Two-thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II in a systematic, relentless process that still exceeds our ability to comprehend its origins and consequences. The Final Solution, which was the Nazi plan to exterminate all European Jews, wasn't implemented until 1942, but Hitler's government had begun openly dehumanizing, harassing, and attacking Jews upon taking power nine years earlier.
Even when the Nazi death machine kicked into high gear, America kept its doors mostly closed to Jews, as filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein recount in The U.S. and the Holocaust, a new three-part documentary series on PBS.
