Island Refuge

Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933-1939

A.J. Sherman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134981960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The acrimonious debate over British policy towards refugees from the Nazi régime has scarcely died down even now, some 60 years later. Bitter charges of indifference and lack of feeling are still levelled at politicians and civil servants, and the assertion is made that Great Britain's record on refugee matters is shabby and unworthy of its liberal traditions. Island Refuge is the definitive account of a largely unexplored and still highly controversial episode in twentieth-century history. This reprinted edition contains a new preface discussing historiographical developments since the first edition.

1
Introduction

One refugee is a novelty, ten refugees are boring, and a hundred refugees are a menace.¹

VERY shortly after the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in January 1933, the British Government was confronted with a domestic and international problem for which it was uniquely unprepared: a wave of refugees fleeing from political, racial and religious persecution. Earlier post-World War I mass movements of refugees—notably of Russians, Armenians and Greeks—with which other European governments were wearily familiar, had largely by-passed Great Britain, and there were few useful recent precedents for dealing with large numbers of would-be immigrants to the United Kingdom and the Empire, some merely politically embarrassing but virtually all unwanted potential competitors in the drastically shrunken labour markets of the Depression years.

Soon after their appearance on the international scene refugees from the Third Reich² represented very little of a novelty, still less of a bore, but indeed something of a menace: they embodied a stubbornly intractable problem which subjected both Ministers and civil servants to a cross-fire of intensely uncomfortable political pressures. There were on the one hand eloquent representations both public and private from Parliament, Jewish groups, the Quakers and other sources to do something for the refugees on humanitarian grounds. Other groups and individuals, slower off the mark and at least initially less vocal, were nonetheless insistent in urging that the number of refugees admitted to Great Britain and the Empire be limited as much as possible. Intense lobbying on the part of many groups, sometimes in competition with one another, produced a policy perhaps inevitably seldom entirely consistent in either conception or execution. A survey of that policy does however refute the widely-held view, based largely on the dramatic clash over Palestine, that the British Government was both ungenerous and indifferent to the fate of refugees from the Nazi regime.

The relentlessly rising numbers of those fleeing from the Reich confronted the Government in London with the necessity to formulate and then often revise policies in several areas. The earliest and most urgent issue concerned the admission of refugees to the United Kingdom itself, whose uniquely favourable geographical position to control immigration was buttressed by legislation conferring wide discretionary powers upon the Home Secretary in deciding on the admission, expulsion or naturalisation of aliens.³ Later the question of admission to the overseas territories, including Palestine, also assumed great importance. Among these territories, the self-governing Dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Eire—each had its own independent aliens policy, agreeing only in a general preference for immigration from the British Isles; London bore no responsibility for making immigration policy in the Dominions, and was wary of even giving the appearance of a wish to intervene in this sphere of jealously-guarded national prerogative.

The British Government did however retain authority to promulgate immigration policy in certain overseas dependencies, the principal one of which in relation to the refugee problem was Palestine, where the League of Nations mandate under which Great Britain administered the country specifically enjoined the Government to 'facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions'. These conditions were until 1937 defined in purely economic terms, as the economic capacity of Palestine to absorb new arrivals.⁴

Policy decisions had in addition to be made on such international aspects of the problem as the extent to which Great Britain should cooperate in League of Nations and other efforts to assist refugee migration. The League had created in 1921 a High Commission'to deal with the international problem represented by more than a million Russian refugees; during the years that followed, the High Commissioner for Refugees, Dr Fridtjof Nansen, was required also to aid in the relief and settlement of Greek, Armenian, Assyrian and other refugee groups. By 1930 some progress had been made in defining the legal status of these largely stateless persons—most had been provided with identity papers which became known as 'Nansen passports'—and in their settlement in Europe and elsewhere. After Dr Nansen's death in 1930 the legal and political protection of refugees was transferred to the Nansen International Office for Refugees, a body directly responsible to the League Assembly, which also provided for the Office's administrative expenses in the confident expectation that the Office and its task could be wound up by the end of 1938. The British Government consistently regarded the problem of 'Nansen' refugees as one not substantially affecting British interests, since very few of these individuals had been admitted to British territories, and remained correspondingly aloof from League refugee work on their behalf.

There was also the effect of the refugee question on relations with Germany, the United States, and several Eastern European countries to be considered. These questions were in turn bound up with the larger issue of which British interests were specifically affected by the refugee movement, and whether Great Britain had in diplomatic usage any locus standi to intervene in one or another aspect of the refugee problem, which from Berlin's point of view remained a largely internal question brooking no interference from the League of Nations or any outside power.

In considering its attitude to the refugee question, each Government department was burdened by its own particular anxiety: for the Home Office it was, overwhelmingly, the large numbers of British unemployed and the possible importation through inadvertence of an undesirable 'racial problem'; for the Foreign Office, fraying relations with Berlin and the desire to avoid criticism from Washington and later from new allies such as Poland and Rumania; for the Treasury, the spectre of unlimited financial liability for the settlement and possible relief of needy migrants; and for the Colonial Office, Palestine and the entire constellation of issues in the Arab-Jewish conflict. Behind all these concerns was the nightmare, based on repeated urgent representations from the Polish Government and broad hints from other Eastern European regimes, that an overgenerous response to the plight of refugees from the Reich might create a precedent which could inspire the expulsion of millions, not thousands, of totally destitute Jews from Eastern Europe, and thus confront the British and indeed other governments with a burden of unbearable dimensions. The many millions in Eastern Europe who might yet become stateless cast a shadow which lengthened in direct proportion to the worsening in the situation of refugees from the Reich.

That situation itself underwent an evolution between 1933 and 1939 in which a number of periods may be distinguished. The first extended from January 1933 when Hitler took office as Chancellor to the promulgation of the so-called Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. The first refugee exodus, relatively small in numbers, was also rather tentative in character, as many of the refugees fled to France and other neighbouring European countries in the expectation that the Nazi regime would somehow be replaced, or at least become sufficiently moderate so as to permit them to resume residence in Germany. Moreover, these first refugees benefited from regulations which still permitted them to rescue a substantial fraction of their property, as well as from a sympathetic attitude on the part of many governments outside Germany. The Nuremberg Laws, however, with their sudden inclusion in the pariah class of many 'non-Aryans' as well as those heretofore regarded as Jews, ushered in a period of increasing repression under whose impact many thousands of new refugees sought permanent settlement outside Germany. Emigration in the second period, from October 1935 to March 1938, proceeded steadily, even though the process was complicated by increasingly confiscatory measures by the German Government and less receptive policies in countries to which the refugees turned for asylum. The incorporation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938 inaugurated the third phase, which lasted until November of that year. This period saw a massive flight characterised by widespread panic, the virtual expulsion of refugees stripped of almost all their property, and the hasty tightening of immigration regulations by countries all over the world anxious to deflect the tide of migrants to some other and preferably far distant shore.

The slender hope that the German Government might permit its unwanted nationals to leave with that minimum of property rendering them acceptable to other countries as immigrants was shattered, along with any lingering illusions that life in the Reich itself might remain barely tolerable for Jews and 'non-Aryans', by the organised pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, which came to be known as Kristallnacht. The ensuing wave—the fourth period—of flight, during which most privately-organised efforts for orderly migration broke down in chaos, was complicated also by the exodus from those parts of Czechoslovakia which had been transferred to the Reich under the provisions of the Munich Agreement. Faced with vast numbers of penniless and demoralised refugees, most countries closed their doors to both permanent settlers and transmigrants; private relief organisations and international refugee agencies struggled desperately but unsuccessfully to deal with the new developments. With the absorption of rump Czechoslovakia into the Reich in March 1939, the fifth and final pre-war phase of the refugee movement began. It saw the widest possible territorial spread of the problem, with refugees streaming to every continent, frequently on ships which wandered for weeks in search of some port where they could dump their unwanted passengers. Shanghai, the one port in the world which required no landing papers, became the uncertain refuge for many thousands. Other thousands from the Reich and from the impoverished and desperate Jewries of Poland and Rumania attempted the hazards and hardships of the clandestine routes to Palestine. With the Gestapo simply pushing refugees over the Reich frontiers, several European governments, in sheer self-preservation, established temporary camps to harbour refugees pending their further migration. Territorial settlement schemes in ever more exotic corners of the globe were explored and debated.

But time, that most critical factor in the migratory equation, had almost run out. With the outbreak of war in September 1939 and successive German occupation of countries on the Continent which had sheltered refugees, the entire problem assumed dimensions and posed policy issues radically differing from those of the pre-war period with which this work is concerned.

¹Quoted by Donald P. Kent, The Refugee Intellectual (New York, 1953), p. 172.

² See Appendix I for a discussion of refugee statistics.

³ See Appendix II, Immigration Regulations.

⁴ Ibid.

B

2 First Wave

January 1933 — September 1935

Indeed, at the beginning of the persecution . . . there was something like an awakening of conscience and an outburst of pity. France and other European countries opened their borders to the refugees. . .. But this attitude was short-lived.¹

ON January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler took office as Chancellor of Germany in a National Socialist-Nationalist coalition government which at the outset was unable to claim a majority in the Reichstag. Within six months, however, the National Socialists had subjugated all their political opponents and were implacably launched on a policy of 'coordinating' almost every sphere of German life. German nationals who were unable to adjust to this Gleichschaltung of German politics and society, or who were for whatever reasons unwelcome to the National Socialist regime—their number included Jews, pacifists, liberals, 'Marxists' of every hue, members of certain Churches, dissenting Conservatives or indeed schismatic National Socialists—were subjected to an intensive campaign of persecution, which was expressed in legislation, administrative regulations, court decisions and the informal and avowedly extra-legal methods of local and national Party leaders and organisations. The result and declared purpose of all these measures, official and unofficial, was to make life in the new Reich intolerable for unwanted categories of German citizens. Dismissed en masse from public and, in many cases, private employment, subjected not infrequently to physical abuse, internment or other indignities, those affected sought refuge either in flight or in the hope, soon to be destroyed by further developments, that the policy of discrimination would be abandoned, or at least its intensity diminished.

The initial wave of terrorism following Hitler's coming to power, during which many prominent Jews, pacifist or left-wing politicians and journalists were forced to seek refuge outside Germany, was not based on specific legislative or administrative authority. Following the dissolution of the Reichstag, however, the Government proceeded to enact in legislation a persecutory regime foreshadowed in the Nazi party programme. The statutory foundation for the entire body of subsequent discriminatory legislation was the Law of April 7, 1933 for the Reconstruction of the Civil Service,² which provided sweepingly that civil servants of 'non-Aryan descent' were to be summarily retired. A 'non-Aryan' was defined in a regulation of April 11, 1933³ as a person one of whose grandparents or parents was 'Jewish', which in its turn was defined as adhering to the Jewish religion. Those officials who were serving members of the Civil Service before August 1, 1914, or who fought at the front during World War I, or who had lost a father or a son in that conflict were however exempted initially from the scope of the new legislation. The definition of 'Aryan' and the 'Veterans' clause' were henceforth to serve as guides for the application of administrative measures to Jews throughout Germany.

A series of ordinances and decrees clarifying and extending the provisions of the basic law led to the dismissal of thousands of university and school teachers, employees of national and municipal enterprises, judicial officers of all kinds, scientists, public health and welfare officers and others. Those branches of the German legal profession outside the ranks of the Civil Service were 'coordinated' under a Law on Admission to the Bar of April 7, 1933;⁴ here too, lawyers who were in practice before August 1914, or who could comply with the requirements of the 'Veterans' clause', were in theory re-admitted to the Bar, but often enough excluded in practice.

Those Jewish doctors who were employed in municipal and State services were dismissed along with other civil servants. The numbers of Jewish panel doctors in National Health Insurance practice, which was widespread in Germany, were restricted by a special decree of April 22, 1933. These restrictions were gradually extended to doctors and dentists in other group practices by decisions of the Medical Association. 'Coordination' in education kept pace with that in other fields: on April 25, 1933 schools, other than primary schools, were ordered by law to limit the numb...