Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

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.

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.”

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.