Emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe started after Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933.
In 1933, Hitler and the Jewish League agreed to the Haavara Agreement in which, over time, German Jews and their finances could and would settle in Mandatory Palestine. Furthermore, the Havaara Mark was used instead of the Deutschmark, because of its lower interest rates, and it was seen as more favourable. By the end of the 30‘s, over 60,000 German Jews had emigrated to Palestine. [1] Following this, they discouraged emigration by restricting the amount of money Jews could take from German banks and imposed high emigrations taxes. The German government forbade emigration from the Greater Germanic Reich after October 1941. The German Jews who remained, about 163,000 in Germany and less than 57,000 from annexed Austria, were mostly elderly who were murdered in ghettos or taken to Nazi concentration camps, where most were murdered. [2] Jews were able to leave Vichy France until the fall of 1942. [3]
Although Jews could initially leave Nazi Germany with ease, it was difficult to find countries that would take them, particularly after the initial wave of immigrants in Europe, Britain, and the United States had been accepted. [2] One of the reasons that emigration was so difficult was that it began during the Great Depression. [1]
...we all wanted to get rid of our Jews but that the difficulties lay in the fact that no country wished to receive them.
—German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in a conversation to Adolf Hitler. [4]
Following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany in 1938, and forced emigration deepened the refugee crisis, the Évian Conference was held in France to explore options for countries to emigrate to, but the key outcome of the conference was that it proved that forced emigration would not solve the problem. [4] Another was a concern that there might be pro-Nazi spies among the refugees. [3]
It was also difficult to get out of Europe. After the war started, there were few ships that left European ports. Lisbon was a neutral port, however, from which refugees could still travel. [3]
In October 1943, 7,000 Danish Jews, and 700 of their relatives who were not Jewish, escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark for neutral Sweden, as was coordinated by the Danish resistance movement. They travelled to Malmö, Sweden across the Øresund Channel. [5]
Many of the French, Luxembourgian, Belgian, and Dutch Jews were protected by their Country's resistances, hid in secret locations that were hard to find for the Nazis, and fled to the United Kingdom, Free France (Algeria), Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and the United States.
Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, [6] when there were about 523,000 German Jews (<1 percent of the population) in the country. [2] Subject to threats and persecution, Jews began to emigrate from that point until the start of World War II. [2] [6] In Austria, more than 50% of the Jews had left the country by May 1939, following Adolf Eichmann's program to force Jews to emigrate that began in the spring of 1938. Franz Mayer, a Jewish leader, said of Eichmann's system: "You put in a Jew at one end, with property, a shop, a bank account, and legal rights. He passed through the building and came out at the other end without property, without privileges, without rights, with nothing except a passport and order to leave the country within a fortnight; otherwise, he would find himself inside a concentration camp." [4] By the end of 1939, there were more than 117,000 Jews who left Austria and more than 300,000 who left Germany. Most of them were trained in a particular field or college-educated. Generally, they were young in age. [2] [6]
Many of the 100,000 people who found refuge in neighbouring European countries, like the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, were captured and murdered by the Nazis, after May 1940, when they invaded western Europe. [2] [1] As the Nazi regime occupied Czechoslovakia, beginning in 1938, and invaded Poland in 1939, there were more Jewish refugees. [7]
After the German occupation of Norway in 1940, some Norwegian Jews were able to find a safe haven in Sweden, which was neutral. [5] However, over half of the Norwegian Jews were rounded up by Quisling regime police and handed over to the Reichskommissariat Norwegen. [8]
Jews were prevented from leaving German-occupied Poland by the Schutzstaffel (SS). [3] About 10% of the Polish Jewish population, together with 1 million Poles in total, were rounded up by the Russians and sent to Siberia in intolerable circumstances. Many died from harsh treatment at the hands of the Russians from 1939 and 1943 and onwards. Other Jews were spared harsh treatment, however, and some were trained in Moscow, so as to be fit to command a new Polish government after the war was over. Some of them were sent to remote areas of the Soviet Union, Siberia, or Central Asia. [5]
In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began the systematic extermination of Jews as part of Hitler's Final Solution plan, beginning with their removal to extermination camps. During The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Jews who were unable to flee to the Asian parts of the country were methodically shot. [5] By the end of the war, 67 percent of the Jews from Europe had been murdered. [7]
Despite pressure from Germany, Fascist Italy protected Jewish people in lands that it occupied in Greece, France, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia, as well as protecting Jews in Tunisia, between mid-1942 and September 1943. [5]
About 30,000 Jews entered Portugal through Spain, and many sought passage in Lisbon on ships bound for the Americas. The refugees were assisted by French and American Jewish organizations. Most travelled between 1939 and 1941, and after Germans pressured the country to limit Jews ability to travel through their country, from 1942 to 1944 there were about 7,500 people who were admitted entry to Spain for Portugal. Spanish consuls also provided identity papers so that up to 5,000 people could escape through other parts of Europe. [5]
Sweden took in Jews from Norway and Denmark. [5]
The Swiss took in nearly 30,000 Jews, yet also turned away 20,000 at their border. [5]
In July 1938, the Dominican Republic was the only country at the Évian Conference that said it would admit a large number of refugees. President Rafael Trujillo did this partially to deflect international criticism of mass killings of Haitian refugees in the Parsley massacre. [9]
Between 1938 and 1941, Bolivia allowed for 30,000 refugees to immigrate to its country. [1]
Mandatory Palestine was a destination for 18,000 Jews escaping the Nazi regime through the Balkans between 1937 and 1944. This was organized by the Zionist movement. There were more than 16,000 Jews who later were bound for Palestine on boats from the Romanian and Bulgarian ports on the Black Sea and often through Turkey for refueling. One ship, MV Struma, was sunk, presumably accidentally, by a Soviet Navy submarine, in what is referred to as the Struma disaster. [5]
Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippines, under the Open Doors policy planned to accept Jewish refugees from Europe. Then a Commonwealth, the United States limited the number of Jews to be admitted to its colony. [10] 1,200 Jews arrived in the Philippines from 1937 to 1941. [11]
The United States had about 27,000 available visas in late 1938 for individuals for refugees. At that time, consulate offices outside the US were visited by 125,000 applicants, and by June 1939, there had been more than 300,000 applicants. This was far more than the US would allow into the country due to its immigration policy. [1] The MS St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany for Cuba, who had issued transit visas for more than 900 Jewish refugees, on a voyage that occurred from May to June 1939. Once the ship had arrived, the Cubans cancelled the refugees' visas. The ship was denied permission to land in the United States and Canada and it had to make a return voyage to Europe. Of 928 returning passengers, 288 were accepted by Britain, 366 survived the war on the continent, and 254 were murdered during the Holocaust. [1] [12] In 1944, the War Refugee Board (WRB) was established to assist tens of thousands of refugees, in coordination with the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and an emergency shelter was established at Fort Ontario in New York, which housed almost 1,000 refugees. [3]
Approximately 20,000 European Jewish refugees settled in the Republic of China, which already had a substantial expatriate population, during the 1930s and the 1940s. Many of them established businesses, decided to remain in the country permanently, and even acquired Chinese citizenship. Almost all of them fled during the Chinese Civil War and the Communist Revolution, with most Jewish expatriates being evacuated from Shanghai to Israel beginning in 1948. [13]
Organizations were established to assist refugees, like the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. There were few non-Jews that helped the Jews escape, but there were some that risked their lives for the cause. [5] Such people were later amongst what became known as the Righteous Among the Nations.
Palestine alone could absorb and provide for the homeless and the stateless Jews uprooted by the war. [...] It is to canalize all the sympathy of the world for the martyrdom of the Jews that the Zionists reject all schemes to resettle these victims elsewhere — in Germany, or Poland, or in sparsely populated regions such as Madagascar.
—Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel [14]
In May 1945, European Jews were released from concentration camps or came out of hiding, to find that they had lost family members and their former homes. The population of displaced persons also included more than 150,000 Jews who had left Central and Eastern Europe due to violence and anti-Semitism. Countries continued to resist taking in Jews, however. [3] The most favourable destinations for the displaced Jews were Palestine and the United States; in the latter, President Harry S. Truman issued the "Truman Directive," on 22 December 1945, and up to 40,000 Jews entered the United States by 1 July 1948. That year, a law was enacted by Congress that increased immigration quotas to allow in approximately 80,000 Jews, who were subject to what Truman called "flagrantly discriminatory" entry qualifications. About 102,000 forced labourers and other individuals from the Baltics and Eastern Europe, who were Christians, were also allowed to be admitted to the US. [3] There were 137,450 Jewish refugees who settled in the United States between 1945 and 1952.[ citation needed ]
On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was founded during the 1947–1949 Palestine war, and many Jews settled there. [3]
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt] ) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced[noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə] ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht (literally 'Crystal Night') comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered passenger ship properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line. The ship was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Her sister ship, MS Milwaukee, was also a diesel powered motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line. St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco. St. Louis was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as Joint or JDC, is a Jewish relief organization based in New York City. Since 1914 the organisation has supported Jewish people living in Israel and throughout the world. The organization is active in more than 70 countries.
Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, most of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.
The Évian Conference was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. It was the initiative of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt who perhaps hoped to obtain commitments from some of the invited nations to accept more refugees, although he took pains to avoid stating that objective expressly. Historians have suggested that Roosevelt desired to deflect attention and criticism from American policy that severely limited the quota of refugees admitted to the United States.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah is a Hebrew term for Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romanis as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several distinct types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit, and destruction ghettos, as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
The Haavara Agreement was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. It was a major factor in making possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
Raymond Herman Geist was the American Consul and First Secretary of the United States embassy in Berlin from 1929 to 1939. Geist has been recognized as Diplomat Savior by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which advocates for the recognition of Holocaust rescuers. However, one academic researcher has asserted that Geist largely acted to block the granting of visas to Jewish immigrants between 1933 and 1939, in line with the policy adopted by U.S. Foreign Service Officers in Germany at the time. A 2019 book about Geist found that "Geist was doing what he could to liberalize America's scandalously tight visa regime for Jewish refugees, help as many German Jews as possible."
The Holocaust in Germany was the systematic persecution, deportation, imprisonment, and murder of Jews in Germany as part of the Europe-wide Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The term typically refers only to the areas that were part of Germany prior to the Nazi regime coming to power and excludes some or all of the territories annexed by Nazi Germany, such as Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
A neutral state, the United States entered the war on the Allied side in December 1941. The American government first became aware of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe in 1942 and 1943. Following a report on the failure to assist the Jewish people by the Department of State, the War Refugee Board was created in 1944 to assist refugees from the Nazis. As one of the most powerful Allied states, the United States played a major role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust saw increased awareness in the 1970s that instilled its prominence in the collective memory of the American people continuing to the present day. The United States has been criticized for taking insufficient action in response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s and the Holocaust during World War II.
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