The question of whether Jews could have been rescued from Europe in the 1930s, before the onset of the Holocaust, continues to bedevil scholars and the public alike.
It will be the focus of “While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939,” a conference sponsored by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies on Sunday, September 18, at Fordham University Law School, 140 West 62 Street (between Columbus and Amsterdam) in Manhattan, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (To register, call 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org.)
Between the time of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933, and the start of World War II, in 1939, Jews were free to emigrate from Nazi Germany – in fact, the Nazis encouraged them to leave. The question was: Where could they go?
Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, remarked at the time that “the world is divided into places where the Jews cannot live and places into which they cannot enter.”
The first scholars to examine the search for havens in the 1930s were Prof. David S. Wyman, in his 1968 book Paper Walls, and Prof. Henry Feingold, in his 1970 study The Politics of Rescue. They described how the British and American governments kicked around a variety of ideas for refugee settlement sites in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, but in every case managed to find a reason to reject the proposal.
The effort to find a refuge for the Jews gained new momentum following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. Accounts in the American press described the spiraling rate of suicide among Jews in Vienna and harrowing scenes of storm troopers forcing Austrian Jews to scrub the streets with toothbrushes.
“Overnight,” The New York Times reported, Vienna’s Jews “were made free game for mobs, despoiled of their property, deprived of police protection, ejected from employment and barred from sources of relief.”
Facing mounting pressure from some members of Congress and journalists to aid the Jews, State Department officials decided to “get out in front and attempt to guide” the criticism before it got out of hand. Undersecretary Sumner Welles proposed to President Roosevelt the idea of holding an intergovernmental conference, in Evian, France, to discuss the refugee problem. FDR assented – but made it clear in his March 24 announcement of the gathering that “no nation would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.”
In the weeks preceding Evian, American Jewish leaders helped the administration fend off advocates of increased immigration, especially Jewish members of Congress whom Secretary of State Cordell Hull worried were “going off halfcocked in the way of legislative proposals regarding immigration, quotas and the like.”
In response to the Anschluss, Representatives Emanuel Celler (D-NY) and Samuel Dickstein (D-NY) announced they would introduce legislation permitting the unrestricted entry of victims of persecution. The Celler bill was “so bad that it almost seems the work of an agent provocateur,” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise complained to a colleague. He and other Jewish leaders lobbied the congressmen to drop the legislation on the grounds that “it may interfere with the government’s plans in connection with the international conference.” The congressmen relented.
Meanwhile, American Jewish Committee officials learned, to their dismay, that Louis Gross, an activist-minded rabbi who edited the weekly Brooklyn Jewish Examiner, was engaged in “agitation to increase the United States immigration quota so as to enable more refugees to come in…carrying on this agitation not only in his weekly publication but also by sending private letters to prominent personalities.”
An AJCommittee representative paid the rabbi a visit and convinced him to suspend his efforts.
