Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

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 Kristallnacht, 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 Kristallnacht as it did at Evian—with shock, condemnation, and no action.

In May of the following year, 1939, 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 Federico 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 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.