German and European Jewish refugees, 1933-1945: reflections on the Jewish condition under Hitler and the Western World's response to their expulsion and flight

After their arrival, the European Jewish refugees had established close contact with the local Sephardi Jews and Russian Jews. However, they had different religious activities and living customs, so there were clashes. Over time, the European Jewish refugees gradually formed their own communities, and also established their own organizations. As the number of European Jewish refugees in other cities in China was small, this chapter focuses on the European Jewish refugee community in Shanghai with more than 20,000 members. It should be noted that, as Jewish refugees could move around in China, the Shanghai Jewish refugee community and their organizations had influenced Jewish refugees in other Chinese cities.

My interest in the 'refugee question' of the 1930s stemmed initially from time spent as an undergraduate at Manchester University, an interest which has been expanded, via a doctoral thesis, to the writing of this book. In wri ting about the German and Austrian refugees who fled to the Netherlands before the country was occupied in May 1940, the main aim has been to re turn the 'refugee question' of the 1930s into its pre-war context, a context from which it has often been dragged to provide an introduction to the events of the war period and the policies carried out by the Germans in oc cupied Europe. A study of the Netherlands provides the opportunity to look at refugees as a whole, not just as Jews, social democrats or communists, and also to examine the reaction and response of an European government to what was essentially a unique problem. I take great pleasure in recording my gratitude to the many people who have helped me in the course of my work. To the Dutch Ministerie van On derwijs en Wetenschappen and the Twenty-Seven Foundation for grants which enabled me to spend time in the Netherlands completing the research for this project, and to the British Acadamy for their financial assistance with publication costs. The research for this book took me to many libraries and archives in a number of countries.

Between 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War, around 6,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany landed on South Africa’s shores, becoming the largest group of Jewish refugees on the African continent. This article by Shirli Gilbert, which is part of a larger project, explores how German Jewish refugees’ historical experiences of antisemitism informed their engagement with South African racism before and during the early years of apartheid. While a limited body of research has documented the refugees’ contributions to South African social and cultural life, as well as the close-knit communities they established upon arrival, we know very little about how the Nazi past informed their engagement with the post-war world’s quintessential racial state. Their responses to the racist policies of their country of settlement are not easily generalizable, but do reveal some distinctive patterns. Of the minority who concerned themselves with racism, few chose the route of radical political activism. Instead, they challenged the racist underpinnings of apartheid in the social and cultural spheres, as journalists, educators, social workers and intellectuals, or via legal political routes, through parliamentary opposition. Multiple factors shaped these responses, including most obviously the traumatic circumstances of the refugees’ migration, as well as gender, class and generational belonging.

Fifty-Plus Years of Watching Asia: An American Perspective Sheldon W. Simon (bio) As a prelude to this personal rumination on the issues in Asian international politics that have occupied my professional life, I wish to express appreciation to See Seng Tan for asking so many well-qualified colleagues to contribute their own assessments to this compendium. My fascination with Asian politics began as an undergraduate in the 1950s at the University of Minnesota, where on a cold, snowy morning in January, Professor Werner Levi—a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who held three doctorates, including one in politics—stated that the world’s future would lie in Asia. A combination of ancient civilizations, historical grandeur, and a strong work ethic among its populations, he argued, would transform Asia in due course into the world’s most dynamic region. He went on to say that those of us who planned for a career in public affairs should consider becoming students of Asia. I was convinced. Upon completing my PhD in political science, I took a position with the U.S. government for three years analyzing Soviet and Chinese commentary on Asia. During this time, I honed the research interests that characterized my subsequent academic life—the interface between the great powers and Asian states as well as the dynamics of the developing Asian actors in dealing with great-power pressures and blandishments. Of course, the Asia-Pacific was home to three of those great powers—the United States in the aftermath of World War II, China under the aegis of its Communist Party, and the Soviet Union. This essay addresses these dynamics in two sections—one on the security arrangements in North and Southeast Asia and one on recent U.S. relations with states in both subregions—before concluding with some final thoughts. Northeast and Southeast Asian Security Arrangements From an American perspective, it is useful to divide the analysis of East Asia into its northern and southern components. The United States’ Cold War and post–Cold War attention to the region may be assessed through its security arrangements. For Northeast Asia, this would be the ongoing presence of U.S. forces in the aftermath of World War II. Japan and the [End Page 74] Republic of Korea (ROK) became junior partners in Washington’s East Asia strategy opposing the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and North Korea. Thus, the U.S. hub-and-spoke security arrangement came into existence. Unlike NATO, a multilateral European military alliance requiring each member to come to the others’ defense in the event of an attack, Washington was unable to effect a similar arrangement between Japan, the ROK, and the United States. Korean bitterness over Japan’s colonial legacy meant that Seoul was unwilling to engage in any security agreement with Tokyo. The alternative was separate U.S. bilateral defense treaties between the United States and each country. The United States was the “hub” and its bilateral partners were the separate “spokes.” These spokes for the most part did not interact militarily with each other. For example, until recently, the Japanese and ROK navies only directly interacted with each other through U.S. intersession in multilateral maritime exercises such as the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC). By contrast, the Southeast Asian states assayed a number of times to create multilateral institutions beginning in the 1950s—for example, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Association of Southeast Asia, and Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia (MAPHILINDO). None were successful, but all demonstrated a realization among non-Communist elites in the region that some form of political collaboration was necessary to deal with both extraregional and intraregional challenges from China, the Soviet Union, and North Vietnam. Southeast Asian leaders were also concerned that Western states might leave the region as the Indochina wars of the 1950s and 1960s ended with Communist victories. Southeast Asian leaders conceived a new regional organization in 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), composed of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In the mid-1960s, Indonesia’s president and founding father Sukarno had attempted to destroy Malaysia, which he saw as a neocolonialist country...

In the 1930s and 1940s, several 1000 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany arrived in Los Angeles. Most of them were eager to Americanize and did not intend to return to Germany, but nevertheless they retained an interest in their home country, and this increased after the end of the Second World War. Focusing on interactions between German Jewish refugees in Los Angeles and West German officials, this article explores relations between refugees and the Federal Republic of Germany and argues that, in acting as critical observers and moral arbiters of German policy from within the United States, the refugees played a role in the making of West Germany.

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was established in the waning hours of the failed 1938 Evian Conference. Its purpose was to con- tact various governments to explore their willingness to accept European Jewish refugees for settlement. The Philippine Islands, a United States Commonwealth, responded to the committee's inquiry with a proposal to allow ten thousand Jewish refugees to immigrate as agricultural settlers. Negotiations to settle Jewish refugees on the large island of progressed over the next three years, but the Mindanao ultimately failed because its architects underestimated the extent of local opposition and the complexity of land acquisition in the Philippines. The United States' entry into the war in December 1941 ended all further efforts on the settlement project. This article examines Philippine President Manuel Quezon's key role in this process, as well as the often skeptical positions of U.S. State Department officials and the surprisingly supportive stance of Paul McNutt, the U.S. High Commissioner for the Philippines. In the months that followed the Evian Conference, the Philippine Islands, an American Commonwealth at the time, submitted a proposal to accept Jewish refugees as agricultural settlers on Island in the Philippine Archipelago. The story of this proposal, which represented the earliest evidence that the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria had been taken seriously by a government outside the Western Hemisphere, has come to light only recently. Materials related to the Jewish refugee settlement in the Philippines and the Plan were found at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the National Archives, where they had been little used for nearly sixty years. 3

This book explores the way in which the peoples of the United Kingdom – —England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—went to war in 1914. It is the first fully documented study of UK public opinion at the time and successfully challenges the myth of British ‘war enthusiasm’. It explores what people felt, and how they acted, in response to an unanticipated and unprecedented crisis. It is a history of both ordinary people and elite figures in extraordinary times. It demonstrates that describing the reactions of over 40 million British and Irish people to the outbreak of war in 1914 as either enthusiastic in the British case or disengaged in the Irish is over‐simplified and inadequate. A society as complex as the UK in the Edwardian era did not have a single, uniform reaction to such a major event as the outbreak of European war. Emotional reactions to the war were ambiguous and complex, and changed over time. By the end of 1914 the populations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland had largely embraced the war. But the war had equally embraced them, and showed no signs of relinquishing its grip. In fact it would continue for another four years. However, the five months from August to December 1914 set the shape of much that was to follow. This book seeks to describe and explain that twenty‐week formative process.

Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) by Anita Desai is based on letters written from concentration camp in Nazi Germany by a mother to her son. It presents the struggles of a German Jewish war time refugee in establishing himself in India. The letters present an obvious repetitive message of well-being in a bid to shroud the actual message of suffering due to the censorship of letters (Judie Newman). All of the collection of novellas, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', 'Translator, Translated', 'The Artist of Disappearance' (2011), by Anita Desai present a front- ambitiousness, as an obvious reason for her characters' unhappiness. In all the novellas the protagonists demonstrate a great desire to succeed in their specific situation in life. In all four of the stories the obvious front present is often taken up as a subconscious reason for the characters' identity crisis. Yet, the literature review is absent when it comes to specific underlying issues of assimilation which runs constant in the selected stories of Anita Desai. Hence, this paper aims to analyse Anita Desai's selected texts associating the issues of assimilation to the identity crisis her characters suffer. Postcolonial power struggle and the struggle to assimilate not just in the new social order, but also into contrasting values, the researcher argues is instrumental to the identity crisis portrayed by Anita Desai. Therefore, this paper depends on various psychoanalytic theories to link the concept of assimilation to individual search for identity. The characters' decision to deviate from certain established norms dictates their particular alienation.

Historians have often studied European Jews in connection with the Second World War. However, their experiences as refugees in Asian colonies are less examined. In this article I examine European Jewish refugees in the Dutch East Indies, with British India, Singapore and Shanghai as counterpoints. The focus is on the way European Jewish refugees were received and how that impacted their identity, as well as the role of international organisations. By using ego documents and articles from local newspapers I assess the meaning of the Dutch East Indies as a place of refuge for European Jewish refugees among other Asian destinations.

This article focuses on the journey of “the Benghazi group,” three hundred European Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, who, for several months in 1940, were stranded in Benghazi, then part of the Italian colonial empire. They organized and attempted to sail from Italy to Palestine in an Aliyah bet voyage, but were eventually forcibly returned to Italy and interned in the Ferramonti camp in the south of the country. Even though the British liberated Ferramonti in 1943, in 1941 and 1942 many Jews had already been transferred to internment locations further north. When Germany occupied Italy in fall 1943, many members of the Benghazi group thus fell victim to the Holocaust. This article examines the possibilities and limitations for self-help and agency among Jewish refugees in Fascist Italy. It describes their experiences in the context of Fascist Italy’s antisemitic policies and the history of Aliyah bet operations, which did not treat Jews in Italy as a high priority for rescue. At the core of this article lies the story of an encounter between central European Jews and the North African Jews of Benghazi. Having spent their last remaining financial means on the journey to Palestine, the members of the Benghazi group became dependent on the extraordinary hospitality of the Libyan Jews, making Benghazi a temporary sanctuary for European Jewish refugees.

An extensive literature portrays Harry Bingham, who served as American vice consul in Marseille, France between 1936 and 1941, as the single American diplomat who defied the Department of State’s restrictive policy toward European Jewish refugees. However, empirical evidence does not always support what many now assume about Bingham’s efforts. Examining Bingham’s personnel file and his career at the Department of State, this article improves our understanding of what Bingham did for Jewish and intellectual refugees.

By late 1941, some 1,300 Jews had escaped from National Socialist-controlled Europe to the Philippines. This essay problematizes the existing historiography on this rescue by going beyond examinations of its mechanisms and the politics of memory. Instead, it introduces a rereading of the refugees’ struggles by focusing on their continued being-in-transit and mandated imperial performativity, which allows for analysing transnational spaces shaped by their seemingly mundane everyday practices, from walking to cooking. During the early years, American, Filipino, and Jewish community leaders expected the performance of imperial norms and policed interactions between the refugees and native Filipinos. Some of the refugees succeeded. Some even managed to open shops. Others failed or rebelled and soon found themselves in peril. The late 1941 invasion by Japanese forces subjected Philippine society to new racial hierarchies. Jewish refugees, suspected of collaborating with the enemy, had to engage in different imperial performances in order to survive. By late 1946, many Jewish survivors had managed to leave, mostly to the United States, where they encountered new challenging power asymmetries of a different kind.

The actions of the Japanese government and military before and during the Holocaust saved tens of thousands of Jews in Shanghai from murder by Japan’s Nazi allies. Because the Japanese were brutal aggressors in East Asia, because their treatment of the Chinese population was genocidal, because the details and organization of Japanese sexual abuse of Korean women are still matters of international dispute, approaches to the Japanese treatment of European Jewish refugees begin from a negative standpoint. Japanese authorities have not investigated or revealed these actions, and Japanese academics have only just begun to consider this issue worthy of study. Discussion of Japanese policy in Shanghai is often dominated by evidence of antisemitism in Japan, the creation of the Designated Area in 1943 to confine Jewish refugees, and the brutally officious behavior of Kanoh Ghoya. The issuance of life-saving visas by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, is treated as exceptional humanitarianism. This study focuses on the decisions and behavior of Japanese authorities toward European Jewish refugees in Japan and in Shanghai which allowed them to survive.

Continental Britons: German Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany

Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi GermanyBerghahnMarion <i>Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany</i> BergLeamington Spa / Hamburg / New York, 1988, 294, £9.50