When Holocaust Refugees Almost Found a Caribbean Haven Efforts to aid Jews fleeing Europe with shelter in the U.S. Virgin Islands ran into bureaucratic hostility.By Richard Hurowitz see note please
http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-holocaust-refugees-almost-found-a-caribbean-haven-1453853817
Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.
On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”
The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.
As Europe burned, qualified applications for immigration visas to the U.S. from victims of Nazi persecution dwarfed the existing quotas (which were based in part on nationality and in any case were not reached because of limited U.S. approvals). Refugees would have to wait years until their number came up, living in great peril if they were in Axis-occupied countries. Ickes and Cramer proposed temporary visas that would let people wait out the immigration-application process in the islands.
The State Department opposed the temporary-visa plan, citing consular regulations and what Secretary of State Cordell Hull called the plan’s incompatibility with existing law. Yet the Labor Department, which oversaw immigration, declared the plan legal. A bureaucratic standoff ensued. As months went by with no resolution, Ickes’s team found another route: an existing FDR executive order that would allow Cramer to waive passport requirements in emergencies.
On Nov. 7, 1940, Cramer signed a proclamation offering temporary haven in the U.S. Virgin Islands to those who could meet certain financial and security safeguards, including prior vetting by the State and Labor departments and by the White House. Ickes issued a 22-page report declaring the decree “legally unassailable.” With momentum building, meetings were scheduled with philanthropic organizations to support the refugees and with relevant government officials.
But then Cramer’s decree caught the attention of Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, scion of a prominent political family and a virulent anti-Semite. In 1938 he wrote in his diary that Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos.” From his senior post overseeing consular issues, Long blocked fulfillment of even the small extant quotas for Jewish refugees.
On learning of the Virgin Islands proclamation, Long went into overdrive. He telephoned Roosevelt to complain, and an irritated FDR sent a memo to Ickes, who recorded in his diary that the president had “rather slapped my ears back by telling me that refugee matters were for him and the State Department to decide.” Roosevelt declared his “sympathy” for the refugees in the memo, but concluded that he could “not do anything which would conceivably hurt the future of present American citizens.”
Undaunted, Ickes went to see the president to plead his case. Long had neglected to explain the various financial and procedural protections built into the temporary-visa plan and the lengthy interdepartmental negotiations. Ickes laid out those points, noting that the plan had the virtue of both serving a humanitarian purpose and aiding the islands’ economy. Ickes came away thinking FDR might approve the plan if the Justice Department confirmed its legality.
Long was furious. “I antagonized Ickes irreparably by opposing his Virgin Islands scheme,” he noted in his diaries (wartime selections were published in 1966, and his papers are in the Library of Congress). A master bureaucratic manipulator, Long decided to act before a Justice Department legal analysis could be issued: Raising spurious national-security concerns about enemy spies possibly lurking among the refugees that would be hard to dismiss with the country on a war footing.
He zeroed in on Alan G. Kirk, then the chief of naval intelligence. Long proposed that the Navy declare the Virgin Islands a restricted area for military use, effectively eliminating Interior Department control and removing, as Long wrote in his diary on April 22, 1941, any “political questions involved in this refugee and undesirable citizen traffic.” Kirk agreed. And with that power play, Ickes and Cramer had been outmaneuvered. The U.S. Virgin Islands would remain as lightly populated as before and thousands of Jewish families would be left to a grim fate.
The efforts of Ickes, Cramer and the members of the Virgin Islands legislature may have failed, but their example remains a powerful one for people of goodwill.
Mr. Hurowitz is an investor and the publisher of the Octavian Report.
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