Shanghai Ghetto

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Seward Road in the Shanghai Ghetto around 1943

As Shanghai Ghetto was a Designated Area (ger .: "designated area") refers to an area of approximately 2.5 square kilometers in the district Hongkou the Chinese city of Shanghai , where about 20,000 Jewish refugees, mainly from the German Reich or of Nazi Germany-occupied territories survived the Holocaust in the Japanese- occupied city.

The Jews flee to Shanghai

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, which saw Jews in Germany intensifying reprisals (see. Increasingly exposed to the Nuremberg racial laws ). With the November pogroms of 1938 , a secure and dignified life in the German Reich was impossible for Jews. Therefore, many applied for asylum in neighboring or more distant countries. Many Jews were interned in order to give them an ultimatum to leave the country. However, many states could not or would not accept Jews, so it was very difficult to leave the German Reich territory. Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936: “The world seems to be divided into two parts - into the places where Jews cannot live and those into which they are not allowed to enter”.

After the unsuccessful course of the Évian Conference in July 1938, in which representatives of 32 nations met on the initiative of the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enable the possibility of Jews emigrating from Germany and Austria, around 20,000 Jews fled from 1938 from the German Reich, Poland and other European countries occupied by Nazi Germany via various routes to Shanghai, since the city was the only place of refuge besides the Comoros that took in Jewish refugees. Shanghai was a divided city under Chinese, Japanese, British, French and US occupations at the time. There were already two Jewish communities in Shanghai: the Baghdadi Jews and a community of Russian Jews who fled Russia from the Russian pogroms after the October Revolution .

The Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk , the consul of the Japanese Empire in Lithuania Chiune Sugihara , the Chinese consul general in Vienna, Ho Feng Shan and the secretary of the legation of Manchuria in Berlin , Wang Tifu , issued visas for a total of almost 20,000 Jewish refugees, who thus went to Shanghai could escape.

Life in Shanghai

The large number of immigrants caught the Japanese authorities unprepared. Therefore, the newcomers encountered disastrous living conditions: 10 people lived in one room, constant starvation, catastrophic hygienic conditions and hardly any opportunity to earn a living with work. In some cases this also applied to the native Chinese.

The group of Jews, the so-called “ Baghdadi ”, who had lived in Shanghai for some time , and later the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) tried to improve these conditions. Despite language barriers, severe poverty and rampant epidemics, the refugees were able to build their own functioning community: schools were set up, newspapers were published and even theater games, cabarets and sports competitions were held.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, many of the wealthy Baghdadi, often being British citizens, were interned and American donation funds were confiscated. Support from the American Jews thus became impossible. The situation deteriorated further. In addition, the attack made it impossible to escape to Shanghai.

Ghettoization

As the Second World War progressed, the National Socialists increased the pressure on Japan to hand over the Jews in Shanghai to them or to arrange for their own murder. However, the Japanese did not comply.

As part of the later legal appraisal in Germany, Fritz Wiedemann reported that Josef Meisinger had told him that he had been instructed by Himmler to persuade the Japanese to take measures against the Jews. According to Wiedemann, he could of course not do this in the form of an order "with the self-confident people of the Japanese". Since the Japanese, with a few exceptions, were not anti-Semitic, Meisinger took advantage of their fear of espionage to achieve his goal. In the autumn of 1942 he held talks with the head of the foreign section of the Japanese Home Office. Meisinger explained to him that he had been commissioned by Berlin to report the names of all "anti-Nazis" among the Germans to the Japanese authorities. "Anti-Nazis" are primarily German Jews, 20,000 of whom emigrated to Shanghai. These "anti-Nazis" are also always "anti-Japanese". As one of Meisinger's subordinates later reported, the Japanese would have believed this thesis after some consideration. This has led to a downright hunt for "anti-Nazis". In response, the Japanese asked Meisinger to draw up a list of all "anti-Nazis". As his secretary later confirmed, Meisinger had already had this since 1941. After consulting with General Müller , Meisinger handed it over to both the Home Office and the Kempeitai at the end of 1942 . The list included the names of all Jews with a German passport in Japan . For the Japanese it became clear that especially those who had fled to Shanghai in large numbers from 1937 onwards from the National Socialists represented the greatest "danger potential".

The proclamation of a ghetto was thus only a logical consequence of Meisinger's interventions. In this way he succeeded, despite the hardly existing anti-Semitism of the Japanese , in having the majority of Jews in the Japanese sphere of influence interned. For this "success" he was apparently promoted to colonel of the police on February 6, 1943 , despite the concern affair . The Japanese 'fear of espionage, which bordered on hysteria , was the reason for the internment, as the former German ambassador in Tokyo, Eugen Ott , later assumed . However, he denied German involvement in court. The emigrants were "naturally opponents of the Third Reich and presumably Japan". However, in his testimony, he considered it “almost impossible” that Meisinger or another German agency in Japan had spoken to the Japanese on “anti-Jewish territory”.

On November 15, 1942 it was decided to ghettoize the Jews. From 1941, Japan took full control of Shanghai during the Second World War and deported the Jews to a designated area of around 2.5 square kilometers in the Hongkou district . On February 18, 1943, the Japanese declared that by May 15, all Jews who had arrived after 1937 had to move their homes and businesses to the “designated district”. The ghetto was not hermetically sealed, but a permit was required to leave the ghetto. Although the Japanese occasionally allowed working outside the ghetto, living conditions continued to deteriorate.

There were no walls or barbed wire, but there were identity cards with yellow stripes, license plates and a special guard with their arbitrary measures. A Chinese majority also lived here, but only the stateless refugees were subject to curfew and forced relocation to substandard housing.

The term “ghetto” is mostly used in research as a synonym for “designated area”. In the context of the Second World War, the term “ghetto” also meant the preliminary stage to the extermination of the Jews , which was not the case for Shanghai. The zone was still referred to as the Shanghai Ghetto by all residents .

The Japanese set up a radio station and ammunition depots that were important to the war effort in the ghetto. In an American air raid on the radio station on July 17, 1945, around 4,000 people were killed. Around 40 of the more than 20,000 Jewish refugees lost their lives, over 500 were wounded and many more were left homeless. The majority of the victims were caused by the attacks in the Chinese population in the Hongkou district.

liberation

The ghetto was officially liberated on September 3, 1945 - after some delay, as the Chiang Kai-shek army was to be allowed to take precedence. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the end of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, almost all Jews left Shanghai. In 1957 only a few hundred Jews remained.

Commemoration

In the autumn of 1997, former Shanghai residents met for a symposium on common remembrance in the Wannsee Villa in Berlin, at the place where on January 20, 1942, the so-called Wannsee Conference decided to exterminate their families. Among the participants were Fred Freud, Günter Nobel , Egon Kornblum and Sonja Mühlberger .

In May 2013, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Shanghai and called Shanghai a “port” for Jews who fled Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

people

Known people who were interned in the Shanghai Ghetto:

See also

literature

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Manchester Guardian , May 23, 1936, in: AJ Sherman: Island Refuge, Britain and the Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–1939. Elek Books: London 1973. p. 112. Likewise in The Evian Conference - Hitler's Green Light for Genocide ( Memento of the original of August 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by Annette Shaw. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / christianactionforisrael.org
  2. ^ Jan Zwartendijk
  3. ↑ Wen Wei Po, 歷史 與 空間 ： 中國 的 「舒特拉」 , November 23, 2005
  4. ↑ Abe, Yoshio, 戦 前 の 日本 に お け る 対 ユ ダ ヤ 人 政策 の 転 回 点 ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Kyushu University , Studies in Languages ​​and Cultures, No. 16, 2002. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp
  5. ↑ Clemens Jochem: The Foerster case: The German-Japanese machine factory in Tokyo and the Jewish auxiliary committee Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, p. 88, ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 .
  6. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 85 f.
  7. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 86.
  8. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 86 f.
  9. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 232–233, note no. 164.
  10. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 86 f. and pp. 232-233, note No. 164.
  11. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 87.
  12. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 88.
  13. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 89.
  14. ^ Elisabeth Buxbaum, Armin Berg Society: Transit Shanghai: a life in exile . Edition Steinbauer, December 12, 2008, ISBN 978-3-902494-33-7 . , P. 31.
  15. ^ Astrid Freyeisen: Shanghai and the politics of the Third Reich , p. 412, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1690-4
  16. ↑ Wiebke Lohfeld, Steve Hochstadt, The Emigration of Jewish Germans and Austrians to Shanghai as Persecuted Under National Socialism . Digitized , p. 10. Accessed October 4, 2017.
  17. ^ Reunion of the "Shanghailänder" In: Berliner Zeitung , 23 August 1997
  18. ↑ Shanghai's Forgooten Jewish Past in The Atlantic on November 21, 2013

Coordinates: 31 ° 15 ′ 54 ″  N , 121 ° 30 ′ 18 ″  E