In the 1930s, central and east-European Jews were desperately attempting to flee Nazi persecution. In July of 1938, Roosevelt called a conference at Evian to explore possible resettlement options. Delegates from thirty-one countries assembled at Evian. Only one, San Domingo, suggested it might be willing to accept Jewish refugees--with money. One Nazi newspaper concluded, “The Evian Conference serves to justify Germany's policy against Jewry.” In November of that same year, Goebbels orchestrated a nationwide pogrom which became known as “Kristalnacht.”
On May 17,1939, Britain published a new White Paper which repudiated all its former commitments to establishing a national Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ten days earlier, a shipload of 937 Jewish refugees had set sail from Hamburg to Havana. The Cuban government, under pressure from Britain, rescinded the visas it had issued, and the ship was refused landing. Many of the passengers threatened suicide. Cuba was not moved.
Trailed by the American Coast Guard, the “St. Louis” drifted in Florida waters. It was only when J.O.I.N.T. guaranteed to sponsor the refugees did France, Britain, Belgium and Holland each agree to temporarily admit a limited number. The refuge they offered was, indeed, temporarily, for within 13 months, the refugees (excluding those lucky enough to have been accepted by Britain) were back in the same “boat.”…Hitler struck the match, and the western democracies locked the exits.
In the spring of 1945, the Allies penetrated into the ruins of what had been the Third Reich and “liberated” those still stumbling among its rubble…Towards the end of the war, Roosevelt had convened another conference. Representatives of forty-four countries laid the groundwork for U.N.R.R.A. (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency) By the end of the war U.N.R.R.A. was established and within little more than a year helped to repatriate and to resettle most of the displaced people who had homes to which they wanted to return. However, there were D.P.s who did not want to go home.
Most of them were Nazi collaborators who dared not return. The rest were Jews. An Allied military directive was issued assigning the D.P.s to camps according to country of origin. This policy threw Jewish survivors together with, among others, unrepentant Ukrainians and anti-Semitic Poles. Initially, the survivors were too ill and exhausted to challenge the new authorities.
When they gained the strength to do so, the military stood on principle. Would not segregation (the segregation practiced in their own country) be an endorsement of Nazi racial policy? So the survivors of death camps were confined behind barbed-wire fences under the surveillance of armed guards. (Ostensibly, to prevent them from “looting.” The Germans were being protected from the Jews.) Just beyond the fences German and Austrian burghers continued to live in their homes, to tend their gardens, to travel without harassment, and to despise the victims they had failed to destroy.
Teams of delegates from Jewish relief agencies raised a ruckus that was heard in the White House. Truman appointed Earl Harrison to conduct an investigation. An excerpt from the Harrison Report read: “…As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentrations camps in large numbers under our own military guards instead of the S. S. troops.
One is led to wonder whether or the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following, or at least condoning Nazi policy.” First and foremost, Harrison urged, the Jews must have their own camps. Truman responded by instructing Eisenhower to give priority to those who had suffered most. He cabled: “We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.”
Another member of the high command reacted to the Harrison Report. In a diary entry dated September 1945 he wrote: One of the chief complaints of (Earl Harrison) is that the D.P.s are kept in camp under guard. Of course, Harrison is ignorant of the fact that if they were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camp, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged…Harrison and his ilk believe that the D.P. is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” This comes from the journal of General George Patton.
Though Patton's reaction was extreme, it was not unique. American officers, bringing their prejudices from home, simply filed and ignored directives that called for humane treatment of the disoriented D.P.s. It was in this atmosphere and under these conditions, that a thirty-four-year-old Jewish lieutenant from Chicago named Albert Hutler was appointed displaced persons' officer for the three-hundred mile region of southwest Germany. Educated as a lawyer and trained as a social worker, Hutler balanced military demands with the exigencies of traumatized people.
