Month: March 2018

$360. That was the cost in May 1938 to rescue a Jewish child from Nazi controlled Austria. $360 would pay for her relocation to a new home in Palestine, and care for her for two years. All this for $360. $360 to save the life of a child.

In May 1938, the national Youth Aliyah Committee identified 1,000 Jewish Austrian children who could leave the country with valid visas, but only until September 30 when the passes to leave Austria expired. One Indianapolis woman refused to allow this brief window of opportunity to close without trying to save these young Austrians. After all, Sarah Wolf Goodman was herself a Jew born in Austria who must have felt great empathy for those who shared her homeland. She was not alone. While the U.S. government was slow to act, many private citizens worked to aid refugees fleeing Germany and Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. And some of these notable American activists were Hoosiers.

History Unfolded

Over the last year, we have been looking at Indiana newspapers to try and determine how much information Hoosiers received through the press about the events leading up the Holocaust. In the last History Unfolded post (Part 4) we also met the tireless and prescient diplomat, James G. McDonald, who tried to warn the world about the impending atrocities. In this post, we will examine the failed Evian Conference, news articles about the deepening refugee crisis, and editorials about how Hoosiers believed the U.S. should respond. We’ll continue to follow McDonald who attended the conference and we’ll meet Sarah Wolf Goodman, another bold and industrious Hoosier who showed her community what could be accomplished without leaving home.

The purpose of this project is twofold: 1. to contribute Indiana newspaper articles to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s History Unfolded database to help the museum determine what the average American knew about the Holocaust; and 2. to analyze these articles and share with our readers our findings on what Hoosiers knew and how they responded. Hopefully, a greater understanding of the events surrounding the Holocaust can inform our responses to current world crises. Anyone can contribute articles to History Unfolded. Find out how through the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum (USHMM).

Anschluss

In January 1933, Jewish Germans made up about one percent of the country’s total  population. The greatest number of Jews resided in Berlin. Over the following years, the Nazis banned Jews from civil service, boycotted Jewish businesses, and stripped away their citizenship rights with the declaration of the Nuremberg Laws. By 1938, the Nazis made life so difficult for German Jews that about 150,000 left the country, according to the USHMM. This was one-fourth of the entire Jewish population. When Germany annexed neighboring Austria in March 1938, many more Jewish people were forced to flee their homes, resulting in a major refugee crisis.

Since the end of World War I, most Austrians supported a union with Germany. However, this consolidation of power was forbidden by the Versailles Treaty. By the mid-1930s, Austria, suffering under a poor economy, saw Hitler as the solution. A bombardment of Nazi propaganda solidified public opinion. Thus, on March 12, 1938, when Nazi troops entered Austria, they were greeted by cheering crowds.

This German-Austrian union, called Anschluss, brought another 185,000 Jews under Nazi rule – all of whom now faced persecution. According to the editors of Refugees and Rescue:*

Austrian anti-Semites, members of the Nazi Party, and police and SS officials immediately attacked, arrested, and humiliated Jews and political opponents in Austria. Confiscation of Jewish property and public scenes such as forcing Jews to scrub sidewalks were everyday occurrences. Hundreds of Austrian Jews committed suicide, and tens of thousands sought to leave as quickly as possible.

The German-Austrian Refugee Crises

These tens of thousands of Austrian Jews joined those from Germany who felt they had no choice other than to leave their homes. However, many who tried to flee were unable to find a country to accept them. According to the USHMM, “a substantial percentage tried to go to the United States.” However, the Immigration Act of 1924, passed during a period of xenophobia and Klan influence, sharply restricted immigration to the United States. Jews were among the ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the legislation and only a very small number were issued immigration visas in the years following the quota enactment. This did not change in 1938. Even in the face of the mounting refugee crises, the United States government largely turned its back on the Jews of Europe.

Widespread American prejudice and anti-Semitism that extending into federal government service definitely contributed to the lack of action, but there were other issues as well. The Great Depression still affected many Americans who feared further competition for jobs. African Americans faced racism and prejudice in addition to the horrors of lynching. It would be hard for many African Americans to see why they should care about injustices across the Atlantic when they faced injustice at home. For other Americans, it simply seemed like a faraway problem of little practical concern to them. Many people simply had their own immediate struggles and problems to make ends meet. Plus, the United States fought in “the war to end all wars” only twenty years earlier. Many just wanted to stay out of what was viewed as Europe’s problem.

For example, in an editorial for the Indianapolis Recorder, African American writer Fletcher Henderson called the annexation of Austria “interesting . . . headline reading for the American people,” but because Hitler was not threatening America, noted it was “nothing for us to become alarmed about.” He stated succinctly, “While we deplore the rape of any nation, it is none of our affair.” Henderson called for the U.S. government, and especially President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to mind its own business. He stated, “If the administration in Washington would bend all of its efforts to end the depression in the United States, it would not have the time even to read of the happenings in the rest of the world.”

James G. McDonald: Stirring the American Conscience

However, there were Americans of conscience who worked relentlessly to find ways to save the Jews of Austria and Germany, some of them Hoosiers. Starting as early as 1933, former Indiana University professor James G. McDonald shared his fears with world leaders that Hitler would eventually order the execution of all the Jewish people under Nazi rule. (Read more about McDonald in the previous post: Part 4). By the time of the Anschluss, McDonald worked tirelessly and traveled widely to spread this warning and raise awareness for the plight of fleeing Jewish refugees. His diary and letters* tell of the frustrating, often bureaucratic, work he undertook in an attempt to convince government, religious, and philanthropic organizations to work together and to connect those who had authority to act with those who had the means to act.

In March 1938, McDonald spoke to a group of potential Jewish donors in New City about the urgent need to give money to save the Jews of Europe who faced annihilation. According to a summary of his speech, McDonald stated:

The war that the Nazis are waging is not a war against the Jews of Germany, but against all Jews, whose influence must be obliterated and who themselves should either be exterminated or driven out of all civilized lands . . . If you think that because you live in the United States you are immune, you are very foolish. Nothing counts these days except money with which to carry on your work of relief, of emigration, and of service to your fellow Jews. Mass meetings, parades, demonstrations, resolutions, getting nice letters from friendly Christians, are all very well, but they don’t actually save a single Jewish life, feed a starving Jewish boy or girl, train a single youth, pay for his emigration, or enable him to start life anew anywhere else.

All over the country and to all kinds of audiences, McDonald reiterated his earlier statements that the refugee crisis was not a Jewish problem but a human one. McDonald called the Nazi persecution of Jews an “attack upon the principles of civilized society” and expressed his disappointment that all Americans were not rising to meet the crises. In accepting the Professor Albert Einstein Medal for Humanitarian Services, he stated:

Until Protestants and Catholics as well as Jews understand, come to see that the things they hold dear, even as the things Jews hold dear, are threatened – not until then will there be an adequate response to enable refugees from Central Europe to be cared for.

McDonald closed his speech by refuting other political leaders’ claims that these refugees who had been stripped of their assets would be a liability and reminded his American audience that they live in a “country of refugees.” In yet another speech, this time to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, he again appealed to his audience’s conscious and pocketbooks:

This problem will require thinking in terms not of a few million dollars, but in terms of tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, the problem is not a Jewish problem. The conscience of America has been stirred.

These Americans, whose consciences has been stirred, placed immense pressure on the U.S. government to act on behalf of those fleeing Nazi persecution. On April 29, 1938, the Jewish Post, published in Indianapolis, reported that “10,000 Americans visited the offices of HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) since Anschluss to learn how to bring their relatives to the United States from Austria.” Charitable and religious organizations did not wait for the government to take the lead. For example, the Jewish Welfare Federation advertised a fundraising campaign in the Jewish Post with an $81,640 goal. The ad pleaded for Jewish American aid:

 Against the storm, against the fold of misery, against dire suffering there is only one great barrier . . . the barrier erected by American help. Compared with the need, what we can do is perhaps little, But the little is the only hope of MILLIONS of our fellow Jews. So Give! Be glad you can Give! Give even if it means self-denial! Give so THEY may have a chance to LIVE!

Road to Evian

By May 1938, in response to mounting pressure, the U.S. government attempted to organize a solution in the form of the International Committee for Refugees (later Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees). On May 12, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government suggested the creation of an international committee  “to facilitate the emigration of political refugees from Germany and Austria.” The article reported that the U.S. State Department had consulted with over thirty other countries and scheduled a meeting for July 6 in Evian, France. According to Refugees and Rescue, President Roosevelt “launched [this] initiative without consulting the state department, inviting a range of other governments” to attend the Evian Conference.**

Meanwhile, President Roosevelt also organized his own group of advisers on the refugee crisis. On May 16, this group, the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, organized and elected James G. McDonald as chairman. According to an account of the founding meeting by Samuel McCrea Cavert of the Federal Council of Churches, President Roosevelt “opened the conference by remarking that the United States has always been deeply sympathetic with political refugees and that the time had come when our country had another historic opportunity to show this sympathy.” However, the president carefully called the emigrants “political refugees” and avoided the term “Jewish refugees.” He seemed more concerned about public opinion than proposed rescue efforts. According to Cavert, in response to proposals that the government loan money to private organizations in position to effect immediate rescue, President Roosevelt stated that “at least for the present it would be unwise to put forward any proposal which would occasion public dispute and controversy, such as a change in the immigration quotas or appropriations or loans from public funds.”  It was clear that raising money would be the key to any successful rescue efforts. And if it were to come in time to help the Jews of Germany and Austria, it would have to come from private organizations, not the government.

As the world awaited the upcoming Evian Conference, the crises mounted. In an article printed in the Indianapolis News in late June, AP Foreign Correspondent, DeWitt Mackenzie described the problems facing the conference. Mackenzie estimated that 450,000 Jews in Austria and Germany were in need of a new country if they were to survive Nazi persecution. However, he speculated that this was perhaps only the beginning of the crisis. Mackenzie wrote:

The anti-Semitic forces in other central and eastern European countries such as Poland, Rumania [sic], Hungary and Lithuania, have been strengthened by events in Germany. Jewish leaders express fear the refugee problem may assume extraordinary proportions if anti-Semitic governments and organizations get the impression that they can solve their Jewish problem by expelling their Jews and trusting the rest of the world to absorb them.

Mackenzie continued by theorizing on how those diplomats about to meet in Evian would handle the crisis. He estimated that they would first attempt to determine the feasibility of convincing the oppressive governments to “diminish anti-Semitic pressure” and allow fleeing emigrants to bring the whole of their property with them. Second, they would try and determine where these refugees would find homes. Like McDonald, Mackenzie made clear that money would be the determining factor in how successful any rescue attempts would be.

On July 2, 1938, just a few days before leaving for the Evian Conference, McDonald served as a sponsor for a Youth Aliyah benefit in New York. “Aliyah” is the Hebrew word for a Jew immigrating to Israel. The Hadassah-sponsored organization aimed to rescue young Jewish refugees and find them new homes in Palestine. The New York Times reported that the proceeds would be used to transport German, Austrian, and Polish refugees to Palestine on 1,100 British visas available until they expired in September. While James G. McDonald worked in New York to raise the $360 per child needed for transportation and two years of care, another Hoosier was hard at work for the same cause back in Indianapolis.

Sarah Wolf Goodman’s “Immediate and Wholehearted Action”

Sarah Goodman was a fixture of Indianapolis society, a prominent Jewish civic leader and supporter of the arts. She was born in Vienna in 1886 and came to St. Louis as a young child. She moved to Indianapolis after her marriage in 1924 to Jack A. Goodman, founder of the Real Silk Hosiery Mills. She was smart, ambitious, and well-connected. She commanded respect and could sway public opinion. In May 1938, she did exactly that.

Goodman devised a plan to address the same issue that faced McDonald: raising enough money for Youth Aliyah to transfer child refugees to Palestine before the September 30 deadline. Goodman shared with the readers of the Jewish Post on May 20 a letter she received from a fourteen-year-old girl who started a “little club of girls, all of about her age” and raised $10 “energetically baking and selling cookies.” The girls sent the money to Goodman asking her to “please accept the enclosed check for $10 and send it on to help save the lives of these poor children” of Austria.

These selfless girls inspired Goodman. She wrote that she believed that young Jewish people in Indiana wanted to help those their age who were suffering Nazi persecution:

In a few weeks many of these eager youngsters will be confirmed or will be graduated from grade school, high school, or college. We, their relatives, will show our love for them by showering them with gifts, some of which will be useful, some of which will never be looked at . . . Children appreciate gifts and the thoughts they express, but more important this year is the fact that they want to share with the Austrian children who have nothing.

Goodman’s plan was simple. She encouraged the families and friends of graduates to make a donation in the name of the graduate, in lieu of a gift, which she would send to the Youth Aliyah fund. The graduate would then receive a “fine” card. She wrote that any amount was acceptable but “only immediate and wholehearted action will suffice,” as the visas expired in a matter of a few months. Goodman stated, “Every one unused represents an opportunity lost forever to snatch a boy or girl from the hell that has been made of a fair country.” The country where she was born.

The Jewish Post supported her endeavors. The editor wrote:

It is to be hoped that Mrs. Goodman’s plan will be seized upon and carried through one hundred per cent. Let the card Mrs. Goodman described become so fashinable [sic] and popular that the tie or book as a gift will become outmoded and in its stead a symbol of Jewish charity on its highest plane – the salvaging of the life of a child will take its place as the finest present possible.

The Indianapolis Star briefly mentioned a lunch fundraiser for Youth Aliyah on its society page, but made no mention of Goodman’s plan. Other Indiana newspapers were silent.

The Evian Conference

Streit began his report with a reminder to the attendees that the refugees have lost everything “because of their refusal to recant what democrats believe to be true” or because they were born Jewish. He said he repeated this well-known fact in the article because “it seems to be in some danger of being lost at the start.” He took issue with the fact that the negotiations were starting from the perspective of viewing refugees as a burden; their humanity was being lost among the poker-like game of negotiating how that burden would be shared. His impression was spot on.

The conference began July 6, 1938 at a lavish resort on Lake Geneva. Delegates from thirty-two countries attended. President Roosevelt sent Myron C. Taylor as the U.S. representative and James G. McDonald to advise him. Taylor was a wealthy businessman with little previous diplomatic experience. The U.S. agenda for the conference, as determined in a series of June meetings between U.S. State Department representatives and the President’s Advisory Committee chaired by McDonald, represented a weak compromise between their opposing visions. The U.S. would allow political refugees from any country (not just Germany as argued by the State Department) but only within existing quotas (to the chagrin of McDonald and the committee). They would tread carefully on the subject of Palestine to not upset the British delegation, which controlled the region. McDonald was cautiously optimistic that the conference would encourage other countries to accept Jewish refugees. He would be disappointed.

Myron C. Taylor addressed the conference on the opening day. He expressed sympathy for the plight of the refugees but noted that all of the countries present were dealing with a depressed economy and widespread unemployment. He noted that the assembled governments must act “promptly and effectively in a long-range program” to aid the refugees, but also noted that “the problem of political refugees” was “thrust upon them by the policies of some other governments.” He reviewed a world history of voluntary migration and then stated:

Now we have a form of compulsory migration, artificially stimulated by governmental practices in some countries which force upon the world at large great bodies of reluctant migrants who must be absorbed in abnormal circumstances with a disregard of economic conditions at a time of stress.

During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept additional refugees.

A New York Times article from July 14, succinctly summed up the Evian Conference. The reporter stated that the delegates “did not find a landing place for the thousands of refugees cast upon the world” and that “no doors were thrown open to the involuntary exiles.” The Times writer concluded: “All the delegates professed a sincere desire to do what they could, but none offered to relax the quotas and restrictions that every country has put on immigration.”

Before the conference even ended, McDonald turned his attention to gaining approval and support from the Vatican on addressing the human crisis. He left for Rome immediately after the conference closed. He did not even record his reaction to the Evian Conference in his diary. (Check back for Part 6 which will look at the widely varying Catholic response to the events leading up to the Holocaust and McDonald’s work to influence the Vatican.)

 Goodman and “The Dignity of Man”

With little encouragement from world events, Sarah Goodman continued her campaign in Indiana to raise funds for the rescue of children from Austria. In all, she was able to save two children, with a total of $750 dollars raised, through her plan to collect donations in lieu of graduation gifts. This might not seem like much. However, this was in the midst of the Great Depression. The average income was just over $1,000 a year. Thus, Goodman raised almost a year’s salary for the effort. Additionally, she received no promotion for her idea from any newspapers beside the Jewish Post. Her plan, however, managed to spread. Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington followed suit.

In September, the Jewish Post enthusiastically reported:

Out from under the blighting shadow of the Nazi swastika over Austria, Jewish boys and girls are sailing away to a life of opportunity and human service in Palestine as the result of a plan translated into action by Indianapolis’ own Mrs. Jack Goodman.

On Thanksgiving Day, appropriately, Goodman shared the thanks of two children with the readers of the Post. She wrote:

On this our Thanksgiving weekend I have been instructed to transmit to all of you the heart-felt thanks of two young people whose lives will be forever yours. They are the youths whose lives were saved by the graduation, confirmation, birthday and other gifts which were made in your names last summer.

 A thousand children were saved by this push for the Youth Aliyah fund. Goodman wrote that “it will never be forgotten that two of this number were saved by the young people of Indiana.” And really, it was the children who led the way, from the young girl who inspired Goodman’s actions to those who sacrificed gifts to help others. One recently confirmed child told the Post that the fund was “a living memorial of the fact that we are lucky to be giving and not getting.”

By September of 1939, around 282,000 Jews had fled from Germany and 117,000 from Austria, according to the USHMM. However, around 202,000 German Jews and 57,000 Austrian Jews were unable to escape, many because of old age. Their numbers fell to 163,000 by October 1941, when then Nazi regime ended Jewish emigration. Again according to the USHMM, “The vast majority of those Jews still in Germany were murdered in Nazi camps and ghettos during the Holocaust.”

Sarah Wolf Goodman did not quit after the drive to help Austrian children ended. She did not quit as the horrific details of the Holocaust trickled and then flooded into newspapers. She spoke around the country, continued to raise money for Hadassah and Youth Aliyah, and helped form new chapters in other cities. She traveled to Palestine to visit the clinics, schools, and scientific farms set up by the Hadassah, of which she was vice-president by the 1940s. Despite her gender, the Jewish Post named her Indiana’s Jewish Man of the Year for 1945. In 1953 she became the first woman president of the Indianapolis Jewish Welfare Federation. In 1956, the Post referred to her as “without a doubt the most prominent Jewish woman in the state” and in 1958 she became chairman of the United Jewish Appeal.

At her 85^th birthday, she looked back on her accomplishments, and perhaps to the 1938 drive to save the children of Austria. She stated:

Anything one does that helps in any way to make the life of another more livable is the greatest reward one can reap. My interest is in the dignity of man – regardless of his denomination.

References

Primary sources cited concerning McDonald, Roosevelt, the U.S. State Department, and the President’s Advisory Committee were accessed:

Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, Eds, Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press & Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 121-159.

Contextual information on the Refugee Crisis and the Evian Conference was accessed via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at ushmm.org. Articles cited include: “German Prewar Expansion,” “Austria,” “German Jewish Refugees- 1933-1939,” “Emigration and the Evian Conference,” and “The Evian Conference.”

The Jewish Post was accessed via Hoosier State Chronicles. This resource is freely searchable and accessible to anyone.

Other newspapers accessed Newspapers.com, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, and NYTimes.com.

Notes

*Refugees and Rescue is the second of a three-volume set of McDonald’s papers and diaries. Cited above.

**President Franklin D. Roosevelt left behind a complex legacy from this period. He called for the Evian Conference but did not ease immigration quotas. He had many Jewish advisors and yet provided no public funds to aid Jewish refugees. According to the USHMM, he took “significant, yet limited action, in response to the persecution of Jews in Germany, the refugee crisis of the 1930s, and the ’Final Solution.’” For a comprehensive study of FDR’s response to the crisis, see Allan J. Lichtman and Richard Breitman, FDR and the Jews (Belknap Press, 2013).