Beyond Belief (16 page)

Between 1936 and 1938, as the situation of Jews in Germany grew progressively worse, increasing numbers of Jews left Germany. Those who sought to enter the United States found a multitude of obstacles in their path. The worldwide flood of refugees would be made much greater and more intense by the events of 1938, beginning with the German invasion of Austria in March and culminating in
Kristallnacht
, the night of broken glass, in November. During this eight-month period the American press responded to Germany's behavior with increasing horror. But its outrage did not alter its attitude regarding immigration and refugee rescue. Negative sentiments toward Germany intensified, but no softening of the American attitude toward refugees occurred. In fact, it stiffened. Faced with a potential flood of German Jews trying to escape the Reich, various papers noted that in light of the increased pressure on Jews to emigrate, now was the time for America to
raise
, not lower, its protective barriers; now was the time for increased vigilance. The press did not permit its disdain for Germany to compromise its conviction that there should be no changing of our immigration laws.

On March 13, 1938, the German army crossed the Austrian border in order to “unify” these two countries. Unlike German Jews, who had five years to adjust to their indignities, Austria's 185,000 Jews were subjected to Nazi antisemitism overnight. Instantly they became a pariah people and swelled the rolls of those seeking refuge. As
New York Times
correspondent G. E. Gedye observed in a front-page article after he was expelled from Vienna by the Nazis for his reports:

The plight of the Jews in Austria is much worse than that of the Jews in Germany at the worst period there. In Austria, overnight, Vienna's 200,000 Jews were made free game for mobs, despoiled of their property, deprived of police protection, ejected from employment and barred from sources of relief.
¹

The
Anschluss
, as this action was known, was but the initial step in a series of events which made Central European Jewry's situation even more desperate than it had previously been. Beginning in 1938, Germany accelerated the imposition of restrictions on Jews and expropriation of Jewish businesses and assets. The deterioration of the condition of Reich Jewry and the surge in the number of refugees seeking a haven forced the United States to confront more seriously that which it had previously tried to treat as a German “domestic issue.” The tragic irony was that the indifferent response of the United States and most other nations of the world intensified the difficulties the Jews ultimately faced. The nations' actions, or lack thereof, served as a “green light” to Germany and a sign that though the world might condemn its behavior, it would do nothing to stop it or to materially aid the victims.

The
Anschluss
propelled the fate of Jews under Nazi rule onto the front pages and into the editorial columns of the American press. During the days and even weeks following the invasion, German actions were front-page news in the vast majority of American papers. According to the
Press Information Bulletin
, which analyzed the news coverage of over 400 different papers, more than 1,400 editorials on the subject appeared in the two weeks following. Close to half of them specifically mentioned or were entirely devoted to the plight of the Jews.
²
German Ambassador Dieckhoff,
well aware of the press's influence on public opinion, tried to convince reporters and publishers in Washington and New York of the “absurdity of this whole commotion.” However, as he correctly observed in his report to Berlin, his protestations “rarely penetrated the columns of the newspapers.” Though he attributed his failure to the fact that the press was under either “Jewish or hostile control,” the truth was that the sudden horror of the Nazification of a country and the persecution of a segment of its population shocked the press in a way that prior events in Germany had not.
³

In the first few days following the
Anschluss
the abusive treatment meted out to Dr. Sigmund Freud was the topic of many editorials and the lead item in reports on Nazi activities. The
Detroit Free Press
observed that the news that the Nazi authorities in Vienna had taken Sigmund Freud's passport and impounded his money in order to prevent him and his wife from leaving Austria “would be unbelievable if the Nazi record in Germany were not already stained by a long record of persecution of members of the Jewish race.”
⁴
Other papers found it hard to fathom that Freud's home could have been raided at night by “thugs cloaked in the law's vestments,” and that Freud himself could have been “persecuted and suppressed without reason.”
⁵
For the press as well as for other Americans including President Roosevelt, Freud's “subjugation” was “one of the most appalling incidents of Hitler ordered atrocities.”
⁶
Many editorials believed it epitomized Nazi behavior and reflected the incomprehensible aspect of Nazi persecution.
⁷
The oppression of one individual, particularly one who was so prominent, elderly, and “harmless,” evoked a more horrified reaction than did more intense brutalities inflicted on a larger number of faceless and nameless persons.
⁸

It was against this background of intensified American outrage that President Roosevelt told the press that the German and Austrian immigration quotas would now be fully allocated, and Secretary of State Hull called for the convening of an international gathering to facilitate the emigration of political refugees from Austria and Germany.
⁹
In previous years the entire allotment of quota slots for Germany had not been distributed—due not to any lack of applicants, but to the many roadblocks placed in their path by State Department immigration officers.
¹⁰

While Hull's proposal was quite vague regarding the conference's objectives, it was quite specific about what would
not
be
done. America would neither increase the size of the quota for Germany and Austria nor liberalize existing immigration legislation. In addition, no cost would be incurred by the United States taxpayer for any programs the conference might adopt. The proposal's absence of detail about the way the conference would aid the refugees was not accidental. The State Department and White House did not have any specific ideas in mind beyond filling the existing German and Austrian quotas, but, aware of the growing public and press interest in the issue, Hull and his close aides and associates decided it “would be far preferable to get out in front and attempt to guide the pressure, primarily with a view toward forestalling attempts to have the immigration laws liberalized.”
¹¹
This was the first and only time the State Department took the initiative regarding the refugee situation.

Despite the fact that most Americans were strongly opposed to the immigration of refugees, the press greeted Hull's announcement with a chorus of hosannas. Newspapers from all regions of the country hailed it as “splendid and timely action” consonant with the finest American tradition of “act[ing] as a haven” and as “praiseworthy a proposal as President Roosevelt has made in a long time.”
¹²
Time
described its reception by the press and various public figures as “magnificent.”
¹³
In the past whenever suggestions for liberalizing immigration laws had been posed, the press had discussed the burden immigrants placed on America. This time the reaction was different. Newspapers cited Freud and Einstein as typifying the Jewish refugee and counseled the nation to consider itself more “the benefactor than the benefited” by these people who could strengthen America.
¹⁴
One southern paper even took the dramatic step of indicating a willingness to have some of the Jewish refugees come to live in its region.
¹⁵

Of the more than 400 editorials which discussed Hull's plan, over 75 percent favored it. At first glance this positive response is quite striking and might be interpreted as indicating a change in the traditional press opposition to any increase in the immigration quota; this, however, was not the case. Analysis of the press response to the
Anschluss
and the other critical events of 1938 reveals that while the press was horrified, its outrage had definite limits. As appalled as the American press was over German behavior, anger did not change its basic opposition to allowing refugees to enter this land. Hull had placed so many strictures on his proposal, including his promise that “any financing of the emergency
emigration referred to would be undertaken by private organizations” and that quotas would not be expanded, that the press felt safe in approving it.
¹⁶
It had been stipulated that two main concerns of the press—increased immigration and cost—would not eventuate. Unfortunately, these stipulations virtually nullified the chance that the proposed conference might substantially alleviate the problem.
¹⁷

Actually, that did not matter to the press because its reasons for supporting the plan had little or nothing to do with refugees. The American press perceived Hull's proposal as a means of registering American opposition to the invasion of Austria. It was a “stinging rebuke” to Hitler which would demonstrate American contempt for “statesmen who . . . act like gangsters” and would serve as America's means of reproaching Germany.
¹⁸
The press approved of the plan because it would do these things without materially involving the United States in the European quagmire and did not appear to compromise America's neutrality. Even the
Chicago Tribune
felt reassured enough to support it. Ironically the opposite perception prevailed in Europe, where the conference proposal was greeted joyously because it appeared that America was, at last, involving itself in the international situation.
¹⁹

The press's euphoria obscured the major problems associated with the plan. If no extension of quotas was contemplated, there would be no real chance of alleviating the distress of persecuted Jews. Though most papers ignored the issue, a few pointed out that a conference which entailed no commitment to additional asylum and an expanded quota would falsely raise the expectations of a vast number of people. At best, one editorial observed, Hull's proposal “restated a basic American principle” but envisioned no change in the refugees' situation.
²⁰
Typical of those papers that viewed the idea and the fanfare that greeted it with cynicism was the
Salem
(Oregon)
Journal
, which categorized the conference as something which appeared at first glance to be a “fine humanitarian gesture” but upon closer inspection proved to be “wistful thinking or a gallery political play.”
Time
magazine was unsure whether it amounted to “much more than a grandiose gesture.”
²¹

Even the President privately indicated that these were accurate assessments. When Felix Frankfurter praised him for setting up the proposed conference, Roosevelt told him that the majority of the victims “won't find a haven of refuge, either here or elsewhere,” but the conference would “help sustain their souls in their material enslavement.”
²²
Actually the press recognized that
the President had an additional more political and less humanitarian objective. A number of papers and periodicals, including both
Time
and
Newsweek
, correctly discerned that the conference was an attempt “to think up a practical way to express the U.S. Government's disapproval” of German behavior, and to move American public opinion away from isolationism toward “active opposition to international gangsters.'”
Newsweek
accurately noted that the administration was “manifestly more interested in belaboring Hitler than in offering asylum to masses of German refugees.”
²³
Though the conference may have served the administration's purposes, ultimately it served Hitler's even more by demonstrating that the world's commitment to rescuing Jews was negligible at best. Afterward the Nazis were able to ask, with some justification, why the nations of the world berated them for wanting to rid the Reich of its Jews when they were no more anxious than Germany to have them in their midst.

There were a substantial number of papers which, despite the promises of private financing, international cooperation, and strict maintenance of quota limits, opposed the conference. In a strongly worded editorial, “Keep Up the Bars,” the
Jackson
(Michigan)
Citizen Patriot
argued that there should not be expansion of quotas nor “should the customary bars against undesirable aliens be lowered.”
²⁴
A New York State paper took a strongly isolationist stand and described the plan as symptomatic of America's tendency to stick “her little pug into matters which did not in the least concern her and from which only trouble ensued.”
²⁵
Most of the plan's opponents cited the standard economic reason for opposing immigration: the United States could ill afford to admit limitless numbers of people, for “until work is found for our unemployed we must not complicate that difficulty by bringing in others.”
²⁶
The other standard argument, raised each time discussion of
any
alteration in the immigration laws was proposed, was that this would open the proverbial Pandora's box of liberalized quotas. The
Milwaukee Journal
cautioned that the “real danger in the present situation is that, overcome by our solicitude, we may forget to apply the protecting tests and to keep the numbers within quota limits.”
²⁷