School of Architecture, University of Waterloo

In the now more than 30-year-old discussion on Canada’s response to the Jewish refugee crisis 70 years ago, the arguments have by and large focused on the domestic issues that shaped Ottawa’s refugee policy. We have learned about the overwhelming effect of the Great Depression, and we know more about the parochialism of Canadian society in the 1930s—one that generated not only an indifference to the larger world, but at times also a nasty chauvinism and xenophobia. Economic insecurity and a general distrust of the outside world led to the effective closure of Canada’s borders for immigrants—which also applied to refugees, as Canadian refugee policy was a part of Canadian immigration policy.[i] Within the domestic factors that shaped Canadian refugee policy the role of antisemitism has claimed center stage. Irving Abella and Harold (Hesh) Troper’s classic None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 became, upon its publication in 1982, the catalyst of a national drama of moral self-examination and repentance which, one may argue, not only helped to shape generous asylum policies, but also destroyed the last vestiges of respectability of racism within Canadian society, and confirmed multiculturalism as a goal that did not only appreciate the contribution of different ethnicities, but also sought the empowerment of those groups.[ii]

But the book also left a legacy that appears less constructive and perhaps even toxic: its catching title, “None is Too Many,” which, as Abella and Troper wrote, appears to have been coined by an unnamed Canadian immigration official after the Second World War, sadly has become a shorthand to summarize Canadian immigration policy in the late 1930s. The assumption, too often made by even otherwise informed and responsible people, that Frederick Charles Blair, the Director of the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources and the chief author of Canada’s immigration and refugee policy in the 1920s and 1930s, responded to the St. Louis crisis with the statement “None is Too Many” makes a caricature of a complex history. In this history, a general prejudice against Jews amongst the Canadian elites (and which elite in the western world did not have a prejudice against Jews) was only one of many factors that helped to shape the policies. I believe, for example, that we may gain much by considering Blair and his colleagues as typical examples of the senior bureaucrats so well described by Franz Neumann—people who regard the state

“more or less as a business undertaking to be run efficiently. He has the successful businessman’s cynicism except that

 administrative efficiency takes the place of profit as his highest goal. Political problems are reduced to technical administrative problems.”[iii]

In other words, Canadian officials were just like officials anywhere, neither better nor worse. Yet it appears that the mean-spirited dictum “None is Too Many” is written on the hairshirt that Canadians must don when they look at this period. And while a hairshirt may do miracles in private devotions, it is of little use when sorting out the contingencies and contradictions that shape history.          

I am not a specialist on Canadian history, Canadian diplomatic history, or Canadian-Jewish history—my education is as a intellectual historian of the middle ages and Renaissance, my academic appointment is as a cultural historian in an architecture school, and my work on the Holocaust centers on the construction history of Auschwitz—and as a result I will not claim to be up to date with all the work on Canadian refugee policy that either has been done or might be undertaken at this time. But I have written a general, global history on refugee Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and as such have some knowledge of the way the refugee crisis was perceived in other countries.[iv] From the perspective of an interested but somewhat distant observer it appears that not enough attention has been given to the way Canada’s perception of, and responses to the refugee crisis of the late 1930s was shaped by considerations of international relations.  

Refugees are an enormous burden on the relations between countries. When refugees leave their country of domicile for another country—which is in the first instance almost always a neighboring country – their request of asylum creates a crisis in the relations between the refugees’ country of origin and the country that faces those claiming asylum. The state that faces an influx of refugees can, for example, forcibly return the refugees to their country of origin. Such an action is mostly done with reference to the disastrous effect of giving in to blackmail: to accept refugees is to signal the country of origin that it can freely dispose of those it does not want. Or the country of asylum can choose to interpret the arrival of refugees as a violation of its own sovereign rights and seek redress under international law. Through diplomatic intervention, it can try to change the policy of the refugees’ country of origin, or limit that country’s participation in international affairs, or even aim for a regime change through covert or open military action. In these cases the aim is to create conditions that allow for a safe repatriation of the refugees. This course of action is, of course, easier when the state that exports refugees is weaker, and the state that is forced to receive them, stronger.

Refugees do not only generate stress between neighbors. When a government is willing to provide a temporary asylum to refugees but not permanent settlement, it will have to open negotiations with other governments in the hope that some will be willing to share the burden. These are negotiations that are often fraught with tension. If the country of asylum is more powerful than the country of potential resettlement, the latter may become resentful of the pressure that is put on it to accept refugees. Or one country of resettlement may try to pressure other countries to open their borders also. And even if it is willing to share in the burden, the government of a country of resettlement will want to skim the cream, admit only those who they deem to be useful, and refuse admission to all the refugees who cannot be easily assimilated—the old, the ill, the disturbed, the illiterate.

It appears that the international aspects of Canada’s response to the refugee crisis of the late 1930s, has not been the focus of much study or speculation. Interesting dissertations may be written on the way Canada negotiated the pressure of European nations such as Great Britain and France, which had provided from 1933 onwards temporary asylum to, first, German-Jewish and, later, Austrian-Jewish refugees and sought ways to export them overseas—as they had done before the First World War. James G. McDonald, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, and his aide, Norman Bentwich, engaged in 1934, in shuttle diplomacy to find permanent homes for the refugees. Tens of thousands had crossed the border from Germany into France, but the French government had made it clear that they would not be allowed to settle there. “We were told that France must be treated as a place of triage (sifting), not as a garage,” Bentwich recalled in the early 1960s. “The principal effort was to get the refugees out of the country which had led in the opening of the asylum.”[v] The Dutch, Belgian, Swiss and Czech governments, which also had provided asylum, made it clear to the High Commission that they also preferred a speedy departure of the refugees for elsewhere. “It was clear from the inception of the work that the solution of the problem of the refugees must lie primarily in the settlement of a large part overseas,” Bentwich wrote in 1936 in an interim report on the work of the High Commission. The European countries were full. “The effort, therefore, must be made to distribute them to countries in which there were the larger physical spaces and the larger intellectual spaces.”[vi] 

Anyone who looked on a map noted that Canada was an enormous garage that provided the larger physical spaces necessary for the resettlement of the refugees. But, as Abella, Troper, and others have taught us, our country did not have the required larger intellectual space—that is the imagination to square the circle and find a synthesis in which a prudent political and efficient administrative approach to the crisis merged with a bold humanitarian response. Why this failure of imagination? One reason might be a lingering grudge or ressentiment about the traditional subordinate position of Ottawa to London in the international sphere. Ressentiment, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche taught us, stands in the way of the imaginative courage that stands up to the fears of the crowd and that overcomes the anxieties within oneself.

In July 1934, the Deputy Minister of Immigration and Colonization, Thomas Magladery, wrote to the Under-Secretary of State of External Affairs, Oscar Douglas Skelton, about pressure coming from Great Britain to participate in an effort of “international collaboration” to resolve the problems of Jewish refugees who had found asylum in western European countries and whose presence created “economic, financial and social problems.” Magladery mocked the notion of such an “international collaboration.” He read it as a code word for “the transfer of a number of these refugees to countries such as Canada where they are expected to find permanent homes.”[vii] Four years later, Canada faced diplomatic pressure from the United States to admit more refugees. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King noted in his diary that the American request had created “a very difficult question” for Canada. The Canadian government ought to be careful “not to seek to play the role of the dog in the manger” by refusing its participation. After all, “with our great open spaces and small population”[viii] Canada seemed to offer an obvious solution. For King, the refugee issue now became a potential source of tension with Washington. A few weeks later, King got the Cabinet to agree to send a representative to a conference to be held on the refugee problem. Cabinet members from Quebec had opposed this. King noted in his diary that he had to remind his colleagues that “it would be unwise in an international situation of the kind for Canada to be classed only with Italy as refusing the invitation.”[ix]

In the 1930s, Canada was still a junior partner to the Great Powers, and it engaged in negotiations with the passive aggressive tactics of the inferior: delay, don’t respond, lose the file, make no commitment. It was a strategy that marked disaster to the Jewish refugees, who were caught in between. And even when the Canadian government had to yield to international pressure to take in refugees, it did not necessarily benefit the Jews. In late 1938, Great Britain was putting great pressure on Canada to open its borders for thousands of refugees. It so happened that at this time Neville Chamberlain had handed Hitler the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia in exchange for “Peace For Our Time”. In surrendering the territory, Chamberlain had accepted responsibility for the fate of anti-Nazi, Social-Democratic Sudeten-Germans who were forced to flee into the remainder of Czechoslovakia in order to avoid imprisonment in concentration camps. When the British government pressured the Canadian government to open its borders to refugees in general, the Canadian High Commissioner in London saw an elegant way out. Vincent Massey cabled Ottawa that

“I feel personally that as a matter of tactics it might be wise for us to make generous gesture in regard to acceptance of as many as possible Aryan Sudeten Germans from the 3,000 or so now in Czechoslovakia. On the whole these appear to be more desirable settlers than any other refugees and if we could take a substantial number of them it would put us in a much stronger position in relation to later appeals from and on behalf of non Aryans.”[x]

On some issues Canada saw eye to eye with Great Britain, France, the United States and the other countries that tried to deal with the refugee crisis. From early 1938 onwards, many politicians, civil servants and experts had become convinced that the German Government had become engaged in an explicit policy of expulsion, and that the Polish and Rumanian Governments, who were unhappy with their Jewish minorities of three million and 800,000 respectively, were inspired by the example of the Germans. A draft letter to be sent to the American Charge d’Affaires in response to Washington’s request for Canada to open its borders to Jewish refugees explicitly noted the larger horizon within which such decisions should be placed.

“The Canadian Government considers that no country is entitled to thrust upon other countries responsibility for its unwanted minority groups and it fears that a successful effort to find new homes for the political refugees of Austria and Germany might encourage other States to adopt repressive measures towards unwanted minorities in the expectation or hope that these would also be received by those countries now asked to co-operate in finding homes for refugees.”[xi]

Such fears were not only articulated in correspondence drafted by inflexible bureaucrats. In an article, the well-known British Zionist, Israel Cohen, observed that the Jewish exodus from Germany and Austria was only the beginning of a much larger catastrophe. Many east and south-east European governments were anxious to

“organize a larger and quicker exodus from their respective territories, because they believe that only in mass emigration can their Jewish problem be solved. Such is the official policy, repeatedly and emphatically expressed, of the Polish Government, which has three and a quarter million Jews, who form a tenth of Poland’s population. Such is also the attitude of the Rumanian Government, even after the inglorious collapse of the Goga Cabinet, which threatened to expel half a million Jews.”

Cohen described the distress of Polish Jewry, and noted how the Polish newspaper Gazeta Warszawaska called on Poles to imitate German anti-Jewish legislation “which will force the Jews to organize their own mass emigration.” In conclusion, Cohen stated that the Polish government was committed to create a Jew-free Poland.[xii]

Hume Wrong, Canada’s permanent delegate at the League of Nations, had already come to the same conclusion. Wrong was to represent Canada in the Evian Conference (July 1938) that was the result of Washington’s initiative to achieve international collaboration on the refugee issue. Wrong learned a few weeks before the beginning of the conference that the Polish and Rumanian position would be that “the problem of refugees from Germany and Austria was only a part of the general problem of emigration.” The Polish and Rumanian representatives would “press upon the Conference the inclusion of all Jews in Europe.”[xiii] Blair, the senior civil servant in charge of immigration, believed that the Canadian Government would come under particular pressure to admit Polish-Jewish and Rumanian-Jewish refugees. In a memorandum for file, he noted that he had informed External Affairs that

“the Jewish people of Canada have not mainly come from Germany and Austria but from Poland, Russia and Roumania, which fact is established by the complexion of requests we get for the admission of relatives, by far the largest number of these being for the admission of those from Poland and Roumania. I said that the Jews of Canada will not be satisfied unless the door is kept open in some way to all the Jews from other countries than Germany and Austria.”[xiv]

May we read prejudice in Blair’s observation? Certainly. But also a realistic assessment of the situation.  

By 1939, the understanding of the refugee crisis as one of blackmail had become common. “The policy of the German Government since 1933 in actively discriminating against its Jewish population has greatly increased the difficulties of Jews throughout Eastern Europe,” Sir John Hope Simpson, Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London (which was in the 1930s and remains up to today a leading think tank on international issues), wrote in an influential report,

“Other governments, embarrassed by problems arising from their Jewish minorities, have seen Germany adopt, with little apparent injury to herself and without effective opposition from other states, a policy of victimization that has already led to the emigration of one quarter of her total Jewish population.”

Having observed how the German government had been successful in pushing the Jews from public life and confiscating their wealth, and having seen how other countries had given shelter to Jews and responded “to a process equivalent to blackmail,” Simpson concluded that

“the temptation to these other governments to follow the German example is obvious. If the policy pursued within Germany and later within Austria is taken as a precedent, other countries may argue that the only way they can secure the interest of the international community in their population problems is to adopt a similar policy and to begin to convert the domestic problem into an international problem of refugees.”[xv]

In other words, the world faced not only a present problem, but a potential problem of five million Jewish refugees.

Compared to that, the existing refugee problem was deemed by Simpson’s main researcher, Walter Adams, to be manageable. In May 1939, Adams published an article in which he observed that

“if Eastern Jewry begins to move on any large scale, Europe will be faced with a refugee catastrophe greater than any that has confronted it in modern history. This is the essence of the German refugee problem; in itself it is a minor disaster, but in its implications it is terrifying.”[xvi]

A humanitarian catastrophe of five million Jewish refugees had to be prevented from the very outset, and a first step to do so was to close the borders of the countries of refuge in order to make clear to the Polish and Rumanian governments that they could not follow the German example. The solution was obvious: show that blackmail does not work. Do not admit any refugees. 

It was at this time that the M.S St. Louis set sail to the ‘new world’. When the Cuban Government refused admission to the great majority of its passengers, the drama began. The US Government decided to play hardball, and the Canadian Government followed. On 8 June 1939, Blair counseled External Affairs not to show any flexibility on the issue and not to allow any of the passengers into Canada. They were to be the thin edge of the wedge. 

 “The readiness with which a German liner took these people on board in the hope of landing them in some other country, creates the impression that this is but another one of Germany’s methods to get rid of unwanted refugees and if this is successful it is likely to be followed by other shiploads.”[xvii]

Ten days later, Blair justified the decision when he wrote to External Affairs again.

“If Canada had invited these refugees, it is probable that they would have been followed by others. It is manifestly impossible for any country to open its doors wide enough to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere.”[xviii]

Many who have negotiated under the threat of blackmail will find some understanding for Blair’s harsh recommendation. Harsh, but when we consider the possible international implications of accepting the refugees, perhaps also understandable—especially if we remember that in the summer of 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews had not yet crossed the threshold of genocide. In the summer of 1939, Oswiecim was still a small Polish town famous for the liquor the Haberfeld family produced, and the crematoria that arose there three years later were still unimaginable.[xix] So a line was drawn.

The Dutch and British Governments also drew lines. But unlike the one drawn by the Canadian Government, it was a double line—one that offered some opportunity to show flexibility. When he counseled governments to close the borders, Simpson also suggested an escape valve.

 “The most urgent matter is removal of the potential refugee from his present position to some friendly environment, where he can be maintained until entry can be found into some country of final settlement.”

Simpson therefore proposed that the democracies should agree to take a quarter of the potential refugees from Germany at once and accommodate them, if necessary in camps.[xx] These were to make up an

“international pool—or pools—into which refugees provided with simple identification papers, can be poured, merely to save their lives or their reason, until they can be dealt with on the case system.”[xxi]

Simpson’s suggestion of how governments could square the circle and both keep the borders closed and take refugees out of harm’s way reflected initiatives proposed in the Netherlands and Great Britain by the Dutch-Jewish and British-Jewish communities. They had agreed to finance closed, long-term refugee camps that were to serve as semi-permanent and semi-extraterritorial waiting areas where Jews could be interned until entry could be found into some country of final settlement. Because it might take 15 years for the inmates to find emigration possibilities, the refugees committed to these closed cities of refuge would face a lengthy confinement. This was to be broadly advertised in the hope that such conditions would serve as a deterrent to Jews from Poland and Rumania to leave their countries, and also as a sign of resolve meant to convince the Polish and Rumanian governments not follow the Nazi example.          

The decision to establish these new camps marked a novum in the history of refugee movements. Unlike earlier refugee camps which had been constructed as a temporary shelter to deal with a humanitarian crisis in an immediate and practical way, these new camps were to primarily serve the political goals of showing both a measure of compassion to those whose life was in peril and to project the firm determination not to give in to blackmail.  

The Richborough Camp in Kent was the first camp established with this aim. In the wake of Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) on 9-10 November, 1938, the British Government was concerned about many of the Jewish men who had been arrested during or following the pogrom and imprisoned in the concentration camps. They and their families had been told that they could be released if and when they could obtain visas to immediately leave Greater Germany. To accommodate this group which was to be admitted “above and beyond” the categories of refugees that were eligible to enter Great Britain, Bentwich and other members of the Council for British Jewry negotiated, in January 1939, a deal with Whitehall that allowed them to establish a refugee camp.[xxii] British Consuls and Passport Officers began to administer the new policy, issuing visas for concentration camp inmates “For transit only, Richborough Camp, pending Emigration.” Richborough became the exit gate from the hell of the concentration camps, and thus was nicknamed by the German Jews either “Purgatory” or “Anglo-Saxon-Hausen,” in contrast to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.[xxiii] The Dutch followed the British example, and created a similar semi extraterritorial camp in Westerbork. It allowed German Jews to move to the Netherlands, and it allowed the Dutch authorities to remain committed to a closed-border policy.  

Blair shared with his British and Dutch colleagues the insight that admittance of refugees would be tantamount to giving in to blackmail, but neither he nor any other Canadian official came up with a Canadian version of the Richborough or Westerbork camps. And when, in 1940, the British Government forced such a situation on them by requesting that Canada accept and intern a couple of thousand German-Jewish refugees interned as enemy aliens in British camps, the Canadian Government did not recognize the opportunity that presented itself to redeem itself in the eye of history. Instead of creating many such extraterritorial camps and instituting a liberal visa policy to the tens of thousands of French Jews and German-Jewish refugees stuck in Vichy France only able to leave via Spain and Portugal if provided with a Canadian visa, Ottawa sullenly said yes to the British request, and hoped that no more would be sent it’s way. And, sadly for Canada, that first request was also the last.           

International relations do not only involve open conflict, or the often dramatic negotiations and pitiless decisions in response to crises that dominate the headlines and must be resolved under the gaze of the whole world. They also involve the much more humdrum negotiations that take place in the chancelleries in which governments assume the mutual interdependence of states, and in which they try to establish mutually acceptable operation principles to regulate their daily transactions in a routine fashion. In the 1930s, seemingly innocent bureaucratic requirements became for refugees insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps the symbolically most charged of these requirements was a passport.  

Possession of a valid passport is a routine matter for an ordinary person, but it is of vital concern to refugees—and easily becomes the focus of obsession. When the famous author Walter Benjamin fled Germany in March 1933, he knew that his passport would expire in August. “One can obviously not count on its being renewed under the present circumstances,” he wrote on 20 March 1933 to his friend Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem.[xxiv] He had heard rumors that consular officials had asked German nationals to hand over their passports for safekeeping. “I am going to pretend that mine has been lost. But of course I don’t believe that I will get another one,” he confided two months later.[xxv] He had gone to the Spanish island of Ibiza and feared getting stuck there, unable to carry on to Paris. Without a passport, the world would be closing in on him. In Ibiza, Benjamin heard that, for the time being, the German Consul on the neighbouring island of Majorca was still renewing passports. Thus, pretending to be an ordinary German tourist on holidays in Ibiza, Benjamin went to the German Consulate in Palma, claiming that his passport had been stolen. He easily obtained a new one, valid for five years.[xxvi] Crisis had been averted. A few weeks later, German refugees ceased to qualify for consular services.  

In the 1920s and 1930s, states conducted both bilaterally and through the League of Nations many negotiations to regulate the status of passports as an essential tool to regulate the admission of foreigners. The basis of these negotiations was a newly-evolved understanding of nationality. In order to explain the concept of nationality as it became dominant after the First World War, let me use myself as an example. I am a Canadian citizen, and as a citizen I have a relationship with the Canadian State—a relationship that comes with rights and duties. When I cross the border into, for example, the United States, I do not enter in a relationship with the American State. I do not become an American citizen. The American Government will consider me to be a Canadian national, that is, it recognizes that I have a special relationship with the Canadian State, and that the relationship of the American State to me will be mediated by the diplomatic relationship between Washington and Ottawa. In the words of the prominent international legal scholar Paul Weiss,

“nationality, according to international law, is that specific relationship between an individual and a particular state which grants that state a right to permanent and unconditional protection of his person and property in relation to other states, and imposes on that state the duty, in relation to other states, to admit the individual to its territory.”[xxvii]

Or to apply this definition of nationality to my own case: Robert Jan van Pelt’s Canadian nationality, according to international law, is that specific relationship between Robert Jan van Pelt and Canada which grants Canada a right to permanent and unconditional protection of his person and property in relation to other states, and imposes on Canada the duty, in relation to other states, to admit Robert Jan van Pelt to Canadian territory. In other words: as a Canadian national I have two important rights. The first is the right to protection by Canada’s diplomatic and consular officers abroad.[xxviii] More importantly, my Canadian nationality gives me the right to return to and reside in Canada.[xxix] International law, as it developed in the wake of the First World War, stipulates that the duty of re-admission with regard to its own nationals is an absolute duty imposed on each State—in other words, Canada cannot oppose my return.[xxx] 

My Canadian nationality comes with a symbolic token: my Canadian passport. While in my passport the Minister of Foreign Affairs,

“requests in the name of Her Majesty the Queen, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”

The real meaning of the passport is not expressed by this formula, which goes back to passports issued before the modern definition of nationality. While before 1914 the passport was indeed a kind of letter of introduction, since the 1920s it has a different meaning: it is a symbol of the bearer’s unconditional right of return to the country that issued it. This is why my passport is such a useful document for immigration officials of other countries when they have to decide if I am to be admitted to their country or not. When they see my passport, they know that they can always send me back to Canada.  

Before the First World War, neither nationality nor passports played a significant role in international relations.[xxxi] After that war, when nationality and passports had acquired vital importance in a world in which borders had closed, the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig looked back with nostalgia at that earlier age.

 “People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. . . . The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.”[xxxii] 

An authoritative legal treatise written shortly before the outbreak of the First World War on the diplomatic protection of citizens confirms Zweig’s memories. It stated “most governments do not require aliens to produce a passport either on admission, or as a condition of residence, or on leaving.”[xxxiii] This proved of incredible benefit to, for example, the two million Jews who between 1881 and 1914 decided to leave the Russian Empire. They found new homes, in European countries such as Germany, France, and Great Britain, and overseas, in the United States, South Africa, Argentine, and Canada. All of them were refugees, but border officials in the countries of transit or final refuge were not interested in some abstraction like nationality (with its concomitant right of return), and hence it did not matter if these refugees had passports or not. And thus the greatest refugee stream in Jewish history did not become a refugee crisis. 

With the outbreak of war in 1914, governments became obsessed with the nationality of foreigners within their territories—a German national in Great Britain or a British national in Germany could count on immediate internment—and officials issued new passport decrees as borders closed. Passport and visa requirements now became quickly standard throughout Europe and later also overseas. The passports themselves, which before the war had been a single sheet without a picture and which primarily served as an official letter of introduction, now became a tool to ensure the re-admission of the bearer to his own country, and required for that purpose a photograph of the bearer, and a full description.[xxxiv] Suspicion of the foreigner did not change after the hostilities had ended. Inflation, unemployment, revolution and civil strife displaced many people and strengthened the xenophobia that had arisen in the war. States were afraid of beggars, vagabonds, refugees, deserters, spies, political agitators, and those who tried to profit from the currency problems. Suspicion mixed with cynicism and, as Hannah Arendt phrased it, a

 “vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs—neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.”[xxxv]

In such a climate, governments were not eager to dismantle the tight control of the movement of strangers that had been imposed in 1914.  

But there was also an additional motivation to restrict the arrival of strangers. In the immediate aftermath of the war, many veterans found themselves unemployed, and governments felt compelled to regulate the labor market to ease the veterans back into the economy. States did not only devise all kinds of restrictions to the entry of all foreigners, but also imposed a whole system of prohibitions and restrictive “permissions to work”. In most countries the right of employment became a corollary of citizenship. Furthermore, with the creation of new systems of educational, unemployment, health and old-age benefits, the state widened the gap between citizen and foreigner as these benefits were not extended to the latter. If foreigners could easily merge into any society before 1914, it had become very difficult after 1918. As one observer noted, “it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the alien in a legal sense is a creature of the post-War world.”[xxxvi] 

After 1918 arose the absolute distinction between those who belonged—a country’s citizens who could enjoy all kind of benefits and who, as that country’s nationals, would have the unconditional right to return—and those who did not belong. And this created the absolute distinction between who is a national, and who is not. It took the experts in international law a few years to sort things out, but by the second half of the 1920s consensus had been achieved: in 1927, Sir John Fischer Williams, the British Legal Representative on the Reparation Commission under the Treaty of Versailles, summarized the new notion that a state is only obliged to receive its own nationals.

“This rule is now well recognized and has acquired prominence at the expense of the earlier rules of free migration, which were admitted by our more individualist ancestors.”[xxxvii]

Some of those who did not belong might be welcome—for a limited time. These were visitors with valid passports, who were conditionally admitted for a limited duration and with various restrictions, and who understood that they would be obliged to leave whenever summoned to do so, and that if they would not leave voluntarily, the host state could deport them. For the individual traveler, the new procedures were a shock. Zweig observed how

“the humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveler, before and during every journey. . . . Human beings were made to feel that they were objects and not subjects, that nothing was their right but everything merely a favour by official grace. They were codified, registered, stamped and even today I, as a case-hardened creature of an age of freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every impression of a rubber stamp in my passport a stigma, every one of the [consular] hearings and [border] searches a humiliation.”[xxxviii]

The Canadian Government had used a passport requirement for Asians before 1914, but in January 1923 it imposed a passport requirement to all those who sought to enter Canada—except nationals of the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1927, this requirement was still so novel that a Canadian immigration official felt the need to explain to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs the reason for the passport-requirement for all aliens, including immigrants. Those arriving in Canada were to be

“in possession of a valid passport issued in and by the Government of the country of which such person is a subject or citizen, such a passport to be presented within one year of the date of issue. I might explain that the basis or necessity for the Passport Regulation is that there shall be no question regarding the right or power of the Minister of Immigration and Colonization to effect the deportation of an alien immigrant within the period prescribed by the Immigration Act. Sections 40 and 42 of the Immigration Act provide the machinery for the deportation of any person, other than a Canadian citizen or a person having Canadian domicile.”[xxxix]

With the new understanding of the absolute distinction between a national and a foreigner, and with the new practice that only admitted foreigners who carried passports and who therefore could return to the country that had issued the passport, deportation became an important tool of the Canadian Government to balance, whenever necessary, the influx of new workers through immigration in boom times and through deportation in times of economic contraction. While in the 1920s Canada continued to offer a promise to people abroad of being a country where they could settle and build a new life, an imperceptible shift – to the foreigners – had taken place in the Canadian attitude to the immigrants: they were now considered more as migrant workers who could be sent “home” when no longer needed. There were always new immigrants willing to take their place. Thus, deportation became the counterpart of Canadian immigration.[xl] Immigrants could be deported to the country of their origin for acts or conditions prior to entry, for the withholding of information or lying at the time of entry, or for acts or conditions after entry. Medical conditions, political beliefs or activities, unemployment, a criminal record, or immoral behavior, both before or after immigration could land an immigrant into trouble, and he or she could be deported as a result of it, easily within the first five years of Canadian residence, but in special cases even after decades in the country. Deportation became a crucial tool of the state. [xli] During the Great Depression, the tool of deportation was used routinely: if the numbers of those deported in relation to those who were admitted as immigrants had averaged 2% in the 1920s, it shot up to 27% in 1932 to reach 36% in 1933.[xlii]

In the post-war world, with its absolute distinction between a national and a foreigner, and with its barriers against the admission of foreigners who could not be send back to their countries or origin, refugees and stateless people found themselves in an impossible situation. Before the First World War, refugees could easily find homes in the new world, and statelessness had not been much of an issue because no-one cared much about nationality. After the war, there were many refugees, and statelessness became an endemic problem. The Bolshevik Government had denationalized a million refugees from Russia, and the Turkish Government had denationalized those who had escaped the Armenian genocide. And then there were countless members of minority groups who found themselves in the new nation states in the wrong country and who were unable or unwilling to fit the specific nationality requirements of the new countries.

The presence of large groups of refugees and stateless people created a problem in international relations and quickly became the focus of reflection and debate. Politicians, bureaucrats and legal scholars convened in many meetings to debate the problems created by those who could not claim the right of return, and the problem that resulted for the relations between states. Given the importance of nationality in international relations, scholars of international law began to define a government’s decision to denationalize a national traveling or residing abroad as an act of aggression against the state in which this person found himself. After all: international law stipulates the duty of readmission of its own nationals to be an absolute duty imposed on states. Denationalizing one’s citizens betrayed the good faith of the states that had admitted these people on the assumption that, at some time, they could be repatriated. This became an important issue in the Hague Codification Conference held in 1930. In this assembly designed to bring order in the sphere of international law, the Preparatory Committee proposed that denationalization of one’s citizens did not cancel a state’s obligation to take these people back.

 “If a person, after entering a foreign country, loses his nationality without acquiring another nationality, the State whose national he was remains bound to admit him to its territory at the request of the State where he is residing.”[xliii]

There was support for this proposal because, as the British delegate formulated it,

 “a kind of contract or obligation results from the granting of a passport to an individual by a State so that when that individual enters a foreign State with that passport, the State whose territory he enters is entitled to assume that the other State whose nationality he possesses will receive him back in certain circumstances.”[xliv]

A nice concept to be sure, but for the time being it found little practical support. So what to do with those who did not have a nationality? In the early 1920s, the Czechoslovak and German Governments had issued provisional identity papers to stateless Russian refugees, hoping that it would allow them to move on to countries that were willing to accept them, either temporarily or, as in the case of overseas countries, as immigrants. But other states did not recognize these identity papers because they did not carry the right of return to Germany or Czechoslovakia. Faced with failure, the Czechoslovak Government decided that the newly-created League of Nations ought to claim the moral authority to represent the rights of the refugees in the international sphere, and also provide a practical forum to resolve the problems of the states that had given asylum. It brought the matter to the Council of the League in May 1921. While the Charter of the League of Nations did not provide for refugees, the Council accepted the responsibility, and asked the famous Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had successfully overseen the repatriation of 450,000 prisoners of war, to become “High Commissioner on behalf of the League in connection with the problem concerning Russian Refugees in Europe.” Nansen accepted the responsibility to coordinate the efforts made by the various relief organizations, and to provide some political and legal protection to what was estimated at the time to be over 1.5 million Russian refugees—a number that proved later to be inflated.[xlv]  

The most visible result was a League of Nations identity document which on the suggestion of Nansen’s aide, Thomas Johnson, was to carry on its cover the somewhat grand designation “Passeport Nansen”. The original proposal included the idea that Constantinople, contested in 1920 by Turks and Greeks, would be internationalized and brought under the League’s authority, and that this territory would become the place to which holders of this document could be repatriated — repatriation being, as we have seen, an absolutely essential dimension of any passport after 1914. This proposal proved unacceptable to the major powers, and thus the document was to have no territorial backing. Neither did the document confer nationality: it was issued by states on behalf of the League, but the League was not a nation, and hence the document could not confer nationality. Instead it was an identity paper of international validity in those states that recognized it (24 by the end of 1922, and 50 a few years later). Valid for one year, it allowed in principle cross-border travel, but because the certificate did not guarantee the possibility of the refugee’s return to the state where it had been issued, it lacked the major element that made ordinary passports effective under international law. For all good it did, the Nansen Passport did not grant the inalienable right of residence citizens enjoyed in their countries of nationality, nor the right to seek employment. Everything was a favour that could be withdrawn. And since states normally grant foreigners favours on the basis of reciprocity, and because as a non-sovereign organization the League could not reciprocate, the refugee remained without rights because legal rights originate from a sovereignty, and a stateless refugee has no sovereign to endow him with or to enforce his rights.[xlvi]  

Predictably, the Canadian government refused to recognize the Nansen Passport.[xlvii] As early as October 1922 — that is, three months before the Canadian Government made the passport requirement law – the Department of Immigration and Colonization wrote to the League of Nations that it required that those seeking to enter Canada carried a passport because

“(a) it establishes the nationality of the owner, and (b) it enables them to bring about deportation from Canada to the country of nationality should the immigrant become deportable after entry to Canada.”

 It added that while the Nansen Passport might establish the nationality of the bearer, it was of no value

“in the second and more important feature, and for this reason, even if there were no other reasons, the Department of Immigration and Colonization do not wish to concur in the acceptance of the proposed Certificate of Identity.”[xlviii]

The Department of External Affairs followed suit. In 1924, it wrote to the Secretary-General of the League that they noted that the document did not provide an unconditional right of return to the state that had issued it. While it expressed confidence that a country that had issued the paper would take back a physically and mentally fit refugee who had no serious criminal record,

“no State would be prepared to take the insane and physically defective, whether suffering from a contagious disease or otherwise, whose return would involve questions of public maintenance during the remainder of a lifetime. As the majority of persons to be deported from Canada would be of the class referred to, the present attitude is considered to be necessary for the protection of the various public authorities of the Dominion.”[xlix]

Canada was not the only country that refused to recognize the Nansen Passport, therefore the Council of the League called an Intergovernmental Conference in 1926 to settle issues and get international agreement.[l] Fearing that Canada’s permanent representative to the League did not know the intricacies of the new passport regulations, the Immigration Branch in Ottawa decided to send to the conference J. Bruce Walker, the Director of Immigration attached to the Canadian High Commission in London. They did not inform the Department of External Affairs. Blair wrote Walker’s instructions.

“Canada will not accept the Nansen passport so long as it remains a one-way document, whether that document is in the hands of people we want or people we don’t want.”[li]

In order to stress this point, Deputy Minister of Immigration W.J. Egan sent Walker a second cable: Walker should state at the Intergovernmental Conference about Canada’s readiness to

“accept such refugees as we can absorb but only on condition that country sending them agrees return misfits. Stop. Deported six Russians last fiscal year and twelve previous year.”[lii]

In the meeting, Walker presented the Canadian position: Canada would accept refugees only if they entered under the same conditions as other immigrants, that is with the right of return to the country of citizenship, or to “the country from whence they came. . . within the period prescribed by the Immigration Act regarding deportation.”[liii] The Nansen Passport did not provide such a right of return. Yet, despite his opposition to the document, Walker ended up putting his signature on an agreement that endorsed the Nansen Passport and did not include his reservations. It is not clear why he did so. Walker’s signature created a political storm in Ottawa. The Department of External Affairs was embarrassed. It stated that it had not known about Walker’s appointment as a delegate, that it had no knowledge of his instructions, and that it did not recognize the validity of his signature on the agreement. When Nansen’s aide, Johnson, tried to use Walker’s signature to force Canada to admit Nansen Passport holders, Walter Alexander Riddell, Canada’s permanent representative at the League, claimed that Walker’s signature only meant to show that he was present at the Conference, “and that he did not intend in any way to bind the Government to ratify.”[liv] And, indeed, the Canadian Government refused to ratify the agreement. 

This refusal to back up Walker’s signature compromised Canada’s international position. Obeying La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that most people are firm from weakness (and perhaps also Tacitus’ dictum that we hate those whom we have injured), Canadian immigration officials adopted an inflexible stand on the issue of returnability. While Canada came to accept the Nansen Passport in principle, it did require that its demand for a five-year-right of return was to be met. In response, the League of Nations circulated a questionnaire amongst the other signatories of the agreement. Only Germany, Hungary and Norway replied positively to the principle of returnability, but Germany, which sheltered a great number of Russian refugees, would only accept refugees back within the one-year period that the Nansen Passport was valid.[lv] In fact, as the 1920s came to a close, the Canadian position hardened. The occasion was a proposal by the Polish Government to issue Nansen Passports with a five-year return visa to Russian refugees willing to emigrate to Canada. Blair decided to tighten the conditions of admittance. He decided that acceptance of the Nansen Passport now depended on the issuing country’s willingness to admit the refugee even beyond the five-year period if deportation was necessary

 “for cause arising within the first five years of the refugee’s stay in Canada. The provision that the issuing state (in this case Poland) is willing to take the refugee back within five years is not sufficient. . . . It frequently happens that an immigrant within the five year period becomes a criminal and deportation is not possible until the sentence has been served. When a sentence extends beyond the five year period from entry, the proposal made by Poland would mean that we would be without power to deport the immigrant who was in goal when the five years expired”[lvi]

A very remote scenario, to be sure, but enough to convince the Government.  

In the early 1920s Canada did not stand alone in its refusal to accept the Nansen Passport. Nansen’s aide, Johnson, recalled in 1938 that in the 1920s many government bureaucrats vigorously opposed it. Yes, as Johnson observed,

“as time went on, most of these officials disappeared from the refugee scene, and the few who remained soon tired of constantly calling attention in official communications to the fact that the document was not, in fact, a passport.”[lvii]

Blair was not like the others. He did not disappear from the refugee scene and he did not tire from opposing the document. And so the institutional fatigue and the shift in key personnel that made other countries accept the document did not happen in Ottawa.  

Considering the problems generated by Walker’s participation in the Intergovernmental Conference of 1926 and the continued resistance of key officials in Ottawa, the League of Nations realized that it might be prudent not to invite a Canadian representative to a Convention organized in October 1933 to officially endorse the Nansen Passports. The fourteen signatory states endorsed a right of return during the validity of the document.[lviii] When in 1934 the League of Nations invited Canada to add its signature to the agreement, Ottawa refused. The fact that the right of return would not match the period in which an immigrant was deportable continued to provide the main stumbling block.

 “The Nansen passport as viewed by most issuing States is that it is a document to leave a country where the refugee is not wanted. . . . Our attitude in the days when we were receiving many foreign immigrants was that if the State issuing the Nansen passport to refugees was unwilling to take a chance on the return of a few who might become deportable from Canada, their best course was to keep them all.”[lix]

By 1934, a new refugee problem was catching the headlines: some 40,000 Germans, most of whom were Jews, had left their country since the destruction of civil rights in late February 1933. From the moment refugees had begun to leave Germany, there had been suggestions that these refugees should be included in the Nansen system. Governments of the states that received the first wave of refugees—Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia—had an especial interest to regularize the position of the refugees. But the Nansen International Office for Refugees refused to extend its scope beyond the groups of stateless persons—Russians, Armenians and some smaller groups—already under its care.[lx] In August 1933, the prominent Anglo-Zionist Norman Bentwich, a well-known scholar on international law, began to speculate if the League could create a parallel organization for German refugees headed by a High Commissioner—a new Nansen so to speak. The situation was urgent as the Assembly was to meet in September, and issues for debate had to be placed three weeks before on the agenda. Bentwich approached the Dutch academic David Cohen, who introduced Bentwich to Dutch Foreign Minister Jonkheer Andries Cornelis Dirk de Graeff, a former Viceroy in the Dutch East Indies and a man who was used to act on his own cognizance without taking too much advice from civil servants.[lxi] Against the advice of his bureaucrats, De Graeff decided to push for a new High Commissioner to help the refugees from Germany. He knew well that Nansen’s achievements had been of a technical nature, and not political, and so the position was to be limited to technical issues, such as the creation of identity and travel documents.

On September 29, De Graeff told the Assembly of the League that the League, which had gained so much experience with the Russian refugees, should act again. He did not propose to look at the cause of the refugee problem.

“Nothing is further from our thoughts than a desire to interfere in internal affairs coming under Germany’s sovereignty. We have no wish to examine the reasons why these people have left their country, but we are faced with the undeniable fact that thousands of German subjects have crossed the frontiers of neighbouring countries and are refusing to return to their homes, for reasons which we are not called upon to judge. For us, therefore, it is a purely technical problem, and its solution must be found by common agreement.”[lxii]

This is not the place to review the complex negotiations that followed.[lxiii] It suffices to say that after much talk the various delegations reached a compromise that the Germans were willing to tolerate: the League would appoint a new High Commissioner, but unlike Nansen he would not answer to the Council of the League, but to a “Governing Body”. This construction was acceptable to the Germans because it effectively castrated the power of the High Commissioner. On October 11, the Assembly accepted the proposal to establish the “International High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and other) coming from Germany” with an abstention of the German delegate. Twelve countries were willing to send representatives to the Governing Body. Of these ten were European countries that had taken in refugees and were eager to find ways to send them on (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland). Only two overseas countries participated: the United States and Uruguay. Like at the Convention of October, Canada was absent. 

There was great disappointment with those who had looked forward to an office with some standing. And there was no hero figure like Nansen ready to give the position prestige through his personality. As it was expected that all the funds to finance the operation would come from American Jewish organizations, it appeared prudent to appoint an American as High Commissioner.[lxiv] The result was the nomination of the American James McDonald—a complete unknown in League circles and a man without experience of refugee work, and with none of the prestige Nansen had brought to the job. Trying to salvage from the wreck what could be salvaged, Bentwich volunteered to act as McDonald’s aide.  

From the very beginning the passport issue loomed large. The need for a new kind of identity document was huge, as the German refugees fell between the cracks of the system devised in the 1920s. All of the arrangements created under the aegis of the League of Nations to provide refugees with papers assumed that these refugees were stateless. With a few exceptions, the German refugees were not, and it became clear that the German Government was not going to facilitate matters by declaring all the refugees stateless. They only were to do so on 25 November 1941, when all Jews who were either abroad or who subsequently were to take residence abroad—voluntarily or as a result of deportation—were automatically deprived of German nationality and, with that, of all their property which, as the decree stipulated, “will be used to further all aims associated with the solution of the Jewish question.”[lxv] But in 1933, the Germans were not there, yet. Nevertheless, the situation for the refugees was bad enough: because German Consuls were unwilling to renew expired passports, or issue new ones, they were in a legal limbo: while they were de iure still German nationals, they had become de facto stateless—and even the great Nansen had not foreseen the implications of such an odd situation. 

Three options were proposed. The first one was the creation of a Carte de Réfugié or, as some called it, a “McDonald Passport” that was to bring to the refugees from Germany the practical and quasi-legal relief the Nansen Passport had brought to the Russian, Armenian and Assyrian refugees. The McDonald Passport was actually to be issued by the High Commissioner—and in that was different from the Nansen Passport, which was issued by governments on behalf of the High Commissioner. It was to provide for the unfortunates who fell in an as-yet unnamed category of existence between Nationality and Statelessness.[lxvi] The problem was that it would take a considerable time for such a passport to gain international recognition, and the need was immediate. And the High Commissioner could not promise a right of return because he did not represent a state. It quickly became clear that no frontier or passport official would accept it. 

A second option would be to have the High Commissioner stamp and endorse expired passports of refugees with the statement that the holder was registered with the High Commission, but this solution was again problematic because such a declaration had no standing in international law, and did not make the passport valid for the purpose of granting a visa or an immigration permit and, again, it did not solve the all-important right of return to the country where the refugees had found asylum.  

A third option mentioned was the generic Carte d’Identité et de Voyage (“Document of Identity and Travel”) for Stateless people and persons of doubtless nationality, adopted by the Third General Conference on Communications and Transit in 1927. The origin of this document was a proposal by the Council of the League to create what it called a “Passport for Persons without a National Passport” that was to function as a catch-all passport for all who fell between the cracks of nationalities and were not eligible for the Nansen Passport. This passport was to indicate explicitly that the holder was not a national of the country that had issued it, but it was also to include the statement that the bearer was authorized to return to the country that had issued it during the validity of the passport. This Carte d’Identité et de Voyage carried, in principle, the right to return to the country that had issued it, this right was not absolute. It goes without saying that Canada did not recognize this document. Because the Carte d’Identité entitled the holder to return to the country where it had been issued, the countries that had received the bulk of Jewish refugees in 1933 objected that it would be issued to refugees from Germany. Their main preoccupation was to pass their refugees on to other countries as quickly as possible.[lxvii] 

With three proposals defeated, the Governing Body created a committee to study the issue. Not surprisingly, the right of return remained a sticking point. British bureaucrats commented that the right of return articulated both in the Nansen Passport and the 1927 travel document was based on the assumption that the refugees and stateless people for whom they were made had de facto acquired a domicile in their countries of refuge and would retain that domicile and only use the document for travel.

 “The problem of the issue of traveling documents to German refugees is substantially different, because they have been allowed to enter most countries merely as visitors seeking a temporary refuge and have not come to be regarded as part of the permanent alien population. The problem of their ultimate absorption and redistribution cannot simply be solved by governments issuing them documents of travel and telling them that they must leave.”[lxviii]

Yet, at the same time, without the right of return the document would be worthless.

 “Unless the document bears a return clause or a return visa it appears to be unlikely that another state would viser it for travel, and the purpose for which the document was issued would thus be frustrated.”[lxix]

Having studied the various options, the committee decided to seek to extend the reach of the generic Carte d’Identité et de Voyage.

“The Document of Identity and Travel, or similar document issued to a refugee, should be valid for a period of one year, and should bear the mention ‘Good for return’ to the country issuing it.”[lxx]

A crucial innovation was that it could be issued to a person who had not technically lost his nationality, such as refugee from Germany who was technically still a German national, but who did not enjoy the benefits of his German nationality because the German Consul refused to renew his passport, or issue a new one. For this to work, it was crucial to obtain from the German Government an undertaking that if and when a Consul refused to renew a passport or issue a new one, he would put that refusal in writing. After much diplomatic to and fro, the German Foreign Office did agree that refugees could obtain a written statement of refusal by a German consular official.[lxxi] This provided enough documentation from the German side to begin serious negotiations with other governments about the issuance of the 1927 document to German refugees.[lxxii] McDonald now tried to stretch the protection of the new document even further, and grant the refugees from Germany the status of holders of the Nansen Passport, as defined in Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees of October 1933.  

By July 1934, thirteen governments had responded. The Canadian Government had not. Each government had its own procedure and concerns. With so little agreement, it took another two years for a “provisional arrangement” for the creation of the Certificat d’Identité des Réfugiés Provenant d’Allemagne to be signed in Geneva. The agreement stated that the certificate was to be for a refugee

“who does not possess any nationality other than German nationality, and in respect of whom it is established that in law or in fact he or she does not enjoy the protection of the Government of the Reich.”[lxxiii]

The document provided the right to freely travel in the country that had issued it, and the opportunity to apply for visas from other countries. It also provided the protection against expulsion provided by the Convention of 1933. The document itself explicitly stated that it “in no way affects the holder’s nationality,” and carried the explicit endorsement that

“failing express provision to the contrary, the present certificate entitles its holder to return to the country by which it was issued during the period for which it is valid.”[lxxiv]

It was not much, but ratified by Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland, the Certificat d’Identité was better than nothing. 

Canada did not sign on to the Certificat d’Identité. The Canadian Government had kept a distance from the High Commission, and it had chosen not to respond to invitations to comment on the various proposals for identity documents that were made. But in early 1938, it was clear that Ottawa’s passive-aggressive position could create problems for Canada’s reputation, and External Affairs was looking for some opportunity to show the world a measure of goodwill. Yet Blair advised against it. On 18 January 1938, he wrote a letter to Skelton counseling him to refuse recognition of the Certificat d’Identité. Blair used the same arguments that he had used to refuse recognition of the Nansen Passport.

“Stateless immigrants have presented a very serious problem to Canada since the war owing mainly to the fact that once they are admitted to Canada they must continue to reside here whether they become inmates of institutions or otherwise public charges, since no other country will recognize their right of return.”

Blair noted that while the Certificat d’Identité was to provide the right of return to the country that has issued it, this provision was as such not sufficient because the Certificat d’Identité was to be valid for one year only.

“As deportation from Canada may take place for cause arising within five years, it becomes apparent that the certificate of identity cannot be accepted by us as a valid passport since in Article 3 return to the country of issue must be within the period of validity.”[lxxv]

Skelton responded on 21 March 1939. The international situation had changed since Blair had written his recommendation. First of all, on 5 February, the German Government had passed a new law that required German nationals abroad to register with local German Consuls, and if they failed to do so, these people would lose their German nationality. Secondly and more dramatically, Germany had invaded Austria, and the Anschluss had triggered a flood of refugees. In a most and perhaps too gentle way, Skelton suggested that Blair might find a reason to change his mind.

“I should be glad if you could have careful consideration given of Canada’s attitude to the Convention, and to the general question of the emigration of refugees. It may be possible after careful study of its provisions to recommend signature of the Convention, with or without reservations.” Skelton noted that the situation was of such importance that “the question to be decided . . . is more than a question of administrative convenience and cannot well be allowed to go by default.”[lxxvi] 

Blair was a stubborn bureaucrat, and he knew that for fifteen years he had efficiently managed Canada’s immigration to the satisfaction of his political bosses. In his response, he made clear that he would not support a change in policy that had protected Canada’s interests. He commented first on the new German law. This had grave implications.

“Since the war and because of the change of nationality of millions of Europeans, we have found the passport to be a very essential document, first because it enables us to determine nationality at the time of entry, and second, it provides a means for return to the country of issue when deportation from Canada becomes necessary. We encountered so many difficulties in repatriating persons to Russia since the Revolution, that immigration from that country had to be refused with few exceptions. When it was proposed by the I.L.O. (International Labour Organization) of the League that we would accept a Nansen or other identification travel document, instead of a passport, we replied at once that if such a document was valid only to leave a country, but not to return, it could not be accepted by us. We have maintained this attitude all throughout the years.”

Blair, in other words, stressed that his refusal to make a special accommodation for refugees from Germany reflected a consistent policy of not bending to the needs of any refugee group, such as the Russian or Armenian refugees, who had been issued with Nansen Passports.

“If Germany enforces the penalty of her law of the 3^rd February, it means that German nationals whether immigrants or non-immigrants, admitted to Canada, must remain here regardless of what difficulties arise, as it is unlikely that the type we get from Germany will protect their nationality by registration and we have no means of compelling them to do so. I suppose it is a fair assumption that if Germany will not recognize the nationality of those who fail to register, she will not recognize any claim on the part of Austrians who left their country some time ago. It is probably too much to expect that the dictators of Europe will be at all concerned with the effect of their action on the individual or on the country of residence, especially for minority groups that they do not want.

The only protection left in our hands is to refuse the admission of German nationals without presentation of passports endorsed as valid for return to Germany within a certain time limit. If we accept people from Germany on one-way travel documents, we have no excuse for refusing a like class from other countries and we will soon reach the place where the only persons we can deport will be British subjects and U.S. citizens. The main difficulty in refusing to accept Germans or others with one-way documents, is that we hereby shut the door against any assistance to Jewish or other refugees. I wish immigration countries would take united action in refusing to admit nationals of countries who will not allow return by deportation.”[lxxvii]

Blair did not wish to surrender the habit acquired over 15 years for the sake of some momentary crisis. He did not want to re-examine the validity of the assumptions on which the original policies had been based—assumptions which, as he had in so many ways admitted, were based on recondite case-scenarios. And in the end neither Skelton nor his political boss, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, were willing to reconsider their own modes of operation, and after having accepted for 15 years Blair’s opinions, finally seriously challenge a reasoning shaped somewhere between an in- and an out-tray, a reasoning that had never faced confrontation with a real-life refugee. They were unwilling to raise the only question that really mattered in that time: what’s the right thing to do—now? And so the fifteen-year-old paper wall that had kept Canada largely free from foreigners in general, and Russian refugees in particular, remained standing—unchanged, and effective.

A quarter-century after Blair decided not to accept the Certificat d’Identité, Hannah Arendt prepared a lecture on the relationship between thinking and morality. She was still shaken by the experience of the Eichmann Trial a few years earlier. She had observed in Eichmann not a wicked genius, but an extraordinarily shallow man who expressed himself exclusively with the help of clichés, stock phrases, and other standardized codes of expression that never seemed to fit the object of the description. Listening to him speak, she came to the conclusion that Eichmann was a man with “a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” And she raised the question: “Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?”[lxxviii]  

After reviewing what Socrates had to say about the need of every person to have a continuous dialogue with himself or herself, to engage and re-engage at the end of each day in acts of self-examination, Arendt came to a conclusion that while such a critical thinking is in general of marginal significance, it acquires political and moral significance in moments of crisis.

“At these moments, thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. The purging element in thinking, Socrates’ midwifery, that brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them – values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions – is political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s mental abilities. It is the faculty to judge particulars without subsuming them under those general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules.”

And she concluded that, in the final analysis,

“The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.”[lxxix]

Blair’s – and by extension, Canada‘s – inability to ‘think’, according to Arendt’s definition of the word, had tragic consequences for all too many human lives. So to answer Arendt’s initial question “Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?”[lxxx] Absolutely.  

L’Amérique du Nord et le St. Louis [i]

Dr. Diane Afoumado

Lead Researcher, Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

« Donnez-moi les foules harassées, misérables,

Grouillantes, qui cherchent à respirer librement,

Le déchet misérable de vos rivages prolifiques.

Envoyez-les-moi, ces sans-abri, ballottés par la tempête.

Je soulève ma lampe au seuil de la porte d’or ».[ii]

Nous commémorons cette année, les 70^e de l’histoire du St. Louis, tandis que le Canada candidate officiellement devient membre a part entière de la Task Force sur l’enseignement de la Shoah. L’organisation par le Canada d’une conférence internationale sur le St. Louis en dit long sur le symbole que représente cet épisode dans l’histoire du pays qui depuis, est devenu une terre d’immigration, tout comme son voisin, les États-Unis d’Amérique. Or, si contrairement a certaines idées reçues, il n’a jamais été vraiment question de faire débarquer les passagers juifs du St. Louis au Canada, pour des raisons que nous développerons dans cet article, en revanche, les États-Unis ont été impliqués de fait. Il ne s’agit pas ici de retracer l’histoire des passagers juifs du St. Louis, mais plutôt d’aborder la réaction de l’Amérique et du Canada face à cet épisode ; les États-Unis étant directement impliqués puisque le paquebot va longer les côtes de la Floride. Dans un premier temps, nous étudierons rapidement le contexte dans lequel se trouve l’Amérique de 1939 et la place qu’occupe l’antisémitisme. Puis, nous verrons quelle a été la réaction de certains Américains à travers l’envoi de télégramme au Président Roosevelt et au Département d’Etat, ainsi que celle de l’Administration, retranchée derrière la loi des quotas. Puis, nous terminerons par la (non)-réaction du Canada qui n’a jamais été vraiment concerné par le court épisode du St. Louis. Si soixante-dix ans plus tard, ces deux pays peuvent se définir comme de grandes nations d’immigration, en 1939, les paramètres économiques, sociaux, politiques et internationaux n’étaient pas les mêmes.

L’Amérique de Roosevelt pendant les années trente n’est pas épargnés par l’antisémitisme, ni par un fort courant anti-réfugiés qui se trouvent être la cible toute désignée en période de chômage. Un sondage publié dans le magazine Fortune en juillet 1938 en atteste : 64,7% des personnes interrogées se déclarent opposées à la libéralisation de la politique d’immigration en raison de la faiblesse économique du pays. La fragile équation emploi/immigration résonne comme un leitmotiv.

Cela dit, l’argument économique n’est pas la seule raison invoquée par les Américains contre l’immigration. Preuve en est que six Américains sur dix s’opposent à des quotas spéciaux pour les enfants qui, pourtant, ne constituent pas un danger pour l’économie du pays ![iii] Malgré le pogrom de la Nuit de Cristal en novembre 1938, l’Amérique refuse de modifier la loi des quotas. Le sous-secrétaire d’État américain, Sumner Welles déclare alors à l’ambassadeur de France, le comte de Saint-Quentin : « Le gouvernement américain [est] résolu pour le moment à garder la plus grande réserve face à une situation, préoccupante certes, mais devant laquelle les gouvernements français et britanniques, plus directement intéressés, semblaient demeurer impuissants[iv]». Il est évident que la solution doit être trouvée en dehors des frontières de l’Amérique du Nord puisque cette dernière refuse d’ouvrir ses portes aux réfugiés. Après l’échec de la Conférence d’Evian, Roosevelt est prêt à étudier tout projet de colonisation dès lors qu’il ne s’agit pas de la Palestine que les Britanniques maintiennent fermée à l’immigration juive[v]. De l’Afrique, à l’Asie en passant par l’Alaska, toute option est discutée[vi] tant que Roosevelt ne s’oppose pas à la politique du Congrès américain avec lequel il entretient des relations plus que difficiles depuis 1937[vii] ; sans parler de l’opinion publique que Roosevelt doit constamment ménager. C’est dans ce contexte que les passagers du St. Louis espèrent ouvrir les portes de l’Amérique après que Cuba leur a refuse de débarquer.  

Le 6 juin 1939, le St. Louis se trouve désormais à cinq miles du port de Miami en Floride. Le capitaine Gustav Schröder fera tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour retarder le retour du bateau en Allemagne, en espérant que le gouvernement américain sera clément à l’égard des 734 passagers qui possèdent des papiers d’immigration américains en règle. Pour toute réponse, l’Amérique envoie les garde-côtes. Un bateau des garde-côtes CG244 sort du port de Fort Lauderdale en Floride pour surveiller le St. Louis afin soi-disant d’éviter qu’un passager ne saute par-dessus bord. La presse américaine précise que les « garde-côtes et les officiels de l’immigration se tenaient en alerte[viii]». La surveillance est renforcée par deux avions des garde-côtes qui décollent de Miami[ix]. Le cas du St. Louis n’a rien d’exceptionnel si l’on en croit les déclarations de l’inspecteur de l’Immigration à Miami, Walter B. Thomas. « […] son intérêt concernant le vaisseau allemand était une affaire de routine. Il n’avait aucune instruction de Washington, dit-il, et l’attention pour ce bateau était seulement la même que celle que l’on aurait eue pour n’importe quel bateau transportant des étrangers à son bord[x]». L’administration américaine traite donc le navire de la Hapag (Hamburg-Amerika-Linie) comme n’importe quel bateau d’immigrants. En minimisant l’épisode du St. Louis par des déclarations laconiques et rassurantes reproduites par la presse, le gouvernement des États-Unis espère pouvoir se débarrasser du problème facilement. Le journal The San Francisco Examiner va plus loin dans le cynisme et le mépris. « La raison de la présence du bateau dans les eaux américaines n’a pas pu être déterminée, bien que l’on pense que le bateau soit principalement en croisière pour passer le temps en attendant que des arrangements soient pris pour le débarquement des réfugiés à Cuba[xi]». Les réfugiés doivent être admis à Cuba, ou n’importe où, du moment que ce n’est pas sur le sol américain. En quelques phrases, cet article résume l’attitude de l’administration. 

Lorsque le St. Louis est au large de Miami, la presse américaine s’empare de cette histoire et une partie de l’opinion publique ne reste pas insensible au sort des 907 passagers juifs. Face à cette tragédie humaine, la Maison Blanche reçoit des centaines de télégrammes d’Américains juifs, et non juifs prêts à venir en aide aux passagers. Des particuliers, mais aussi des associations demandent à Roosevelt d’agir. Certains expéditeurs s’adressent au secrétaire d’Etat, Cordell Hull, mais la plupart écrivent directement au président des États-Unis, ou à la First Lady qui a la réputation d’aider les déshérités. Le contenu de ces télégrammes est variable, mais certains thèmes sont récurrents. Reproches, critiques, appels aux sentiments humains, à la grandeur de l’histoire américaine, références aux textes saints, mais aussi propositions pour aider les passagers, autant de réactions spontanées face à l’urgence humanitaire.  

Parmi les réactions, on mesure l’incompréhension des Américains qui s’insurgent contre l’apparente apathie du gouvernement. « Si ce navire était attaqué par les flammes, nous enverrions nos gardes-côtes, nous enverrions nos avions amphibies, nous enverrions nos bateaux de guerre pour rechercher les corps. Sur ce bateau, il y a 903 corps vivants. Allons-nous les renvoyer vers la mort. Parmi eux, cinq cents femmes et cent cinquante enfants. Dans ce grand pays qu’est l’Amérique, n’avons-nous pas assez de place pour ces 903. Je ne suis pas juif ; je ne suis pas un réfugié[xii]». 

Certains Américains refusent de comprendre le silence de leur président. « Honte à vous de ne rien faire pour ouvrir les portes de cette terre à ces malheureux 917 êtres humains (qui, par accident de la nature, sont nés de parents juifs) à bord du bateau allemand St. Louis. […] Je vous en supplie, agissez maintenant, non comme un homme politique, mais comme un être humain[xiii]». Tantôt suppliants, tantôt vindicatifs, les Américains apostrophent leur président, n’hésitant pas à utiliser parfois un ton autoritaire. « Je veux que vous fassiez quelque chose pour ce bateau avec tous ces être humains à bord qui n’ont aucun endroit où aller[xiv]». Parfois, d’autres font preuve de diplomatie et en appellent à la grandeur d’âme de Roosevelt. « Je suis sûre que vous ferez tout ce qui est humainement possible pour ces pauvres âmes à bord de ces trois bateaux [xv]».  

Dans leurs suppliques, les expéditeurs de ces télégrammes en appellent à l’Humanité, à Dieu, à Jésus. « Moi, un Américain, je vous vous implore, au nom de l’Humanité, d’utiliser votre énorme pouvoir et votre influence pour leur offrir un paradis américain. Aucune nation ne perdra quoi que ce soit si elle protège Israël dans ces instants troublés [xvi]».Rien d’étonnant à cela quand on sait que les valeurs religieuses ont toujours occupé une place considérable dans la vie quotidienne des Américains. « Les puissants gouvernements d’Europe et leurs dirigeants ont fait preuve de leur échec à cent pour cent. Le seul grand dirigeant à réussir cet examen amer a été notre président qui craint Dieu. Franklin D. Roosevelt et notre nation qui craint Dieu […] Laissez ces cœurs qui saignent et ces âmes blessées entrer dans ce paradis des réfugiés, le pays béni de Dieu[xvii]». Les Américains ont foi en leur président et s’en remettent à sa décision comme on s’en remet à la décision divine. « Si j’en appel à vous, Monsieur, c’est parce que seule votre voix peut être le moyen de sauver ces âmes en détresse et oubliées. Faisons que l’histoire se souvienne qu’il y eut au moins une voix dans ce monde cruel qui eut le courage de s’élever contre l’injustice qui s’est abattue sur ces innocents, hommes, femmes et enfants. Dieu vous récompensera pour votre bonté et après tout, c’est à Lui seul que l’on doit s’en remettre[xviii]». Dans ce registre religieux, la crainte d’un Jugement divin est souvent présente dans de nombreux télégrammes. « Souvenez-vous ce que dit notre Seigneur – « Je bénirai ceux qui vous bénissent et maudirai ceux qui vous maudissent[xix]». Certains vont même jusqu’à rappeler la judéité de Jésus. « Je vous fais cette demande au nom de notre Christ qui, lui-même était un Juif [xx]». De manière plus générale, c’est l’image des États-Unis comme grande nation chrétienne qui est remise en cause. « Nous ne pouvons plus oser prétendre que nous sommes une nation chrétienne si nous échouons dans leur sauvetage[xxi]».

Les plus séculaires cherchent dans l’histoire américaine des raisons susceptibles de justifier l’accueil des réfugiés. Des télégrammes rappellent que ce sont les immigrants qui ont fondé l’Amérique. La devise des États-Unis n’est-elle pas « E pluribus unum[xxii]» ? Doit-on rappeler que nombreux sont ceux qui ont dû fuir la Vieille Europe et les persécutions religieuses pour se réfugier en Amérique où la liberté religieuse est inscrite dans la Constitution ?  « Certainement, notre grand pays qui a été fondé et construit par les victimes des persécutions du Vieux monde ne laissera sûrement pas ces innocents, hommes, femmes et enfants, retourner vers les horreurs des camps de concentration allemands[xxiii]».

Autre moment important de l’histoire des États-Unis, la Déclaration d’Indépendance de 1776. « Les États-Unis devraient-ils fermer leurs portes à l’humanité souffrante. Lisez la déclaration d’Indépendance de notre peuple américain[xxiv]». Les noms des grands hommes qui ont fait l’histoire américaine sont également invoqués comme pour rappeler que l’Amérique a connu des dirigeants, capables de prendre des décisions historiques. « Au nom de George Washington, de la Liberté et de l’Humanité, s’il vous plaît, aidez-les[xxv]» ! Autre symbole dont les Américains sont fiers, la Statue de la Liberté et ce qu’elle représente. « J’aimerais que nous nous souvenions de la magnifique poésie inscrite au pied de notre Statue de la Liberté. Quelle blague dans les circonstances actuelles ! La suffisance et l’inaction constantes de notre grand gouvernement fourniront aux dictateurs des nations la plus grande victoire sans verser une goutte de sang qu’ils n’ont jusqu’alors jamais remportée[xxvi]».   

Ces références aux fondements de l’histoire des États-Unis vont de pair avec le patriotisme. Les Américains – et surtout les immigrants - ont toujours été fiers d’appartenir à une nation qui les a acceptés en leur permettant la liberté d’expression, la liberté de pratiquer leur religion, et pour certains, la liberté tout court. Mais ce sentiment patriotique et les symboles qu’il représente ont été ébranlés par l’épisode du St. Louis. « Toute froideur à l’égard des passagers du St. Louis serait pure folie ; devons-nous encore saluer le drapeau d’un tel pays [ ?][xxvii]». 

De manière quasi anecdotique, l’arrivée du St. Louis au large des côtes américaines coïncide avec le voyage officiel du couple royal d’Angleterre en Amérique du Nord. Parallèle certes facile que certains télégrammes utilisent pour opposer l’accueil réservé à leurs Majestés au silence adopté face aux réfugiés. « Considérant comme un accueil mémorable de leurs Majestés, le roi et la reine d’Angleterre et comme un acte de gratitude envers Dieu pour notre libre démocratie, qu’y aurait-il de plus noble que l’ouverture de nos portes aux 907 hommes, femmes et enfants [xxviii]» ? Plus cynique, le télégramme d’une habitante de New York : « Pendant que vous receviez la Royauté cette semaine, le sort de neuf cents Juifs innocents était en suspend [xxix]». D’autres optent pour un ton vindicatif. « Nous dépensons des dollars pour accueillir un roi et une reine d’Angleterre bien nourris et dorlotés, mais personne ne fait attention ou pense à ce millier de personnes qui n’ont nul endroit où aller [xxx]».  

Certains expéditeurs proposent même des solutions au président Roosevelt pour accueillir les réfugiés. Parmi celles-ci, des Américains suggèrent d’augmenter exceptionnellement les quotas[xxxi]. Toutes les solutions sont envisagées, même les plus incongrues. « Les États-Unis sont probablement le seul pays dans le monde qui puisse aider. Si nécessaire, nous pourrions même construire un ghetto juste pour leur donner un lieu de refuge. L’immigration a toujours amélioré notre pays[xxxii]». Toujours dans le registre de l’originalité, une lettre signée « The Unitedstaters », envoyée de Butte dans le Montana, propose d’installer provisoirement les 907 passagers dans l’île « Dry Tortugas, Island of Mystery », non loin de l’île aux Pins et de la Floride. Aux dires de ce groupe, cette île serait à vendre (l’annonce date du 31 juillet 1926 !) et possèderait des fortifications[xxxiii]. 

Mais avant tout, certaines propositions des citoyens américains reflètent la générosité. Si la majorité considère que la réponse doit venir du gouvernement américain, d’autres proposent leur aide en offrant qui, un toit, qui du travail. « Mon mari donnera du travail à deux personnes et un toit si nous nous pouvons compter sur votre permission. Je suis sûre que l’on peut trouver neuf cents autre places comme celle-ci [xxxiv]». Autre exemple : « J’ai un appartement qui peut accueillir une famille de trois ou quatre réfugiés et je les accueillerai gratuitement aussi longtemps que cela sera nécessaire et je les nourrirai aussi longtemps que cela sera nécessaire. Et je suis sûre que je peux obtenir que trois cents ou quatre cents habitants de Miami fassent la même chose afin que nous puissions nous occuper de ces pauvres gens[xxxv]». Une Américaine du Wisconsin offre de mettre à la disposition des passagers dix acres qu’elle possède dans l’Arkansas pour une durée de six mois, renouvelables six autres mois, jusqu’à juin 1940[xxxvi]. L’avocat George Sandler de New York offre de régler la somme de 50.000 dollars à la Hapag pour couvrir les frais des 907 passagers[xxxvii]. Cette proposition est reproduite par la presse américaine. « Si personne ne prend ces réfugiés, nous en appellerons au Président Roosevelt pour qu’il envoie un message d’urgence au Congrès afin de suspendre les lois d’immigration jusqu’à ce que le statut de ces infortunés soit décidé. Je pense que le Congrès leur donnera asile temporairement ici lorsqu’il deviendra évident qu’ils retourneraient vers une mort certaine en Allemagne[xxxviii]». 

Ces quelques extraits choisis témoignent de la générosité et de la spontanéité des Américains face à la détresse humaine. Parmi les appels les plus émouvants, celui d’une fillette de quatorze ans qui écrit au Président des États-Unis. « Cher Président Roosevelt, Je suis une petite fille de quatorze ans. Je n’ai pas à me vanter de mes notes à l’école, mais je suis humaine. Si vous recevez cette lettre, s’il vous plaît, laissez ces neuf cent sept réfugiés juifs débarquer quelque part aux États-Unis ou dans une île qui appartient aux États-Unis [xxxix]». 

Les Juifs américains déjà installés aux États-Unis se manifestent également auprès du Président Roosevelt et se disent prêts à accueillir leurs coreligionnaires, en insistant sur le fait que ceux-ci ne seront pas à la charge de l’Etat et ne prendront pas le travail des Américains. « Pour l’amour de Dieu, s’il vous plaît, permettez à ces malheureuses victimes de la bestialité d’Hitler d’entrer aux États-Unis . Nous, Juifs, nous pouvons facilement veiller à ce qu’elles ne soient pas en compétition avec les Américains. […] S’ils retournent [en Allemagne], ils mourront probablement de faim dans des camps de concentration[xl]». De nombreux télégrammes visent à rassurer tout en démontrant que les Juifs ne sont pas plus « dangereux » que les autres immigrants. Ces quelques phrases révèlent la portée des clichés antisémites dans la société américaine.  « Ces pauvres Juifs, nous avons besoin d’eux ici, lorsque l’on pense quels citoyens américains merveilleux ils feraient. […] Je suis un Américain né dans ce pays, tout comme mes parents. Je suis un « Gentil », mais j’aime le peuple juif [xli]». Autre argument concernant l’intégration des Juifs dans les diverses catégories de sociétés. « Les Juifs sont loyaux envers les diverses formes de gouvernements sous lesquels ils vivent et le fait qu’ils soient puissants dans chaque gouvernement prouve leur capacité et leur habilité. Ils sont toujours bons envers les pauvres et les nécessiteux. Je n’ai jamais entendu quoi que ce soit concernant un Juif qui refuserait d’aider quelqu’un dans le besoin, sans distinction de race[xlii]». 

La Maison Blanche ne reçoit pas que des télégrammes de particuliers ; des associations se mobilisent aussi pour intervenir auprès de FDR. Le président de la communauté juive de Tallahassee envoie un télégramme à Roosevelt[xliii]. La Zionist Youth Organization Gordoniah de Dallas au Texas qui a pour but « d’installer des Juifs dans leur foyer national en Terre Sainte » adresse une supplique au président américain[xliv]. La League for Humanity demande « un sauvetage immédiat des réfugiés de Cuba » en insistant auprès du gouvernement américain pour que celui-ci « les amène ici sans délai[xlv]». Le 8 juin, l’American League for Tolérance écrit un second courrier à Cordell Hull, se plaignant de n’avoir pas encore reçu de réponse à un télégramme du 2 juin[xlvi]. 

Même Hollywood se sent concerné par le sort des réfugiés du St. Louis. Le 2 juin, la Hollywood Anti Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy adresse un télégramme au secrétaire d’Etat Cordell Hull. Parmi les signataires du texte, figurent des noms que l’on a plutôt l’habitude de voir sur les affiches des films à succès. L’acteur Edward G. Robinson et son épouse, l’actrice Miriam Hopkins, le metteur en scène Anatole Litvak, Frank Tuttle, le scénariste Donald Ogden et son épouse Ella Winter Stewart, Viola Brothers, Herbert Biberman, Boris Ingster, Carl Laemmle jr, Jay Gorney, Marian Spitzer. Mais leur requête est différente car elle suggère que le gouvernement américain fasse pression sur le gouvernement cubain afin que ce dernier accepte de donner asile aux passagers, au moins temporairement[xlvii]. Sept jours plus tard, un second télégramme de la même ligue demande à Cordell Hull de permettre au St. Louis d’amarrer dans le port de New York pendant dix jours, en attendant de trouver un pays d’accueil pour les passagers[xlviii]. 

De nombreux télégrammes sont aussi rédigés par des parents des passagers du St. Louis,déjà installés aux États-Unis. Ainsi, Lotte Frenkel écrit-elle : « J’ai mes parents à bord de ce bateau. Je vous en prie, essayer aider immédiatement[xlix]». Ces appels sont désespérés : « Nous avons personnellement cinq personnes à bord. Nous espérons que nous ne vous implorons pas en vain pour ces malheureux êtres humains[l]». Certains supplient le gouvernement d’accorder exceptionnellement des visas aux passagers. Un télégramme est envoyé en ce sens au Département d’Etat par une personne ayant de la famille à bord du St. Louis. La réponse est administrative. Il n’est pas question d’étudier les 907 passagers cas par cas ; même pour ceux qui ont la chance, a priori, d’avoir de la famille déjà installée aux États-Unis.

« Cher M. X, [le nom de l’expéditeur est chaque fois repris comme pour personnaliser la réponse officielle]

J’ai reçu votre lettre du [date], concernant le cas de votre sœur et de son mari qui ont fait une demande de visas d’immigration au Consulat général de Berlin en Allemagne.

Il n’est pas possible de savoir à quel moment les noms de vos parents seront sélectionnés sur les listes d’attente pour un examen de leur demande de visa car cela dépend du nombre de demandeurs au préalable. […][li]». 

Le Département d’Etat répond à tous les télégrammes qui lui sont adressés ou qui sont envoyés directement au président. Il s’agit d’une réponse type, personnalisée par le rappel du nom de l’expéditeur précédé de la formule consacrée « Cher Monsieur ou Chère Madame ».

Votre télégramme du [date] au président Roosevelt concernant les réfugiés juifs du bateau à vapeur St. Louis a été transmis au Département d’Etat pour être étudié.

Nous savons que les réfugiés allemands sur le vapeur St. Louis ont enregistré en Europe leurs demandes sur les listes de quotas et doivent, selon nos lois d’immigration, attendre leur tour avant d’obtenir des visas d’immigration en vue de leur admission aux États-Unis. Nous savons que des négociations ont permis aux réfugiés d’être admis temporairement par des pays européens[lii]». Ce courrier reste néanmoins factuel, sans le moindre sentiment humain. 

Une réponse moins administrative est envoyée à une femme du Montana, mais la teneur n’est pas très différente. « Bien que nous éprouvions une profonde compassion à l’égard de la terrible détresse de ces personnes, je suis certain que vous comprendrez, à la lumière des éclaircissements ci-après, que le Département ne peut manifestement rien faire pour les aider.

Le Immigration Act de 1924 précise qu’aucun immigrant ne doit être admis aux États-Unis sans avoir un visa d’immigration valide […].

Vous n’êtes pas sans savoir que les quotas d’immigration pour l’Allemagne, qui sont de 27.370 par an, tout comme les quotas pour les autres pays d’Europe centrale, sont si largement remplis que les demandeurs sont contraints d’attendre très longtemps après avoir été enregistrés au consulat américain[liii]». 

Aucune exception n’est donc prévue pour répondre à l’urgence humanitaire que représente le St. Louis. L’administration américaine se retranche derrière ses lois, ne souhaitant surtout pas déroger à la règle.  

Des Américains en appellent alors à la femme du Président, Eleanor Roosevelt. « En cet instant d’extrême urgence, nous prenons la liberté de vous demander de l’aide pour ces pauvres misérables sur le St. Louis. Nous savons que vous êtes, vous-même une mère ». Cet appel est signé par des : « enfants malheureux qui ont des parents à bord[liv] ». « Vous êtes la First Lady aimée et admirée de notre pays et vous êtes toujours prête à aider les laissés-pour-compte[lv]». Mais comme pour tous les courriers reçus par le président et le Département d’Etat, la réponse de la First Lady est identique ; une réponse type visant à rassurer l’expéditeur.

« Mon cher M. X, Votre télégramme du [date] à Mme. Roosevelt, au sujet des réfugiés sur le bateau à vapeur St. Louis a été transmis, à la demande de Mme Roosevelt, au Département d’Etat pour étude. Vous avez sans aucun doute été déjà informé que des arrangements ont été faits pour l’admission temporaire des réfugiés par certains pays européens ». Le signataire n’est autre qu’A.M. Warren, chef du département des visas.  

Même d’illustres personnalités prennent fait et cause pour les passagers du St. Louis. Les journaux américains mentionnent l’intervention du professeur Albert Einstein et de Stephen S. Wise auprès du président du Panama, Dr. Juan Demostenes Arosemena.[lvi] Mais rien n’y fera. Comme toutes les autres, ces requêtes seront vaines.  

Parmi tous ces appels, il y a aussi quelques télégrammes envoyés pour demander qu’on ne fasse aucune exception et qu’on ne laisse surtout pas entrer ces 907 Juifs. Ainsi, un télégramme est adressé au président Roosevelt pour lui rappeler que l’Amérique a déjà accueilli, selon lui, suffisamment d’immigrants[lvii]. Une fois encore, les vieux clichés refont surface et l’antisémitisme est, chez certains, plus fort que tout sentiment humain. « Il y a beaucoup trop de Juifs dans ce pays et tout particulièrement ici à Pittsburgh. Et je suis désolé de dire que 90 % sont indésirables en tant que personnes, en tant que voisins, en tant que politiques et en tant que citoyens. […] Par pitié, n’acceptons plus un seul Juif ». Et en post-scriptum : « Demandez-vous pourquoi les Juifs n’ont jamais été intégrés dans aucun pays, ni par aucun peuple[lviii]». Néanmoins, ces télégrammes restent minoritaires au sein du corpus. 

La version officielle que la Maison Blanche fournit à la presse quant à la position du gouvernement est pour le moins étonnante. Officiellement, le Président n’aurait reçu aucun appel. Pourtant, le télégramme envoyé par les passagers du St. Louis sera reproduit dans certains journaux américains[lix]. Sans compter que le l’American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) intercède auprès du gouvernement américain pour que le Président Roosevelt intervienne. FDR aurait-il été le seul au sein du gouvernement à avoir été tenu à l’écart de cette histoire ? Joseph Hyman du Joint écrit dans une lettre adressée au rabbin Morris S. Lazaron de Baltimore, dans l’Etat du Maryland : « Je suis certain de n’avoir pas besoin de vous dire que nous avons épuisé tous les efforts possibles pour faire jouer les influences les plus utiles et puissantes à l’intérieur de notre propre gouvernement, à travers le Département d’Etat, à travers l’ambassadeur à Cuba, à travers la Chase Bank là-bas, à travers des messages directs au président, etc. Tout cela en vain[lx]». Aucune exception ne peut être faite dans le cas du St. Louis. L’administration est résolue à n’accepter aucun compromis en matière de loi sur l’Immigration : « des représentants officiels de la Maison Blanche ont déclaré aujourd’hui qu’il n’y avait rien que le Président eût pu entreprendre pour aider les 907 réfugiés juifs qui retournent en Europe sur le bateau St. Louis après que son admission eut été refusée par Cuba. Ils ont dit que les réfugiés d’Allemagne n’avaient ni passeports, ni visas pour entrer aux États-Unis et que le gouvernement a respecté les règles pour permettre aux immigrants d’entrer dans l’ordre de leurs requêtes et dans le respect des quotas décidés par la loi. Il a été précisé que M. Roosevelt n’a reçu aucun appel à l’aide de ces gens sans patrie[lxi]». Le mélange du statut de réfugié à celui d’immigrant n’est qu’un prétexte utilisé par le gouvernement de Roosevelt pour refuser les 907 passagers. « Des officiels déclarèrent hier soir que […] les réfugiés étaient sur le même pied d’égalité que n’importe quel immigrant et devaient s’inscrire sur les listes de quotas d’immigration[lxii]». En avançant cet argument, la seule issue proposée aux passagers est de patienter jusqu’à ce que leurs numéros sur les listes de quotas sortent. En effet, 734 passagers sont inscrits sur ces listes[lxiii]. En attendant, ce sont 907 êtres humains en sursis qui risquent de mourir dans un camp de concentration allemand.  

La communauté juive américaine  

Face à l’impassibilité de l’administration de Roosevelt qu’elle est la réaction des Juifs installés aux États-Unis, outre l’envoi de télégrammes. Comment les Juifs d’Amérique s’accommodent-ils de la décision de leur président de verrouiller les portes du pays ? Questions pour lesquelles on trouve des éléments de réponse dans la presse juive publiée principalement à New York. Selon Haskel Lookstein, la presse yiddish réagit vigoureusement au sort des réfugiés du St. Louis[lxiv]. Tous les grands titres accordent une place en première page durant toute la durée de l’épisode du St. Louis y compris jusqu’à la fin de voyage de retour. The Day, The Morning Journal, The Forward, The Freiheit, mais aussi la Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) couvrent très largement les faits. Dès le 2 juin, le Forward publie en première page un appel à l’aide. « Nous lançons un appel au Judaïsme mondial. Nous allons être renvoyés. Comment pouvez-vous rester si paisibles ? Comment pouvez-vous être silencieux ? Faites tout ce que vous pouvez ! Certains sur le bateau ont tenté de se suicider. A l’aide ! Ne permettez pas au bateau de retourner en Allemagne[lxv]»! Hormis des articles publiés dans la presse juive, la réaction de la communauté juive américaine est plutôt timide. Le Contemporary Jewish Record qui enregistre et rapporte les activités de la communauté juive ne mentionne, pendant les mois de mai et de juin, aucune discussion, ni aucune décision concernant le St. Louis. Même lors de la cinquantième convention annuelle de la Central Conference of American Rabbis qui se tient à Washington, D.C. à partir du 13 juin, le St. Louis ne sera pas évoqué[lxvi] ! Excepté le Joint, aucune organisation juive ne semble encline à agir en faveur des Juifs du St. Louis. Le B’nai Brith, le Congrès Juif Américain, le Jewish Labor Committe, le General Jewish Council n’ont, semble-t-il, rien entrepris de concret pour tenter de sauver les 907 Juifs en sursis. Aucune démarche officielle, aucune concertation discrète. Malgré leurs divergences politiques, les journaux juifs The New Palestine, The Day, Congress Bulletin et The Freiheit s’accordent sur la certitude que les dirigeants juifs n’ont pas répondu à l’appel au secours lancé par les passagers du St. Louis[lxvii]. The Day déclare : « Si les dirigeants juifs sont si impuissants qu’ils ne peuvent rien faire dans un moment aussi critique, laissons-les partir et faisons de la place pour d’autres[lxviii]». Et le journal The New Palestine est parmi les quelques journaux qui osent critiquer le silence de la communauté juive : « Le tragique voyage du St. Louis et l’étrange silence de nos leaders apportent un caractère poignant particulièrement aigu à la moralité de cette histoire[lxix]». C’est aussi le prétexte utilisé par certains journaux pour faire le point sur l’efficacité de l’organisation de la communauté juive. « Ceci est arrivé parce qu’aucune des organisations puissantes et responsables n’était prête à établir et à reconnaître une autorité supérieure… Ceci est arrivé parce qu’ils se sont obstinés à refuser de bâtir une agence centrale de toutes les organisations juives pour traiter des problèmes de migration… La tragédie du St. Louis et d’autres bateaux raconte au monde d’aujourd’hui et aux générations de demain une histoire honteuse d’une désintégration et d’une division du Judaïsme confronté au désastre, dont une partie aurait pu être anticipée[lxx]». 

D’une manière générale, la réaction de la communauté juive des États-Unis n’est pas différente de la réaction de l’opinion publique américaine dans son ensemble. Le 6 juin, le correspondant du Forward révèle l’une des raisons pour lesquelles les Juifs américains n’ont pas tenté de faire pression sur le gouvernement. « Nos meilleurs amis au Congrès conseillent de ne pas commencer une telle campagne. […] Nos dirigeants juifs restaient calmement assis lorsque le bon sens nous disait que la solution résidait dans des pressions de Washington sur Cuba pour accepter les réfugiés. Mais, les États-Unis ne presseront pas Cuba de faire cela parce que les Cubains répondraient : « Pourquoi, vous, les États-Unis, ne les laisseriez-vous pas entrer ? » Il n’y aurait pas de réponse parce que « les États-Unis sont inébranlables lorsqu’il s’agit de changer les lois d’immigration [lxxi] » ». Quelques décennies plus tard, la communauté juive américaine partagera avec le gouvernement le sentiment de culpabilité dans cet acte manqué.  

Le St. Louis et le Canada 

Plus le temps passe, plus les portes se ferment les unes après les autres et plus les chances de trouver asile de ce côté de l’Atlantique s’amenuisent. Jusqu’alors, durant les négociations, un pays est resté discrètement en retrait. Le Canada qui figure parmi les pays d’immigration du continent nord-américain assiste de loin à la détresse des passagers du St. Louis. 

Pourtant, ce vaste pays d’immigration est a priori envisageable. Mais la politique pratiquée alors à l’égard des réfugiés et l’antisémitisme profondément enraciné au sein du gouvernement canadien d’alors agiront comme obstacles à toute négociation. Pour résumer la position du gouvernement canadien, aucun immigrant n’est le bienvenu en 1938-1939. Suite au krach boursier de 1929, le Canada pratique une politique encore plus stricte en matière de régulation de l’immigration et le gouvernement canadien restera sourd aux multiples appels lancés par les Juifs d’Europe tout au long de la deuxième moitié des années trente. En cela, les autorités expriment le sentiment général de l’opinion publique canadienne qui est, en majorité, opposée à l’immigration juive[lxxii]. Preuve en est que tous les efforts entrepris avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour ouvrir les portes du Canada aux réfugiés juifs échoueront. Les autorités restent sourdes aux appels désespérés de Juifs qui fuient le Reich. Pourtant, la Jewish Colonization Association reçoit de nombreux appels à l’aide comparables à celui-ci, écrit le 31 juillet, par Bertha Fugend-Witzer résidant à Vienne, en Autriche : « Je prends la liberté de m’adresser à votre organisation et j’espère que votre organisation, qui a tant fait pour le peuple, pourra aussi m’aider. Mon mari et moi, avions un hôtel à Vienne que je fus contrainte, selon les circonstances actuelles, d’abandonner. Mes trois fils qui ont respectivement 19, 24 et 25 ans et qui, jusqu’à nos jours travaillaient assidûment et courageusement, ont également dû quitter leurs postes et nous sommes à présent sans ressource.

J’ai une cousine à Montréal, Mme Gusta Samuelson, 6044 Waverly St. Montréal, à qui je me suis adressée. Elle nous envoie un peu d’argent pour nous aider et serait prête à tous nous accueillir au Canada, ou du moins, mes fils.

Très estimée organisation, je n’ai rien et je n’ai aucun parent à l’étranger à qui m’adresser. Et si la seule et ultime chance de sauver mes enfants disparaissait, alors je ne saurais plus que faire.

Par conséquent, je vous supplie d’assister ma cousine afin d’obtenir les permis nécessaires. Peut-être avez-vous la possibilité d’obtenir de tels permis. Nous ne serons pas une charge sociale. Mes fils, ici, ont travaillé dans des fermes et sont prêts à faire n’importe quel travail.

J’apprécierais beaucoup que vous me répondiez rapidement et je vous en remercie par avance. »[lxxiii] 

En réalité, la politique du Canada a été clairement définie suite à la Conférence d’Evian en juillet 1938. Le Directeur de l’Immigration, du Département des Mines et des Ressources, Frederick Charles Blair, se pose en fervent défenseur d’une politique ferme et n’hésite pas à affirmer son hostilité à toute immigration juive. En septembre 1938, faisant référence à la Conférence d’Evian, il écrit : […] « notre participation ne nous engageait d’aucune manière à recevoir des réfugiés, bien que cela fût l’impression donnée à l’étranger[lxxiv]». S’agissant des Juifs, il poursuit : « J’ai souvent pensé que, plutôt que des persécutions, il serait bien mieux de leur dire [aux Juifs] plus souvent franchement pourquoi nombre d’entre eux sont impopulaires. S’ils se débarrassaient de certaines de leurs coutumes, je suis certain qu’ils seraient aussi populaires au Canada que nos Scandinaves ».[lxxv] 

Le principal argument que Blair brandit contre les Juifs n’est autre que la vieille image antisémite du Juif incapable de travailler la terre : « Il est étrange qu’il en soit ainsi. Néanmoins, il est vrai que le pourcentage de Juifs est plus faible dans l’industrie basique de l’agriculture dans ce pays que celui des autres races ou classes parmi les populations que nous avons, sans inclure les Chinois, les Japonais, les Grecs, les Syriens et les Arméniens. Et à l’autre bout de l’échelle se trouvent les Allemands avec le pourcentage le plus élevé. Je ne reproche pas au Juif de ne pas cultiver, mais d’un autre côté, cela ne doit pas étonner ce peuple qu’un pays dont la Confédération a encouragé l’immigration de la classe d’agriculteurs favorise les autres races plutôt que celles qui n’ont jamais ou rarement cultivé. Simplement parce que le peuple juif ne comprendrait pas la franchise de cette déclaration que je viens de faire dans cette lettre qui vous est adressée, je l’ai estampillée du sceau confidentiel. »[lxxvi]  

Rien d’étonnant donc dans la politique pratiquée par le Canada. Pour Blair, l’argument de l’agriculture revient constamment dans ses prises de position. Né de parents écossais en 1874 à Carlisle, dans l’Ontario, Blair travaille en 1901 pour le Département de l’Agriculture, puis devient en 1903 un employé du Département de l’Immigration dont il sera Directeur en 1936. Il a occupé depuis 1924 le poste d’ « Assistant Deputy Minister of Immigration ». Il est considéré comme un homme croyant, membre de l’église baptiste[lxxvii].  

L’attitude de F. Blair n’est pas un cas isolé. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Premier Ministre libéral, se veut le défenseur du sentiment nationaliste du Canada français. Il voit dans l’immigration juive un facteur de division au sein du Canada français et se déclare contre l’ouverture du Canada aux réfugiés juifs. En mars 1938, il écrit d’ailleurs dans son journal, « je crains que nous ayons des émeutes si nous optons pour une politique qui admette de nombreux Juifs[lxxviii]». Faut-il rappeler que Mackenzie King décrit Hitler comme étant « un homme très sincère », qu’il qualifie d’adorable (« sweet »)[lxxix] ? On comprend donc que la position des membres du gouvernement demeure inflexible. Quelques statistiques parlent d’eux-mêmes : sur 5.718 personnes qui entrent au Canada entre 1931 et 1937, 1.983 sont des Juifs ; en 1937, lorsque 11.352 Juifs se réfugient aux États-Unis, le Canada en accepte…619[lxxx] ! Au total, entre 1933 et 1945, seuls 5.000 réfugiés juifs pourront émigrer au Canada !  

Dans ce contexte, que peuvent espérer les passagers du St. Louis ? Pourtant, au sein de la population, le sort des passagers touche quelques Canadiens influents qui envoient le 7 juin un télégramme au Premier Ministre. Parmi eux, il y a l’historien George Wrong, professeur à l’Université de Toronto, B.K. Sandwell du journal Saturday Night, Robert Falconer, ancien président de l’Université de Toronto et Ellsworth Flanelle, un businessman très riche[lxxxi]. Dans ce télégramme, ils implorent Mackenzie King de faire montre de « vraie charité chrétienne » en laissant débarquer les passagers du paquebot. Mais une fois encore, le sort semble jouer contre les passagers du St. Louis qui doivent rivaliser avec un personnage qui ne peut souffrir aucune entorse au protocole. Mackenzie King se trouve en effet à Washington aux côtés du… couple royal d’Angleterre qui termine un voyage sur le continent nord-américain et dont la presse se fait largement écho[lxxxii]. Bien que le St. Louis ne fasse pas partie de ses principales préoccupations, le Premier Ministre canadien accepte de s’en entretenir avec O.D. Skelton, sous-secrétaire d’Etat aux Affaires étrangères, le Québécois Ernest Lapointe, Ministre de la Justice et F. Blair[lxxxiii]. La réponse de Lapointe ne se fait pas attendre. Il se déclare « radicalement opposé[lxxxiv] ». Blair, quant à lui, reste fidèle à la ligne de conduite qu’il a adoptée jusqu’alors, en précisant : « Aucun pays ne pourrait ouvrir ses portes assez largement pour laisser entrer les centaines de milliers de Juifs qui veulent quitter l’Europe : la limite doit être tracée quelque part. » [lxxxv] Pour les 907 passagers juifs du St. Louis, la limite est tracée… juste devant eux. 

Le mardi 6 juin à 23 heures 40, face au silence de l’Amérique, le St. Louis met le cap sur l’Europe après avoir perdu tout espoir de pouvoir débarquer ses passagers quelque part sur le continent nord-américain. A bord, le Comité des passagers décide d’envoyer un ultime appel de détresse au… président Roosevelt, au Joint à La Havane et à l’agence Associated Press à New York[lxxxvi]. Le message est court et sans équivoque : « Très urgent. Implorons à nouveau aidez les passagers du « St. Louis » M. le président, aidez les 900 passagers parmi lesquels plus de 400 sont des femmes et des enfants[lxxxvii]». Ce télégramme demeurera sans réponse…

Quelques décennies plus tard, les historiens nord-américains n’ont pas de mots assez durs pour analyser, voire dénoncer l’attitude de leurs gouvernements respectifs. « Échec », « abandon » des Juifs qui ne sont pas considérés comme « indispensables », autant de qualificatifs qui révèlent un profond sentiment d’injustice[lxxxviii]. Les États-Unis souffrent encore aujourd’hui d’un sentiment de culpabilité[lxxxix]. Les historiens américains ont beaucoup travaillé sur ce court épisode historique.[xc] Puis, des ouvrages d’histoire, le St. Louis est ensuite passé dans la sphère muséographique. En 1999, l’United States Holocaust Memorial Museum de Washington (USHMM) [xci] a consacré une exposition entière au St. Louis. D’un simple fait divers toutefois relaté par la presse mondiale de l’époque, le St. Louis s’est hissé, aux États-Unis, au rang de symbole national. Aucun autre bateau – et il y en eut des centaines – n’a connu une telle notoriété quelques décennies après les faits, excepté… l’Exodus.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 

Closed Door: Newfoundland’s Denial of Sanctuary to Refugees from the Third Reich 

Professor Gerhard Bassler

Newfoundlanders are known to be hospitable to strangers. They value their tradition of hospitality. As proof of the lack of antisemitism on the island, some would point to the integration of a handful of well-known Holocaust survivors who have lived in the local community since the 1950s (Moishe Kantorowitz, Grunia and Lewis Ferman, Philip Riteman, and Ernie Mauskopf).  Before the publication of Sanctuary Denied, most Newfoundlanders would have rebuffed any suggestion of Newfoundland having discriminated against Jews, or having closed its doors to them, as incredulous or maliciously inspired. Not surprisingly, the publication of my book Sanctuary Denied in 1993 was greeted with public silence. In 1995, the local Synagogue invited me to present my research to the Holocaust Remembrance service in St. John’s. After the service, the Newfoundland premier at the time (and subsequent Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland), approached me with astonishment. My findings must be wrong, he protested, since he had had Jewish friends from childhood days and was not aware of any incident of discrimination against Jews in Newfoundland.

Until some 25 years ago when I began researching the history of 20th-century Newfoundland immigration, I used to share such sentiments.  I had assumed that the proverbial hospitality of Newfoundlanders had formed the basis of the country's immigration policy and that anyone willing to come and settle here had been welcomed with open arms. Newfoundland had always had difficulties attracting settlers, I believed, because it was so unknown that not even refugees thought of it as a haven. At first, my assumptions about Newfoundland hospitality seemed confirmed when I discovered that in 1906 Newfoundland had enacted a unique refugee clause as part of its so-called Aliens Act, an Act that remained the law of the land until Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. That act prohibited the immigration of criminals, the mentally ill, or those unable to support themselves. But a clause in the Act specifically offered asylum to refugees from political and religious persecution, even if they arrived in poverty. The only other country enacting such generous legislation for refugees was Britain (in 1905), and it repealed this law in 1920. The question arises whether this clause was intended as a device to attract settlers since Newfoundland had not experienced any immigration for a century.

The Aliens Act was introduced at a time when Newfoundland was clamouring for immigrants, economic growth, and industrial diversification to catch up with Canada and the United States. Newfoundland, a British Dominion the size of today’s Germany, had a population of only 243,000 in 1911 (290,000 in 1938), mostly poor fishermen eking out a living in the island’s fishery-centred economy.  Periodic crises in that single-industry economy had caused a steady out-migration of fishermen to Canada and the United States without compensating immigration. The need for a larger population of up to five million had been a recurring theme in public discourse. It was based on the widely shared view that progress and economic growth meant filling the country’s open spaces with people. Preferred were middle-class settlers who would be able to start new industries and generate capital. The quest for economic and industrial development as a life-line intensified in proportion to the deteriorating economy and the growth of unemployment in the 1920s. The economic collapse of Newfoundland in the Great Depression led the British Dominions Office to replace its elected self-government with an appointed Commission of Government. The three British and three Newfoundland members of this Commission had a mandate to impose any measures conducive to economic recovery. Although the Great Depression created widespread unemployment and put thousands of Newfoundlanders on the so-called dole, settlers with skills, proposals, and capital for economic reconstruction were always welcome.

            When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, Newfoundland thus seemed to offer unique opportunities to certain kinds of refugees from Nazi persecution. Not only did Newfoundland have the distinction of being the sole country in the world where refugees from Nazi persecution were legally eligible for admission, simply by virtue of being refugees, it also provided challenges of industrial development and the exploration of untapped natural resources for skilled and enterprising refugees. Although Newfoundland officials did not promote this right to asylum, the law became known to desperate Jewish refugee agencies. Aware of the economic challenges, refugee agents criss-crossed the island, evaluating its potentials in lengthy reports, and submitting proposals for development along with requests for settlement. One Jewish refugee organization surveying Newfoundland in 1938 in anticipation of refugee settlement concluded that

"the Jews can take little from a country that is practically bankrupt. On the contrary, with undeveloped resources and a small population, much can be contributed by them... Jewish ingenuity will certainly develop these resources."  

The existence of only 83 doctors serving a population of 280,000 tuberculosis-ridden Newfoundlanders, and even fewer dentists, as well the opportunities for farming alone made refugee settlement viable in their eyes.  

Refugee organizations approached the new Newfoundland government as early as 1934. By 1940, applications by and on behalf of refugees, whom were mostly Jewish, had reached an estimated 12,000 individuals. Among the refugees seeking entry were doctors, dentists, and nurses willing to establish travelling clinics and to work in isolated outports urgently needing medical services; there were Jewish manufacturers proposing to locally produce items that were imported at the time; there were farmers, engineers, technicians, accountants, scientists, university professors, and so on. The petitions for sanctuary included at least eight significant economic proposals for refugee group settlement. The proposals outlined detailed plans for harnessing the hydro potential of Churchill Falls in Labrador, developing Labrador's resource-rich Lake Melville area, and launching fish canneries, furniture factories, and other industries with the eventual employment of thousands of Newfoundlanders.            

            Although most group settlement proposals came with assurances of financial backing, the Commission of Government rejected every single proposal. Rejected also were all individual applications for sanctuary. The reasons given for all denials of sanctuary did not reflect any consistent criteria and differed from case to case. In February 1939, a petition on behalf of 1,000 Jewish families, headed by farmers, engineers, and young merchants from Hungary, was turned down on the alleged grounds that there was "no prospect of room being found" for them on the island. The settlement of Jewish doctors was blocked through the intervention of the Newfoundland Medical Board, allegedly on the grounds of their qualifications, but in reality for fear of competition.  The refugee clause of 1906, Newfoundland's senior commissioner Lewis Emerson confided to colleagues in 1938, was "simply too liberal in present circumstances.”            

            Especially telling are the rejections of requests from several naturalized Newfoundlanders to sponsor first-degree relatives. In one heartbreaking case, a prosperous St. John's Jewish businesswoman and naturalized resident was denied permission to rescue her parents and two brothers from Poland, despite five separate efforts between 1937 and 1939, and the engagement of the foremost St. John's law firm on her behalf. Her urgent pleas, predicting the impending outbreak of war and the mortal danger to Jews in Poland, fell on deaf ears. In this instance, local officials based their refusal on the Australian case of Musgrove vs. Chun Teong Toy, heard in the Privy Council in 1891. It reaffirmed the right of the Australian colony of Victoria to turn back any Chinese ship that attempted to land in excess of the limit for Chinese set by Victoria's Chinese Immigration Act. This legal precedent, the Newfoundland Secretary for Justice Brian Dunfield stated, entitled the government "to refuse to receive the Polish immigrants in question, and its right being absolute, it need not give any reasons." Dunfield, by the way, served as Newfoundland Supreme Court Justice from 1939 until his death in 1960.            

            Another reason for rejection was the suspicion that Jewish refugees were really German spies. For example, in June 1940 the Commission abruptly expelled Newfoundland's only refugee entrepreneur (Maurice Metal), a Jew, on these grounds. Admitted six months earlier, this alleged spy had already invested thousands of his own dollars in a new forest enterprise that had created jobs for sixty unemployed Newfoundlanders. In the local perception, he, along with five Jewish refugee physicians, became German spies when war broke out. The five physicians had been recruited in London in 1939 to serve as nurses in isolated outports where no local doctors and nurses wanted to go. Even the Rabbi of the St. John’s Hebrew Congregation, who had fled Germany with his family in 1938, was accused of spying for Germany. The Rabbi and the refugee physicians found the public stigmatization and official suspicions unbearable and moved on to the United States before 1945. The wartime myth of Jewish refugees being German spies was so powerful that it has survived to this day in publications of local amateur historians. One widely read writer (Tom Furlong), a wartime Newfoundland Customs employee, repeated this allegation in books published as late as 1995 and 2004, ignoring my well-documented refutation in the 1993 publication of Sanctuary Denied.           

Responsibility for the wholesale exclusion of refugees in defiance of the legally-guaranteed right to asylum rests squarely with Newfoundland's "great" leaders. There is some evidence that the impoverished rural population would have welcomed refugee doctors and dentists to provide badly-needed services in the neglected and tuberculosis-ridden outports. Is it right for Newfoundland’s 83 doctors “to prevent thousands of Newfoundland citizens from receiving medical care,” protested one writer from the distant outport of Burgeo in 1934. In the government of the day, Lewis Emerson, Commissioner for Justice and Defence, represented the vested interests of the local professional and business elite, and he usually had the last say in the Commission. This tightly-knit group of community leaders - merchants, doctors, businessmen, and lawyers - feared competition and consequently considered the refugees a potential threat to their privileged position. Antisemitism reinforced these selfish motives. Largely a prejudice “borrowed” from Europe and mainland North America, antisemitism was as prevalent among Newfoundland's ruling class and officialdom as in other parts of the western world.  

The power of these community leaders derived from the fact that, in contrast to the open, dynamic, and multicultural societies of Canada and the United States, Newfoundland society was closed, rural, and culturally homogeneous. The absence of a sizable middle class widened the gulf between the upper and lower classes and intensified polarization between them. Contemporary portrayals of Newfoundland’s ruling class leave little to the imagination. It consisted traditionally of some 15 fish merchants who controlled the fish export and consumer-oriented trades, in association with the small urban middle class of businessmen, professional people, and church leaders. This elite exercised its hold on the population through the cash-free economy of merchant credits, the pervasive influence of the churches, and the political power structure. The merchants owned and controlled most of the local factories producing consumer goods. High tariffs, in turn, protected these from outside competition. The power and prestige of this “fishocracy” were proverbial, and became synonymous with exploitation and with the patronage that permeated the churches, the legislature, the political parties, and almost every other aspect of life in Newfoundland.            

Why, one might ask, would this merchant regime in an obscure, self-governing British colony pass legislation only in order to evade its enforcement? The Newfoundland Aliens Act of 1906 was adopted verbatim from the British Aliens Act of 1905, and no thought was given to the implications of its asylum clause. In fact, the overall intent of the 1906 Aliens Act was to restrict immigration by establishing procedures for the identification, exclusion, and deportation of undesirables; it was to provide for the exclusion of anyone likely to become a public charge on the grounds of insufficient means, mental health, or criminal record. The Act was directed against the very migrants who would have been eligible for asylum. This inherent contradiction was ignored at the time because refugees were still perceived as individual activists rather than impoverished masses fleeing persecution.

Like its model, the British Aliens Act of 1905, the Newfoundland Act may be viewed as an essentially anti-alien measure. It was intended to serve as a filter for an undesirable mass influx of new immigrants, especially east European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, while preserving the myth of Britain's oldest and most loyal colony as a bastion of freedom.  Britain, however, allowed excluded aliens to appeal to an Immigration Board, which adjudicated claims to refugee status leniently. Its members were under instruction from the Home Secretary to give the benefit of doubt to immigrants claiming flight from persecution. Newfoundland copied the text of the refugee clause, but showed no interest in copying its British administration.   Newfoundland's Minister of Justice in 1906 praised the Aliens Act as "a very perfect measure."

            The systematic denial of asylum to refugees whose plight was well publicized attests to the low esteem in which asylum was held even where legally entrenched. No contemporaries protested or regretted this breach of the law, and its historical implications have been ignored until this day. Moreover, implementation of the Act would probably have been very beneficial to Newfoundland because, far from imposing a burden, refugees offered scarce skills, expertise, initiatives, connections, and even funds to a poor and backward country unable to attract other types of immigrants. History offers numerous, well-documented cases attesting to the beneficial impact of refugee settlement on ravaged or undeveloped countries. From the dispersals of the Anabaptists in the 16th century and of the French Huguenots in the 17th century to the absorption of post-World War II displaced persons, refugees from political and religious persecution have established an impressive record as catalysts of economic development and nation-building.

            Several of the British members of Newfoundland's Commission of Government, as well as Dominions Office officials, recognized the constructive contributions a select number of European refugees might make. These officials realized that for impoverished and backward Newfoundland the proposals for refugee settlement constituted a rare windfall of human capital – middle-class settlers whose professional expertise, technical skills, and resourcefulness could have been invaluable. The majority of the Commission, however, sided with the vested interests of the local professional and business leaders. Even as prominent an expert on the international refugee situation as Sir John Hope Simpson, whom the Dominions Office appointed to serve as commissioner in Newfoundland from1934 to 1936, failed to sway the local power elite in favour of refugee settlement.

We might therefore conclude that in its relentless denial of sanctuary to Jewish refugees, Newfoundland even outdid Canada, a country known to have cared little and done less. But while Canada admitted at least a token number of refugees, Newfoundland practised what Canada's antisemitic immigration director, F.C. Blair preached, namely: "None is too many.” Newfoundland not only held hope for thousands of would-be refugees from the Holocaust whose rejection and destruction were also Newfoundland's loss. The truly sad realization is that Newfoundland was poised for moral leadership with its sanctuary law. Instead, its past leaders spurned this historic challenge and ensured that solutions to many economic local problems would remain elusive to this day.

Gerhard P. Bassler, Sanctuary Denied: Refugees from the Third Reich and Newfoundland  Immigration Policy, 1906-1949 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1992). 

Gerhard P. Bassler, “Leave to Land Shall not be Refused”: The Right to Asylum in Newfoundland, 1906-1949,” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 7: 2 (1993), 6-23.

Gerhard P. Bassler, “Newfoundland and the Holocaust,” Keynote address, Holocaust Remembrance Service, Hebrew Congregation of Newfoundland, 1995.

Gerhard P. Bassler, Vikings to U-Boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

The Complicity of Civil Society in the Delegitimization of the Jews

Immigration and Refugee Lawyer; Senior Legal Counsel, B’nai Brith Canada

Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Civil society has contributed to Jewish exclusion by complicity in delegitimization. The legal profession was guilty of collaboration with Nazi-driven antisemitism before and during the Holocaust. Today certain human rights NGOs are guilty of collaboration with anti-Zionist attempts to criminalize the Jewish state. 

Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg, Germany, in charge of guardianships during the Nazi era, noticed that a number of his wards, mentally retarded children and adults housed in a local mental hospital, died suddenly after transfer to certain institutions. He concluded that they had been murdered by the Nazi regime under its policy "Operation Mercy Killing", and wrote to the Minister of Justice Franz Gurtner to object.  

In July 1940, when nothing happened, Judge Kreyssig filed a murder complaint with the State Attorney in Potsdam against Philip Bouhler, the head of both Hitler's Chancellery and the Nazi euthanasia program. He then, in August, issued injunctions against the hospitals housing his wards, ordering the hospitals not to transfer his wards without his prior approval.  

Justice Minister Gurtner summoned Kreyssig to Berlin and asked him to abandon his efforts. Kreyssig refused and Gurtner ordered his early retirement^[i]. Kreyssig suffered no other consequence; he received a state pension from the Third Reich. He lived till 1986. 

In his book, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Muller wrote:

"No matter how hard one searches for stout‑hearted men among the judges of the Third Reich, for judges who refused to serve the regime from the bench, there remains a grand total of one: Dr. Lothar Kreyssig."^[ii] 

An extreme form of a more typical phenomenon, the antisemitic jurist, was Oswald Rothaug. The Nazi race laws prohibited, amongst other things, sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. Leo Katzenberger was prosecuted in March 1942 for having an affair with Irene Seiler. Both denied the affair and there was no evidence to the contrary other than that they knew each other and were friends. Katzenberger was nonetheless convicted by Judge Oswald Rothaug, sentenced to death and executed in June 1942^[iii].  

Oswald Rothaug was prosecuted at Nuremberg after the war in the Justice Trial, a trial of sixteen members of the Reich Ministry of Justice or People's and Special Courts. The trial was conducted by a US military court in the US-occupied zone of Germany in Nuremberg after the International Military Tribunals were completed.  

One element of the charge against Rothaug for war crimes and crimes against humanity was his conduct of the Katzenberger trial. Rothaug was convicted December 1947 and sentenced to life in prison. In convicting Rothaug, the US military tribunal wrote:  

"From the evidence it is clear that these trials [one of which was the Katzenberger trial] lacked the essential elements of legality. In these cases the defendant's court, in spite of the legal sophistries which he employed, was merely an instrument in the program of the leaders of the Nazi State of persecution and extermination."^[iv]  

A fictionalized version of the prosecution of Rothaug was included in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. Judy Garland played the part of a character based on Irene Seiler. 

The complicity of the legal profession in Nazi persecution, of which the Katzenberger prosecution was an example, permeated the bench and the prosecution. It also convulsed the defence bar. Counsel for the defence saw themselves as agents of the State and routinely turned against their clients in pursuit of what they saw as Nazi State interests^[v].  

Nazi corruption of the law was not confined to the criminal sphere. Every legal domain, including contract law, labour law and child custody, became venues for the application of Nazi racist ideology. 

Moreover, this exclusion through law was not limited to Nazi Germany. In every country but Denmark that the Nazis invaded, racial laws excluding Jews from economic activities were enacted and enforced^[vi]. 

It is easy to see why Nazis would want to use the law to promote their racist ideology. Totalitarianism meant total control, control of the legal profession along with every other profession. But there was more to Nazi control of the legal profession than that. 

The law is normative. It is statements by the law makers of what they want society to be. The law sets out the legislator's ideal. Legal discourse is a discourse about what ought to be. 

To exclude Jews in fact from society was just bigotry, discrimination. To exclude Jews by law from that same society was exclusion at a higher level, a level of standards. Legislated antisemitism was marginalization in principle, dehumanization as an ethic.  

In the Third Reich, the legality of exclusion provided an additional justification for that exclusion, reinforcing the marginalization, making it more systematic. Law gave respectability to brute prejudice.  

It is harder to explain why the legal profession went along with this Nazi attempt to legitimize bigotry. Kreyssig, the one judge who resisted the Nazis, as noted, suffered no other consequence than dismissal with a pension. And this was the result of active opposition to Hitler in 1940, long after the Nazi project had gathered steam, even after World War II had started. If the judges and lawyers had actively opposed to the Nazi project in the early years of the Third Reich, it seems likely that they would not have suffered even this sort of adverse consequence.  

Why did they not do so? In light of how little happened to Lothar Kreyssig for resisting so boldly so late in the Third Reich, the answer cannot be that they co-operated because they had to. The answer must be that they co-operated because they wanted to. 

How could the legal profession have abandoned so completely and systematically its ideals? The explanation is the same for the lawyers as for the rest of society, the pervasiveness of antisemitism.  

In Germany and virtually everywhere the Nazis went, vicious antisemitism had become an informal ethic. Legalizing that ethic just formalized what was already rampant. The legal profession did not resist the antisemitism of the Nazis because all too many jurists were antisemitic themselves.  

There may be a temptation to suggest that this legitimization of antisemitism did not matter. The death camps, the roving killing squads, the Final Solution, the Holocaust, were not implemented through legislation and court orders. Yet, the complicity of the legal profession mattered very much indeed. 

If the legal profession had insisted from day one of the Third Reich on obedience to justice, fairness, due process and the rule of law, the Nazi project could have been stopped before it developed a full head of steam. Only because the legal profession and the legal system tolerated and cooperated in the lesser wrongs did the greater wrongs become possible. 

When Rothaug was prosecuted at Nuremberg, he argued in mitigation that the numbers killed as the result of his decisions paled in comparison to the numbers killed by those who ran the death camps or operated the roving extermination squads^[vii]. The Court, in convicting him, said:

"That the number the defendant could wipe out within his competency was smaller than the number involved in the mass persecutions and exterminations by the leaders whom he served, does not mitigate his contribution to the program of those leaders. His acts were more terrible in that those who might have hoped for a last refuge in the institutions of justice found these institutions turned against them and a part of the program of terror and oppression." 

The failure of legal recourse makes crimes against humanity even more terrifying. Victims of persecution are entitled to expect refuge, safety, protection from the law. When the law joins in the persecution, the horror of the persecution is amplified. 

The law of the Nazi era provided a continuity with the past, camouflaging the abrupt nature of the change the Nazi regime inflicted on Germany and the other countries where the Nazis went. Relying on the law made discrimination easier, not just easier to accomplish but easier to attempt. Those who hesitated to wallow in the pure discourse of bigotry could hide behind the fig leaf of the law.  

Exclusion through law cloaked Nazi-ruled countries in a semblance of similarity with other countries where the rule of law prevailed, giving Nazis a smokescreen of respectability as they went about their business of exclusion. The legitimization of exclusion served as form of self-delusion for the perpetrators and a deception of outsiders and non-participants, mitigating their objections and interference.  

When Nazis pre-empted and co-opted the law to serve their ideology of exclusion, they gave an excuse, a pretence of civilization to some of the most barbaric behaviour the world had ever seen. Those who could not seek comfort for their inhumanity in bigotry alone sought and obtained solace in the connection with legal traditions with which they were familiar. To all too many, both insiders and outsiders, what the Nazis did was not wrong because it was legal.  

It is noteworthy that the one judge who did object to Nazi murders, Lothar Kreyssig, did so in legal terms. In his letter of protest to the Minister of Justice, Kreyssig argued that the killings of his wards were illegal on both substantive and procedural grounds.  

On substance, he asserted that there was no legal basis for killing wards of court. On procedure, he inveighed against the absence of both the opportunity to call expert witness and the possibility of appeal.  

The Minister of Justice Gurtner attempted to persuade Kreyssig that what was done was legal because it met with the Fuhrer's will, something which was stated in print in a document Gurtner showed Kreyssig. Kreyssig asserted the view that the Fuhrer's will could not represent a legal basis for the killing of his wards^[viii]. 

In one sense, the objections Kreyssig made, legal rather than moral, seem formalistic, suggesting that a mere change in the law would have removed his objections. Nonetheless, his insistence on legality was more than just form. In another sense, he hit dead on at least part of what was amiss in what was happening, the abuse of law. 

Perpetrators developed a sense of immunity through law. Though at the end of the day, after the War, when Nazis were hauled before the Nuremberg courts, their defences based on local law were dismissed, many thought they had those defences, thought they would be immune from prosecution for what they were doing because it was legal. The then-legality gave the perpetrators what later turned out to be a false sense of security, but at the time the crimes were committed it helped mobilize partners in exclusion and undermined attempts to turn them away from their awful deeds. 

Sometimes, all that is necessary to prevent wrongdoing is to see it plainly for what it is. The mask of legality prevented the clear and unequivocal exposure of wrong doing. It muddied the waters, confused and obfuscated, making it unclear to those without strong moral grounding where their duty lay. 

The phrase, “I was only doing my job”, when it came to applying Nazi exclusion law, was more than just an excuse. It became an effective means for getting Nazi dirty work accomplished. If the task of exclusion could be extracted from its impact on humanity, if it could be turned into a mere technical abstraction, it would become that much easier to perform.  

Making exclusion legal sanitized the task and anesthetized the perpetrators. Legalisation became a technique of avoidance. Instead of confronting and flinching from the infliction of suffering on real human beings, perpetrators thought instead only about the mundane, everyday application of legal technicalities. Killing real human beings is a bloody business, but applying legal technicalities can seem bloodless. 

Those who did not think that what they were doing was right because it was racist could and did think that what they were doing was right because it was legal. Legality expanded the range of perpetrators beyond true believers to encompass the full, formal machinery of the state. 

Violations of human rights are a spreading stain. By being complicit from the very start, the legal profession in Nazi Germany legitimated, spread and amplified exclusion. The law in Nazi Germany became a building block of the Final Solution; the legal profession was a builder. 

What are the lessons which can be learned from this experience? One is as, the title of this panel indicates, civil society can be suborned to the process of marginalization, dispossession, dehumanization and deportation. One would have thought the legal profession, with its ideals of justice, equality, due process, fairness and the rule of law, would be steeled against this subornation. Unfortunately, Nazi Germany showed that this was not so.  

Before Nazi Germany, there had been an equation of law with civilization. If one looks at the statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice which began in 1922, it states "the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations"^[ix]. International law, according to the Court statute, came from civilized nations.  

While the Statute of the Court did not state which nations were civilized and which were not, it was drawn up in the era where the colonial powers were thought to be the civilized nations and the colonized states were not. The phrase "civilized nations" was understood to refer to the states of continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States^[x].  

The Holocaust was distinctive, unprecedented, and unique from a wide variety of perspectives. Germany, at the time of the Holocaust, was an advanced civilization in a myriad of ways, not least of which was its development of legal scholarship and jurisprudence. It was startling to see the failure of the participants in a fully-developed legal culture, judges as well as the legal profession, with the sole exception of Lother Kreyssig, to oppose Nazi crimes as illegal, and, on the contrary, their willingness to participate actively in these crimes.    

In Nazi-ruled countries, human rights violations were perpetrated by means of visible legal structures. Nazi ruled countries were states dedicated to the violations of human rights, built upon the principle of human rights violations. Nazi-ruled countries used the law to pursue the Nazi racist agenda.  

Due to the behaviour of the legal profession in Nazi-ruled countries, we have to think of the law in a completely different way. The participation of the legal profession in Nazi crimes showed, in a way, that jurisprudence alone never could complete the divorce between law and morality, between the law and the rule of law, between law and respect for human rights standards. The Holocaust showed that advanced civilization, even an advanced legal culture, is no defence to the worst crimes known to humanity. Legality and barbarity can go hand in hand. 

The advanced legal culture of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century speaks to the universality, the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. It may be tempting to say of other killers in other genocides that they were nothing but uncivilized barbarians. This cannot be said of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.  

Even during the midst of the Holocaust, many of the most accomplished German jurists of the day were among its most enthusiastic supporters. The Holocaust tells us in a way that no other tragedy can that the law alone can not immunize us from evil. 

On the contrary, law can and – in the case of the Holocaust – did contribute to dehumanization. Laws and lawyers and courts, by giving an appearance of legality to the exclusion of the Jews, served to legitimate that exclusion.  

Nazis did not just flout the law; they used it. There is a tendency even today to think of the law as a friend of the oppressed, as a bulwark or defence against the authority of the state. Yet, if we direct our attention to the law and the legal profession in Nazi-ruled countries, we can see the complete opposite: not just that the law can be overwhelmed and undermined, but that the law can make an oppressive state even more oppressive, that the law can partner and reinforce tyranny as much as liberty, that the law can be a harbinger and accelerator of genocide. 

Today, we have a range of human rights standards, institutions and non-governmental organizations that did not exist before and during World War II. They provide mechanisms to resist exclusion which were not previously available. However, just like the legal profession, the legal structure and the legal standards before World War II, they too can be and sometimes are corrupted to support rather than oppose exclusion. 

In spite of the suffering of the Jewish people before and during the Holocaust and the perversion of the law to add to their suffering, the Jewish people yet again have become victim of this sort of perversion. They are victimized this time by the very human rights mechanisms and organizations sprung up in reaction to the Holocaust that were meant to prevent reoccurrence of the violations of the sort the Jewish community had suffered in the past. 

Before and during the Holocaust, the law was used for delegitimization of Jews as individuals. Today the law is used for delegitimization of Jews as a people.  

There is a constant, active effort by enemies of the Jewish state to demonize it through law. Human rights standards mechanisms and organizations are used to accuse Israel of every crime under the sun. Lawfare has become an extension of warfare.  

1. Israel is accused of the crime of apartheid. Basic to apartheid was the denationalization of Blacks – because they were black – and allocation of nationality in state created bantustans or homelands. Blacks assigned to bantustans were subject to influx controls and pass laws. The objective of apartheid was to denationalize all Blacks, to assign every Black person to one of ten bantustans. Blacks were forcibly removed from where they lived to their designated bantustans. 

Israel has not since its inception taken away vested Israeli citizenship of even one person on the basis of identity. Israel has not created designated territories within its borders to which it has forcibly removed its own citizens who are different^[xi]. 

2. Israel is accused of illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Until 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. If the accusation of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza could be properly made against Israel now, it should have been made earlier against Jordan and Egypt. Yet, it never was. If Israel is in alien occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, occupying it against the Palestinian people, why were not Jordan and Egypt before Israel also not in alien occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, also occupying the territories against the Palestinian people? 

3. Israel is accused of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Yet, in principle, what are tendentiously labelled as the settlements are nothing more than Jews living in the neighbourhood. Why do so many people who would oppose restrictive covenants forbidding sales of residential properties to Jews everywhere else in the world, endorse the notion of a restrictive covenant against Jews for the West Bank and Gaza? 

4. Israel is accused of violating the laws in war by the use of disproportionate force in response to terrorist attacks.   Yet, there is no crime of disproportionality. The standard to which critics sometimes refer when pressed to explain this disproportionality charge, is the prohibition against indiscriminate attacks which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.  

There is a world of difference between a disproportionate attack and an indiscriminate attack. An attack can be as “disproportionate” as an all-out attack and still be legal as long as the attack discriminates adequately between military and civilian targets. 

5. Israel is accused of frustrating a Palestinian right of return. Yet, there is no such right. Human rights are rights which belong to all people because of their common humanity, not just to Palestinians. If there were a real right of return, it would be a right of return of all human beings to territory in which their ancestors once lived. Yet, one only needs to state this claimed right in its general form for it to be apparent that no such right exists. 

6. Israel is accused of the crime of colonialism, that it is a colony of the West. Demographically, the charge is misplaced since the majority of Israelis are either emigrants from other Middle Eastern countries or their descendants. Culturally also the charge is inaccurate, since the language of Israel and many other aspects of Israel are not Western. 

Historically, the Jewish people are Middle Eastern. The land of Israel has had a Jewish population continuously from pre-historic times. Israel is self governed. It is not governed by the Western states. 

7. Israel is charged with the crime of ethnic cleansing. Yet, not one Israeli citizen has been forcibly evicted from Israel solely because of his or her ethnic origin. There is a substantial Arab population in Israel today, approximately 1.5 million. Many of these Arab Israelis or their ancestors were in Israel from its inception. 

At the same time as they denounce non-existent Israeli ethnic cleansing, anti-Zionists call for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, anti-Zionists do not call this ethnic cleansing. Instead, they call for dismantlement of the settlements. But, what is the call – that the West Bank and Gaza Jewish settlements should be dismantled – if it is not a call for ethnic cleansing? 

Moreover, though population statistics alone show that Israel has not ethnically cleansed its territory of Arabs, those same statistics show that Arab countries have ethnically cleansed their territories of Jews. In 1948, the year the modern-day State of Israel was born, the Jewish population of Arab countries was 856,000; in 2001 the figure was 7,800. During that period, another 57,000 were displaced from Iran. 

These people were mainly refugees, forced to flee to save themselves. Before they were displaced, they were threatened, harassed and persecuted. Their property was forfeited or confiscated, either before or after they fled.  

8. Israel has been subject to an abusive proceeding at the International Court of Justice, a one sided reference from the UN General Assembly. The General Assembly chooses the judges of the Court and decides on the renewal of their terms. When Israel built a security barrier to defend itself against terrorist suicide bombers, the General Assembly asked the Court to find the barrier illegal; which the Court dutifully did without hearing from Israel.  

I have written a book on this problem entitled Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism^[xii]. For an elaboration of the points made here or for additional examples, I invite you to read the book. 

These phoney charges against Israel are not just fomented by anti-Zionist governments. They are all too often endorsed, promoted and elaborated by human rights NGOs.  

A classic example of this phenomenon was the NGO Forum against Racism at Durban in August 2001. The Forum preceded by three days and overlapped by two the intergovernmental World Conference Against Racism. The Durban NGO forum was plagued by a group of NGOs who had an anti-Zionist political agenda, and who were willing to stop at nothing to realize that agenda.  

For the anti-Zionists, both the NGO Forum against Racism and the World Conference Against Racism became a continuation of the war against Israel by other means. Anti-Zionists succeed in including language in the NGO Forum Declaration and Program of Action which accused Israel of the worst crimes known to humanity. There was quite a lot of such language. Let me just read part of one sentence:

"Appalled by the on‑going colonial military Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the West Bank including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip), we declare and call for an immediate end to the Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing (as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court), including uprooting by military attack...."^[xiii] 

The problem for the Forum was not just the dedicated anti-Zionist NGOs. Even more worrisome was the feebleness of the support the Jewish community received from other NGOs.  

While the Cultural Diversity, Asian Descendants, Eastern and Central European, South Asia, Peace and European Caucuses each in their own way expressed their voices in solidarity, most did not. The international NGOs disassociated themselves from the attacks on the Jewish community, but refused to condemn those attacks. At a press conference, they all urged the media to move on to other issues.  

The Eastern and Central European Caucus circulated a petition condemning the NGO Forum process and the content of the concluding Declaration. The petition stated:

"We must emphasize that the language of the chapter 'Palestine' as well as the deliberate distortions made to the chapter 'Anti‑Semitism' are extremely intolerant, disrespectful and contrary to the very spirit of the World Conference".    

All of the international human rights NGOs refused to sign this petition. 

Both yesterday and today, civil society has been deeply implicated in marginalization and exclusion through abuse of the law. It might be said, in the years leading up to the Holocaust, that it was unclear where all this marginalization was heading. One of the defendants in the film Judgment at Nuremberg, says to the presiding judge, "Those millions of people [who perished in the Holocaust] - I never knew it would come to that". The presiding judge replies: "It came to that the first time you sentenced to death a man you knew to be innocent."  

President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad propagandizes incitement to genocide against the people of Israel^[xiv]. Legal slurs which civil society foments and amplifies have become a central component of this incitement.  

For instance, Ahmadinejad has remarked that "[n]ext to them [Zionists], all the criminals of the world seem righteous"^[xv]. He has characterized Israel, which he refers to as the "Zionist regime" as being created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime^[xvi]. He has referred to Israel as the "criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file"^[xvii].

            Today, we can not use the excuse that we do not know where all this incitement is going and what all this will come to. We know where it is going; we know what it will come to. We must do what we can to oppose civil society when it levies phoney legal charges to demonize the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

The Media and the International Response to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide[1]

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies

University of Western Ontario

When we speak of the St. Louis tragedy of 1938 and the genocide of six million Jews in the years that followed, we do not speak only of victims and perpetrators. We also speak of discriminatory immigration practices, pervasive antisemitism, and the willful marginalization and abandonment of the Jews by the “international community.” Fifty-six years later, in the spring of 1994, the “international community” also stood by with silence and complicity as Hutu extremists, the Interahamwe militia, and “ordinary” Rwandans massacred 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu in one hundred days.  

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was organized, systematic, and preventable, a human-wrought disaster that involved the participation of almost every element of civil society. Media – as both propaganda and news – played a critical role in the dehumanization and dispossession of the Jews and the Tutsis. In the Nazi era, Jews were characterized as vermin and insects, and Nazi scientists used the pseudo-science of eugenics to inscribe ideologies of Jewish inferiority and the spirit of the German “Volk” in popular culture, school curricula, and the extracurricular education of Nazi youth groups. In Rwanda, a radical hate radio station called RTLM was instituted a year before the massacres began, priming the Hutu majority for genocide with descriptions of Tutsi “cockroaches” and “snakes.”  

Likewise, an examination of the western news media tells us something important about the failure of the international community to intervene in the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, about our role as bystanders and our collective complicity in mass killing. Laurel Leff suggests that during the Holocaust, newspapers like the New York Times actually provided fairly steady coverage and accurate descriptions of the persecution of the Jews. The Times reported ghettoization, torture, mass shootings, and gas chambers as early as the fall of 1942, but these stories were consistently buried in the back pages of the paper, failing to signal the importance of the “millions dead” that they reported. The Holocaust rarely appeared on the front page, was never editorialized, and was never the lead story.[i]  

This paper will focus on the role of the international news media during the Rwandan genocide, using Canada’s national paper of record, The Globe and Mail, as a case study. The Globe serves as a fairly representative example because the paper relied so heavily on newswires (and was, therefore, similar – and in some cases identical – to the typical coverage Rwanda received across English-language papers), and because they refrained from sending their own journalist to Rwanda until more than a month into the massacres. 

In a 2000 report for the Foreign Press Institute, Alan Kuperman identifies four fundamental factual inaccuracies that were widely reported by the international media during the first three weeks of the Rwandan genocide:[ii] 1. the media conflated genocide with civil war between the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-led rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front;[iii] 2. the massacres were reported to be diminishing when they were, in fact, increasing;[iv] 3. Tutsi death tolls were seriously underestimated;[v] and 4. media coverage focused on the capital city of Kigali and failed to report the massacres that were spreading into the countryside.[vi]   While Kuperman acknowledges that many journalists fled Rwanda when foreign nationals were evacuated,[vii] he does not emphasize the media’s preoccupation with the danger to the mostly-white western expatriates in Rwanda, nor does he write extensively about the proliferation of racially-inflected media fabrications about “reciprocal ethnic violence” and “centuries-old tribal warfare”.  

The first Globe article appeared on April 7, 1994, a brief, front-page story about the plane crash that took the life of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana the previous day.[viii] On April 8, The Globe’s front-page article, “Rwandan troops kill prime minister,” focuses on the assassination of the moderate Hutu prime minister,[ix] but it also provides the first descriptions of the massacres: “gangs of youths wielding machetes and clubs ... settling tribal scores by hacking and clubbing people at random”.[x] Significantly, we see the first mention of expatriates – “no reports of attacks on Canadians living in Rwanda” –which eventually became the central narrative in the Globe’s coverage of the genocide.  

By the third day of The Globe’s coverage, on April 9, the plight of foreign nationals in Rwanda was the leading story. Written by Jeff Sallot, “Ottawa readies Rwandan evacuation”focuses on the approximately two hundred Canadians who needed to leave Rwanda in the wake of the violence. Sallot relegates the massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus to the background of the story, suggesting that African deaths are less significant than phantom fears of violence against western ex-patriots. In doing so, he further reinforces the interpretation of genocidal violence as “tribal warfare,” writing that “[Kigali]... had been turned into a killing ground by rampaging gangs and security forces from the rival Hutu and Tutsi tribes.”[xi]  

Similarly, on April 11, the A1 Rwanda headline was “Foreigners flee Rwanda,”[xii] and this article focuses on French, Belgian, and US expatriates, while describing the genocide as “fighting and ethnic violence” and “three days of savage chaos.” A second story about the massacres, “Butchered bodies fill morgue,” was buried deeper on A7,[xiii] and this article is particularly visually misleading because, directly above the headline, there is a photograph of RPF rebels with guns accompanied by the following caption: “RPF rebels guard a road north of the capital, Kigali. Thousands have died in the latest outbreak of fighting between the Hutu and Tutsi tribal groups.”[xiv] The juxtaposition of the photograph of armed RPF soldiers, and the adjacent text about the “latest outbreak” of violence, suggests that the RPF (not the Interahamwe) are responsible for the butchered bodies, and that mass killing of civilians is a “normal” part of Rwandan life. By the time “Butchered bodies” was published, Globe readers had been given every cue to fear for the safety of Canadian ex-patriots, while, at the same time, they remained mystified about the threat of annihilation that was bearing down on hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi. On 12 April, the paper ran three Rwanda articles: “Shaken Canadians arrive in Nairobi” on A1, “Foreigners flee Rwandan bloodbath” on A12 (which describes “battles between rebels and government troops” and calls the massacres “tribal bloodletting”), and “Rare mountain gorillas in Rwanda put at risk by bloody tribal conflict” on A12 (which suggests that “the world’s last mountain gorillas are in serious danger in Rwanda because of a tribal war there”).[xv]  

Almost every report about massacred civilians in the month of April was organized around the rubric of civil war and tribalism, encouraging Globe readers to interpret the violence as an indiscriminate and inevitable force. Day after day, The Globe published newswire stories that portrayed the genocide of Tutsi civilians as “savage chaos”,[xvi] “ethnic violence”,[xvii] “tribal war”[xviii] and “tribal bloodletting”.[xix] The motivation for the massacres was usually articulated in the form of a paradox: the victims were killed “at random,” but as a function of “settling scores” in a media fabrication that explains mass killing as simultaneously anarchic and methodical, arbitrary and purposeful. One particularly troubling version of this paradox appeared in “A history of hate in Central Africa” on 13 April, The Globe’s first editorial stance on the massacres. In its primary account of Rwanda’s history, it refers to “chaos and slaughter” and “savage violence between the area’s two main groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis,” but it also succeeds in undermining this description by suggesting, “the Hutu-dominated army used the death of the president as an excuse to settle scores.”[xx]  While the notion of “settling scores” makes the regrettable assertion that the murder of civilians is a kind of revenge killing (implying that the victims must have done something to be massacred), it also suggests – contrary to the tone in the rest of the editorial – that the violence is premeditated and state-sponsored, not chaotic.  

Throughout the first five weeks of coverage, the Globe conflated the victims and the perpetrators, painting Rwanda with perilously broad strokes, and narrating a stylized and exoticized performance of “savage” African caricatures that obscured the reality of the genocide, the legacy of colonialism and the complexity of diverse African subjectivities. The Globe reader’s initial, vague, and confused concern about Rwandan civilians is quickly replaced by the persistent message that mostly-white westerners are engulfed by “savage chaos” in Rwanda, and that the rescue of these westerners is a moral necessity. In other words, the Globe places the evacuation of a few hundred western ex-patriots above the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan genocide victims.  

Nowhere is this juxtaposition more evident than on April 14, 1994, when the Globe published a photograph above the fold on page A1.  

The image shows a hysterical white woman being escorted by two white Belgian soldiers. Another soldier stands behind them, and about twenty Rwandan civilians – mostly men – provide a striking visual backdrop for the woman’s dramatic rescue. The caption reads: 

“TERRIFYING ESCAPE: Belgian paratroopers lead a frightened woman from a crowd in Kigali yesterday. Rebels and government troops continued to battle in the Rwandan capital.”

 Initially, the caption seems to describe the photo accurately enough; the woman does look frightened, and she is, indeed, surrounded by a “crowd.” But there are really two narratives at work here, one that is overt and one that is concealed. The overt narrative is, of course, the rescue of the expatriate woman, which dominates the visual frame and relies upon the caption-constructed performance of “chaos” and “savageness” by the anonymous Rwandans behind her. The second repressed, obscured, ignored narrative is the horror faced by those same Rwandans, a truth that is lost in the transposition of a western body (and western interests) onto Tutsi civilian suffering. The combination of the image and the caption suggest to us that the Rwandans in the background are a menacing bunch – rebel or government troops (or both) who are the perpetrators of the chaotic, reciprocal violence of “tribal warfare” – and that the woman is being rescued from the impending threat of this “crowd” in the nick of time. Like the stream of A1 stories about the evacuation of westerners from Rwanda in the first week of the genocide, the photo narrates a form of privileged, unselfconscious western-ness that is not recognized at the time, let alone challenged. In 1994, the photo and its caption participate in an African/Western duality in which black bodies are merely part of a mass, undifferentiated crowd. The crowd threatens the life of a single white expatriate woman, who is clearly situated as the primary recipient of our empathy and identification.