No Haven for the Oppressed

No Haven for the Oppressed NO HAVEN for the Oppressed United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 by Saul S. Friedman YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY Wayne State University Press Detroit 1973 Copyright © 1973 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48202. All material in this work, except as identified below, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/. Excerpts from Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy formerly copyrighted © 1964 to Penguin Publishing Group now copyrighted to Penguin Random House. All material not licensed under a Creative Commons license is all rights reserved. Permission must be obtained from the copyright owner to use this material. Published simultaneously in Canada by the Copp Clark Publishing Company 517 Wellington Street, West Toronto 2B, Canada. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Friedman, Saul S 1937– No haven for the oppressed. Originally presented as the author’s thesis, Ohio State University. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Refugees, Jewish. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 3. United States— Emigration and immigration. 4. Jews in the United States—Political and social conditions. I. Title. D810.J4F75 1973 940.53’159 72-2271 ISBN 978-0-8143-4373-9 (paperback); 978-0-8143-4374-6 (ebook) Publication of this book was assisted by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The publication of this volume in a freely accessible digital format has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation through their Humanities Open Book Program. http://wsupress.wayne.edu/ Contents Preface 7 Introduction 9 1. Haven of the Oppressed? 17 2. From Anschluss to Evian 37 3. The Intergovernmental Committee 56 4. The Wagner Bill 84 5. The Fifth Column 105 6. A Partnership of Silence 129 7. The Bermuda Conference 155 8. Holding the Keys 181 9. New Agencies: Old Rationalizations 203 10. The Yoke of Shame 225 Notes 236 Index 296 Preface his manuscript represents the product of twelve years of research into the complicity of the Western democracies in Twhat has popularly been termed the Holocaust, the slaughter of European Jewry in World War II. Several readings of Malcolm Hay’s Europe and the Jews generated intense discussions on this subject with an elder brother, Norman, while we were both students at Kent State University. Norman’s death in 1964 served as the motivation for a short research paper for Foster Rhea Dulles of Ohio State University on the wartime An- glo-American Conference on Refugees at Bermuda. The an- guish of that research was the germinal of this paper. My investigations of the Jewish refugee question have since been guided and expanded by Professors Robert Chazan, John Burnham, Harry Coles and Robert Bremner of Ohio State Uni- versity. I am, however, especially indebted to Professor Marvin Zahniser, who took on an unknown student several years ago and guided him through the difficult days of general examina- tions, research grants, and the final editorial winnowing. Because of the excellent advice and direction given me by these scholars, I hope that this book constitutes a synthesis of American social, diplomatic, and minority history for the period 1938–1945. In approaching such a difficult subject I have also been generously aided by a number of government historians and private archivists, including Miriam Leikind of Rabbi Silver’s Temple in Cleveland, Ezekiel Lipshutz and Mrs. D. Abramo- wicz of YIVO, Hester Groves of the American Friends Service Committee, Robert Shosteck of the National B’nai B’rith Head- quarters in Washington, Richard Ploch, curator of rare books 7 NO HAVEN FOR THE OPPRESSED and special collections at Brandeis University, Dorothy Brown, professor at Georgetown University, Arthur G. Kogan, chief of the research guidance and review division of the Historical Of- fice of the Department of State, Dean Allerd of the Office of Naval History, Thomas Hohmann of the Modern Military Re- cords Division, and numerous unnamed persons in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College, the Cleveland Public Library, and the Ohio State Uni- versity who made my travels and studies less trying. I am, moreover, indebted to those persons, at one time in- timately involved in the decision-making processes of refugee questions, who have given freely of their time to answer questions related to this dissertation. Among them I wish to thank Harold Willis Dodds of Princeton University, who added valu- able insight into the Bermuda conference; Lillie Shultz, Leona Duckler, and Richard Cohn of the American Jewish Congress, who broadened my understanding of Rabbi Stephen Wise; for- mer presidential adviser Benjamin Cohen, I. S. Kenen of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Helen Eckerson, chief of the statistical section of the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. But most of all, I wish to express my gratitude to my wife, Nancy, who tolerated the painful seizures of creativity and revi- sion and encouraged me to continue with this project, which is dedicated to the oppressed children of all races and of all time. S. S. F. 8 Introduction n the spring of 1941, when the United States was not yet formally embroiled in World War II and when it was still possibleI to rescue Europe’s persecuted Jews from Vichy France, Isaac Chomski, a doctor representing the OSE (Jewish Health Protection Society), the American Joint Distribution Commit- tee, Secours Suisse (Swiss Aid), and HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) was placed in charge of 111 child refugees at the local Quaker relief office in Marseilles.* All but five of the children, whose ages ranged from eight to fifteen, were Jewish. Each carried a small, untidy bundle or a battered valise which held belongings remaining after wanderings in two or three different lands. Each child also wore a white numbered card about his neck, a card which read “Father died in concentration camp at Buchenwald,” “Mother died in French internment camp at Gurs,” “Parents sent to Lublin,” or simply “Parents unknown.” Throughout the 500-mile train ride which carried the group on its way to the Spanish border and its ultimate destination, the S.S. Mouzinho, docked in Lisbon harbor, Chomski was struck by the solemnity of the children, their stoic acceptance of the mea- ger food provisions, and their unlaughing silence as they watched a host of French university towns—Nîmes, Montpellier, Tou- louse, Tarbes—pass by. Only rarely did a child volunteer to speak with the doctor, and this conversation was generally fol- lowed by a tearful breakdown as the young refugee confided his fears of going to America, where he had “no one.” * A list of organizations cited in the text, with abbreviations, appears on pages 236–40. 9 NO HAVEN FOR THE OPPRESSED On Sunday morning as the train neared the small pro- vincial town of Oloron, thirty miles from the Spanish border in the department of Basses-Pyrenees, Chomski noted a transfor- mation in the children. Awake even before dawn, they were in a festive mood, for many hoped to glimpse their parents for one last time this day. The children knew that close to Oloron was Gurs, the notorious French concentration camp where 10,000 Jewish refugees were living under the most primitive conditions. Originally constructed to house 3,000 Spanish Loy- alist refugees, Gurs had been converted into a detention camp for German nationals (including Jewish refugees) by the French government in 1939. By 1941 it was serving as a deportation center to the East. Thirty persons died of hunger, exposure, or disease in Gurs each day, but this did not dampen the enthusi- asm of Chomski’s charges, who hoped that the prisoners would be released for a few moments to meet the train. Klaus, a boy from Germany, showed Chomski a photograph of his father. Tall, stately, his World War I German officer’s uniform be- decked with medals, the father was one of many still detained in Gurs. The train pulled into the Oloron station amid shouts of the excited children and the anxious parents lining the platform. Scenes of unbelievable tragedy were enacted in the ten minutes that sympathetic gendarmes permitted the train to sit at the depot. The children, having saved the bread which had been their last evening’s meal, forced it on the adults. Children who had no parents gave their ration to strangers. Chomski records that even the French guards wept before such human misery. A man, bearded, unkempt, and wearing rags, walked hesi- tatingly up to the son he had not seen in two years, and, with some embarrassment, spoke: “Klaus, my son, don’t you recog- nize me?” The boy recoiled for a moment. Suddenly, he lunged for- ward, burying his head in his father’s tattered coat. Then he reached up to kiss the grimy forehead and sobbed, “Papa, Papa, Papa.” Later, in the corridor of the moving train, Klaus stood holding a letter from his father. With German deliberateness, 10 INTRODUCTION the doomed man, fearful that three minutes might not be suffi- cient to bid his son farewell, had written: “My dear son, my be- loved Klaus, do not forget your father.”1 Klaus and the other children under Chomski’s supervision arrived in the United States in June 1941. They were the fortu- nate ones. According to figures compiled by the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress, more than 1,000,000 of the 6,000,000 Jews exterminated by the Nazis in World War II were children under age fifteen.2 Twenty-five years ago the villains in this drama were relatively easy to de- note—Hitler, the Nazis, the German people.

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