Useful Enemies

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 forty thousand angry demonstrators, the largest anti-Semitic demonstration in Cuban history.

To command the St. Louis, the Hamburg-Amerika 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 five hundred dollars on the head of each passenger. The bill came to about half a million dollars (nearly $8 million today). 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 “rescue” any passenger desperate enough to try to swim to freedom, and 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 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t answer, either.

President Roosevelt’s hands were not completely tied. Although U.S. immigration law prevented the St. Louis passengers from entering the country, he 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 17 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 the German captain: “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, they 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. 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 did not want European refugees, especially Jews. Second, if it had to accept some refugees under its strict quota system to save face, it would make it as difficult as possible for Jews to enter the country even if denial meant death. And if a few thousand Nazi collaborators ended up in the U.S. refugee potpourri, better them than Jews, who belonged in Palestine.

CHAPTER TWO The Triumph of Bigotry

The United States entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 with its “no refugees—especially Jews” policy intact. When Sweden requested help in rescuing Jewish children, and when England proposed a bilateral conference to discuss the refugee problem, America stalled and stalled, then stalled some more.

Neutral Sweden came up with a plan in early 1943 to save 20,000 Jewish children. At the time, it had good relations with Germany and felt confident that if it asked Hitler to release the children, he would, if only to keep Sweden sweet. Already bursting with 42,000 Jewish refugees, including almost all of neighboring Denmark’s Jews, tiny Sweden turned to England and the United States for help. It would welcome the 20,000 children, Sweden said, if England and the United States would share food and medical expenses and agree to resettle the children after the war. How could the two great countries refuse?

The British Foreign Office accepted the Swedish proposal immediately. The U.S. State Department waited five months to respond even though it knew, without a doubt, that Hitler was gassing Jews in death camps in Poland, that millions had already been murdered including 85 percent (2.8 million) of Polish Jews, and that Hitler didn’t plan to stop until he made Europe Judenrein, cleansed of Jews. Polish emissary Jan Karski, a Catholic, had made those facts clear to President Roosevelt during a visit to the Oval Office the previous year.

• • •

The Jewish underground had smuggled Karski into the Warsaw Ghetto and, disguised as a Ukrainian guard, into Izbica Lubelska, a concentration camp for Jews in eastern Poland. With the accuracy and coldness of a camera, Karski described to Roosevelt the atrocities he witnessed. When he finished he said: “I am convinced that there is no exaggeration in the accounts of the plight of the Jews. Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.”