Cruel World (24 page)
Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Refugees arriving in New York
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(photo credit 6.1)
The 1929 stock market crash in the United States was only one element of a worldwide spiral into depression and unemployment that would last throughout the 1930s. By early 1932 Germany had six million unemployed. In the United States, by early 1933, an estimated 4.7 million families needed relief, a demand that soon would exceed the capacities of local agencies and charities.
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An Episcopal bishop noted that “vast multitudes … have lost financial security forever. In bewilderment and bitterness they will seek a sign of hope and no sign will be given.” Millions could not pay rent: small children in jammed day-care centers were observed playing “eviction” and moving their classroom furniturne from one corner of the room to another. Others stood in line to eat in soup kitchens, and by 1932 an estimated 250,000 teenagers, some as young as thirteen, had left home and taken to the roads and trains in search of work and sustenance.
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Nature did not help. Years of unprecedented drought in the American heartland would culminate by 1936 in the Dust Bowl and the desperate migration of tens of thousands of families. And in England, George Orwell, exploring the depressed mining areas of the Midlands, where long-term unemployment combined with a severe shortage of housing
had created unparalleled squalor, described a family unable to find a house and driven to living in a trailer:
Most of the people I talked to had given up the idea of ever getting a decent habitation again. They were all out of work, and a job and a house seemed to them about equally remote and impossible. Some hardly seemed to care; others realized quite clearly in what misery they were living. One woman’s face stays by me, a worn skull-like face on which was a look of intolerable misery and degradation. I gathered that in that dreadful pigsty, struggling to keep her large brood of children clean, she felt as I should feel if I were coated all over with dung.
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It was not a moment conducive to the reception of refugees anywhere.
The United States normally granted immigration visas only to persons who fulfilled a number of complex health, social, and economic criteria. Most important among these was the “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) clause, which denied entry to those unable to support themselves. This could be overcome by an affidavit from an individual in the United States who would guarantee support, but organizations could not sponsor immigrants, a regulation that would cause great problems as the number of refugees increased. American consuls processed the applications according to guidelines emanating from Washington, but the final decision was left to their judgment. Those accepted were given a quota number and told to wait for it to be “called.” This could take a long time, since the total number permitted to enter in a given month was carefully controlled. Conversely, if the visa was not collected or used by a certain date, it became invalid.
In September 1930, two and a half years before Hitler’s accession, President Herbert Hoover, responding to the crash of 1929 and the resulting gigantic rise in American unemployment, had ordered the consulates to enforce the LPC clause strictly and to reduce the number of immigration visas granted by 75 to 80 percent. The drop in admissions was dramatic. The United States’ total, worldwide immigration figure for February 1931 was 3,147, the lowest for any month since 1820. A little earlier the Secretary of Labor had begun to hunt down and deport illegal aliens. In addition, some 100,000 legal Chicano workers were persuaded to return to Mexico after a vicious anti-Mexican scare campaign in the press. The theme of this exercise was exemplified by the testimony of Vanderbilt genetics professor Roy I. Garis, who told the House Committee on Immigration
and Naturalization, which was pondering the imposition of a Mexican quota, that even legal Mexican-Americans were “human swine” whose minds “run to nothing higher than animal functions—eat, sleep, and sexual debauchery.” To speed things up, the American authorities provided trains to take these citizens back to Mexico.
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America was not alone in its anti-foreign campaigns. France, whose depression had started a bit later than that of the United States, imposed nationality quotas on certain professions in 1932, and some three million resident aliens, mostly Poles and Italians, who had been welcomed in earlier years to solve labor shortages, were now not very graciously encouraged to leave. By 1936, 450,000 of them had done so. In France, the aliens, like the Mexicans in the United States, were often refused unemployment relief and vilified by nativist polemicists, who accused them of being Fascists or Communists (which of course some of them were) and questioned their morality: “This crowd of immigrants, many of them uprooted and ill-adapted, work to increase criminality … and unarguably contribute to demoralization and disorder. No less pernicious is the moral delinquency of certain Levantines, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and other ‘metic’ tradesmen and traffickers.”
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In England, where unemployment had reached well over two million by the early 1930s, the government was equally reluctant to take in anyone who was not self-supporting. The British had no specific quotas, but their Aliens Acts of 1914, aimed at the same groups targeted by the United States, had been reinforced in 1919 and 1920 and the British government also did not allow special consideration for refugees. The Home Office, given enforcement power, granted entry on a case-by-case basis, and up to 1933 kept the numbers very low.
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Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932 and inaugurated in March 1933, only weeks after Hitler’s accession, was, like the German leader, faced with enormous social and economic problems. Both would create nationwide projects to relieve unemployment and revive the economy, the difference being that Hitler had conveniently rid himself of the checks and balances that controlled what Roosevelt could and could not do. The American President’s social programs, unprecedented in scope and expense, were utterly dependent on a Congress in which nativism, sheltered by the sacred cow of immigration quotas, reigned supreme. Any attempt to increase the quotas was not only politically dangerous, but inspired the more extreme opponents of immigration, without success, to propose legislation to reduce or abolish the quotas altogether. Nativism was not limited to the Congress. It lived in organizations that ran the gamut from the
Daughters of the American Revolution to Father Coughlin’s Social Justice Movement, and thrived in the Washington corridors of the State Department and other agencies that were also dependent on the Congress for their appropriations. Along with nativism, the defense of bureaucratic fiefdoms, endemic genteel anti-Semitism, and varying degrees of fear of immigrants as fifth columnists, Communists, and spies—all reputed to be entering the country in secret droves—made any large exceptional admission of German refugees out of the question. Even Einstein would be temporarily refused a visa on the basis that he was too left-wing.
This inflexible attitude was not necessarily shared in the embassies and legations abroad where individual consuls were frequently sympathetic to applicants, but could not risk major defiance of policy without peril to their careers. Despite all the opposition, a combination of pressure by interested groups and behind-the-scenes action by various agencies allowed the number of visas granted to German applicants, who were thought to be almost entirely Jewish, to rise from 1,300 in 1933–34 to 20,301 in 1937–38. This annual figure involved no change in the official limit, and in late 1937 it was felt by many in Washington that if continued for a few more years its maintenance would suffice to take care of most of the Jews remaining in Germany, who, it was now clear, would eventually be forced to leave.
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The European nations and Great Britain, despite their antiimmigration stances, did not refuse entry to the early waves of refugees from Nazism, who were regarded as temporary political exiles. France, particularly, true to its long tradition as a nation of asylum and transit, allowed an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 to enter, over half of whom soon moved on to other countries. Of these, it is thought, some 17,000 to 20,000 were German Jews.
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In England numerous charitable organizations came forward to help the 4,000 to 5,000 early arrivals.
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There was considerable sympathy for the victims of Nazi extremism and calls for expanding aid to them resounded in Parliament. As is always the case, the rich and well connected soon found refuge and positions. Furthermore, the German government, at this stage, still permitted many of those fleeing to take enough assets with them to assure entry into various countries and make survival possible once they had arrived.
To those who made it to Paris, London, or Amsterdam the relief of a civilized reception and of freedom were overwhelming. German author Hermann Kesten, newly arrived in Paris, wrote, “What a dream exile is. You cross the border and immediately the terror becomes ‘foreign.’ In the same instant you begin to doubt the reality of the horror in Germany.”
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The euphoria did not always last. Freedom was fine, but the prohibitions on employment or expiration of residence permits soon led the less well heeled to resort to lives of nomadic and ill-fed illegality, moving themselves and their children from one house or room to another. Meanwhile, those hoping to leave the Continent entirely once again joined the lines of applicants at foreign consulates. Here, as time went on, despair was palpable: “ ‘We still have the ocean,’ a man with two little children and a young wife said.… ‘Maybe I escaped only that we might die together in Holland.’ ”
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Behind the scenes, each of the “receiving” governments worried about how many refugees there were to come and how long the pressure would last. The situation was delicate. No one wanted to “upset” Germany by strong censure of its Jewish policies, as that would violate the diplomatic taboo of interfering with the internal affairs of other nations. Quite apart from their own immigration rules, many governments reasoned that elaborate plans to take care of German exiles would be a sign of acceptance of Hitler’s policy and only encourage the expulsion of more. An ineffectual branch office of the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, carefully detached from the main body in order not to offend the Germans, who were still members of the League, was set up in mid-October 1933, in order to “formulate plans for an international solution to the German refugee problem.”
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Its chief, James G. McDonald, an American purposely chosen to put pressure on the United States, which was not a member of the League, wanted to propose to Hitler a ten-year plan for the “removal of Jews and the transfer of German property for their support.” But many prominent German Jews, such as the bankers Georg Solmssen and Max Warburg, despite their now “troubled” lives, felt that Jews everywhere should keep a low profile and seemed determined to wait things out in Germany.
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McDonald was equally stymied from the opposite direction, confiding to the American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, that “he had raised 500,000 pounds sterling from English Jews but that the givers were not enthusiastic and did not wish many German Jews to enter England” and that in the United States “there is much interest in limited circles but no enthusiasm for taking persecuted Jews into the country.”
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This fear of overt action extended even to the possible rescue of children. A 1934 program to send 250 German Jewish children to the United States, which waived many of the immigration rules and which had been negotiated with great difficulty in Washington, had to be suspended for two years when not enough Jewish families (gentiles were not permitted to take the small refugees) could be found to take the children, one problem
being that the organizing agency, the German-Jewish Children’s Aid, was unable to come up with the $500 per annum funding provided to the foster families for each child. Appeals to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to support the program were rejected because the JDC “considered it more cost effective to either care for the children in Germany or finance their passage to Palestine.”
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Things were not helped when an inaccurate statement by the American Jewish Congress claiming that 20,000 more children would be coming led to ferocious attacks on the program by nativist organizations. The chairman of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies even went so far as to demand a congressional investigation of the program, suggesting that the children were from “communist families.”
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Nevertheless, the U.S. government did continue to authorize a tiny trickle of entrants, and by March 1938, 351 had arrived under this program.
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But the flow out of Germany did not cease. In January 1935, a plebiscite held in the Saar Territory, an enclave administered by the League of Nations since World War I, overwhelmingly favored its reunion with Germany and caused 7,000 Saar residents who felt differently to flee to France. This group, considered “international refugees,” was more or less successfully resettled there and in Paraguay with funding from the League of Nations.
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A 1934 law severely restricting the assets that could be taken out of Germany without permission, and the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, made the position of the Jews infinitely more precarious. Applications at the consulates increased, but there was as yet no real panic. Some who had fled in the first wave, mistakenly convinced that the Nuremberg Laws were the final word, even returned to Germany, and many both there and abroad were further lulled in 1936 as anti-Jewish propaganda was toned down in preparation for its nationalist extravaganza at the summer Olympic Games in Berlin. From 1935 to 1937, despite the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, the total Jewish emigration from Germany remained at a steady 20,000 to 24,000 per year.
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