nazis were taking it to the next level.
FDR did not "DESPISE" Jews. He did much for them. That he could have done more does not negate all he did do.
In politics, few constituencies get everything they want. (I rarely get anything I want.) It rarely means that you are "DESPISED."
I only repeat what I hear, combined with policies at the time (really, was it so hard to bomb a few railroad bridges to Auschwitz near the end of the war, or to take in a boatload of Jews). For FDR, that seems to be a policy of Jew hating to me.
EoZ discusses Burns’ documentary and its curious treatment of Palestine https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/09/0913-links-pt2-anti-zionists-advocate.html:
For the past five months, in interviews and press releases about his upcoming documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns has been claiming that the Roosevelt administration accepted more refugees than any other sovereign nation during the Nazi era.
The phrase “sovereign nation” struck us as odd. Ordinarily, one would say, “than any other country.” Why emphasize the word “sovereign?”
Now Burns has let the cat out of the bag. Apparently responding to criticism of his handling of the immigration statistics, Burns admitted to an interviewer from The Daily Beast on September 4 that he has been using the term ‘sovereign nation’ to distinguish [it] from the fact that people escaped to other places, like Palestine.
Why is Burns trying to disqualify Palestine from the conversation? Why resort to a technicality about sovereignty in order to try to push Palestine out of the discussion?
Even though Palestine was not sovereign, the ruling authorities there – the British – certainly were a sovereign power and they had to make a decision about how many Jews to admit either to the United Kingdom or to the territories under its control. Likewise, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to make a decision about how many Jews he would admit either to the mainland United States or to the non-sovereign territories it controlled, such as the US Virgin Islands
Burns will do a doc on how great the clintons are and obama and biden. Blame all troubles on white conservatives and praise Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
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