 Good afternoon. I'm Jesse Crotts, historian of the National Archives. On behalf of David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, I welcome you to the McGowan Theater in the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Before we hear from Michael Dobbs on his new book, The Unwanted America, Auschwitz and the Village Caught in Between, I'd like to mention some of our programs that will be coming up next week. On Friday, May 10th, our newest exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote will open in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery here on the main exhibit level in the National Archives in Washington. The exhibit celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution and tells the story of women's struggles for voting rights as a critical step in securing equal representation. Rightfully Hers explores the dynamic involvement of American women across the spectrums of race, ethnicity, and class in securing their voting rights. The exhibit will be open through January 3rd, 2021. To highlight the exhibit, the National Archives will be presenting a variety of programs, films, and discussions related to the 19th Amendment and women's voting rights. On Friday, May 10th, at noon, celebrated feminist biographer, Susan Ware, will present an author talk about her book Why They Marched, Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote. The book looks beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement and gives voices to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions who all worked tirelessly for their right to full citizenship. A book signing will follow the program. Then at 4 p.m. on May 10th, we will present Amending America, How Women Won the Vote. In this One Woman performance, Kate Campbell-Stevenson combines music and theater to tell the story of the struggle to secure the women's suffrage amendment. She portrays many renowned women throughout American history. To find out more about these and other programs and exhibits, please visit our website at www.archives.gov. You will also find some printed material in the theater lobby and a sign-up sheet if you want to receive our electronic monthly calendar. Today's talk by Michael Dobbs on his book The Unwanted, America, Auschwitz, and the Village Caught in Between is presented in recognition of Jewish American History Month. Michael Dobbs was born and educated in Britain and is now a U.S. citizen. He was a long-time reporter for the Washington Post covering the collapse of communism as a foreign correspondent. He has taught at leading American universities, including Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Georgetown. He is currently on staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For this book, Dobbs researched extensively in several archival collections, including the National Archives, to tell the story of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape Nazi Germany, and the United States' response to the refugee crisis of that era. The Unwanted has received critical praise. In the New York Journal of Books, Mike Ferris writes, In The Unwanted, Michael Dobbs personalizes the terrible period with the names and faces of families who, no longer lost in the shuffle of dry history, cry out through the decades to be remembered. There will be a book signing after the program. Let's please welcome Michael Dobbs. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here at the National Archives. This is my sixth book, and five of them I've researched, at least in part, at the wonderful National Archives facilities, not only here in Washington, but around the presidential libraries around the country. And in fact, I've got my suitcase packed. I'm off to California this afternoon to give a talk, but before I give the talk, I'm going to spend a day at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. So I'm a bit of an archive nut, and I've worked at archives all over the world. The National Archives is the Walmart of archives. The other archives, for example, the National Archives in Britain, you'll give them three or four folders of materials in the National Archives in College Park here. They wheel out an entire trolley of riches for researchers. So it's a wonderful experience if any of you have not had that experience, even if you're just wanting to research your own family history. It's something that's very well worth doing. And I've spent a lot of happy hours going through boxes of materials in the National Archives in College Park and other National Archives venues around the country. My book, The Unwanted, is devoted to this question of immigration and the obstacles to immigration and refugees trying to reach the United States in the 1930s and the early 1940s. Although it's about the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s, but it could be about other refugee crises. It just happens to be about the Jewish refugee crisis. The title, The Unwanted, comes from the German Wunewunscht. In Germany in the 1930s, there were signs outside every town or village in the country saying, Juden sind hier Unwunsch, Jews are unwanted here. So that's where the title came from. And the subtitle, The Choice, in some cases, came down to either getting to America or ending up in Auschwitz. And I focus on one particular village. I'll explain a little later why I chose the village I did. It's called Kippenheim. The book grew out of my research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum just across the mall here. A couple of years ago, they started to plan a new exhibit, which was opened last year called Americans and the Holocaust, looking at what Americans knew about the Holocaust and what more could have been done. And this question of immigration and refugees was, of course, a very important part of the exhibit. And since I'd written books, I wanted to, I thought about a way of trying to write about this in book form. And being a former journalist, you always want to personalize the stories. So I decided to write about one specific community of German Jews trying to reach America. I was interested in the question, why? Why did some people make it and why did others not make it and what happened to them? In some ways, in many ways, the answer to that question came down to whether or not they received a precious piece of paper, in other words, a visa to the United States or some other country. But often it was to the United States. In August 1938, an American journalist called Dorothy Thompson, who had actually been one of the first American journalists to interview Adolf Hitler after he came to power in 1933, she wrote about the refugee crisis saying this, it's a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people, a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death. And this is a, what we call a paper wall in our exhibit at the museum that illustrates all the pieces of paper that you had to get, you had to either fill in or obtain in order to immigrate to the United States. These pieces of paper were literally life-giving in many circumstances. Inspired by the Dorothy Thompson quote, I wanted to find out how you got these pieces of paper. I wanted to dive into the lives of the people who were responsible for issuing the pieces of paper, the people who were trying to obtain them and describe everything about how to obtain one of these pieces of paper. So it's a Holocaust story, but it's also an American story. Now there have been many books written about the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s. And some have been very critical of President Roosevelt and the U.S. administration at the time. Some have been more understanding and defensive. They've all looked at the question predominantly through the eyes of the political, the prism of the political debate here in Washington, the political bureaucratic debate. And they've described the pressures on FDR, how FDR responded. I wanted to do that, but I also wanted to integrate it with the lives of actual people who were trying to come to America. I wanted to show the connection between this rather abstract political debate that was going on in Washington and the lives of real people. So the book interweaves three stories. It interweaves the story of what was happening here in Washington in the White House and on Capitol Hill and in the State Department. And what was happening in the U.S. consulates around the world, particularly in Germany and France, where throngs of refugees were appearing every day, standing in line for visas, the story of the consuls who had the responsibility of implementing the policy, and the story of the refugees who were trying to obtain the visas. I tried to take, you know, as a journalist, I felt that I was an eye witness to history. I worked for many years in the Soviet Union during the collapse of communism. And I tried to take my readers behind the scenes to show them what was happening. And I'm trying to do the same, more or less the same thing with this book and other books. I'm trying to take people behind the scenes into the White House, into the Congress, into this obscure little village, into concentration camps, and show them what was happening at the time. And I'm still an eye witness to history, but just a history a little further back. So the village I chose is the village of Kippenheim on the edge of the Black Forest just across the Rhine River from France. There on the right you can see a photograph of the village. It's a typical village of about 1,500 people back in the 1930s. And still about 1,500 people today. On the left of the photograph you can see the church, which was a Catholic church, also shared with the Lutherans. In the center of the picture is the town hall, or the rat house. And on the right of the picture you should be able to see the synagogue, which is a beautiful neoclassical synagogue that was built in the middle of the 19th century. Since this village is on the border of France and Germany, this for many centuries had been a kind of military zone. And the Jews were originally brought to the Black Forest in Kippenheim, or they were allowed to settle there as part of supplying the armies of the princes and dukes who were responsible for defending the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. They weren't allowed to settle in the big towns but they could settle in the villages. And Kippenheim was one of the places that had a mixed Christian Jewish community. In Germany, when Hitler came to power in 1933, there were about 520,000 Jews living in Germany. That's less than 1% of the population. It's amazing to think actually that the Nazis were so obsessed by a minority that was less than 1% of the population. In Kippenheim, there were 133 Jews living in Kippenheim when Hitler came to power. That was about 10%, 12% of the population of Kippenheim. So what made this village particularly interesting to me? Why did I choose this village as opposed to some other village? I became interested, I think the slides are a bit out of order here, I became interested in an event that occurred in October 1940 when the Jews of Barden, this part of southwest Germany called Barden, were deported to France after the fall of France. When we think of deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany, we tend to think of Jews deported to the east, the concentration camps in the east, which mainly happened in 1941 and 42. But in fact, before these deportations to the east, there was a deportation to the west, what we would now call ethnic cleansing. After the fall of France, the Nazis decided that they would clear out, and they called it cleaning out, Judenrhein, this entire part of Germany and send all the Jews in this, put them all on trains and send them across the border to unoccupied France and let the French deal with them. The French put them in concentration camps, mainly one called Gers by the Pyrenees in southwest France. This posed a challenge to the United States because all these refugees, 6,500 of them arrived in Vichy France and the government of Vichy France immediately turned to the United States to President Roosevelt and said, well, you talk so much about wanting to help Jewish refugees, you should accept these refugees yourself. And this went all the way up to FDR and the State Department advised FDR that if we yield to these blackmailing totalitarian tactics, the Germans will inaugurate a reign of terror against the Jewish people, i.e. if this deportation is successful, they will do the same thing in the rest of Germany. So they advised FDR against doing anything that would be seen as cooperating with this ethnic cleansing in southwest Germany. But this, it posed because they were deported to France and because they were all put in concentration camps in southwest France, they were still able to communicate with their loved ones in America or other countries. So we have a lot of correspondence from these refugees. They were also practically all of them were already in mind to get American visas. They were waiting for American visas. They had applied in some cases several years before. So their visa applications were all transferred from Stuttgart in Germany to Marseille in France and they continued to request American visas. So I thought this would be an interesting group to look at as a kind of window into U.S. immigration policy at the time. And I eventually settled on a, I want to describe one community rather than all of the Jewish communities of Barden. I settled on a little village called Kippenheim, which is a fairly typical village. These photographs illustrate the fate of the Jewish community of Kippenheim between 1933 and 1938, the events of Kristallnacht. The first photograph, actually that is taken in January 1933, about a week before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. And you see the sort of very open procession from one of the Jewish homes in the village to the synagogue. The bystanders are very respectful. There's even a policeman in the photograph who's keeping order. Perfectly normal, integrated life of the Jewish community of Kippenheim. The second photograph, 1935, just two years later, Hitler's been in power for two years. Already the Nazi brownshirts are in the village together with a farmers' ban. But this is actually outside the house of one of the Jewish residents of Kippenheim. And if you look carefully at the window there, you see one of the Jewish mother and her son looking out the window at this demonstration that is taking place outside their house. So it's still not, I mean, it's interesting. You see the Nazi, the SA, the brownshirts taking part in this demonstration. But it doesn't have the sort of menacing, I mean, it is menacing, but it's not threatening. They're still there peacefully looking at this. In fact, they rather enjoyed the music. I spoke to an old lady who was the daughter of this person in the photograph. And she told me at first she enjoyed the rousing music until she listened to some of the words in the songs that the brownshirts were singing. And one of the songs was about, we're looking forward to the time when we will use knives against Jews. And then the whole thing changed, of course, for her. But still, in 1935, this is still fairly peaceful. By 1938 and the events of Kristallnacht, November 1938, that changed everything. The synagogue, this beautiful synagogue that I talked about was destroyed. It wasn't actually burned down because there was a Christian house next door. But it was destroyed. There are people there with axes that are smashing everything. And there are little boys who are looking for fragments of the Kristallnacht chandeliers amid the wreckage. It was Kristallnacht, actually, that whether or not people had been Jews in the village beforehand had been in two minds whether they should leave or not. But Kristallnacht decided it for everybody. There was no alternative after Kristallnacht but to get out of Germany. And the place they were trying to reach, for the most part, was the United States. So actually, I chose the village of Kippenheim because I found of this deportation, there are a few photographs taken. And in most of the photographs that we have of the deportation, it's impossible to figure out who's in the photographs. But because Kippenheim is a small place, we were able fairly easily to identify who the people are in the photographs and where precisely the photographs were taken. So there are actually five photographs taken from different parts of the different places in the village. Of the Jews being forced out of their houses and being put on trucks to be taken to the local railway station, they were allowed to take a couple of suitcases. Each family was allowed to take a couple of suitcases with them. And we know who these people are in the photographs. So when I saw these photographs, I wanted to find out who the people are in the photographs and what happened to them later. And were they successful in reaching the United States or weren't they successful? So this photograph particularly struck me. It's of a family of six actually from grandparents down to boy age 10 leaving their house on October 22, 1940. The mother and one of the sons is already on the truck. The grandmother, the grandfather and this little boy, I'll talk about him a little later, are following. And the father has locked up the house, locked the shutters. He was told to leave the keys in the door. And they're all getting on the truck to go to the railway station. You notice that neighbors are looking at what is going on fairly impassively. Not only the young children in the street, but also if you look back here, you can also identify neighbors watching what is happening. So the truck stops outside their house, which is here. I have a photograph, a map, this comes from a map in the book. And then it goes around the corner, past the synagogue, and stops outside the house of another Kippenheim Jewish family called the Valfers. This man is a cigar distributor and this is his name is Max Valfa. Her name is Fanny Valfa. They're getting on the, being put on the truck. Notice the cow is a rural community. A lot of people kept cows, a lot of cattle traders. But everyday life is going on as the Jews are being deported. This is a man from the SS. We actually have a, when they got to Kippenheim, when they got to Gers rather in France, they started writing letters. So we actually have a letter from Fanny Valfa written to her family in, she had relatives in the United States and she writes a letter about this incident. She says she packed so much of it in so much as much as she could in two hours. But the Heron, which is a kind of codename they gave to the SS, threw back most of it into the house. We had no linen, no clothes, none of the things that your papa, dear papa and I had acquired over the years. We have become beggars. I still cannot grasp that we have become so poor and helpless. My eyes hurt from crying. That's Fanny to her children from Gers in December 1940, shortly after this photograph was taken. Kind, sweet children, do not forget us. Go to the Jewish community over there, i.e. in the United States or in the United Kingdom. And do all that is necessary so that we can get some relief from the mess that we're in. Now they arrive or they're sent off to Gers in southern France in, this is October of 1940. There's four or five months after the fall of France in June of 1940. And one result of the fall of France was it triggered in the United States a what's sometimes called a fifth column mania. Many people believe that the reason France fell so quickly was that there were German agents operating behind the lines as fifth columnists. And it was thanks to all these fifth columnists that the French resistance buckled very quickly and they feared that the same thing could happen in America. And many people feared that refugees were a way of bringing fifth columnists into America. That among all the legitimate refugees that were coming into the country, there could also be Nazi agents. And this became the stuff of pulp fiction as you see in this magazine, the headlines on this magazine on the right. But it was also a concern of the U.S. government, particularly a man called Breckenridge Long who was in charge of security policy at the State Department, who issued instructions in June of 1940 that if consuls had any doubt about the whatsoever concerning the alien, they should reject the visa applications. I mentioned this because this is the climate that exists when all these refugees from this part of Germany end up in guise and still continue to try to get American visas but from France rather than from Germany. Now, since I'm talking at the National Archives, I should mention a document that I came across at the Archives in College Park. One of the U.S. consuls who worked in the consulate in Marseille wrote a memorandum about U.S. immigration policy and how he was enforcing it at this time. The photograph on the left is the consulate and outside the consulate, you can see all these refugees would be immigrants to the United States waiting for their appointments at the consulate. And on the right, you see part of the memorandum from the consul, Mr. Peck, who I'll just read what I wrote in the book. I don't subscribe to the School of Thought, which advocates refusing visas to all persons whose faces we do not like on some flimsy pretext, Peck wrote. Nor was he in favor of turning down applicants whose paperwork was not entirely complete. The consul interpreted humanitarian considerations to mean favoring older refugees, especially those in the camps. He saw little risk in granting visas to the elderly and chronically sick. These are the real sufferers and the ones who are dying off, he wrote. The young ones may be suffering, but the history of their race shows that suffering doesn't kill many of them. Furthermore, the old people will not reproduce and can do our country no harm, provided there is adequate evidence of support. I think that sort of fairly accurately reflects attitudes in the State Department at the time, even among people who considered that they were implementing a fairly generous refugee policy. They weren't excluding everybody, but they were certainly filtering people. And there was a kind of rather snobbish attitude towards, to say the least, towards in this case Jewish refugees. If they're old, they can do our country no harm, provided there is adequate evidence of support. There he is with his parents being loaded onto the truck. He went door to door with his car, which was rarity in those days. He was quite well off. So they had actually started trying to get out of Germany in 1936, 1937, that actually succeeded in getting visas, but the borders were sealed after the war started. And then they found themselves in Gers. The main thing everybody remembers about Gers is the, in the Pyrenees, it rained all the time. They were there during the winter and there was terrible mud. People remember the sinking down into the mud as soon as you stepped out of these flimsy little huts, the mud and the rain and the cold. It's a good photograph of Gers. But eventually, because their visas had been authorized before in Germany, they just hadn't been able to use them from Germany, they were able to re-obtain their visas in Marseille and get out via a long complicated route, which actually took them to Casablanca, where they were put back, put in camps again. But they reached the United States on board the Niasse in the summer of 1941. Now, contrast that with the story of Max and Fanny Valfa, the other couple I mentioned earlier, who were on the point of receiving visas at least three times that I was able to document. And each time something would change, something would happen in somewhere else in the world that they had no influence over. And the visa regulations would change slightly and they would have to start all over again. In fact, there's an American relief worker who called Varian Frye, who wrote from Marseille. He said, the visa rigmarole here is inhuman. It's almost killing the refugees. They have to wait in corridors and lines over and over and over again until their very souls must be shriveled and shunken by the experience. But finally, and this is a note in early 1942, a letter from Fanny, when I first arrived here, we expected to leave for the United States after four weeks. It didn't work out that way. Now we must wait until it's our turn. We have nothing to do but suffer. Actually, Valfa's had been given appointment at the U.S. consulate in Marseille for 8th of December, 1941. And they showed up at the consulate, expecting to be issued their visas. And of course, on December the 7th of the previous day, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States found itself at war, both with Japan and Nazi Germany. And suddenly all these refugees, German Jewish refugees who were attempting to get visas, became enemy aliens. And so just by that happenstance of the time they were given their appointment, they were put on hold once again. They weren't rejected outright. But they were told that they would have to be further checks before they could be admitted to the United States. That was in December. For applications in Washington, actually on the Mall, just outside here, some of you may have heard of these temporary buildings that were erected on what is now a green expanse of the Mall. And one of the buildings was a building to house this new visa bureaucracy that was examining the visa applications of people trying to get to the United States. By July of 1942, Max and Fannie were again promised an American visa. Their eldest son, Carl, wrote to them from Chicago. He heard that he had to appear before the committees, right outside here in the Mall. And the interview went well. The visas were authorized. And Carl writes to Max and Fannie, I see you, my dears, trying to keep the tears from your cheeks. And other of these big world events happens and the Germans change their policy and start changes from forcing people out of Germany to a policy of extermination and deporting Jews from Germany, from occupied countries, including occupied and it turned out unoccupied France, the French government cooperated with these deportations. So instead of coming to the United States, the Max and Fannie Valfa were transported by train first to a camp at Drancy outside Paris. And then in August 1942 to Auschwitz. Briefly summarize what happened to these 6,500 Jews from Southwest Germany who ended up in southern France in Gers. 50% were deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, including Max and Fannie Valfa. 12% succeeded in emigrating to the United States. 25% died in France, many in Gers camps, other camps, where the conditions were terrible. There were malnutrition, hunger, various epidemics. And 12% mainly children managed to hide in France when the deportation started. Some sympathetic French officials allowed some of the children to escape and others to escape. And they managed to hide in France until the end of the war. So the question that I tried to, the book is really about, why did some people end up in America and others end up in Auschwitz? And you can't reduce it to a single factor. But I've just listed here some of the factors that were involved. One very important factor was the date of your immigration application. By and large, German Jews who applied before August 1938 and got in line, they had lower quota numbers. They succeeded either in coming to the United States or on the strength of those lower numbers getting to an intermediary country like Britain. Support networks in the United States were very important because in order to qualify for immigration, you had to have a sponsor in the United States who was willing to say that you would not be a public burden to the US Treasury. Somebody who was willing to sponsor you financially and also serve as a guarantee of your character. Education, wealth, age, gender mattered. By and large, richer people had the resources to get out. Poor people didn't. Women, younger people were more energetic in trying to get out than older people who were often left behind. That happened to the Welfare family. All their children managed to get out. But the Welfare parents left it until it was too late. The quotas were important. Actually, the quota system of the time that was introduced in 1920s favored German Jews or German citizens over citizens of Eastern Europe. So if you were a German Jew, your chances of getting an American visa were much higher than if you were a Polish Jew or you lived in a Balkan country. The German quota was actually fairly generous in contrast to the quotas of some of the East European countries. This deportation to GERS that I talked about, that actually gave people a second chance at immigration. Because even though conditions were terrible at GERS, and only a small minority of the people deported to GERS succeeded in getting out, that they remained in Germany, they wouldn't have had any chance at all. The national security scares, such as the Fifth Columnist, the whole question of how the United States would deal with what were called enemy aliens, all factored into decision-making. The attitudes of consuls were important. And finally, there was always the question of luck. Had the Welfars, Max and Fanny Welfare been given their appointment at the US consulate the previous week, there would have been issued visas and probably been able to get out of France. I also look at the whole question of one of some members of the Welfare family that I describe, whose fates I describe in the book, were on board the St. Louis, that the ship that was turned back from Cuba and then later the United States in the spring of 1939. The Welfare children were lucky because they ended up in the UK. Other passengers ended up in France, in Belgium, or the Netherlands. And many of them were killed later in the Holocaust. So it came down to luck in many cases. This is a graph just summarizing the fulfillment of the German quota. There were 25,000 spots, almost 26,000, which increased to 27,000 in 1937, 38 when the Austrian and German quotas were combined. So you see here that for a long time the quotas weren't filled. They began to be, and that was partly because of a very restrictive interpretation of the immigration policy by the administration. But in 1938 and 1939, some of the restrictions, particularly on who would be considered a public burden, were relaxed. And you see for two years between 1938 and 1940, the German quota was filled, or almost filled, in the case of the second year. After the fall of France and these national security scares the fifth columnists, then the number of immigrants admitted to the United States starts to fall. And by 1941, certainly after Pearl Harbor, it dwindled to virtually nothing. So I thought I might just end by telling you about Kurt Meyer, the little boy that we saw in this photograph being deported or taken out of his house in Kippenheim on October 22, 1940, put in that truck taken to Gers. This is one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because I started looking for people in these photographs. And of course, with Google, you can do everything I stuck Kurt Meyer into Google. And it turned out that he was a cataloger of German books at the Library of Congress about a mile away from here. Right next to the Holocaust Museum where I work, I'd found one of the subjects of my book right here in Washington. And on the right, you see the visa that Kurt's family was issued with in Marseille that enabled them to get out of France, avoid the fate of the Welfare family, and so many others. And all the stamps on the visa, I went back to Kippenheim or went to Kippenheim with Kurt, who goes back to Kippenheim every year to give talks to young Germans. And he shows them this visa, this little piece of paper that he got. And he shows them all the stamps that they had to obtain in order to get out of France and get to safety. One of them is actually the US immigration visa, but they're all these other stamps. They had to get a French exit visa. In many cases, they needed a transit visa by Spain and Portugal. They had to get various financial stamps. And if you miss just one stamp, as Kurt says, you frequently didn't get out at all. So perhaps I should end by just quoting Kurt about this piece of paper that his family was lucky enough to obtain. These stamps saved our lives, he says. If you were missing just one stamp, you would likely die. This was the most precious document I ever possessed. These stamps saved our lives. Well, thank you very much. And I'd be very happy to have a discussion with you, answer any questions. I think there's probably somebody with a, I think we have to go to, anybody who'd like to ask a question should go to one of these microphones on the left or the right. This is being recorded for YouTube. So it's important you speak into the microphone. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. I always have to say before I start, I'm not from the United States, I'm from the Caribbean. I grew up in the Netherlands. So I happened to know during the time I grew up there and the people I grew up with in the Netherlands, they were hunted by World War II. I mean, it was a daily discussion about the experiences with the Nazis in the Netherlands and all the experiences that they went through. But be that as it may, what I want to ask is a few questions. You put on a set of reasons why people were not allowed to come to the United States. And what I'm interested in is the fact that you, I do not know why, but during that time, anti-Semitism in the United States was quite rampant, especially on the white North American people. But basically, it was rampant in the country. And you talked about Breckenridge Long, who is known to be quite, quite problematically a human individual in the State Department. So what I would like you to maybe talk about a little is the fact that anti-Semitism certainly and also the Great Depression, the fear that there was a significant unemployment, although it was starting to shift down with a new deal, that if these people come, they would have to be able to get jobs and stuff like that. And how these issues played out. And it's not something that only played out, obviously, in the United States of North America. But basically, in many other countries in the West, there was total rejection of the Jewish people coming here. And had the West being more open to the Jews, in our probability, a million of Jews would have been able to survive. And to a certain extent, we are seeing the same game being played out again in the West at this point in time. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Yeah, it wasn't just anti-Semitism. There was sort of xenophobia in general. In fact, under the 1924 Immigration Act, which was still in effect at the end of the 1930s, and there was a complete exclusion of entire populations, no Chinese were allowed to come into the country at all. This is the Chinese Exclusion Act. And you're right in saying that some of this was, well, a lot of it was linked to economic depression in the United States and the consequences of World War I and the huge amounts of immigration prior to World War I. So all these factors are mixed together. But in the 1920s, the idea that anybody could come to the United States was discarded in favor of a restrictive immigration system based on quotas. And each country got its quota. And the North European countries got higher quotas. And the East European countries and Southern European countries got much smaller quotas. And Asian countries and African countries barely got any quota at all. Now, Germany is an interesting case, because actually Germany was considered a northern European country. So next to UK, Ireland, Germany got one of the largest quotas. And there was no specific distinction between made in the law between Jews and other German citizens. Of course, in the implementation of the acts, there was that left a lot of room for the consuls and the State Department to interpret the act in different ways. And particularly for up until 1938, there was a very restrictive interpretation of a clause that was called the public charge clause that the immigrants had to prove that they would not be that they could gain a living in the United States from the moment they set foot in the United States. And that was very difficult to prove. And that certainly allowed consuls and people in the State Department who were in favor of a more restrictive policy to use the interpretation to keep people out. But the overall question, was it just anti-Semitism? It wasn't. There was anti-Semitism, xenophobia, economic depression. All these things were mixed together. Although there was anti-Semitic strain in American opinion, as you can see from that memorandum that I quoted from the console. Yeah, two questions. How was legitimate was the issue that a fifth column was responsible for the French collapse? And is there anything we can gain from this experience with regard to our current immigration issues? I realize that's another seven-hour lecture, but perhaps you might comment on that. Yeah, on the question of the fifth columnist, I mean, it was not the national security threat in general. I think it was exaggerated. And it was blown out of all proportion. But there are national refugees and immigration do involve perfectly legitimate national security questions, both back in the 30s and today. I mean, the question is the balance. Where do you strike the balance? And there's a man called Howard Ickes, who was one of in the FDR's cabinet. And he was constantly having arguments with Breckham Ridge Long, who we mentioned earlier. And Ickes would say, Long would say, well, there has to be a sieve. We have to have a sieve to identify the people who could be a threat to the United States. And he was pretty much in favor of excluding everybody, particularly after the fall of France. And Ickes would say, well, yes, there can be a sieve, but the holes in the sieve have to be larger. When I was researching the book, actually, I came across many. I mean, you can't directly compare America in the 30s and America today, but there's certainly echoes of the debate. And the national security question is certainly one echo, that the national security fifth column threats, threats from terrorism, terrorists have become part of this immigration refugee debate in the United States, just as they were back in the 1930s. And I think for most people, the question is one of balance. Where do you strike the balance? It's not that there's no national security threat at all from refugees or immigrants. But how do we process immigrants and refugees effectively so that you weed out the national security threat? That's the debate that we're having. Yeah. Professor Dobbs, Jonathan Gallaba. Thank you. Most no propo that you were discussing this on Yama Shoah today, and I appreciate you coming and sharing with us. My question is, what would be some of the differences that would be on the exit visas, transit papers of exit, perhaps not necessarily of Jews per se, but maybe the political prisoners, people with certain businesses of certain type of activity that may be considered against the ideas of the group in power at the time in Germany per se, the regime, such as in Casablanca when Victor has to get his exit papers from Casablanca to leave, how would those be different per se than these papers that necessarily had to be obtained by Jews leaving through Marseille? Yeah. At the time, there was no real refugee policy in the United States. It was only after the war, I think in the 60s, that refugee policy was introduced. Before, people who wanted to come to the United States either had to come as visitors or they had to come as immigrants. They couldn't come formally. There was no refugee policy except there was an exception made for that. Very prominent people who are leading cultural figures, opponents of Hitler, members of leaders of labor unions, people who were thought to be in immediate physical danger. They were for a brief period in 1939 and 1940. Many of these people after escaping Nazi Germany, they ended up in France. And then after the Germans marched into Paris, they all fled southwards to Vichy France. And many of them ended up in Marseille. So there was a man called Varian Frey who was sent over there by the group that still exists today called the Emergency Rescue Committee. And with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, they tried to identify leading figures who were immediately in danger of being handed over to the Germans and find ways to help them get out of France. And that program continued for a year or so. And that was an exception. I don't know how many people benefited from it, probably less than 1,000. But certainly there's a distinction between these prominent personalities and ordinary Jewish refugees like the ones I described mainly in the book. But that's the story of what happened to the, and there's some leading writers. For example, Leon Ferkwanger, who was the leading German writer of the day, he received a visa as a political refugee and was allowed to come to the United States at the end of 1941, essentially skipping the line of the regular refugees. So there was always actually a tension between the treatment of the prominent people, the more prominent people, and the treatment of the refugees nobody had ever heard of. Thank you. Thanks. The Jews of Germany didn't experience the pogroms that they had in the East. So they were an incredibly assimilated crew into German society. What was the shock value for them as middle class, solid German citizens? And then all of a sudden this occurs to them because it was different than being out in Russia. I was just wondering, was it a slow process or? Right. Well, if you look at, I mean, since I studied this little village, which is quite illustrative of similar communities all across the country, I mean, in this village, the Jews, they tended to be the tradesmen. They're very middle class, very assimilated. They all had, would play Beethoven. They read the German classics. They considered themselves a German. In many cases, they'd fought with the German army during the First World War. And they were living pretty well. And they continued to live pretty well, even though, despite the climate of persecution, right up until Kristallnacht. So many of them and the younger people saw the writing on the wall very quickly. But the older people, they were living quite comfortable lives in Germany up until Kristallnacht. So they thought they could hang on for a bit longer. And perhaps Hitler would be overthrown, go away, and everything would be OK. But of course, it was a huge shock for them when, I mean, I think some of the letters that I quote in the book from Max and Fanny Valver reflect exactly what you're saying. Here they are leading essentially middle class comfortable lives in Germany. And suddenly, one day, they're put on a truck and taken to this terrible camp in Gers, where they're all living in these huts. There's no inside toilets. They have to go out in the mud. They don't have anything to eat. There's nothing to do. I mean, I'd describe some of the, you know, just the French had a word for it. It was called kaffar, this just godless emptiness, it means. And of course, it was a huge shock to them. But people become used to the shock. The one thing about Gers was that they were able to communicate with their families. They were able to write letters and they were able to receive letters. And they were also able to receive donations or small transfers of money. Those are Quaker organizations that would transfer money from America or Britain to Gers. Took a long time, but that helped them to some extent. I think we've pretty much reached the end. We've been here for an hour, but I've enjoyed being able to talk to you. And I think that if anybody would like to buy the book at the library, at the book, there's a bookstore, is it on this level? Or is it one level up? One level up. Yeah, I'd be very happy to sign a copy of the book if any of you interested in buying it. Thank you very much. Books, as Michael said, the bookstore is one level up. The books are available at the cash registers.