Why did the US refused to let the St. Louis dock in the US and allow its passengers to emigrate?
MS St. Louis.
The ship sailed transatlantic routes, from Hamburg to New York,
but during the Great Depression turned to cruising to make revenue.
The ship is most notable for a single voyage in 1939, which was
dramatised in the 1976 motion picture Voyage of the Damned.
The German propaganda ministry and the Nazi party conceived of a
propaganda exercise which would demonstrate that Germany was not
alone in its territorial, exclusionary hostility towards Jews as a
permanent minority within the political economy of their state. The
German propagandists wanted to demonstrate that the "civilized"
world agreed with their assertion that Jews constituted a
continuing "hidden-hand" of influence on national and economic
affairs. They wanted to demonstrate that no other Western country
or people would receive Jews as refugees. Firstly it would appear
that the Nazis were allowing the Jewish refugees a new life in
Havana
The Nazis were aware of rising western antisemitism and
correctly surmised that these Jews, traveling on tourist visas (not
immigrant visas, which none of the potential host countries would
likely have issued to them), would not be able to visit Cuba as
tourists when in fact they were political/social refugees; who, for
whatever reason, had been forcibly removed from Germany, their home
country. Furthermore, having been refused entry into Cuba and other
Atlantic nations, the plight of the refugees would force the world
to admit that there was, as the Nazis characterized it, a "Jewish
problem" that Germany, for all to see, was trying to resolve
"humanely."
With not one of the countries of the Northern Atlantic basin
allowing the Jewish passengers entry, those countries would be in
no position in the future to morally object when Germany dealt with
its problem Jewish population. The St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg
into the Atlantic Ocean in May 1939 carrying one non-Jewish and 936
(mainly German) Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi
persecution just before World War II. However, on the ship's
arrival in Cuba, the passengers were refused either tourist entry
(which in theory was valid for their tourist visas) or political
asylum (which was not the stated purpose for which the tourist
visas had been issued) by the Cuban government under Federico
Laredo Brú. This prompted a near mutiny. Two people attempted
suicide and dozens more threatened to do the same. However, 29 of
the refugees were able to disembark at Havana.
On 4 June 1939, the St. Louis was also refused permission to
unload on orders of President Roosevelt as the ship waited in the
Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. Initially, Roosevelt showed
limited willingness to take in some of those on board despite the
Immigration Act of 1924, but vehement opposition came from
Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and from Southern
Democrats-some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their
support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this
occurred.
The St. Louis then tried to enter Canada but was denied as
well.
The ship sailed for Europe, first stopping in the United
Kingdom, where 288 of the passengers disembarked and were thus
spared from the Holocaust. The remaining 619 passengers disembarked
at Antwerp; 224 were accepted into France, 214 into Belgium and 181
into the Netherlands, safe from Hitler's persecution until the
German invasions of these countries.[5][6]
The ship without the passengers eventually sailed back to
Hamburg, Germany. By using the survival rates for Jews in these
countries, Thomas and Morgan-Witts estimated that 180 of the St.
Louis refugees in France, along with 152 of those in Belgium and 60
of those in Holland survived the Holocaust, giving a total of 709
estimated survivors and 227 killed of the original 936 Jewish
refugees.
Later, more detailed research by Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has given a slightly
higher total of deaths:
Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental
Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate
before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred
and fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France and the Netherlands
after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people
were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sóbibor; the
rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the
Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned
to continental Europe survived the war.