The Voyage of the St. Louis: 937 Refugees and the Doors That Closed

On the evening of 13 May 1939, the Hamburg-America Line's motor ship St. Louis slipped its moorings and moved down the Elbe toward the North Sea. On board were 937 passengers. Almost all of them were Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, and most held landing certificates for Cuba. They had paid for their tickets, paid for their visas, and paid the Reich its "flight tax" for the privilege of leaving. Many had already registered with the American consulate and been assigned quota numbers. Cuba was meant to be a waiting room. The United States was meant to be home.

Two weeks later the ship lay at anchor in Havana harbor with its passengers still aboard. Within a month it was steaming back toward Europe. The voyage of the St. Louis lasted only a few weeks, but it became one of the most enduring symbols of the world's response to the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s: a floating community of people who had done everything asked of them, and who found that every door they knocked on had already been closed.

Why They Were Leaving

The passengers of the St. Louis were not fleeing an abstract threat. Six months earlier, during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, synagogues across Germany and Austria had been burned, Jewish businesses looted, and some 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Many were released only on the condition that they emigrate immediately. A number of men on the ship had come directly from those camps. Their families had spent the intervening months gathering the paperwork that might get them out.

Emigration was the Nazi regime's stated policy in 1939, but the outside world made it extraordinarily difficult. The Evian Conference of July 1938 had ended with almost no country willing to raise its quotas. The American waiting list under the German-Austrian quota stretched for years. Cuba, by contrast, had been issuing landing certificates freely, and the island had become a way station for those hoping to reach the United States.

The Crossing

The Atlantic crossing was a strange interlude of normality. The captain, Gustav Schröder, instructed his crew to treat the passengers as they would any other paying guests: meals in the dining room, dances, films, a swimming pool for the children. The ship flew the swastika flag, but Schröder insisted on courtesy, permitted Sabbath services, and allowed the portrait of Hitler in the social hall to be covered while they were held.

What the passengers did not know was that the ground had shifted beneath them before they ever set sail. Their landing certificates had been sold by Cuba's director-general of immigration, Manuel Benítez, in a lucrative private trade that had angered his political rivals. On 5 May 1939, a week before the St. Louis departed, President Federico Laredo Brú issued a decree invalidating the certificates. Only passengers holding a different, more expensive class of visa, approved by the Cuban State Department, would be permitted to land. Fewer than thirty people on board held such documents. The shipping line knew of the decree and sailed anyway.

Havana

The St. Louis reached Havana on 27 May 1939. It was not allowed to dock at its usual pier and anchored instead in the harbor. Twenty-eight passengers, those with valid visas or Cuban nationality, were admitted. The rest waited. Relatives who had already reached Cuba hired small boats and circled the ship, calling up to family members at the rails. One passenger, Max Loewe, a lawyer who had survived a concentration camp, slashed his wrists and threw himself overboard; he was rescued and taken to a Havana hospital.

Lawrence Berenson, a lawyer sent by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, negotiated with the Cuban government for days. Laredo Brú demanded a bond of 500 dollars for every passenger; when Berenson tried to bargain the figure down, the president broke off talks. On 2 June the St. Louis was ordered out of Cuban waters. Schröder sailed slowly north, so close to the Florida coast that the passengers could see the lights of Miami.

The United States and Canada

Telegrams went from the ship to the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not reply. The State Department's position was that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." Public opinion ran strongly against increasing immigration, and a bill to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany had died in Congress months earlier. A Coast Guard cutter shadowed the liner, but no offer of refuge came. An appeal to Canada was likewise refused; Frederick Blair, the senior immigration official in Ottawa, argued that admitting the passengers would invite a flood of similar requests.

On 6 June 1939, with food and fuel running short, Captain Schröder turned the ship toward Europe. Schröder told the passenger committee he would not return them to Germany, and privately considered running the ship aground on the English coast so that the passengers would have to be taken off as shipwreck survivors.

Antwerp, and What Came After

The Joint Distribution Committee, working with Jewish organizations in Europe, negotiated a solution while the ship was still at sea. Four countries agreed to take the passengers: Great Britain accepted 288, France 224, Belgium 214 and the Netherlands 181. The St. Louis docked at Antwerp on 17 June 1939, more than a month after leaving Hamburg. No one was sent back to Germany. At the time, this was regarded as a rescue, and for a few months it was one.

In May 1940 Germany invaded the Low Countries and France. The passengers who had gone to Britain were, with few exceptions, safe for the rest of the war. The 619 who had landed on the continent were once again under Nazi rule. Research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which traced the fate of every passenger, found that 254 of them were murdered in the Holocaust, most at Auschwitz and Sobibor, or died in the camps and ghettos of occupied Europe. The remaining 365 survived, some in hiding, some by emigrating before the deportations began, some by living through the camps.

Remembering the St. Louis

Gustav Schröder never commanded another ship. After the war he was honored by the West German government, and in 1993 Yad Vashem recognized him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his conduct during the voyage. The St. Louis itself was damaged in an Allied bombing raid on Kiel in 1944 and scrapped in 1952.

Governments have since revisited the episode. In 2012 the U.S. State Department formally apologized to surviving passengers, and in 2018 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized in the House of Commons. A memorial, the Wheel of Conscience, stands at Pier 21 in Halifax, the port through which so many immigrants entered Canada and the passengers of the St. Louis did not.

The story endures because of what it is not. It is not a story of a secret: newspapers followed the ship day by day, and the passengers' plight was known to every government that refused them. Nor is it a story of the death camps, which did not yet exist in 1939. It is a story of the moment before, when the persecution was undeniable, the killing had not yet begun, and the countries that could have opened their doors chose to keep them shut. The 254 passengers who later died were not beyond anyone's reach. They had been within sight of Miami.