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Why Cuba
didn't permit the St. Louis to enter Cuba in 1939...
This article is an excerpt from Richard Rashke’s new book, Useful
Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War
Criminals. (Delphinium Books, 2013) Mr. Rashke posts a
weekly blog on the topic at his web site:
http://www.richardrashke.com/
The headline above is by Walter Lippmann.
Thanks so much to author Richard Rashke for sharing this excerpt from
his book. It may be purchased through all the usual outlets:
http://www.richardrashke.com/buy-the-books/
A peek into the book can be made at the website of Amazon.com:
<http://www.amazon.com/Useful-Enemies-Demjanjuk-Open-Door-ebook/dp/B00ARQXXE2#reader_B00ARQXXE2>
CHAPTER ONE
Anywhere But Here
By all standards of fairness, the U.S. record on World War II refugees
is embarrassing for a country that prides itself on its generosity.
Beginning with the Evian Conference in 1938 and culminating in the
Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the United States was blatantly selfish,
timid, callous, and discriminatory. It is a chapter of history that
Americans would prefer to leave resting in the coffin of ancient
history.
If the United States was slow to admit World War II refugees from
Europe, it was a tortoise in the hunt to find and expel thousands of
former Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding among the 400,000-500,000
refugees it had been shamed into accepting. American sentiment was to
"let sleeping Nazis lie" and the United States only entered the hunt,
bickering and screaming, in the late 1970s-more than thirty years after
the war. The reasons it took so long are clear: Most Americans couldn't
have cared less about a bunch of former Nazis as long as they behaved
themselves; some felt that old Nazis were better than Jews; the U.S.
government didn't want to take time from the Cold War to smoke out
former Nazis who were now loyal, contributing members of American
society; and America had dark secrets to protect.
o o o
The first time the United States showed its hand in the refugee poker
game was at the international, invitation-only conference in Evian-les-Bains,
France, in the summer of 1938, six months before Kristallnacht, Hitler's
first major salvo in his war against Jews. More than 150,000 German Jews
had anticipated the murder and mayhem of Kristallnacht and fled Germany
in the vain hope of finding a home elsewhere. When Hitler annexed
Austria (in the forcible union known as the Anschluss) in March 1938,
another 200,000 Jews became either homeless or at risk.
Most of the wandering German and Austrian Jews wanted to settle in
Palestine, but the British, who controlled that territory, had set a
rigid quota. Great Britain was not about to turn Palestine into a
dumping ground for European Jews whom other countries, including the
United States, didn't want. To do so would risk yet another Palestinian
Arab uprising.
Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist who would later become the first president of
Israel, parsed the Jewish problem with laser precision. In an address to
an international refugee conference in London, he said: "The world
seemed to be divided into two parts-those places where Jews could not
live and those where they could not enter."
All eyes were on America, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't
relish the spotlight. Most Americans were nervous isolationists who
didn't want to be drawn into someone else's war, and a good part of the
working classes and WASP intellectuals were openly anti-Semitic.
Roosevelt knew he had to do something. But what?
Ten days after the Anschluss, Roosevelt called for an international
conference to address the growing refugee problem, which he foresaw was
much larger than a few hundred thousand homeless Jews. France
volunteered to host the meeting at Evian.
The call to action was more political than humanitarian. America was
slowly emerging from the Great Depression and, although unemployment was
gradually dipping, it still stood at a staggering 19 percent. Roosevelt
found himself facing the twin pressures of isolationism and overt
anti-Semitism. The latter had spiked in the 1930s with the advent of a
string of anti-Semitic publications and the popular anti-Semitic radio
addresses of Charles Coughlin, a Detroit Catholic priest. Father
Coughlin had a following of more than forty million, and the Catholic
hierarchy made no attempt to silence him.
Opinion polls at the time illustrate Roosevelt's political dilemma. A
1938 American Institute of Public Opinion poll asked the following
question: "Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany
to come to the United States to live?" Seventy-seven percent said no.
Other polls reported that one-third of Americans thought the government
should economically restrict Jews and one out of ten favored racially
segregating Jews as well as deporting them. Many members of Congress and
the State Department, including U.S. consulate officials who had great
discretionary powers in granting visas, reflected the nation's
anti-Semitism. The Veterans of Foreign Wars opposed the Evian Conference
and called for the end of all immigration. And the American Coalition of
Patriotic Societies challenged Roosevelt to "stop the leak before it
became a flood."
What was a president to do?
If he sought to admit more Jews into the country, Roosevelt knew he
would be pouring gas on the embers of isolationism and anti-Semitism,
thus running the risk of losing the upcoming presidential election. A
consummate politician, Roosevelt called for a high-profile conference.
It was a deft sleight of hand that would simultaneously make the United
States appear humanitarian; offer a sop to Jewish voters; win applause
from the majority of Americans for not caving in to international
pressure; and discourage the unemployed from staging angry
demonstrations. Roosevelt invited thirty-three other countries to
Evian. Only Italy and South Africa declined.
A lone New York Times reporter, Anne O’Hare McCormick, sought to
challenge Roosevelt, the conference attendees, and the American public.
With amazing insight and clarity, she wrote:
It is heart breaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings
around our consulates in Vienna and other cities waiting in suspense for
what happens at Evian...It is not a question of how many unemployed this
country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of
civilization...Can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away
with this policy of extermination?
Roosevelt wasn’t listening. His invitation to Evian had reduced the
conference to a cruel charade even before the first tap of the gavel.
It said in part: “No country would be expected or asked to receive a
greater number of immigrants than is permitted by its existing
legislation” Having said that, the conference challenged the
participating countries to accept more German and Austrian (Jewish)
refugees either under their quota systems or current immigration laws,
something the United States itself was unwilling to do.
Evian was little more than a ten-day paid vacation at the Royal
Hotel, a luxury resort on Lake Geneva. Casino gambling, pleasure
cruises on the lake, outings to Chamonix for summer skiing, five-star
dining, mineral baths, massages, golf. In the end, the conference
turned out to be historic, but not in the way Roosevelt had anticipated
or hoped.
Hitler believed that western democracies were cowardly and
hypocritical. Evian proved him right. The United States did not send a
single government official, high or low, to represent it at the
conference because it didn’t want to antagonize Hitler. Instead,
Roosevelt chose a friend, steel tycoon Myron C. Taylor, and gave him the
title of Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary. One of Taylor’s
mandates was to ban the use of the words “German... Hitler...Jew” during
the conference, to which Third Reich observers had been invited.
Roosevelt didn’t want to upset them.
Prior to the conference, the United States and Great Britain struck an
under-the-table deal: Britain agreed not bring up the fact that the
United States was not even filling its legal German-Austrian
emigration quota, if America would not propose that Palestine accept
more Jews. As a result, the word “Palestine” was added to the list of
verboten words. Also verboten would be any mention of the
fact that out of its l938 combined German-Austrian emigration quota of
27,370, the United States had only granted 18,000 visas so far that
year. Of course, any Jew from these two countries could apply for a
visa at the appropriate U.S. consulate. But there was a hitch. The
United States required a certificate of good conduct from the German
police from whom the Jews were fleeing.
Ambassador Taylor tried to put a positive spin on U.S. reluctance to
admit more refugees. He promised that more German and Austrian refugees
would be accepted under its existing quota and that U.S. consuls would
be instructed to make it easier for them to acquire visas. In effect,
the United States offered nothing. Taylor was hoping, of course, that
countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand with their vast
territories and small populations would open their borders.
One by one the conference delegates took the microphone and repeated the
same message as if rehearsed before the conference: we are saturated
with refugees and, therefore, regrettably cannot accept any more; we
are willing to accept refugees as long as they are agricultural
experts (by law there were no Jewish farmers in Germany and Austria);
and we already have too many merchants and intellectuals and,
regretfully, cannot accept any more (thus eliminating most Jews).
Although the underlying anti-Semitism in the country-by-country refusal
was unspoken in most instances, it was blatant in the responses of
several countries:
Australia said it currently had no real racial problem and was not eager
to import one.
Brazil said it would accept refugees if a Christian baptismal
certificate were attached to the visa application.
Great Britain promised to accept refugee children but not their parents
out of fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. It did eventually accept 9,000
Jewish children.
New Zealand noted its policy of admitting only immigrants of British
birth or heritage. Since the conference invitation said participating
countries were not expected to change their immigration laws, New
Zealand said it wouldn’t.
Switzerland brazenly stated that it had as little use for Jews as
Germany had and promised to adopt measures to protect Switzerland from
being swamped by Jewish refugees. Switzerland would soon require all
German Jewish passports to be stamped with a large “J.”
None of the Evian attendees seemed to understand the scope of the
refugee problem confronting them. It was not just about a few thousand
homeless German and Austrian Jews. It was about the soon-to-be millions
of homeless non-Jewish refugees who were certain to overwhelm Europe.
As one analyst at the time put it: “Viewed as a whole…this potential
problem is vast and almost unimaginable.”
The conference ended with a resolution to establish a permanent
Inter-governmental Committee on Refugees to study the problem and design
a framework to deal with it. The only one who thought Evian was a
success was Myron Taylor, who reported to the State Department: “I am
satisfied that we accomplished the purpose for which...the meeting at
Evian was called.”
The Evian Conference was a bonanza for the Third Reich. The pro-Nazi
German press interpreted it as a tacit approval of the Reich’s handling
of the Jewish problem. And Hitler laughed all the way to Auschwitz.
Evian only proved what Hitler had suspected all along: he could do
anything he wanted to European Jews and the Western democracies would
turn a blind eye. To some Jewish observers, Evian had become “Hitler’s
Green Light to Genocide.”
No one explained the Jewish perception of Evian clearer or better than
Golda Meir, a conference observer who would later become prime minister
of Israel. In her memoir, My Life, she wrote with great angst:
"I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand
what I felt at Evian—a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.
I wanted to get up and scream at them all. Don’t you know that these
numbers are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives
in concentration camps or wandering around the world like lepers, if you
won’t let them in?’”
In sum, the Evian Conference of July 1938 betrayed the Jews who trusted
in world humanity, rendered them worse off than before, and opened the
door to genocide. As one Jewish analyst put it: The thirty-two
countries met, ostensibly, to help the Jews out of the jaws of the
German beast; instead they tossed them to the sharks.
Four months after Evian, the Nazis celebrated Krystallnacht
during which thousands of Jewish businesses and shops were destroyed,
hundreds beaten to within an inch of their lives, and hundreds more
imprisoned and killed. Hitler was right. The world responded to
Krystallnacht as it did at Evian—with shock, condemnation, and no
action.
In May of the following year, l939, the German transatlantic liner
St. Louis steamed down the Elbe River into the North Atlantic.
Flags were flapping in the wind and well-wishers waved from the Hamburg
pier. On board the eight-deck ship were 938 paying passengers, all but
one of whom were Jews fleeing Germany for their lives. They had all
purchased landing permits from the Cuban government. Several had
relatives, spouses, or children waiting for them in Havana. Most were
on the waiting list for visas to the United States and planned to stay
in Cuba until America granted them entry.
The voyage was a setup. Cuba had no intention of letting them off the
ship. Caving in to anti-Semitic pressure, Cuban President Frederico
Laredo Bru signed Decree 938 eight days before the ship departed
Germany. The decree invalidated the landing permits. No one had
told the passengers.
It was more than hiding the truth. The Reich was playing an espionage
game and the St. Louis passengers were its pawns. Havana was the
center of German intelligence and espionage activities directed against
the United States. Nazi intelligence officers there had purchased top
secret documents detailing U.S. submarine designs and needed a way to
smuggle them into Germany. The plan was simple: a Nazi agent, planted
as a St. Louis crewman, would disembark in Havana, rendezvous
with a Nazi intelligence agent there, carry the documents back to the
ship, and deliver them to Berlin as soon as the St. Louis
returned to Hamburg with its Jewish cargo.
Over and above the espionage payoff was the PR factor. Nazi Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make the
United States look like a hypocrite in the eyes of the world. The
St. Louis would show the German people that the Reich was serious
about ridding the country of its Jews. Then, it would demonstrate to
the world that the Reich was allowing Jews to leave freely and
unharmed. And finally, it would make concrete in human terms what Evian
had told the world in theoretical terms: nobody, especially the United
States, was willing to take German and Austrian Jews.
To make sure Cuban President Bru would not change his mind under
pressure from the United States and the world community, Goebbels sent
fourteen Nazi propagandists to Cuba to stoke the smoldering flames of
anti-Semitism. The strategy worked. Five days before the St. Louis
steamed out of Hamburg harbor, the streets of Havana boiled over with
40,000 angry demonstrators, the largest anti-Semitic demonstration in
Cuban history.
To command the St. Louis, the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line,
operating under the direction of the Reich, had chosen Gustav Schroeder,
an experienced seaman and staunch anti-Nazi, to captain the ship. Even
though the Reich didn’t trust him, he was perfect window dressing for
the charade.
The St. Louis reached Cuban territorial waters in mid-May. To
the shock and anger of Captain Schroeder and the passengers, Cuba
refused to allow passengers to disembark until a sales transaction was
completed. President Bru put a price of $500 on the head of each
passenger. The bill came to about half a million dollars ($730
million).
It was a bluff. Bru knew the passengers didn’t have that kind of money,
and he gambled on the assumption that no one else would come to their
rescue. Then, when an international coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish
leaders called his bluff and deposited the money in the Chase National
Bank of Cuba, Bru raised the ante to $650 per head. When an
international negotiator tried to bargain, Bru abruptly removed his
offer from the table.
President Bru’s denial of entry left Captain Schroeder with two
choices: return to Hamburg as ordered by the Hamburg-Amerika line or
find another country willing to accept more than nine hundred refugees.
Gambling on the generosity of America, Schroeder sailed north into
international waters off the coast of Miami and aimlessly cruised up and
down waiting for either a change of heart from Bru or a message of
welcome from the United States. From the decks of the wandering ship,
passengers could see blinking lights of hope from the luxury hotels
lining Miami’s beaches. A Coast Guard cutter shadowed the ship,
not so much to prevent it from docking as to
Arescue@
any passenger desperate enough to try to swim to freedom as well as to
keep the ship in sight in case President Bru had a change of heart.
Captain Schroeder sent a message to Roosevelt. He didn’t answer. The
St. Louis’s children cabled a plea for help to Mrs. Roosevelt.
She didn’t answer either.
Roosevelt’s hands were not completely tied. Although U.S. immigration
law prevented the St. Louis passengers from entering the country,
Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to accept them, a
politically dangerous move. It would have been unfair to the 2,500 Jews
already waiting in Cuba for visas, as well as to the many more thousands
in Europe, all of whom were in line ahead of the St. Louis
passengers. It would have triggered a wave of protest from the
anti-immigrant lobby and encouraged the other ships filled with Jews
roaming the seas in search of a home to head for the United States.
To complicate the issue even more, the U.S. unemployment rate was still
over seventeen percent and national feelings of isolationism and
anti-Semitism had not changed since the conference at Evian the previous
year. Courage aside, Roosevelt was not prone to commit political
suicide.
The State Department visa division didn’t keep Captain Schroeder waiting
very long. “The German refugees,” it ruled, “must wait their turn before
they may be admissible to the United States.” And immigration officials
in Miami cabled the following blunt message to Captain Schroeder: “The
St. Louis will not be allowed to dock here, or at any U.S.
Port.” To further encourage the problem to go away, the United States
offered the ship no water, food, or fuel.
The international press followed the St. Louis story with great
sympathy as Goebbels had hoped. The United States was no better than
Nazi Germany, it wrote. It didn’t want German and Austrian Jews
either. As the St. Louis pointed its bow back toward Germany and
the lights of Miami faded like a dream, hope turned to despair. The
passengers cabled President Roosevelt one last plea: “Repeating urgent
appeal for help for the passengers of the St. Louis. Help them,
Mr. President.” There was no response.
The passengers knew with awful certainty that a return to Hamburg was a
death sentence. Fearing mass suicides, Captain Schroeder set up suicide
watch patrols. In a wild attempt to save themselves, a small group of
refugees forcefully commandeered the ship. Captain Schroeder talked
them out of their futile mutiny and never pressed charges.
After Canada and Great Britain also refused entry and the other European
countries did not volunteer to accept any of the refugees, Captain
Schroeder devised plan B. He would shipwreck the St. Louis off
the coast of England and set the vessel on fire. Under international
law, Great Britain would be forced to accept the refugees as shipwrecked
passengers. The plan, however, never came to fruition. Before he could
execute it, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, and France agreed to divide
up the passengers.
The voyage of the St. Louis was an espionage and public relations
success for the Reich. As for Captain Schroeder, the Federal Republic
of Germany awarded him its Order of Merit medal after the war, and
Israel posthumously honored him as a Righteous Among the Nations. But
254 of the St. Louis Jews in Europe weren’t so lucky. They were
murdered in the Holocaust, most in the killing camps of Auschwitz and
Sobibor.
The Evian Conference and the St. Louis affair firmly established
the first two planks in U.S. refugee policy. First, the United States
does not want European refugees, especially Jews. Second, if it must
accept some refugees under its strict quota system to save face, it will
make it as difficult as possible for Jews to enter the country even if
denial means death. And if a few thousand Nazi collaborators end up in
the U.S. refugee potpourri, better them than Jews, who belonged in
Palestine.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Rashke’s new book, Useful
Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War
Criminals. Mr. Rashke posts a weekly blog on the topic at his web
site:
http://www.richardrashke.com/
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