And, of course, racism had long been entrenched here, not least of all toward Blacks and indigenous people, to the point where Hitler turned to America’s treatment of them - including Jim Crow laws - as models for his efforts to disenfranchise Jews. We learn about the strict anti-immigration law (the Johnson-Reed Act) passed in 1924 that included a tiny quota for immigrants from Eastern Europe. That false perspective led many Americans to see immigrants as fouling the effort to create some kind of superior race.

The film explores the theory of eugenics - selective breeding of the human population - that rose in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and went on to captivate the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Helen Keller. Some of the reasons predate the question of admitting refugees who were fleeing Hitler, and they include the economic fears triggered by the Great Depression. and the Holocaust.' LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA PBS/NYT In an image provided by Library of Congress, via PBS, an immigrant family looks at the Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island in New York in 1930, as seen in'The U.S. Those reasons don’t erase the fact that we failed so many desperate victims - 75 percent of the 6 million murdered Jews were already dead by the time we landed in France in 1944 - but they help us to understand why.

There is a plethora of reasons we did not allow many refugees into this country, even while we ultimately went to war against the sources of their torment, Hitler and the Nazis. and the Holocaust,” which is from filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, is not a finger-pointing attack so much as a detailed explication filled with nuance and context. One of the strengths of the PBS three-parter, which airs Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights at 8 on GBH 2, is that it provides us with the kinds of in-depth answers to all these questions that defy easy summarizing. And, most difficult of all, as xenophobia, antisemitism, white supremacy, and fascism continue to dog the promise and the premise of this country, have we learned anything from our inadequate response to Hitler’s genocide?

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