Susanne Heim Die Abschottung der Welt
[The Sealing of the World]

Should they stay or should they go, this was the agonizing question for the well over half a million Jews living in Germany in the spring of 1933. Law student Heinrich Marx – who decades later, as the program director of Goethe-Institut in New York, had Anglicized his name to Henry – wrote in his diary: “As for me, I’ve always taken the view that it’s better to grin and bear it here in Berlin ... leaving only makes sense if you’re able to burn all your bridges behind you.” Heinrich Marx decided to leave after all, many decided to stay, whereas others left but soon came back. Of the 60,000 Jews who emigrated in 1933 about 23,000 came back that same year – some because they believed the situation had stabilized in Germany, others because they lacked the legal or financial means to live abroad. That they didn’t have the money to make a new start abroad was in no small part related to the fact that Jews in Germany had been systematically stripped of their assets.

The history of the escape and expulsion of the Jewish population of Germany has, for whatever reason, been less thoroughly researched than the history of their extermination. One expert on this complex topic is Susanne Heim, project director and editor of the sixteen-volume source edition The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. Her new book is about the “walled-off world” that German Jews faced after the Nazi seizure of power. It was Germany that deliberately made it impossible for Jews to stay. And it was the rest of the world that frequently refused to let them in when they tried to leave. Hannah Arendt criticized this policy of closed borders as “a form of lawlessness, organized by the police.” Heim sees parallels to today’s refugee policies – in Europe, America and elsewhere. “How,” she asks, “will future historians judge today’s migration policies?”

Much of Heim’s book is dedicated to the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees. There were notable differences between the fates of men and women, poor and rich, old and young, as well as those who left early and those who left late. With the outbreak of the war in 1939 the situation came to a head. Those who couldn’t go overseas were at risk of deportation. Heim takes a detailed look at the policies of host countries, where often enough homegrown anti-Semitism stood in the way of granting refugees asylum. Only gradually did an international refugee policy take shape in which plans were discussed, sometimes in the service of isolationist aims, to resettle Jews in Africa or Australia. On the other hand there were commendable initiatives like the Kindertransport, when the British Parliament permitted the admission of unaccompanied children in 1938. Even though the international community failed to establish a joint policy there were voices in this era that recognized the necessity of a multilateral refugee policy, one consequence of which was the founding of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950.

In the end, however, it was not so much states as civil networks that enabled Jews to escape and survive. International Jewish organizations, most actively the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were occasionally in a position to mobilize politicians and society to rally around their cause. The small steps taken by aid organizations at the time might seem modest when compared to the magnitude of the catastrophe that was the Holocaust. And yet the Jewish community succeeded in making its voice heard, especially in the United States and Britain. Which lobby nowadays, to recall the parallels noted by Heim, would be able to give our current refugee movements a voice?