MS St. Louis

The MS St. Louis was a German diesel-powered transatlantic liner which was used as a luxury cruise ship for the Hamburg-America Line which regularly sailed from Hamburg to Halifax and New York. In 1939, the MS St. Louis was carrying over 900 German Jewish refugees when it was refused entry in Cuba, the United States and Canada and forced to return to Europe. The ship departed from Hamburg on May 13th, 1939, captained by Gustav Schroder. Most of the 937 passengers were Jewish, and were in possession of what they believed to be legal landing permits for Cuba which they planned to use temporarily before obtaining American visas. In reality, Cuban immigration official Benitez Gonzalez had used his position to sell illegitimate landing permits, which were nullified by the pro-fascist Cuban government amid rising anti-Semitism in Cuba while the MS St. Louis while completing its transatlantic crossing. When the ship arrived in Havana on May 27, 1939, it was not permitted to dock, and was eventually asked to leave Cuban waters with most of the passengers still on board. Captain Schroder, determined not to return his passengers to Germany, sailed around the coast of Florida in hopes that U.S. authorities would permit the refugees entry but instead the ship was trailed by the coast guard and not permitted to approach the shore. Despite appeals from sympathetic American citizens and organizations President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government refused to allow the refugees to land, citing existing immigration guidelines. Halifax was the last port of asylum available in North America, and while Captain Schroder made no appeals directly to the Canadian government, as the ship’s plight became more widely known within Canada efforts were made to convince Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government to allow them into the country. Leaders of the Canadian Jewish community made appeals to the government, and a group of 27 prominent Canadian citizens in Toronto led by clergyman and historian George Wrong signed a petition requesting that Prime Minister King provide sanctuary to the refugees. His government’s decision was that the refugees did not qualify as admissible immigrants under Canada’s immigration law, and on June 7th, 1939 Captain Schroder was forced to sail back to Europe where the passengers were dispersed to France, to Belgium, the Netherlands and England. Of the St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, 254 of them died during the Holocaust. Economic hardship caused by the Great Depression as well as anti-Semitism from within Canada had caused Canada to further restrict its already restrictive immigration policies in the 1930s, which prioritized immigrants based on race, ethnicity, occupation and class and was biased against Jewish refugees. As a result, Canada allowed only 5000 Jewish refugees to settle in Canada between 1933 and 1948. Canada’s refusal of the MS St. Louis became a symbol for the country’s record of refusing Jewish refugees during the Second World War. On November 7th, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an apology for the federal government’s decision to deny entry to the MS St. Louis, and for the government’s antisemitic policies that denied entry to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The apology also acknowledged the continuing existence of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the twenty-first century. Some of the surviving passengers from the ship were present in the House of Commons during the apology, as was Nimrod Barkan, Israel’s ambassador to Canada.