Abstract
Families who had been divided in their reactions to unprecedented persecution, often alonggenerational fault lines, became united behind the idea of escape through the sudden Nazi takeover in Austria, unexpected arrests, and the planned riot on Kristallnacht. Virtually all of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Greater Reich wanted to leave. 1 They were now forced into the arms of a Nazi bureaucracy determined to rob and humiliate them. By late 1938, the Nazis had stolen the financial resources needed for international travel, while the rest of the world raised bureaucratic walls, which were often also motivated by antisemitism.
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Notes
In the city of Worms, nearly every German Jew tried to get out after Kristallnacht, but most only succeeded in securing a place on an interminable waiting list: Henry R. Huttenbach, “The Emigration of Jews from Worms (November 1938–October 1941): Hopes and Plans,” in Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), pp. 267–88.
Christiane Hoss, “Abenteurer: Wer waren die Shanghai-Flüchtlinge aus Mitteleuropa?” in Exil Shanghai 1938–1947, ed. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger, (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2000), p. 107. Numbers of arriving refugees come from a compilation of information about ship arrivals and numbers of refugees on board, which were consistently reported by the Shanghai Municipal Police to the Shanghai Municipal Council, the real government of the city run mainly by foreign businessmen and diplomats. The reports are located in the records of the SMP, file D5422(c).
For a detailed study of the changing official policies that governed entry into Shanghai, see Steve Hochstadt, “Shanghai: a Last Resort for Desperate Jews,” in Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, ed. Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). pp. 109–21.
“The Refugee Problem,” North China Herald, December 28, 1938, p. 529; Cordell Hull’s telegram to U.S. Embassy in Berlin, archived in United States National Archives, file number 893.55J/4, microfilm publication LM63, roll 143. I am grateful to the late David S. Wyman for alerting me to this document, which is reprinted in Steve Hochstadt, Sources of the Holocaust (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 83.
The literature about Sugihara tends toward the hagiographic: see the book by his widow, Yukiko Sugihara, Visas for Life (Sacramento, CA: Edu-Comm Plus, 1995). There is little written about Zwartendijk.
Lutz Haase also left Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railroad in October 1940, after spending two years in the Oranienburg concentration camp: Debórah Dwork, ed., Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust (New York: The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, 2002), p. 194.
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© 2012 Steve Hochstadt
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Hochstadt, S. (2012). Leaving Home. In: Exodus to Shanghai. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006721_3
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