This May will see the 83rd anniversary of the expulsion of the refugee ship, the MV St. Louis from U.S. waters and the forced return of 963 Jewish refugees from Hitler’s’ Germany back to Europe where most of them perished in the concentration camps as Germany conquered its European neighbours. The story was captured in a book written in 1974 by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts entitled Voyage of the Damned, and was adapted for a film with the same title, released in 1976.
The passenger ship, the MV St. Louis was built in Germany and travelled the transatlantic route between Hamburg, Halifax and New York. Occasionally it would travel on to the West Indies. On this voyage, the Captain Gustav Schröder, a German Christian, was well aware of the cargo he carried and vowed to find a safe port in which to discharge his passengers. They had paid for a voyage to Cuba which said they would take the refugees and it was there that the vessel first travelled. When they arrived at Cuba the Cuban authorities would not recognise them as refugees but labelled them as tourists. That meant they had to buy tourist visas; at US$500 each. Only twenty-nine on board had that amount and they disembarked. The rest stayed on the boat as negotiations continued. Two passengers committed suicide when they learned that they were being expelled from Cuba.
The vessel and its passengers then set sail for nearby Florida and sought asylum. The US would not let them land and they stood off Florida. Key administration figures in the Roosevelt Government, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, tried to persuade the Cubans to allow them in but they refused. On 4 June 1939 the US sent the MV St Louis away from US waters. There was an abortive try by Canadian well-wishers to find them a place in Canada but the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, refused his permission as he stated this would attract a flood of Jewish refugees.
Captain Gustav Schröder vowed he wouldn’t take the refugees back to Germany and tried to find someplace that would take them. He sailed back to Europe and docked at Antwerp, Belgium. The United Kingdom finally agreed to take 288 of the passengers. These were picked up by other boats and transported to safety in the UK. The remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp; 224 were accepted by France, 214 by Belgium, and 181 by the Netherlands. Their safety was temporary. As Hitler’s’ troops marched across Europe the returnees were caught and met the fate of other European Jews. About 254 returnees perished in the camps.
After the war, Captain Schröder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany and in 1993 Gustav Schröder was posthumously named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel in recognition of his heroism in finding safe haven for his passengers on the MV St. Louis.
The Horrible Treatment of Jewish Refugees by the U.S. Government During WWII
Sal Writes, History, 5/2/22
83 percent of Americans strongly opposed their admission into the country.
The Nazi Party’s Rise to Power and Ideologies Drive Out the Jews
When the Nazi Party rose to power under Adolf Hitler, their ideologies of national and racial superiority spread through Germany and established their control over the country in the 1930s. Their policies and laws actively sought to stigmatize and persecute groups of individuals who were considered to be ‘outsiders’ and enemies of the state. These groups included Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti people, and political opponents.
Violence against the Jews, specifically, had become widespread; their synagogues, businesses, and homes were being targeted and thousands upon thousands of Jewish people were being interned at concentration camps for extended periods.
By making life incredibly challenging for Jews in Germany, official German policies motivated the Jewish community to flee from the country. They were forbidden from working most well-paying and esteemed jobs, from renting and owning homes in many locations, and from having ownership of their financial assets and access to free mobility. Antisemitic propaganda fostered an increasingly violent climate for European Jews and fleeing from the country became necessary for their survival.
Initially, the Jews were offered asylums by neighboring countries like France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia; however, German occupation spread throughout the continent rapidly and drove them out from those countries as well.
As desperate Jews from Europe fled a terrifying regime, they attempted to find refuge in the U.S.; unfortunately, however, the American government and people were not too eager to extend a helping hand. They were concerned that accepting refugees would put their own citizens at risk and did not believe that the refugee crisis was their problem to fix.
The crisis was unfolding in the midst of a global economic crisis: The Great Depression, a period when many also feared that accepting immigrants would place an extra burden on the country’s economy. Additionally, feelings of fear, hatred, and distrust also motivated American immigration policies and sentiments. Many leaders like Father Charles Coughlin (also known as the ‘radio priest,’ preached antisemitism to millions of people, accusing the Jews of being financially manipulative and seeking to take over the world. Even Henry Ford was a prominent antisemitic voice in the nation.
While some individuals like First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt were allies and actively fought for the liberalization of immigration laws, they were only able to help a handful of individual refugees; their efforts were mostly ineffective in changing national policies. Those who were in power in the State Department enforced strict immigration laws that created nearly impenetrable barriers for Jewish refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. For example, the visa form was 8 feet long and printed in small type. Policies like these were described by many as “paper walls that meant the difference between life and death” because even though approximately 200,000 Jews did manage to enter the U.S. between 1933 and 1945, a larger number was either turned away or died trying to enter the country.
A Ship Filled with Jewish Refugees was Turned Away by the U.S.
On May 13, 1939, 935 people, most of whom were German Jews, fled from Hamburg on a ship called St. Louis. The ship had set sail for Cuba, but for most refugees on board, the goal was to get to the U.S; they had applied for their visas and were planning on moving to the U.S. (from Cuba) once their visas were approved. U.S. immigration laws during this time had set extremely strict quotas that placed a limit on immigrants entering the country (especially those from eastern and southern Europe).
Even though the passengers of St. Louis had arranged for their documents before embarking on the one-way trip, Cuba decided to change its visa policy without prior notice. The Cuban government declared that old admission documents would no longer be accepted; when St. Louis docked in Cuba, only 26 passengers were allowed to get off, while the rest of the 900 were not.
At the beginning of June, St. Louis was forced to leave the Cuban waters and it turned to Miami instead; however, as soon as the ship reached the Miami harbor, the Coast Guard began tailing it. At this point, the U.S. government had the authority and ability to allow the exhausted and scared passengers off the ship and into their land, but it refused. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that he had never issued an official order for the ship to be turned away, but the fact of the matter was that his government had already made the decision and he had not interceded.
The ship sailed in circles around the coast of Miami for the next few days, until it was forced to sail back to Europe and the refugees were scattered across different European countries. Most of the passengers who ended up in Great Britain survived, but the ones who were sent to the Netherlands, France, and Belgium were sent to Nazi concentration camps shortly after the German’s power spread through most of Europe. Out of the 935 people on board St. Louis, 254 died in the Holocaust.
A Growing National Threat?
According to the Washington Post, in 1940,
“the complaints and tips on acts against the national defense reached the astounding maximum of nearly 3,000 a day.”
The warning about spies was often referred to as a ‘fifth column,’ and began to dominate a large part of American culture soon after the Second World War broke out. In 1940, when Nazi Germany defeated France, Americans worried that enemy agents were responsible for the downfall of the loss.
When a poll was conducted among the American public, results revealed that percent of Americans believed that the Germans had placed spies in the country, while 22 percent of the participants were unsure about their answer. Additionally, cautionary tales about spies in the United States had gained popularity and were being spread among the public through various media outlets. Even President Roosevelt himself called international spies a threat to national security.
The Story of Herbert Bahr Used to Deny Jewish Entry into the U.S.
In 1942, the SS Drottningholm had set sail from Sweden, carrying hundreds of Jewish refugees who hoped to flee to New York City in the U.S. Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr was one of these refugees. Bahr was a 28-year-old German man who sought entry into the U.S. for the same reason as his fellow passengers aboard the ship; however, during his interview with five different government agencies, he was accused of being a Nazi spy and given the death penalty for attempting to leak American industrial secrets to the Gestapo. The U.S. would proceed to use the story of Bahr as an excuse to deny thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe.
While Bahr was being tried, the FBI released propaganda films that boasted of their capture of German spies; they said that they had “guarded the secrets, given the Army and Navy its striking force in the field.” Films and other forms of media that contained comments and messages like these instilled a deep-seated fear of refugees among the American public, with most of these suspicions being directed at all foreigners (not just ethnic Germans).
Bahr was sentenced to 30 years in prison and he lived long enough to tell his story. In 1946, after the Second World War came to a close, he was called to the stand in the trial of another accused spy. After he revealed all the information he had on ‘spy tricks’ he claimed to have learned from Gestapo, he was returned to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
The Extent of Bahr’s Case’s Influence on American Immigration Policies
Today, government officials in the U.S. and Europe continue to call for refugee bans in the name of national security; a parallel can be drawn between immigration statuses today and during WWII. While today’s refugee crisis may not be exactly the same as the mass migrations that occurred during WWII, governments could still stand to learn from the mistakes they have made in the past.
At the time of the Holocaust, the governments and the media “went along with the fears of security-minded people.” They used rare occurrences (like Bahr’s) to justify their policies and extensive screenings for refugees and immigrants, even though among thousands of refugees, only a handful were accused spies.
The U.S. had a poor track record of offering asylum long before they discovered Bahr; with everything that happened with the passengers aboard St. Louis, the American government had proven that offering humanitarian aid had never been a priority and that the concern about refugee spies (after Bahr’s case) had been blown far out of proportion.
The American public’s conception of the Nazis and what they thought was the ‘Nazi plan for America,’ swayed their perception of refugees as a security threat to the U.S. Even though the arrested spies were mostly depicted pre-judiciously (because of their fascist ideologies), the American public had grown to fear German spies among them who had not yet been caught. The public was not informed about the ratio of success to failure for German spies in the U.S., which is why they continued to remain on the defensive against all refugees who could be a potential threat.
References
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4588&context=open_access_etds
http://www.crfimmigrationed.org/lessons-for-teachers/144-hl5
