Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
While these deliberations were going on, the job of the British consular officials had become more and more difficult. According to guidelines issued in May, only “bona fide” visitors and businessmen were to be given visas without delay. The problem was deciding who was “bona fide.” Consuls were instructed by the Home Office to “discreetly question” visitors “who appear to be of Jewish or partly Jewish origin … as to their family circumstances, and how their business or employment has been affected by recent events, and if it is suspected that emigration is intended the applicant should be invited to say so frankly” so that his application could be dealt with on its merits. All visitors would have to sign a document noting that violation of the visa would lead to forcible deportation back to Germany or Austria. The temptation to cheat was enormous, as the criteria
for acceptance eliminated all but a few. Leading scientists, artists, industrialists who wished to transfer their businesses, “distinguished persons of international repute,” schoolboys, and students enrolled in long-term programs all had little problem. “Prima Facie unsuitable” were, however, small shopkeepers, retail traders, artisans, agents and middlemen dependent on commissions, minor musicians, and the “rank and file” of professional men—lawyers, doctors, dentists—that is, most people.
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By midsummer, the situation at the British consulate in Vienna had reached the boiling point. Day after day the sixteen consular officials had to enforce the guidelines and decide which of the 600 to 700 persons who appeared each morning would be granted salvation. The desperate applicants, by now forbidden to work in Austria and many with departure ultimata, were not always polite. Extra ushers were brought in to keep order in the waiting areas. Soon there were charges of bribery and favoritism as “bona fide” applicants with appointment cards, who, the consular officer reporting on events felt, “cannot be left to be jostled about by hundreds of low class Jewish emigrants,” went to the head of the line.
The ushers are pushed about and occasionally struck and often insulted and it is little short of remarkable that the good order which generally obtains can be maintained.… I have twice recently, with the utmost reluctance, had to appeal for police help when the crowd has got out of hand and a policeman is now permanently stationed outside the main door.
Articles appeared in the
Spectator
accusing the government of adding to the persecution of the Jews by not increasing the consulate staff. The head of the Vienna passport office, in a letter sounding as if he himself were on the verge of tears, vehemently defended his employees, noting,
It is not possible for anybody who is not directly concerned with the work to form an idea of the difficulties involved and of the responsibilities connected with it.… The staff are so overwrought that they will burst into tears at the slightest provocation and every means must be found of easing their burden.
Pressure was not confined to working hours: “Almost everyone has a ‘pet’ Jew, my consular Colleagues here, personal friends … both here and at home, Members of Parliament … our own Diplomatic Services.” From all of these the passport officers received a “stream of letters” and often felt “bound to see their protégés.” Even out of the office “life becomes a
misery,” for at every lunch or dinner there was “always a fellow guest who has a ‘friend’ who he is sure I will help.… As often as not it is the host or hostess who asks this and to refuse point blank when full of their food and drink is not always easy. In this way arises the charge of favoritism.”
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This sort of dilemma was not limited to the diplomats. The daily processing of people, all of whom had problems that defied solution, after a time turned the most sympathetic workers into hard-nosed bureaucrats, for in the end choices had to be made. Henri Eitje, an Orthodox Jew who worked with the Amsterdam Refugee Committee, remarked that those who merely gave money to the rescue organizations did not have to worry about the terrible decisions that faced him. Some refugees he found to be “poor material” to work with; many were not satisfied with arrangements that were made. Eitje noted that if he had provided help to everyone who threatened suicide, which happened several times a week, soon all the refugees would declare this intent. There were other problems too. It was harder to find support for Eastern and stateless Jews. In addition, the Dutch Jews felt that the German Jews made little effort to adapt to Dutch customs, and indeed the German refugees had attempted to set up their own help organization, independent of the Dutch Jewish Council, but were prevented from doing so by the Dutch government.
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Meanwhile, George Rublee, an American international lawyer, appointed director of the Intergovernmental Committee established at the Évian Conference, had come to London to try to negotiate an “orderly emigration plan” with Germany, but both bureaucratic delays in the summer of 1938 and the Munich crisis in September, which was followed by a series of dramatic events, delayed the beginning of any serious negotiations. As officialdom plodded along, the potential number of refugees grew steadily: shortly after the Munich meetings, Italy passed racial legislation that threatened the 15,000 or so Reich Jews who had fled there.
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The German takeover of the Sudetenland produced another multifaceted mass of 127,000 refugees, including Jews, exiled German political dissidents, and anti-Nazi Czech Sudetens. Now they too tried to flee to England, France, Poland, and anywhere else they could. More would be added in March 1939, when Hitler took over another large piece of Czechoslovakia.
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The possibility that tens of thousands of Jews resident in the expanded Reich might also seek refuge in Poland had not been lost on officials of that doomed nation either. On March 31, 1938, the government quietly revised its citizenship laws and required all of its nationals living abroad to register by October 6 at Polish consulates in order to have their passports
renewed. Those who had been out of Poland for more than five years would not get new passports unless approved by the consuls. The decree was directly aimed at the 40,000 Polish Jews who had lived for many years in Germany and who, it was now all too clear, might soon have to come “home,” where they were equally unwelcome.
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A few months later, preparing the ground for Poland’s coming abandonment of its citizens, Foreign Minister Jozef Beck told American Ambassador Anthony Biddle that the Évian Conference had been “an excellent beginning for further study and search for a solution of the Jewish problem as a whole and not limited merely to the refugee aspect.” The minister had apparently detected “distinct evidences” that the Polish “Jewish issue” might also turn into a “refugee problem.” Beck had concluded that before the problem could be solved “as a whole” the Palestine question had to be settled “definitely,” and indicated that he felt that Jewish leaders would “retard other settlements in hopes of bettering their position vis-à-vis Palestine.” Once the issue of Palestine was solved, other areas of settlement could be explored, an effort that “might serve to instill the Jews with hope and thus replace the potentially dangerous effect of … increasing despondency over their dismal outlook.” Ambassador Biddle, apparently deeply persuaded by this diatribe that the outlook for the Polish Jews was indeed “grim,” now also urged their inclusion in the groups to be rescued.
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The German government, which had not been fooled by the Polish maneuver, on October 28 peremptorily ordered all Polish Jews in Germany to leave. Six thousand left voluntarily. Some 15,000 of those who resisted were immediately loaded onto trains and, having been refused entry by the Poles, were left stranded in a no-man’s-land between the two frontiers near the tiny town of Zbaszyn (pop. 7,000). Here, in conditions remarkably similar to those the Spanish refugees would soon endure, hundreds perished and thousands more would spend months in misery. Among them were the parents of a seventeen-year-old student in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, who was so upset by their treatment that he assassinated an official at the German embassy, thereby triggering the events of Kristallnacht.
Only days after this expulsion, the Polish ambassador in Washington rushed to the State Department to request, once again, that his country be “included” in the considerations of the Intergovernmental Committee, as he feared that “unless some gesture were made to Poland to show that its problems were being dealt with on a parity with Germany there might be anti-Semitic outbursts in Poland.” When this request was rebuffed, the ambassador, knowing that there were still some 25,000 Polish Jews in Germany
who would soon follow the rest to no-man’s-land, reiterated that “it was a frightfully urgent matter.” The American official retorted that the “acute” situation in Germany and Austria must be dealt with before “a more chronic situation.”
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In a simultaneous and equally unsuccessful approach to the British Foreign Office, the Polish Ambassador in London declared that for Poland “the question of finding an outlet for her Jews was one of vital necessity.”
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But the Polish government still had a card to play: it now threatened to expel equal numbers of German nationals. For the Nazis, deep in secret plans for the conquest and resettlement of Poland, this was not a good thing. A compromise was negotiated: Poland agreed to take back its nationals and their dependents, but only if they could bring their household goods, tools, and assets with them. The Nazis, about to take over Poland, assets and all, happily agreed. A number of the Jews were thus allowed to return to Germany to liquidate their assets and put the funds into a special account, from which an undetermined amount would be transferred to Poland. This was no humanitarian decision: the Polish government expected to make some hundred million marks on the arrangement. The Jewish community in Poland, fearful of having to support its brethren, was pleased as well. Alas, they were the more deceived. The American embassy later reported that groups of Jews, carefully escorted by German police, had begun to arrive in Poland with only the ten marks in cash allowed to all Jews exiting Germany. To the dismay of both the Polish government and the Jewish community, the expellees, fully aware of the anti-Semitic attitude of the Poles, and hoping they would not be in Poland for long, had not brought their household goods and professional tools with them, but had shipped them to German ports, hoping to export them to other countries. Even worse, many, still hoping for “better treatment in the future,” had not even liquidated their German assets. Thus, an American diplomat commented, “the precautions taken with the German Government by Poland to avoid taking back Polish Jews without resources have been defeated largely by the action of the repatriates themselves.”
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The treatment of the expellees by the Germans at the frontier, even after they had complied with all the regulations, was horrendous, as one Quaker team observed:
The German Police take the deportees from the trains after dark in groups of about twenty. Dogs are set upon them, and they are chased into the woods and swamps. One woman we saw had been bitten in the leg. A woman came with 2 children, one she could carry, the other fell
behind. She was not allowed to go back for it, and the little thing perished in the swamp.… Most of them are able to find their way into Poland in a day, but others are sent back and forth, wandering for a fortnight.
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At this stage many testified to the humane attitude of numbers of individual Polish guards and people in the frontier region who, against regulations, fed and sheltered the wanderers. The police in cities such as Katowice were less sympathetic. The Quakers observed raids to round up refugees who, even if they had visas for England and other countries, were loaded into trucks and returned to the limbo of no-man’s-land. In Warsaw, as in Vienna, the U.S. consulate was overwhelmed with applicants, and the Polish quota of 6,000 per annum was booked for years.
Although open violence and dispossession of Jews in Germany had grown slowly since the riots accompanying the takeover in Austria, public persecution there did not become fully fledged until after Kristallnacht. Despite all the publicity given to the Austrian situation, the carefully orchestrated German actions, which included giving schoolboys and Hitler Youth groups a holiday so they could participate in the “demonstrations,”
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came as a shock. Reading about horrors did not prepare people for witnessing the real thing. The American consul in Stuttgart, writing in the formal style required in diplomatic cables, which did not disguise his distress, said:
I have the honor to report that the Jews of Southwest Germany have suffered vicissitudes during the last three days which would seem unreal to one living in an enlightened country during the twentieth century if one had not actually been a witness of their dreadful experiences, or if one had not had them corroborated by more than one person of undoubted integrity.
The “vicissitudes” included “the wailing of wives and children suddenly left behind, the imprisonment in cells and the panic of fellow prisoners … as well as the forcible eviction of children from the Jewish State Orphan’s Asylum in Esslingen, just outside Stuttgart, where the children were chased into the streets.”
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Now it was the turn of the consulates in Germany to receive the onslaught. The Dutch reported 40,000 to 50,000 requests for entry in a few weeks. By this time, there were already so many refugees in Holland that the government, like those of France and Switzerland, had begun the construction of special camps to contain them. Among these was one at
Westerbork, another dismal, flat, and windy place, which would receive its first inhabitants in October 1939. Meanwhile, there were terrible scenes at the Dutch frontiers as desperate families, many with small children, who had been pushed toward the border by German police, were sent back into the Reich.
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Similar incidents took place in Luxembourg, which, after some weeks of turning a blind eye to the hundreds of forced illegal entrants, on December 1, 1938, “with the utmost reluctance,” deployed its entire police force in an attempt to halt the crossings.
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The American consulate in Stuttgart now further reported that