In 1938 a joke was doing the rounds throughout Jewish communities in Germany and Austria . It went something like this: A Jew goes into a travel agency hoping to buy a ticket that would enable him to leave the Third Reich. The agent asks him where he would like to go:
“Switzerland ?”
“No, they’re restricting Jewish entry there.”
“Brazil ?”
“No, likewise.”
“How about the United States?”
“Sorry, quotas.”
“New Zealand , then?”
“No spaces available.”
Exasperated after having gone through more than a dozen possibilities, the clerk reaches behind his desk and brings out a globe of the world. “Choose,” he invites his customer. After a moment of contemplation, the Jewish man asks: “Do you have anything else?”
The international scene was anything but welcoming for the Jews of Nazi Germany as 1938 progressed, and after the union ( Anschluss ) of Austria with Germany in March of that year immigration regulations, already tight in most countries, became even more constricted. Two years earlier, the President of the World Zionist Organization , Dr. Chaim Weizmann , testified before the Peel Commission established by the British government for the purpose of exploring options for the Palestine Mandate . On November 25, 1936, Weizmann declared that the Jews of Europe faced a situation in which “the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter.” 1 After the Anschluss , that situation was exacerbated significantly.
Up to this time, Jews in Nazi Germany had been reluctant to leave what, for the previous century and a half, they had considered to be their legitimate homeland. 2 Frequently raised in discussions of whether or not to stay was the sacrifice made by German Jews on behalf of Imperial Germany during the First World War , when almost 100,000 Jews wore the Kaiser’s uniform and 12,000 were killed in combat. 3 Despite the threat posed by the Nazis, most Jews after 1933 preferred to remain in Germany. When Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Germany’s Jewish population numbered around 525,000 (with 160,000 in Berlin alone); by 1939 just under 300,000 had left, meaning that nearly half the Jewish community still remained in in the country on the eve of the Second World War . As John V.H. Dippel , who has made a major study of the subject, has asked: “Why did they stay?” Attempting an answer, his conclusion is multifaceted: for “many thousands of German Jews”
the bond to Germany was too complex, too emotionally and psychologically compelling, to be neatly rent asunder. It was, in fact, a relationship akin to an abusive marriage. When the Jews were first attacked, their reaction was to deny the accusations of infidelity, profess continuing love and devotion, and endure in silence, with stoic forbearance. Verbal threats and even outbursts of violence, they believed, were momentary excesses that, in a more sober mood, would pass. They were not part of Germany’s true nature; they could not annul a centuries-old affection. Rumors of worse treatment to come were dismissed as panic-inspired exaggerations from faint hearts, none of which would come to pass. 4
Arguing that “perhaps no other Jewish community in Europe was so decentralized and diffuse in its views and allegiance” than that in Germany, Dippel continues that “the interesting fact remains that … the message conveyed during the first Nazi years was essentially the same: Except for the young and the rootless, emigration was not the answer; for better or worse, their destiny still lay in Germany, where the Jews had lived and endured for centuries.” 5
These are important points when juxtaposed alongside the additional fact that countries outside Nazi Germany after 1933 did not want to accept Jews as immigrants. When considered globally there are perhaps four possible reasons for this—and these, whether individually or in combination, presented few options for German Jews as life under the Nazis reduced their hopes of remaining in Germany.
In the first place, many countries carried a number of prejudices toward foreigners that had been formed according to racial or ethnic criteria in earlier times. Second, the world in the 1930s was staggering through a period of economic depression, occasioning mass unemployment and a succession of financial crises. Opposition to all migration, from both organized labor and the middle class, was common: the former on the ground that newly arrived migrants would work for reduced pay that lowered industrial standards; the latter from a fear that “migrants take jobs” and that wherever employment possibilities did exist local workers would be crowded out.
Interwoven with these fears was the third theme running through immigrant (read refugee) rejection: a measure of xenophobia and intolerance of aliens, whereby recent arrivals would be those most likely to bear the brunt of local animosities and prejudices—the more so if they were visibly different or spoke a foreign language. All too frequently, foreign arrivals were viewed as objects of suspicion, and the fears which usually emerge from such a perception were often quick to surface.
Finally, the question of antisemitism must be examined. Since the vast majority of refugees from Nazi Germany were Jews—indeed, many countries such as Australia simply equated the two terms—the question is not one that can be considered lightly. Certainly, the history of refugee reception cannot be separated from the history of antisemitism, and in some countries it formed the primary motivation underscoring policies of refugee rejection. Scholarly literature relating to worldwide antisemitism during the interwar years is vast and covers a wide range of variables, but it is important to point out that it was only one of a number of factors counting towards the rejection of refugee Jews from Germany in the 1930s. 6
To appreciate the motives determining how policy makers framed their various approaches to the refugee issue, it is also important to identify the nature and impact of a number of key relationships holding sway over their thinking: between public opinion and governments; between immigration authorities and other government agencies; between ministers and bureaucrats; between these same bureaucrats and the general public; between local Jewish communities and governments; and between each individual state and Nazi Germany. Many questions need to be asked: What were these relationships? How extensive were they, and how far did they influence policy formation or execution? To what extent can it be said that these relationships acted to the detriment or benefit of the refugees? These questions were far from easy to answer in the 1930s, but they all played a role, at one time or another, in determining the policy perspectives of every country that addressed the refugee issue—whether forced to do so by circumstances, or voluntarily, due to domestic initiatives.
A further introductory question needs to be tackled: When discussions took place regarding refugees from Germany and Austria , who, indeed, was to be considered in this category? In March 1938 a memo circulating in the British Foreign Office dealt with the question by recognizing that up to this point the term “refugee” was applied “only to persons who have already left their country of origin and have taken refuge in some foreign country.” The memo noted that within the context of Nazi Germany the term referred to “persons who have not already left Austria or Germany but who desire to emigrate by reason of the treatment to which they are subjected on account of their political opinions or religious beliefs.” 7
This attitude was later reinforced by a leading bureaucrat in the British Treasury, Edward Playfair , who, in a handwritten note dating from June 1938, commented that the forthcoming conference on refugees at Evian “must restrict its activities to people still in the Reich 8 ;” that is, those who did not formally come under the existing classifications defining refugees. The conference terms of reference, when they were established, would incorporate this into the definition of who could be classed as a refugee. At the same time, unavoidably, the definition also embraced those who had, in fact, already left Germany.
Earlier, in October 1933, the League of Nations had created a new office, the High Commissioner for Refugees (Jewish and Other) from Germany. This supplemented, but did not replicate, the existing Nansen International Office for Refugees, established by the League in 1930. The League already had a long history of taking care of refugees, starting with its High Commission for Refugees under the dire...