Odyssey of St. Louis

The St. Louis in the port of Hamburg

The odyssey of the St. Louis was a journey of 937 almost without exception German Jews on the St. Louis , a passenger ship of the Hamburg shipping company HAPAG , in May – June 1939 from Hamburg to Cuba and back to Antwerp . The passengers wanted to emigrate to Cuba in order to escape the Nazi regime , but were not given a landing permit there, in the USA or Canada . They were eventually disembarked in Antwerp and distributed to Belgium , the Netherlands , France and Great Britain .

The trip

Passengers on the trip to Cuba in the spring of 1939 were 937 German Jews who wanted to flee from the National Socialists with tourist visas for Cuba and mostly with valid papers from the US immigration authorities six months after the riots on the Night of the Pogroms. In the Caribbean, the escape began to fail because the ship was not permitted to dock anywhere. On May 27, 1939, the St. Louis anchored in the Bay of Havana because the Cuban government refused to allow the ship to call at the pier in spite of a previous promise . The Cuban immigrant visa requirements had recently been changed and the authorities there denied entry to passengers with tourist visas. After negotiations by Captain Gustav Schröder , 29 passengers were allowed to disembark: 22 German Jews whose visas were recognized as valid, as well as four passengers with Spanish and two with Cuban passports and one who had attempted suicide . On June 2, 1939, the ship had to leave Cuba.

Captain Schröder and Jewish organizations then personally asked US President Franklin Roosevelt for help, which was refused. The ship's odyssey sparked heated discussions in the United States as President Roosevelt initially wanted to take in some of the refugees, but bowed to pressure from Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the Democratic Party . Some party members are said to have threatened to refuse support for the 1940 presidential election . On June 4, 1939, Roosevelt refused to moor the ship in the USA, which was waiting in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. She met the same fate on the coast of Canada under the then Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King .

The ship had to return to Europe on the instructions of the shipping company in June 1939, which even an attempt by the passengers to take command of the ship did not change anything. Captain Schröder continued to support the refugees. He even considered simulating an accident off the British coast so that his passengers would be taken ashore there. The Belgian government finally allowed the landing in Antwerp. Passengers were picked up from Antwerp from Belgium (214), the Netherlands (181), France (224) and Great Britain (254). One passenger died on the way.

Survivors and the Holocaust

The USHMM has published a complete passenger list for the St. Louis on its website. The alphabetically ordered list also allows differentiations according to the host country (Search by country of disembarkation), so that the names of all passengers who were allowed to go ashore in Cuba or were lucky enough to receive an entry permit for England can be viewed. They form the largest group of those who survived the Holocaust: "We now know that about half survived the Holocaust," says Sarah Ogilvie. Most of those who were stranded in France, Holland and Belgium had no chance, while those who found refuge in England were treated as " enemy aliens ", but at least lived to see the end of the war. ”However, some of those by the British Authorities internees were not only taken to a camp on the Isle of Man , but also deported to Canada and Australia. Eighty former passengers on the St. Louis lost their lives when they were to be taken to internment camps in Canada on the Arandora Star from England . The ship was sunk by the German submarine U 47 under the command of Günther Prien . A total of 700 internees and 100 men of the occupation were killed.

With the outbreak of World War II, all Germans and Austrians were interned in France - including the emigrants who fled the Nazis. One of these internment camps, the Stade Olympique de Colombes, was located in Colombes . Kurt Stern mentions in the diaries of his internment in France that survivors of the St. Louis were also interned in Colombes . When the Wehrmacht conquered Belgium, the Netherlands and France in May / June 1940 , the majority of the passengers came back under the control of the Nazi regime . The emigrants accepted by Great Britain were safe. According to recent research, 254 of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust .

The Austrian pedagogue Ernst Papanek (1900–1973), who lived in exile in France from 1938 to 1940 and built children's homes there on behalf of the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), was involved in negotiations about the supply of passengers on the St. Louis involved. In his book The Children of Montmorency , he reports that the adults of the French contingent were initially housed in a camp in Le Mans . The children were temporarily quartered in a hotel and then distributed to the homes looked after by Papanek, where they were remembered as Cubans . As the obvious leader of this group, Papanek mentions Hans Windmüller (born December 4, 1923 in Dortmund; † December 2, 2003 in Ithaca ), about whom he writes elsewhere: “Which of our children should one day become a professor of industrial relations? Windmüller, of course. ”That became a reality for Windmüller at Cornell University .

Known survivors

Clark Blatteis (* 1932 in Berlin). The later pathophysiology was added after the disembarkation from Belgium. From there he fled with his family via France and Spain to Morocco and was able to move to the United States in 1948.
Ludwig Greve was on the St. Louis with his parents and sister. They were admitted to France after disembarkation, and Ludwig also spent some time in an OSE children's home. The family continued to flee to Italy, where Ludwig's sister and father were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Ludwig and his mother survived with the help of an underground Catholic organization.
Arno Motulsky
Fritz Spanier was a general practitioner in Düsseldorf and later a camp doctor in the Westerbork transit camp .

Remembrance and posthumous apology

Memorial plaque on the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken in Hamburg

A memorial plaque placed in Hamburg in 2000 on the right side of the passage to Bridge 3 of the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken commemorates the fate of the passengers on the St. Louis .
In 1957, captain Gustav Schröder was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on the ribbon by the Federal Republic of Germany for "services to the people and the country" , posthumously by the State of Israel through acceptance into the circle of the " Righteous Among the Nations " and by the Hanseatic City of Hamburg honored in February 1990 by naming a street in Hamburg-Langenhorn , the “Kapitän-Schröder-Weg”.

In September 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to fourteen surviving passengers present in Washington.

We apologize for the heartlessness of the Canadian response , said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on November 7, 2018 in the national parliament in Ottawa to the applause of the House. Canada refused to help where it could help, and thereby contributed to the "cruel fate" of many people who were later murdered in the Nazi extermination camps, he said.

The country of Cuba has not apologized so far.

Movies

The drama of St. Louis was the subject of the 1976 film premiered British Voyage of the Damned ( Voyage of the Damned ).
Captain Schröder and the odyssey of the “St. Louis “- memories of a drama at sea . In: NDR, January 24, 2018, 9:00 p.m. - 9:45 p.m. (docu-drama).
The unwanted - the odyssey of the “St. Louis ” . In: ARD, October 21, 2019, 8:15 p.m. - 9:45 p.m. (docu-drama).

theatre

Daniel Kehlmann : The Journey of the Lost , based on the book Voyage of the Damned by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. World premiere on September 6, 2018 in the Theater in der Josefstadt .

literature

Gustav Schröder: Homeless on the high seas . 1949. Digital: [1]

Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts : The Ship of the Damned. The odyssey of St. Louis (original title: Voyage of the Damned ). German by Helmut Kossodo . Edition Bergh and WMP publishing house delivery service , Tübingen and Zug (Switzerland) 1976, 382 pages, ISBN 3-88065-044-6 .

Julian Barnes : A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters , German 1990, ISBN 3-499-22134-9 .

Georg Mautner Markhof : The St. Louis Drama. Background and riddle of a mysterious operation by the Third Reich. Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz - Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7020-0931-0 .

Georg Reinfelder: MS "St. Louis". The odyssey to Cuba, spring 1939. Captain Gustav Schroeder saves 906 German Jews from being attacked by the Nazis , Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-933471-30-3 .

Gilbert Sinoué : Un bateau pour l'enfer . 2005 (French)

Diane Afoumado: Exile Impossible . L'errance des Juifs du paquebot St. Louis , Paris, L'Harmattan, 2005, 286 p .; Foreword by Serge Klarsfeld . (French)

Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller: Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust , 2006, ISBN 978-0-299-21980-2 .

Art Spiegelman : St. Louis Refugee Ship Blues , in: Die Zeit, August 27, 2009, p. 47.

Ursula Krechel : Regional Court , Young and Young, Salzburg / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-99027-024-0 .

Leonardo Padura : Ketzer , Unionsverlag, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-293-00469-6 .

Eva Schöck-Quinteros , Simon Rau, Matthias Loeber (eds.): No refuge, nowhere. The Évian Conference and the Voyage of St. Louis (1938/39) , Bremen 2019, ISBN 978-3-88722-763-0 .

Stefan Lipsky: The odyssey of the "unwanted" - Jewish emigrants on the St. Louis . In: Schiff Classic , magazine for shipping and marine history eV of the DGSM , issue: 2/2020, pp. 38–45.