Let Us In
There is something rousing about the three-word chant. “Lock Her Up!” or “Let’s Go Mets!” It can really get a crowd going. But in World War II the US attitude regarding Jewish immigration was a resounding “Keep Them Out!”
The refugee crisis was growing to a fever pitch due to Jewish persecution. The application for visas was doubling yearly, but despite worsening conditions for Jews, the US was firmly against accepting new arrivals. Even after Kristallnacht, three-quarters of Americans responding to a Gallup poll said we should not accept Jewish refugees. Antisemitism, and fears that German spies might be hidden among the refugees, helped to fuel the flames of fear and distrust.
In 1939, my father’ss cousin Paula Kahneman, along with her younger brother Arthur and his wife and daughter, left Germany and headed for Cuba, on the passenger ship the St. Louis. Along with nearly a thousand other Jewish refugees, they had a plan to wait in Cuba with temporary tourist visas, safely outside the reach of Nazi Germany, until their American visas were issued. However, upon entering the Havana port, the Cuban government suddenly refused to allow the refugees to land.
The St. Louis sailed up the Florida coast, but the US State Department would offer no sanctuary for the refugees. American Jewish organizations tried to negotiate a compromise with the government to no avail. FDR remained eerily silent. The St. Louis had no choice but to return to Europe. Although several nations graciously granted asylum to the Jewish refugees, nearly 300 ultimately were rounded up and murdered in concentration camps
My father’s family applied for a US visa in 1937 and faced outrageous delays, obstacles and indifference from the US consulate. Naively, they thought bureaucracy, incompetence or antisemitism was behind it. But by far the greatest obstacle my family would face, unbeknownst to them, would come from one man: Breckenridge Long. In his first year in charge of the Visa Division, the career politician with fascist leanings and racist views managed to reduce immigrations to a quarter of the quotas. Eventually, his interference caused 90% of visas to go unfilled.
In a now famous 1940 memo, Long wrote: "We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas."
It took over four years for my family’s visas to be approved. They started their journey out of Berlin in July of 1941 and got to the US on September 12. By October of 1941, all legal immigration out of Germany had come to a grinding halt.
Read more about my father’s tale of escape and immigration in AMERICAN WOLF: From Nazi Refugee to American Spy.
