Useful Enemies

After stalling Sweden for five months, the State Department made a face-saving counterproposal: The United States would accept the Swedish plan only if it would include in the 20,000 Jewish children some Norwegian, non-Jewish orphans. The United States was worried about an anti-Semitic American outcry—our soldiers are dying just to save Jews.

By the time the amended U.S. plan finally reached Sweden—eight months after the original plan was proposed—Sweden’s relationship with Germany had become strained. Convinced that Hitler would never release the children, Sweden scuttled the plan. No one knows how many of the twenty thousand children Sweden had hoped to save were murdered.

Around the same time Sweden proposed its save-the-children plan, the British Foreign Office suggested a British-American conference in Bermuda to discuss both the Jewish and looming non-Jewish refugee problem. Once again, the United States stalled. When it couldn’t delay any longer, it tried to take credit for the idea, angering the British Foreign Office, which was in dire need of good press.

The tentative U.S. plan was to ask Hitler, through neutral intermediaries, to release several million Jewish refugees who were in German-occupied territory. If Hitler refused, the reasoning went, his moral position would be further compromised. When visiting British foreign secretary Anthony Eden was informed of the plan, he observed that any attempt to ask Hitler for anything fell into the realm of the “absolutely fantastic.”

In light of Eden’s criticism, Washington scuttled its tentative plan.

Ultimately, the United States gave its conference negotiators the following secret orders:

• Do not offer to accept any more Jews into the United States.

• Do not pledge funds for any rescue operations.

• Do not offer naval escorts for ships carrying any kind of refugees.

• Do not offer any refugee space on empty U.S. ships.

The Bermuda Conference was doomed to shame. It was structured by diplomats in the U.S. Department of State and the British Foreign Office who, to put it kindly, had little if any desire to help Jews. To them, Bermuda was like Evian, another sop to the “sob sister” crowd and “the wailing Jews.” The two countries built the conference on a false dichotomy that no one could possibly challenge: Winning the war was primary; saving Jews was secondary. No one dared say publicly what they privately believed: Saving Jews would actually delay winning the war.

When the conference was over, the United States and England jointly announced that the delegates had passed a number of concrete recommendations to help refugees of all nationalities, but the recommendations must remain secret because of the war. The top-secret recommendations were to revive the totally ineffective Evian Conference’s Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees so that it could study the problem in depth, and to ship twenty-one thousand Jews already safe in Spain to North Africa to make room for more refugees in Spain.

World opinion saw through the not-so-clever smoke screen. The general consensus was that the Bermuda Conference was a dismal failure. Both the international press and liberal American politicians called it a farce… perfidy… an exercise in futility… a distortion of civilized values… diplomatic mockery… a yoke of shame… complicity with the Nazis.

• • •

By 1948, more than two years after the war ended, the European refugee problem had reached critical mass. International refugee agencies had already settled 90 percent of the refugees in their Western European countries of origin outside the new Iron Curtain. But that still left more than a million refugees whose countries of origin were now behind the Iron Curtain. Even the United States recognized that Western Europe could not be expected to absorb them all. For these refugees to go back home would mean harassment, imprisonment, or death. Most of them were either Polish Catholics or Christians from Ukraine and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It was time for the United States to step up to the plate. At bat was President Harry “the buck stops here” Truman.

The majority of Americans were still antirefugee after the war. A 1946 American Institute of Public Opinion Poll asked: “About a million Polish people, Jews, and other displaced persons must find new homes in different countries. Do you think the United States should let any of these displaced persons enter the country?” Fifty-eight percent said no even though U.S. unemployment was low. There were limited exceptions, such as religious and ethnic relief organizations who welcomed only their fellow religionists and countrymen.

Truman was not Roosevelt. Where Roosevelt chose to deal with the refugee issue as a political problem, Truman confronted it as a humanitarian problem. Where Roosevelt asked, “What is expedient?” Truman asked, “What is right?”

With typical bluntness, Truman challenged the Eightieth Congress in his 1947 State of the Union address. He said he didn’t think the United States had done its share in accepting European refugees, and that new immigration legislation was necessary to admit more. It was not a popular stance. Nevertheless, the president asked Congress for a swift, fair, and generous American response to an international humanitarian crisis.

What he got was congressional silence.

In July 1947, six months after his call to action, Truman sent Congress a special message. “We are dealing with a human problem, a world tragedy,” he said. “I urge the Congress to press forward… and to pass legislation as soon as possible.”

Congress adjourned for the summer.

In January 1948, a full year after he first asked for new legislation, Truman again prodded Congress to ante up “at once so that this nation may do its share in caring for homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths.”

Congress crept forward like a garden slug.

On June 2, 1948, nearly seventeen months after Truman’s 1947 State of the Union address, the Senate finally passed a refugee bill; the House followed with its version ten days later. Neither chamber held a single hearing on its respective bill. Then, anxious to adjourn for the summer, Congress hastily merged both bills and, in a late night session, passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which authorized the entry of two hundred thousand refugees over the next two years. The bill managed to incorporate the worst of the Senate and the House versions. The devil lurked in the details.

To begin with, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 created an artificial “device” to discriminate against Jewish refugees. U.S. visas could be granted, the act stipulated, only to displaced persons who had entered refugee camps in Austria, Germany, and Italy before December 22, 1945. That seemingly innocuous, random date rendered ineligible more than 90 percent of the mostly Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, since they sought safety in the West after that date. Then, to make it nearly impossible for the eligible remaining 10 percent to secure visas, the bill added a list of financial, occupational, and good conduct restrictions. Just as the United States had blocked the entry of the more than nine hundred St. Louis refugees under an old immigration law, it now blocked the entry of Jewish refugees under the new 1948 legislation. The reason for the bigotry was obvious: It was an election year.

The Eightieth Congress didn’t stop with Jews. It used the same date “device” to block the entry of middle European Catholics, many of whom refused to live under communism both as a matter of conscience and out of fear of persecution. Most of these anticommunist Catholics had fled west after 1945, when it was clear that their homelands would become “independent” communist countries under the sway of the Soviet Union.

The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 further stipulated that 30 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States had to be farmers, a regulation that further discriminated against Jews, who couldn’t own land, and favored Ukrainians who could and did. The bill went on to reserve fifty thousand slots to Volksdeutsche, mostly the descendants of seventeenth-century German settlers in Ukraine who maintained cultural and emotional ties to Germany. With one foot still in Germany, the Volksdeutsche had been perfect candidates for Nazi collaboration.

Finally, the act not only used the December 22, 1945, device to discriminate against Catholics and Jews; it also favored refugees from the countries “annexed by a foreign power” (the Soviet Union). The act mandated that 40 percent of the refugees to be admitted into the United States under the bill had to come from the countries now behind the Iron Curtain. It was generally known by 1946 that thousands of Belorussians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians had volunteered to help the Nazi Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen identify, round up, and execute more than one million Jews, mostly Ukrainians and Belorussians, living in their communities.