The US and the Holocaust: Ken Burns’s masterful documentary

BBC4’s The US and the Holocaust is, by Ken Burns’s standards, a fairly short opus, coming in at about six-and-a-half hours, said Carol Midgley in The Times. And “it is worth every minute”. Over three episodes, the documentary holds a mirror to the face of America (and the West), “and shows an ugly truth staring back: namely its tardiness in helping Jews to escape the evil of the Nazis”.

Made by Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein (The Vietnam War), the series is “peppered with depressing examples of companies cravenly trotting to the beat of antisemitic fervour” and politicians failing to act. It never “uses gimmicks” or talks down to the viewer, and it doesn’t do them the disservice of assuming they have short attention spans. It’s compelling, “harrowing” stuff.

What a “diligent, absorbing, serious, committed piece of astounding television” this is, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. Each frame brings “unforgettable laser bits of information”, such as that at one camp, 280,000 Jews were killed in a single month in 1942; or that “Hitler once gave an interview to Cosmopolitan”. Burns’s “skill is that not one of these tiny details is distracting, or isn’t apposite, or doesn’t ring true. A masterpiece.”

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Like the very best documentaries, it asks us “not just to remember the past, but to consider how we’d do things differently in the future”, said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. “An impactful coda, with scenes of recent synagogue shootings, white supremacist marches and the attack on Congress, reminds us that it could always happen again.”