Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SS St. Louis. German luxury cruise ship. On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis set sail from
Hamburg carrying 937 German Jews who were seeking refuge abroad. The ship was bound
for Havana, Cuba, and it had been arranged for the Jews on board to have visas that would
allow them to land temporarily while they were obtaining permanent residence elsewhere.
Upon arrival in Cuban waters, however, the president of Cuba, Federico Laredo Bru
(1875–1950), refused the ship permission to dock or for the passengers to land. In an
attempt at making profit from the refugees’ plight, Bru demanded a payment of 500,000
U.S. dollars as an entry fee. Ultimately, only twenty-two Jews were permitted to land.
Seven hundred of the refugees possessed U.S. immigration quota numbers that would see
them eligible for entry to the United States some three years hence; in desperation, the
ship left Cuba bound for Florida, in the hope that the refugees might negotiate an early
entry with the U.S. authorities. The government of U.S. president Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1882–1945) was adamant, however, that there would be no early admissions,
no landing of refugees, and no docking of the St. Louis. The U.S. Coast Guard was ordered
to intercept the ship and ensure that it did not enter U.S. territorial waters. Jewish organizations,
in particular the Joint Distribution Committee, negotiated furiously for the
refugees’ admission to any country in the Americas; besides Cuba and the United States,
attempts were made to land the passengers in Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina,
but to no avail. The ship, with little to no alternative, was ordered by its German owners
to return to Europe. It docked at Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939, and most of the Jews
on board were accepted for temporary refuge by Britain, Belgium, France, and the
Netherlands. Most of those taken into Britain survived the war, but fewer than 250 in total
of those accepted by the European countries lived to see the liberation in 1945, as they
were ultimately rounded up and transported to ghettos, slave labor camps, or death camps.
The story of the St. Louis has become symbolic of the failure of the countries of the
Americas to assist the Jews of Nazi Germany in their hour of need, a symbol brought into
even starker relief by the legitimacy of the documentation for entry possessed by the refugees.
SS-Totenkopfverbände (German, “SS Death’s Head Formations”). The name given
to specially trained units of concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany. These units
were formed out of earlier, ad hoc detachments established soon after the first concentration
camps appeared in 1933. These early units went under a variety of names:
Wachmannschaft (guard unit), Wachsturm (guard company), Wachtruppe (guard troops),
and Wachverbände (guard formations). The SS-Totenkopfverbände, or SS-TV, were
formed in April 1934 by the first inspector of concentration camps, Theodor Eicke
(1892–1943). The essential rationale for establishment of the SS-TV was to provide a
trained body of guards able to administer the very precise regulations that pertained to
discipline in the concentration camps. Eicke’s system, basing itself on the “model camp”
at Dachau, Bavaria, that had been established in 1933, developed a body of guards who
acted with strict adherence to discipline and harshness—and, increasingly, brutality—
toward their prisoners. By the beginning of World War II in 1939, the SS-TV numbered
twenty-four thousand members; by 1945 it had increased to forty thousand. Much of this
increase was due to the fact that in 1939 the SS-TV had been formed into a combat
division, the SS-Panzerdivision-Totenkopf. This, in turn, became one of the foundation
units of the Waffen (armed) SS, the military wing of the SS. It was the SS leader
Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) who gave the official name “death’s head” to the SS-
TV, when, on March 29, 1936, he addressed its members as such and approved the use
SS-TOTENKOPFVERBÄNDE
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