So. In May 1938, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador to the Court of St James, took the visiting Secretary of State for the Interior, Harold Ickes, to meet Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary. The subject of Jewish refugees from the recently enlarged German Reich was raised.
Lord Halifax, according to Kennedy, enquired "if it might be possible to locate these Jews in the United States (or) in South America…" Ickes and Kennedy replied that, though antisemitism in the US was not such a problem as in Europe, "there was a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment which would undoubtedly increase if an attempt were made to bring in a large amount of Jews". Was there, they asked in return, not "plenty of room in the British colonies to take care of all the Jews who need a new home?"
The months passed, the Sudeten crisis loomed, and Kennedy and Halifax resumed their discussions.
At a meeting in August, Halifax wondered about the wisdom of admitting refugees at all, since to do so would encourage "other countries who want to get rid of their Jews to throw them out hoping that America, England and France will find some way of taking care of them".
After the Munich agreement, Roosevelt asked Chamberlain to take up with Hitler the question of the plight of Jewish refugees. Chamberlain said he would do so "in due course". But then a Jewish refugee shot a German diplomat in Paris and the Nazis responded with Kristallnacht.
There were alternatives to Britain and the US, Uganda, Peru or Panama. The previous year the Jewish, autonomous Oblast, set up by Stalin on the far border with China, reached its pre-war peak Jewish population of 20,000. But purge-ridden Russia in 1938 was not a place Jews or anyone other than the most ideologically committed (and fatalistic) comrade would emigrate to. Which was why, after Kristallnacht, Jews tried to get away to the West.
A year after Ickes and Kennedy met Halifax, the liner, the St Louis, left Hamburg with nearly 1,000 passengers, making for Havana. In Cuba, the arrival of these refugees was the subject of demonstrations against people seen as alien takers of jobs.
When the St Louis docked, fewer than 30 passengers were allowed to disembark. The ship sailed close to Florida but was refused permission to dock there. The refugees had to "wait their turn" in the queue for immigration visas, and given that the 1939 annual quota from Germany and Austria was 27,000, that turn would take years to come. The ship went back to Europe. A third of the passengers were accepted in Britain. Of the rest, nearly half died in the Holocaust.
The St Louis was a symbol for the plight of the unwanted. And even so, while noting the situation of the wretched passengers, few non-Jews made the case for the admission into their own jurisdiction of these unfortunates. They were too disruptive in themselves or in their effect on others. And letting them in would either encourage the rest to come, or perhaps somewhere else would be better able to receive them. Somewhere emptier like Africa or Patagonia.
The numbers and places change, but the arguments never do. So perhaps even now there's a Syrian Joseph Roth in a shabby hotel room in Izmir writing, as Roth wrote in 1937 in Ostend in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, that the emigrant "with his senses sharpened by despair, can hear the inaudible call to him from every border: 'Die miserably where you are!'" Except now, of course, you can do it on television and people have to pretend harder that they don't know.
David Aaronovitch is a Times columnist
