The Shame of the St. Louis
Less than six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the German ocean liner MS St. Louis left the port of Hamburg for Cuba. Nearly all 937 passengers on board were Jewish, literally fleeing for their lives in the face of Hitler’s Holocaust.
The plan was that they would land in Cuba as an urgent interim before moving on to the United States, where long immigration waiting times faced them. In order to do so, most had paid substantial sums for the Cuban landing certificates.
On May 27, 1939 the St. Louis docked in Havana where due to shifting politics and pressure due to rising anti-semitism, the Cuban government refused all but 29 passengers, notwithstanding the clear validity of the landing certificates.
The ship then went to “Plan B” and sailed toward Florida. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the State Department refused to allow entry, citing strict quotas, but also reflecting the anti-immigrant sentiment of the day. To ensure nobody got any ideas about sneaking into the country, the Coast Guard watched carefully, day and night.
Canada was therefore the next logical step, but the St. Louis was up against the notoriously anti-semetic Director of Immigration, Frederick Blair, who when asked about Jewish immigrants said, “None is too many!” The never-principled Prime Minister Mackenzie King would not intervene.
The St. Louis re-crossed the Atlantic. Britain accepted 288 passengers, the Netherlands 181, Belgium 214, and France 224. War broke out three months later and most of those landing in continental Europe ended up in concentration camps where 254 perished.
Canada has many things of which to be proud. The tale of the St. Louis is not one of them.