Cruel World (27 page)

Conditions in the camps improved slowly in the next few months and thousands of Spaniards acceptable to the Franco government were sent home. Special trains were provided for pregnant women, and a number of camps were set up for mothers and children. By mid-July 1939 half of the Spanish refugees had been repatriated and a few thousand taken in by Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, and other countries. But many rejects remained in the awful enclosures. The American naval attaché to France, on a visit to the camp at Gurs, near Bayonne, felt that it would take fifteen more months to “dispose” of the camps and their blacklisted occupants. Meanwhile, maintenance of the remaining refugees was costing the French government four to six million francs a day,
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and six months after the end of the Civil War, the consortium of organizations known as the International Commission for the Assistance of Spanish Child Refugees was still helping and soliciting funds for women and children in 2,000 different locations in France, as well as for 800,000 people, mostly children, that Franco’s Auxilio Social could not adequately care for in many of the devastated areas of Spain. These victims were about to be joined by millions of others.
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If Guernica had aroused sufficient humanitarian outrage in the nations of refuge to inspire any number of groups to work for the evacuation of Spanish children, the Nazis’ brutal takeover of Austria and, six months later, their attack on the German Jewish community on Kristallnacht would be the catalyst for similar actions to save the threatened children of Germany and Austria. But the rescue efforts would come very late and only after it had become obvious that the nations of the world, for myriad reasons, were not prepared to take in the massive numbers of families who were in danger of expulsion, not only from the Reich, but from a number of other countries. Governments can deal with the idea of a few hundred thousand refugees on a temporary, humanitarian basis, but the prospect of caring permanently for many millions had become, by 1938, more of a threat than a duty to most politicians.

Jews scrub Vienna streets under the supervision of Hitler Youth boys
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(photo credit 6.2)

Until March 12, 1938, when Hitler’s forces marched into Austria, the truly desperate situation of Jews in the Reich had not been taken seriously in the outer world, or even in the German Jewish community. Emigration had proceeded calmly, at a manageable pace, and many thousands of German Jews had found havens of a sort. Most of those who had departed, and even more so those who still hesitated to leave, had persisted, along with the rest of the world, in the belief that reason would prevail, and that Herr Hitler would not survive very long in office.

The scenes in Austria, in the full glare of public scrutiny, were appalling. The Austrian Nazis, who had been hoping for this takeover for years, were in the streets within minutes of the resignation of Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who had been betrayed by his own Nazi ministers. British journalist G. E. R. Gedye reported with amazement “the pathological anti-Semitism of the Nazis”:

Until the early hours of the morning this “howling mob, comprising perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 of Vienna’s population of 2,000,000,” marched through the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt, looting houses as it went. The next day, American journalist William Shirer described the public humiliation of Jews forced to scrub the streets and clean public lavatories with their bare hands, while storm troopers jeered and urinated on them in “an orgy of sadism.” Jews were beaten and arrested on the streets for no reason; they were fired from their jobs, and thousands were taken to concentration camps. Even small children soon learned the Nazi attitude. A kindergarten teacher walking in the park overheard the following exchange by two five-year-olds who, until that day, had gotten along perfectly well:

Now fear was predominant in the Jewish community. To the delight of the storm troopers, there were hundreds of suicides. Carts removing the bodies, sometimes of whole families, were labeled “Neighbors, Please Copy.”
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For those not previously so inclined, there could now be no doubt that emigration was the only thing to do. Within hours the roads to the frontier were jammed. Thousands took to the woods and mountain passes. The airports and train stations were mobbed. At the stations and on the departing trains storm troopers robbed and arrested hundreds. The Czechs gave no political asylum this day, and after waiting for hours in the stations, carload after carload was sent back into Austria from the Czech frontier and soon from all the others, which were also sealed.

In case anyone still had doubts, the Nazis, under the aegis of Adolf Eichmann, immediately set up a special agency dedicated to the expulsion of Jews and soon were requiring that 300 persons be processed for departure each day. Those who were released from prison had to promise to leave Austria within six weeks. Making it more difficult for the émigrés to find a place of refuge, they were not only stripped of most of their assets,
but were required to sign a document pledging that they would never return to Austria.

The calm, if often quietly desperate, negotiations for visas that had gone on for years at the consulates of the United States, Great Britain, and other nations of refuge were transformed, overnight, into scenes of hysteria. Some, who acted fast and got to the American consulate in the first hours after the takeover to get a quota number, were, in fact, rewarded with success, and, if they could gather all the proper documentation, and especially the essential affidavit of support, could get out within a few months. But within a few days the consulate was dealing with 6,000 people a day, of whom no more than 500 could be interviewed in the eleven hours the office stayed open. Soon the quota for Austria of 1,413 per annum was booked for years ahead.

Public and press opinion had also been galvanized in the United States. Only days after the takeover in Austria, President Roosevelt expressed a desire to offer the Austrian émigrés a place of refuge as had been done “for so many fine Germans in the period of 1848,” and asked his Cabinet if they thought an increase in the German quota would be approved by the Congress. The response was negative. Vice President John Nance Garner told him that “if it were left to a secret vote of Congress,
all
immigration would be stopped.”
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Instead of attempting this perilous change, Roosevelt and his advisers somewhat ameliorated the situation by ordering the amalgamation of the German and Austrian quotas and use of all of its 27,370 annual slots. They also set up a Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees to coordinate refugee matters at home and called for an international committee to consider the problem. By March 23 invitations to a meeting at Évian-les-Bains, a resort town in France, to set up a committee “for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees” were presented by U.S. envoys in all the major nations of Western Europe and the Americas except Spain, which was obviously not qualified. The original proposal reassured the invitees that they would not be responsible for funding the émigrés and that “no country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.”
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The existing legislation, had it been left intact, would, if spread over ten years, probably have provided adequate refuge for the remaining Austrian and German refugees. But by the time the Évian Conference took place, many nations had changed their immigration laws. It was increasingly clear to all that the earlier anti-Semitic noises made by other countries
were serious and that things would not stop with Germany and Austria. In May 1937 a Polish mission had, with the consent of French Prime Minister Léon Blum, himself a Jew, gone to the French colony of Madagascar to see if it would be a suitable place to send large numbers of Polish Jews.
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In December of the same year, the Romanian government had passed anti-Semitic laws and stated that it wished to expel most of its 800,000 Jews, and neighboring Hungary, under pressure from its powerful Nazi Party, also instituted anti-Jewish measures.

Now, as preparations for the conference proceeded, the Romanian government suggested that not only Romania, but Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland be added to the list of nations whose political refugees would be received abroad, intimating that “Romania would like to dispose annually of a number corresponding to the Jewish birth rate.”
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Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles replied with some feeling that it would be “unfortunate” if the “mere existence” of a refugee committee “should anywhere be construed as an encouragement of legislation or acts that would create a new refugee problem.”
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Thirty-two nations agreed to come to the Évian Conference, which did not take place until July 6, by which time many drawbridges had been raised.

On March 21, the Dutch government increased its border guards and tightened its admission rules. This move had been contemplated for some weeks. Since 1933, thousands of German refugees had entered the Netherlands legally, but many more were suspected of being there. Town officials in the border areas had noticed that if one or two refugees were given permission to stay, they soon would be joined by others, who used the addresses of the original entrants to get past the border controls. The change in policy was not limited to new arrivals: on May 7, all foreigners were required to register with the police. These measures met with considerable public protest and accusations that the government was inhumane, though one Jewish newspaper noted that a greater influx of refugees would destabilize the economy and lead to “a surfeit of foreigners.” By now, some 25,000 Jews and 7,000 German political refugees were known to have entered Holland, of whom 25,000 remained. Despite the new measures, 1,800 more refugees were admitted and registered by Jewish organizations in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. There was, in fact, no real way to know how many were in the country, as many foreign Jews never registered with the Dutch Jewish Council at all.
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On April 21, the British too, who before had had no visa requirement, fearing an uncontrollable flood of penniless arrivals off Channel steamers and convinced that those emigrants who arrived would probably not be
able or willing to return to the Reich, informed the German government that visas would in future be required for all of its nationals who desired to land in Great Britain. On the same day, the British Consul General in Vienna, still unaware of the centralized nature of the expulsions, reported that

Arab resistance against Jewish emigration to Palestine, a British mandate since 1920, where more Jews had gone than anywhere else, particularly from Poland, had led the British to reduce immigration there sharply as well. By the early spring of 1938, a stage of intermittent warfare existed there that would become particularly fierce at the time of the Évian Conference.

Despite the scenes of horror before the eyes of the world, the meeting at Évian had no concrete results. Most delegations spent their time explaining why they could not take more refugees. Only the Dominican Republic, apparently desiring to increase its white population, offered to take a substantial number. The Jewish agencies in attendance did not help matters with their endless squabbling and rivalry among themselves. In the end it was decided to set up the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which would “explore” further solutions.