Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States ed. by Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore, and: The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism ed. by Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis (review)

The “saga of the St. Louis,” often retold in the media, epitomizes the volume of essays edited by Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore, Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States. On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis left the port of Hamburg to bring its 931 passengers, mostly Jews, to safety in Cuba. Because of Cuban immigration policy, the passengers were refused entry to the island. Ultimately, British, French, Dutch, and Belgian authorities were willing to take in the group of exiles. The tragic story of the St. Louis is often used to highlight the hospitality of the liberal western European states. Caestecker and Moore’s book casts doubt on this.

The volume concentrates on efforts by France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark to formulate a policy to deal with Jewish refugees in the 1930s. The editors limited the volume to the years 1933–39 to avoid “any teleological discussion of policy in the 1930s in relation to the Nazis’ later collective expulsion and extermination of the Jews” (8). Caestecker and Moore’s synthesis of the essays in the volume, which focus on individual national cases, instead detects continuities (and discontinuities) between their immigration policies at the end of the nineteenth century and in the 1930s. This approach allows the contributors to relate immigration policy to the rise of the nation-state. Most of the essays in the volume are meticulous reconstructions of the tense relations among the western states, which were closely watching each other’s attitude toward the refugees. None of them wanted to become a paradise for refugees or an illiberal hell. Moreover, they all endeavored to avoid encouraging German refugee policy and offending Adolf Hitler.

The volume’s focus on the prehistory of the Holocaust also highlights how unprepared the western states were to deal with the flood of Jewish refugees. Because their notion of the “refugee” was largely rooted in the nineteenth century, they did not distinguish between political and Jewish refugees. As a result Jews had to prove that they would be in severe danger if they returned to Germany. In her essay about Danish immigration policy, Lone Rünitz examines the country’s refusal to grant permanent residence to immigrants who were not allowed to marry a Jew because of German Rassenschande laws. In general, the policy of the liberal western states focused on temporary residency permits, with the expectation that the refugee would eventually emigrate to another country. In 1933 there was no international institution in control of immigration policy. When a new refugee body was erected, Susanne Heim reveals in her essay that its High Commissioners were ineffective or unwilling to improve the situation of the Jewish refugees.

Over the course of the 1930s, Jewish migration went through several phases. Vicky Caron’s essay shows that French immigration policy toward the martyrs of “Teutonic barbarism” (57) was more liberal than that of most other western states during the first wave of Jewish refugees in 1933. The liberal policy of all western states was largely abandoned after Kristallnacht and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, however. The authors emphasize that consideration of the refugees themselves rarely determined immigration policy. Although citizens sometimes protested against inhumane measures, self-interest, fuelled by the economic crisis, continued to prevail. Claudia Curio’s essay shows that those included in the famous Kindertransporte to Great Britain were preselected to enable a smooth integration into English society: little girls of “Aryan” appearance from solid middle-class homes received preference...