The question inevitably to be asked: Does the rise of Nazi Germany and the resulting Holocaust in the 1930’s and 1940’s offer instruction to us for what is happening now, in the United States, indeed, in the world, in 2017?
In a well-crafted and moving presentation about three families caught in the morass that was immigration in the 1930’s, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. offered an oblique answer. “I’m an historian,” she said. Historians discover and ready facts for interpretation by others.
Dr. Erbelding spoke to an audience of approximately 250 registered attendees at the St. Louis Public Library on March 22nd. The event marked the launch of a 10-year initiative by USHMM to discover and initiate discussion about what Americans knew of the Holocaust before the atrocities were exposed in 1945. In these times, today, it is an important discussion.
Dr. Erbelding explained that in the 1930’s and early 1940’s no country wanted immigrants from Western Europe, especially Jewish ones. Gallup polls conducted at the time indicated that 94% of Americans did not approve of what Hitler and the Nazi’s were doing in Europe, but only 21% thought the U.S. should relax immigration laws to accept more refugees. Even after WWII, after the Holocaust had been exposed, only 5% of Americans felt immigration should be loosened.
Dr. Erbelding further explained that in 1924 the U.S. Senate passed the Johnson-Reed Bill which severely restricted immigration by establishing a quota of only 27,950 immigrants from Germany and deferring their selection to “in-country” bureaucracies. The sentiment at the time, not unlike now, was isolationism. To paraphrase Senator Robert Reynolds, an avowed Isolationist from North Carolina during this time: the U.S. needs to take care of its own children and Europe needs to take care of its own.
As the National Socialists tightened their grip on power in Germany and Europe and began to single out Jews for vengeance and retribution, countries around the world, not just in the U.S., tightened already existing immigration quotas. Waiting lists became two and three years long if you were from Germany; for Romanians, it was 43 years.
Of the three families – and many more – who tried to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe, each of their stories had a common thread: escaping the madness was successful only by prodigious persistence and an equal amount of luck. And it wasn’t always successful.
While Dr. Erbelding is off to another city and another presentation, you can conduct your own research to find out for yourself what parallels between then and now exist. It is as simple as touring the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, at 12 Millstone Drive in Creve Coeur, just off Lindberg Blvd. and Schuetz Rds. There you will find an immersive exhibit – either self-guided with a listening device and audio stations or with a Docent upon advanced request. The twenty-year-old Museum and Learning Center provides ample factual information from which you can draw your own conclusions.
But to answer in a different way the “question inevitably to be asked?”, Dr. Erbelding offered a quote from Goethe’s “Faust” that she discovered had been often spoken by one of the émigrés she traced,
“That which thy fathers
Have bequeathed to thee,
Earn it anew
If thou wouldst have it.”
Submitted by Mark Kumming, WCD Member
Great article. I think we need to become more serious in looking at the fascist aspects of Republicanism and Trumpism. It will do us no good to look away or tiptoe around the subject because we fear that the word “fascist” will upset the fascists.