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Useful Enemies
John Demjanjuk and America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals
By Richard Rashke DELPHINIUM BOOKS
Copyright © 2013 Richard Rashke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0159-4
CHAPTER 1
Anywhere But Here
By all standards of fairness, the U.S. record on World War II refugees is embarrassing for a country that prides itself on its generosity. Beginning with the Evian Conference in 1938 and culminating in the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the United States was blatantly selfish, timid, callous, and discriminatory. It is a chapter of history that Americans would prefer to leave resting in the coffin of ancient history.
If the United States was slow to admit World War II refugees from Europe, it was a tortoise in the hunt to find and expel thousands of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding among the 400,000–500,000 refugees it had been shamed into accepting. American sentiment was to "let sleeping Nazis lie" and the United States only entered the hunt, bickering and screaming, in the late 1970s—more than thirty years after the war. The reasons it took so long are clear: Most Americans couldn't have cared less about a bunch of former Nazis as long as they behaved themselves; some felt that old Nazis were better than Jews; the U.S. government didn't want to take time from the Cold War to smoke out former Nazis who were now loyal, contributing members of American society; and America had dark secrets to protect.
* * *
The first time the United States showed its hand in the refugee poker game was at the international, invitation-only conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, in the summer of 1938, six months before Kristallnacht, Hitler's first major salvo in his war against Jews. More than 150,000 German Jews had anticipated the murder and mayhem of Kristallnacht and fled Germany in the vain hope of finding a home elsewhere. When Hitler annexed Austria (in the forcible union known as the Anschluss) in March 1938, another 200,000 Jews became either homeless or at risk.
Most of the wandering German and Austrian Jews wanted to settle in Palestine, but the British, who controlled that territory, had set a rigid quota. Great Britain was not about to turn Palestine into a dumping ground for European Jews whom other countries, including the United States, didn't want. To do so would risk yet another Palestinian Arab uprising.
Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist who would later become the first president of Israel, parsed the Jewish problem with laser precision. In an address to an international refugee conference in London, he said: "The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter."
All eyes were on America, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't relish the spotlight. Most Americans were nervous isolationists who didn't want to be drawn into someone else's war, and a good part of the working classes and WASP intellectuals were openly anti-Semitic. Roosevelt knew he had to do something. But what?
Ten days after the Anschluss, Roosevelt called for an international conference to address the growing refugee problem, which he foresaw was much larger than a few hundred thousand homeless Jews. France volunteered to host the meeting at Evian.
The call to action was more political than humanitarian. America was slowly emerging from the Great Depression and, although unemployment was gradually dipping, it still stood at a staggering 19 percent. Roosevelt found himself facing the twin pressures of isolationism and overt anti-Semitism. The latter had spiked in the 1930s with the advent of a string of anti-Semitic publications and the popular anti-Semitic radio addresses of Charles Coughlin, a Detroit Catholic priest. Father Coughlin had a following of more than forty million, and the Catholic hierarchy made no attempt to silence him.
Opinion polls at the time illustrate Roosevelt's political dilemma. A 1938 American Institute of Public Opinion poll asked the following question: "Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?" Seventy-seven percent said no. Other polls reported that one-third of Americans thought the government should economically restrict Jews and one out of ten favored racially segregating Jews as well as deporting them. Many members of Congress and the State Department, including U.S. consulate officials who had great discretionary powers in granting visas, reflected the nation's anti-Semitism. The Veterans of Foreign Wars opposed the Evian Conference and called for the end of all immigration. And the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies challenged Roosevelt to "stop the leak before it became a flood."
What was a president to do?
If he sought to admit more Jews into the country, Roosevelt knew he would be pouring gas on the embers of isolationism and anti-Semitism, thus running the risk of losing the upcoming presidential election. A consummate politician, Roosevelt called for a high-profile conference. It was a deft sleight of hand that would simultaneously make the United States appear humanitarian, offer a sop to Jewish voters, win applause from the majority of Americans for not caving in to international pressure, and discourage the unemployed from staging angry demonstrations. Roosevelt invited thirty-three other countries to Evian. Only Italy and South Africa declined.
A lone New York Times reporter, Anne O'Hare McCormick, sought to challenge Roosevelt, the conference attendees, and the American public. With amazing insight and clarity, she wrote:
It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings around our consulates in Vienna and other cities waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian.... It is not a question of how many unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization.... Can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination?
Roosevelt wasn't listening. His invitation to Evian had reduced the conference to a cruel charade even before the first tap of the gavel. It said in part: "No country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of immigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation." Having said that, the conference challenged the participating countries to accept more German and Austrian (Jewish) refugees either under their quota systems or current immigration laws, something the United States itself was unwilling to do.
Evian was little more than a ten-day paid vacation at the Royal Hotel, a luxury resort on Lake Geneva. Casino gambling, pleasure cruises on the lake, outings to Chamonix for summer skiing, five-star dining, mineral baths, massages, golf ... In the end, the conference turned out to be historic, but not in the way Roosevelt had anticipated or hoped.
Hitler believed that Western democracies were cowardly and hypocritical. Evian proved him right. The United States did not send a single government official, high or low, to represent it at the conference because it didn't want to antagonize Hitler. Instead, Roosevelt chose a friend, steel tycoon Myron C. Taylor, and gave him the title of "Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary." One of Taylor's mandates was to ban the use of the words German ... Hitler ... Jew during the conference, to which Third Reich observers had been invited. Roosevelt didn't want to upset them.
Prior to the conference, the United States and Great Britain struck an under-the-table deal: Britain agreed not to bring up the fact that the United States was not even filling its legal German-Austrian emigration quota, if America would not propose that Palestine accept more Jews. As a result, the word Palestine was added to the list of verboten words. Also verboten would be any mention of the fact that out of its 1938 combined German-Austrian emigration quota of 27,370, the United States had only granted 18,000 visas so far that year. Of course, any Jew from these two countries could apply for a visa at the appropriate U.S. consulate. But there was a hitch. The United States required a certificate of good conduct from the German police from whom the Jews were fleeing.
Ambassador Taylor tried to put a positive spin on U.S. reluctance to admit more refugees. He promised that more German and Austrian refugees would be accepted under its existing quota and that U.S. consuls would be instructed to make it easier for them to acquire visas. In effect, the United States offered nothing. Taylor was hoping, of course, that countries with large territories and small populations, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, would open their borders.
One by one the conference delegates took the microphone and repeated the same message as if rehearsed before the conference: We are saturated with refugees and, therefore, regrettably cannot accept any more; we are willing to accept refugees as long as they are agricultural experts (by law there were no Jewish farmers in Germany and Austria); and we already have too many merchants and intellectuals and, regretfully, cannot accept any more (thus eliminating most Jews). Although the underlying anti-Semitism in the country-by-country refusal was unspoken in most instances, it was blatant in the responses of several countries:
• Australia said it currently had no real racial problem and was not eager to import one.
• Brazil said it would accept refugees if a Christian baptismal certificate were attached to the visa application.
• Great Britain promised to accept refugee children but not their parents out of fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. It did eventually accept nine thousand Jewish children.
• New Zealand noted its policy of admitting only immigrants of British birth or heritage. Since the conference invitation said participating countries were not expected to change their immigration laws, New Zealand said it wouldn't.
• Switzerland brazenly stated that it had as little use for Jews as Germany had and promised to adopt measures to protect Switzerland from being swamped by Jewish refugees. Switzerland would soon require all German Jewish passports to be stamped with a large J.
None of the Evian attendees seemed to understand the scope of the refugee problem confronting them. It was not just about a few thousand homeless German and Austrian Jews. It was about the soon-to-be millions of homeless non-Jewish refugees who were certain to overwhelm Europe. As one analyst at the time put it: "Viewed as a whole ... this potential problem is vast and almost unimaginable."
The conference ended with a resolution to establish a permanent Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees to study the problem and design a framework to deal with it. The only one who thought Evian was a success was Myron Taylor, who reported to the State Department: "I am satisfied that we accomplished the purpose for which ... the meeting at Evian was called."
The Evian Conference was a bonanza for the Third Reich. The pro-Nazi German press interpreted it as a tacit approval of the Reich's handling of the Jewish problem. And Hitler laughed all the way to Auschwitz. Evian only proved what Hitler had suspected all along: He could do anything he wanted to European Jews and the Western democracies would turn a blind eye. To some Jewish observers, Evian had become "Hitler's Green Light to Genocide."
No one explained the Jewish perception of Evian clearer or better than Golda Meir, a conference observer who would later become prime minister of Israel. In her memoir, My Life, she wrote with great angst:
I don't think that anyone who didn't live through it can understand what I felt at Evian—a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all. "Don't you know that these numbers are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps or wandering around the world like lepers, if you won't let them in?"
In sum, the Evian Conference of July 1938 betrayed the Jews who trusted in world humanity, rendered them worse off than before, and opened the door to genocide. As one Jewish analyst put it: The thirty-two countries met, ostensibly, to help the Jews out of the jaws of the German beast; instead they tossed them to the sharks.
Four months after Evian, the Nazis celebrated Kristallnacht, during which thousands of Jewish businesses and shops were destroyed, hundreds beaten to within an inch of their lives, and hundreds more imprisoned and killed. Hitler was right. The world responded to Kristallnacht as it did at Evian—with shock, condemnation, and no action.
In May of the following year, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis steamed down the Elbe River into the North Atlantic. Flags were flapping in the wind and well-wishers waved from the Hamburg pier. On board the eight-deck ship were 938 paying passengers, all but one of whom were Jews fleeing Germany for their lives. They had all purchased landing permits from the Cuban government. Several had relatives, spouses, or children waiting for them in Havana. Most were on the waiting list for visas to the United States and planned to stay in Cuba until America granted them entry.
The voyage was a setup. Cuba had no intention of letting them off the ship. Caving in to anti-Semitic pressure, Cuban president Federico Laredo Bru signed "Decree 938" eight days before the ship departed Germany. The decree invalidated the landing permits. No one had told the passengers.
It was more than hiding the truth. The Reich was playing an espionage game and the St. Louis passengers were its pawns. Havana was the center of German intelligence and espionage activities directed against the United States. Nazi intelligence officers there had purchased top-secret documents detailing U.S. submarine designs and needed a way to smuggle them into Germany. The plan was simple: A Nazi agent, planted as a St. Louis crewman, would disembark in Havana, rendezvous with a Nazi intelligence agent there, carry the documents back to the ship, and deliver them to Berlin as soon as the St. Louis returned to Hamburg with its Jewish cargo.
Over and above the espionage payoff was the PR factor. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels couldn't pass up the opportunity to make the United States look like a hypocrite in the eyes of the world. The St. Louis would show the German people that the Reich was serious about ridding the country of its Jews. Then it would demonstrate to the world that the Reich was allowing Jews to leave freely and unharmed. And finally, it would make concrete in human terms what Evian had told the world in theoretical terms: Nobody, especially the United States, was willing to take German and Austrian Jews.
To make sure Cuban president Bru would not change his mind under pressure from the United States and the world community, Goebbels sent fourteen Nazi propagandists to Cuba to stoke the smoldering flames of anti-Semitism. The strategy worked. Five days before the St. Louis steamed out of Hamburg harbor, the streets of Havana boiled over with forty thousand angry demonstrators, the largest anti-Semitic demonstration in Cuban history.
To command the St. Louis, the Hamburg-Amerika line, operating under the direction of the Reich, had chosen Gustav Schroeder, an experienced seaman and staunch anti-Nazi, to captain the ship. Even though the Reich didn't trust him, he was perfect window dressing for the charade.
The St. Louis reached Cuban territorial waters in mid-May. To the shock and anger of Captain Schroeder and the passengers, Cuba refused to allow passengers to disembark until a sales transaction was completed. President Bru put a price of five hundred dollars on the head of each passenger. The bill came to about half a million dollars (nearly $8 million today). It was a bluff. Bru knew the passengers didn't have that kind of money, and he gambled on the assumption that no one else would come to their rescue. Then, when an international coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish leaders called his bluff and deposited the money in the Chase National Bank of Cuba, Bru raised the ante to $650 per head. When an international negotiator tried to bargain, Bru abruptly removed his offer from the table.
President Bru's denial of entry left Captain Schroeder with two choices: return to Hamburg as ordered by the Hamburg-Amerika line or find another country willing to accept more than nine hundred refugees. Gambling on the generosity of America, Schroeder sailed north into international waters off the coast of Miami and aimlessly cruised up and down waiting for either a change of heart from Bru or a message of welcome from the United States. From the decks of the wandering ship, passengers could see blinking lights of hope from the luxury hotels lining Miami's beaches. A Coast Guard cutter shadowed the ship, not so much to prevent it from docking as to "rescue" any passenger desperate enough to try to swim to freedom, and to keep the ship in sight in case President Bru had a change of heart.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Useful Enemies by Richard Rashke. Copyright © 2013 Richard Rashke. Excerpted by permission of DELPHINIUM BOOKS.
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