THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: DOCUMENTARY

Otto Frank--father of Anne, the teenager whose posthumously published diary became standard reading for students learning about the Holocaustfled with his family from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933. But the Nazis eventually followed him there. One target of their 1940 bombing campaign was the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam, where Frank's visa application was destroyed along with everything else.

In The U.S. and the Holocaust, a three-part PBS documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, the Frank family's repeatedly frustrated escape attempts epitomize the challenge facing Jews as they confronted a regime intent on eliminating them. Hitler initially sought to purify the Third Reich by pressuring Jews to emigrate. But other nations generally did not want them, which the Nazis thought proved their point. Meanwhile, Germany's invasions of other countries reduced the number of possible refuges.

The United States was an obvious candidate to accept people threatened by the Nazis. But decades of increasingly restrictive immigration policies had...