In the spring of 1939, a luxury German ocean liner called the St. Louis left Hamburg
with almost 1,000 Jewish refugees on board. To the passengers, it felt like a cruise to freedom:
white tablecloths, an orchestra, Shabbat services, even a swimming pool. But just weeks later,
that same ship would be hovering off the coast of Florida, close enough for passengers to see
Miami’s lights and yet they were never allowed to set foot on American soil.
The tragic voyage of the St. Louis has become a symbol of how the United States and other
countries turned their backs on Jews fleeing Nazi terror. The U.S. didn’t round up those passengers
or push them onto trains, but by refusing them entry and sending them back to a continent sliding
into war and genocide, American leaders helped seal the fate of hundreds of people.
Understanding what happened on that ship isn’t just a history lesson. It’s a case study in how
immigration laws, public opinion, racism, and political fear can combine into a deadly
bureaucracy one that, in this case, left Jewish refugees with nowhere safe to go.
Setting the Stage: A World That Didn’t Want Refugees
To grasp the story of the St. Louis, you have to start with the world of the late 1930s.
Nazi Germany had already stripped Jews of rights, livelihoods, and safety. With Kristallnacht in
November 1938 a wave of state-sanctioned violence against Jewish homes, businesses, and
synagogues it had become brutally clear that things would only get worse.
In theory, desperate families could try to emigrate. In reality, most countries had
essentially closed their doors. The United States operated under a restrictive immigration quota
system created in 1924, designed to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe exactly
where most Jews came from. Those quotas were rarely even filled, thanks to layers of red tape,
consular discretion, and outright prejudice within the State Department.
Public opinion wasn’t any kinder. In multiple polls taken in 1938 and 1939, roughly
83% of Americans said they opposed admitting more refugees fleeing Europe. Many were
still reeling from the Great Depression and blamed immigrants for economic competition. Others
feared “foreign radicals” or bought into antisemitic conspiracy theories. Politicians took note
including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was sympathetic in private but cautious in public.
Against this backdrop of fear, indifference, and quiet antisemitism, 900-plus Jews scraped together
money, sold belongings, and bought tickets on a ship they hoped would carry them to safety.
The Voyage of the St. Louis: A Cruise to Nowhere
Tickets to Freedom
On May 13, 1939, the MS St. Louis left Hamburg with 937 passengers, most of them Jewish
refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe. Their destination: Havana, Cuba. Each passenger carried
landing certificates that had cost small fortunes in bribes and fees. Families had sold furniture,
businesses, and heirlooms; some assumed they’d never see their homes again.
The ship’s captain, Gustav Schröder, was no Nazi sympathizer. He ordered the crew to treat the
refugees as first-class passengers, uncovered a bust of Hitler only long enough to cover it again,
and allowed religious services on board. Survivors later recalled the first part of the trip as
almost surreal: while their friends and relatives back in Germany faced daily terror, they were
enjoying music, good food, and sea air.
What they didn’t know was that politics in Havana had shifted dramatically and that the
“guaranteed” landing permits in their pockets were no longer worth the paper they were printed on.
Havana Slams the Door
When the St. Louis reached Havana on May 27, 1939, the ship was ordered to anchor in the harbor
instead of docking. Cuban President Federico Laredo Brú had just issued Decree 937, which
retroactively invalidated most of the landing certificates passengers had bought. Only a small
group with special visas or Cuban connections were allowed ashore. In the end, just 28 people were
permitted to disembark.
For the hundreds of families still on board, panic set in. Refugee organizations, especially the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), scrambled to negotiate with Cuban authorities,
offering large sums of money for the right to land the refugees. But Cuban officials were under
pressure from domestic antisemitic groups and politicians eager to appear tough on immigration.
The negotiations failed. The St. Louis was ordered to leave Cuban waters. The “vacation cruise to
freedom” was suddenly a ship with nowhere to go.
So Close to Miami, So Far from Safety
With Havana closed, Captain Schröder turned the ship toward the United States. The St. Louis moved
slowly up the Florida coast, at times close enough for passengers to see Miami Beach, palm trees,
and neon signs glowing at night. This was the America they had dreamed of visible from the
deck, but legally out of reach.
Passengers sent telegrams to the White House and to friends or relatives already in America,
pleading for help. Behind the scenes, Jewish organizations lobbied the Roosevelt administration to
make a one-time exception for the St. Louis. The quota for German immigrants that year wasn’t even
full; letting a few hundred refugees disembark wouldn’t have broken the system.
But the State Department held firm. President Roosevelt remained silent. The Coast Guard even
shadowed the St. Louis to ensure the captain didn’t try to run the ship aground and force an
informal landing. Canada, too, rejected appeals to take in the refugees, with one official
famously implying that “none is too many” when it came to Jewish immigrants.
After days of waiting, Captain Schröder who had considered desperate moves like grounding the
ship on the British coast had no choice but to turn back toward Europe.
Why the United States Said No
Why did the United States refuse to accept fewer than 1,000 terrified refugees, when the full scale
of Nazi mass murder was not yet known but the danger was obvious?
First, there was the immigration quota system. The 1924 law assigned strictly limited
immigration slots by national origin and heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western
Europe. Even within those quotas, consular officials could slow-walk applications, require extra
paperwork, or simply say no. The system was designed to give maximum discretion to officials who,
in many cases, were openly antisemitic or hostile to refugees.
Second, there was fear. Some U.S. officials argued that admitting Jewish refugees might allow Nazi
spies to slip in among them a claim for which there was essentially no evidence, but which
played well with isolationist politicians. Others warned that making an exception for the St. Louis
would open the floodgates for more ships.
Third, there was politics. With an election looming and isolationist sentiment strong, Roosevelt
calculated that openly defying public opinion on immigration could cost him support in Congress
and among voters. Historians still debate how much he could realistically have done, but the basic
fact remains: he did not choose to spend political capital on saving the passengers of the St.
Louis.
Finally, there was antisemitism. It wasn’t always shouted; often it appeared as “concerns” about
“too many Jews,” or as a refusal to bend rules that were bent in other cases. But it was there, in
Congress, in the State Department, and in the broader public part of the moral atmosphere in
which letting a ship of Jewish refugees sail away seemed, to many leaders, like an acceptable
option.
Back to Europe and Straight into the Holocaust
When the St. Louis returned to Europe, it did not go back to Germany. Through frantic negotiations,
Jewish aid organizations persuaded several Western European countries to accept the refugees:
Great Britain took 288 passengers; France 224; Belgium 214; and the Netherlands 181. For a
brief moment, it looked like the worst had been avoided.
Then, in 1940, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Belgium, the Netherlands, and much of France.
Refugees who had barely escaped one country now found themselves trapped again under Nazi rule.
Researchers have painstakingly traced the fate of each passenger. Of the 620 people who returned to
continental Europe, 532 were caught in Nazi-occupied territory. Just over half of them survived.
The rest were deported to ghettos and concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz and
Sobibor. In total, historians estimate that around 254–255 passengers of the St. Louis were
murdered in the Holocaust.
Put another way: when the United States and other countries sent the ship back to Europe, they
didn’t know the exact names of the camps or the final form of the “Final Solution.” But they did
know that Jews in Germany and its orbit faced escalating persecution, violence, and the real risk
of death. They chose to send those people back anyway.
Did the U.S. “Send Them to Their Death”?
The title of this story makes a hard claim: that the United States sent Jewish refugees to their
death. Is that fair?
On a narrow, legalistic level, American officials did not order anyone to be killed. They didn’t
load passengers onto trains, or run camps, or design gas chambers. That was the Nazi regime.
But morally, the picture looks different. U.S. leaders knew that Jews in Germany and its sphere
were in serious danger. They had before them a very specific group of people, physically present
on a ship within sight of American shores, begging to be let in. Allowing those refugees to land
would have cost the U.S. almost nothing, and almost certainly would have saved hundreds of lives.
Instead, the government chose to prioritize immigration quotas, public opinion polls, and political
risk over human survival. It chose, in effect, to push the problem back onto Europe a Europe
increasingly dominated by a genocidal regime. In that sense, yes: the U.S. helped send those
refugees back into a deadly trap.
It’s also true that the story of the St. Louis is not just about America. Cuba, Canada, and the
European countries that accepted passengers only to be overrun by Nazi forces all share
responsibility. The tragedy is global. But in American memory, the image of a ship full of
refugees turned away from Miami has become a powerful symbol of what happens when a wealthy,
secure democracy chooses caution over compassion.
Lessons for Today’s Refugee Debates
The St. Louis didn’t disappear into history. Its legacy keeps resurfacing every time the world
faces another refugee crisis whether involving Syrians, Afghans, Central Americans, or others
fleeing violence and persecution.
In 2012, the U.S. State Department held a formal ceremony acknowledging the government’s failure to
help the passengers of the St. Louis. Survivors and their families attended, and officials
expressed “regret” that America had not done more. In 2018, Canada issued a full apology in
Parliament for rejecting the ship in 1939.
These apologies matter, but only if they change how we act now. The core dynamics that doomed the
St. Louis fear of outsiders, obsession with quotas and paperwork, political leaders who treat
refugees as a “problem” instead of people are still with us. The story forces us to ask hard
questions:
- When we say “never again,” do we mean never again for anyone, or just never again in the
abstract? - Are we willing to accept some political risk or public backlash to save real human beings?
- Do we see refugees as potential threats, or as neighbors we just haven’t met yet?
The saga of the St. Louis doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer a clear warning:
even countries that see themselves as humane and democratic can make decisions that are, in
hindsight, morally indefensible. The question is whether we learn from that history or repeat it
with different ships and different faces.
Experiences and Reflections: Imagining Life on the St. Louis
Because we can’t interview every passenger today, much of what we “experience” about the St. Louis
comes through survivor testimonies, memoirs, and visits to museums and memorials. But imagining
yourself into that moment can make the history hit in a different way.
Picture standing on the deck of the St. Louis as Havana first comes into view. You’ve sold most of
your belongings back in Germany. You’ve endured years of humiliation, threats, and antisemitic
laws. You explain to your children that Cuba is just the first stop that soon you’ll be in the
United States, where people are free and “it can’t happen here.” The band is playing; people are
taking photographs; there’s a nervous but genuine hope in the air.
Then the ship stops in the harbor and doesn’t dock. Rumors spread: there’s a law, a decree, some
kind of technical problem with the papers. Surely it’s a misunderstanding. Days pass. A few people
are allowed to leave a handful of lucky ones whose documents are somehow still valid. You wave
goodbye to them, hoping you’ll be next. Instead, you hear the captain has been ordered to leave.
Now imagine the days off the coast of Florida. It’s hot and humid; tempers are fraying. At night,
you can see the lights of Miami on the horizon, like a promise you’re not allowed to claim. You
send telegrams to relatives in New York and Chicago. Word comes back that they’re calling senators,
rabbis, anyone who might have influence. Rumors swirl that the president himself might step in.
And then the mood shifts. The Coast Guard appears. The ship keeps its distance from shore. People
start to realize that no miracle is coming. Parents have hushed conversations at night, away from
their children, about what they’ll do if they’re sent back. Some younger passengers talk about
taking over the ship or forcing it to beach itself, though nothing comes of it. The captain walks
the deck with a face lined by lack of sleep; he’s trying everything he can think of, but the
decisions are being made in offices thousands of miles away.
Fast forward to a modern experience: you’re standing in front of a St. Louis exhibit at a Holocaust
museum in Washington, Miami, or Montreal. On the wall, there’s a copy of the passenger list and a
map of where each group of refugees ended up. Next to some names are the words “killed in
Auschwitz,” “deported to Sobibor,” or “survived in the United Kingdom.” A small dot on the map
marks Miami, with a caption explaining that the ship was never allowed to dock there.
Visitors often linger in front of that display longer than they expect. Part of the shock comes
from how ordinary the St. Louis feels. It wasn’t a warship or a train in a death camp. It was a
cruise liner with dining rooms, decks, and cabins. The people on board weren’t soldiers; they were
dentists, teachers, shopkeepers, children with stuffed animals. In other words, people who look
like the neighbors and colleagues you know now.
That’s one of the most powerful “experiences” the St. Louis offers us today: the realization that
bureaucracy plus indifference can be just as deadly, in the long run, as guns and barbed wire.
The decision-makers who kept that ship offshore weren’t shouting hate slogans. They were quoting
regulations, citing poll numbers, and worrying about re-election. It’s precisely the ordinariness
of those choices that makes the story so chilling.
When people visit these exhibits or read survivors’ accounts, many come away asking what they
would have done if they had been in Miami in 1939. Would they have called their representatives?
Stood on the beach with a sign saying “LET THEM IN”? Or would they, too, have shaken their heads
and said, “It’s terrible, but the law is the law”?
We don’t get to answer that hypothetical. What we do get is something more demanding: the chance
to respond differently when new “St. Louis moments” appear in our own time. That might mean
supporting humane refugee policies, pushing back on fearmongering, or simply refusing to let
stories like this fade into the background noise of history.
The saga of the St. Louis isn’t only about how the U.S. once failed Jewish refugees. It’s also a
mirror, held up to each generation, asking: when desperate people knock on the door of your
country or your conscience will you answer differently?
