The Voyage of the Saint Louis

January 29, 2017

53 min read

Captain Gustav Schroeder refused to return the ship to Germany. He's celebrated as a righteous gentile by the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem

German Jewish mother and son look out at Havana Harbour, hoping to disembark in May 1939

More than 900 Jewish refugees leave Hamburg, Germany for Cuba in May 1939

In light of President Trump signing an executive order banning refugees from seven countries with Muslim majority population, a group calling itself St. Louis Manifest has published the photographs of hundreds of German Jewish refugees turned away by the United States and Canada aboard the SS Saint Louis in May 1939, four months before the start of the Second World War. Hundreds of the refugees were killed in death camps across Europe.

In 1994, Iranian filmmaker and the editor of IranWire Maziar Bahari made a film about the St. Louis story. Bahari is one of the very few filmmakers from a Muslim country who has made a sympathetic film about the Jewish Holocaust.

In May 1939, a luxurious cruise ship from the Hamburg-America Line left the port of Hamburg, carrying close to 1,000 Jews who had permission from the Nazi regime to sail to Cuba. For the film, director Bahari interviewed survivors, who 55 years after the event came together on a cruise ship near Florida, and a German sailor, who said he was not allowed to accept tips from Jews. The film also features Bahari reading from the captain of the ship's diaries. With a large amount of archive material, consisting of photographs and footage, as well as an explicative voice-over, Bahari offers a chronological reconstruction of the dramatic boat trip.

After the war, the German captain Gustav Schröder, who was celebrated as a war hero by the Nazis, escaped punishment at the hands of the Allies because the passengers on the SS Saint Louis testified that they had been well treated while on board. They told how they were treated with the same respect as ordinary cruise guests and swam, danced and dined on the luxurious ship along with other passengers.

But when the SS St. Louis was unexpectedly refused access in Havana, the refugees embarked on a journey that was nerve-wracking and traumatic. The United States ignored the vessel, Canada barred it from landing on its shores, and eventually the ship set sail back to Europe again. In the end, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Belgium admitted the exiled people, three quarters of whom would not survive the war.