# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Refugees

Increasingly discriminatory measures in Nazi Germany led many Jews and others targeted by the Nazis to try to leave the country. Between the 1933 Nazi party rise to power and 1939, more than 300,000 Jews migrated from Germany and Austria.

However, for many, finding a safe haven proved difficult. Western nations feared an influx of refugees, especially in the wake of the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass," November 9-10, 1938) pogroms. Although 85,000 Jewish refugees reached the United States between March 1938 and September 1939, due to American immigration restrictions on the number of immigrants this level of immigration was far below the number seeking refuge. At the 32-country Evian Conference convened in 1938 to consider the plight of refugees, no country except the Dominican Republic was prepared to increase immigration quotas. In 1939, both Cuba and the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St. Louis. The ship was forced to return to Europe where, ultimately, many of the passengers perished in concentration camps or killing centers.

Over 50,000 German Jews migrated to Palestine during the 1930s under the terms of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement. However, with the enactment by the British Parliament of the 1939 White Paper, the British governing authorities placed severe limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine. As the number of hospitable destinations dwindled, tens of thousands of German, Austrian, and Polish Jews migrated to Shanghai, China, one of the few destinations without visa requirements.

During World War II, even as reports of Nazi genocide filtered to the West, the U.S. Department of State failed to relax its strict limits on immigration. Despite British restrictions, limited numbers of Jews entered Palestine during the war through "illegal" immigration (Aliyah Bet) or other means. Great Britain itself limited its own intake of immigrants, though the British government did permit the entry of some 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children in a special Kindertransport (Children's Transport) program. At the Allies' 1943 Bermuda Conference, no concrete proposals for rescue emerged.

Officially neutral Switzerland took in approximately 30,000 Jews, but turned back thousands more at the border. Spain accepted a limited number of refugees and then speedily sent them on to the Portuguese port of Lisbon. From there, thousands managed to sail to the United States in 1940-1941, although thousands more were unable to obtain U.S. entry visas.

After the war, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons (DPs) found shelter in camps administered by the Allies while they awaited a new home in which to rebuild their lives. In the U.S., immigration restrictions were still in effect. Immigration to Palestine (Aliyah) was also still severely limited. Between 1945 and 1948, the British interned thousands of illegal immigrants to Palestine in detention camps on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish refugees began streaming into that new sovereign state. Thanks to revised immigration policy, the United States admitted 400,000 DPs between 1945 and 1952, roughly 20 percent of them Jewish Holocaust survivors. The search for refuge frames both the years before the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Further Reading

Baumel, Judith Tydor. Unfulfilled Promise: Rescue and Resettlement of Jewish Refugee Children in the United States, 1934-1945. Juneau, AK: Denali Press, 1990.

Breitman, Richard, and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Fox, Anne L., and Eva Abraham-Podietz. Ten Thousand Children: True Stories Told by Children Who Escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport. West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1999.

Genizi, Haim. America's Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945-1952. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.

Laqueur, Walter. Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001.

Zucker, Bat-Ami. In Search of Refuge: Jews and US Consuls in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001.

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