German-Jewish Diaspora

When the world shut its door on the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, there were some interesting proposals for where the Jews could relocate.

>Trujillo's Dominican Republic was willing to take in 150,000 Jews, but he wanted right-wing agrarian Jews. There weren't too many of these in Germany.
>Some Japanese officials, inspired both by Nazi Propaganda and the actions of Jacob Schiff during the Russo-Japanese War, thought of bringing a number of Jews to Manchuria. About 17,000 Jews were in Manchuria by 1940.
>The Japanese ambassador to Lithuania Chiune Sugihara, was deemed righteous among the nations for his actions during the war in which he enabled a great many Jews to emigrate
>There were no limits on the number of Jews who could go to Shanghai. As such about 20,000 Jews managed to make their way to Shanghai in the 1930s.
>The Dutch had no limits on immigration to the ABC islands in the Caribbean. Many Jews made their way to Curacao.
>Many Jews illegally migrated to mandatory Palestine.
>A number of Jews relocated to Switzerland, France, Britain, Belgium, etc


So lets say Hitler dies post-Munich but before he can start a war and Germany ends up an isolated North Korean style state. What sort of places would the many Jews of Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, and Slovakia end up? This is about 1.1 million people.
 
Why are you excluding OTL Endlösung? Even without Moustache Dolf, they were still nazis, you know.

Perhaps the real question is: would someone start a war to prevent that?
 
Why are you excluding OTL Endlösung? Even without Moustache Dolf, they were still nazis, you know.

Perhaps the real question is: would someone start a war to prevent that?

My understanding is that the Germans just wanted the Jews gone. Before the war, there were only so many Jews in Germany and there were ways to get rid of them. As the war raged the Germans came to control more Jewish populations and lost the means to get rid of them due to there being a war going on.


If the final solution were pursued, sadly I don't think anybody would take action to stop it.
 
My understanding is that the Germans just wanted the Jews gone. Before the war, there were only so many Jews in Germany and there were ways to get rid of them. As the war raged the Germans came to control more Jewish populations and lost the means to get rid of them due to there being a war going on.


If the final solution were pursued, sadly I don't think anybody would take action to stop it.

If Germany is really interested in getting rid of its Jews there are plenty of places for them to go to. The Germans might work a deal out with France to deposit their Jews in Madagascar like some had planned. If Germany doesn't have territories stolen from the Poles and Soviets, there would be less Jews in their territory, and as a result wouldn't be able to build as many concentration and or Death camps.
 
There were about 700,000-750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933. Perhaps half or a little more of them got out before the war started. Of course, some of them went to countries where they were later scooped up by the Germans. The majority of those that left were leaving with little more than the clothes on their back. The British were not letting any in Palestine, the Americans were not letting any Jews in and they were working as hard as possible to prevent any Jews from going to South and Central America (1). Even if the remaining 350,000 or so Jews in the Großdeutsches Reich could get out, where would they go? France, Holland, Poland, etc won't help. Haf there been any place willing to take penniless Jews many more would have left - exit visas could be obtained, the problem was entrance visas for someplace else.

(1) US immigration quotas established in the early 1920s would have allowed "Germans" and "Austrians" in in significant numbers between 1933 and 1939, however the quotas had specific quotas for "Hebrews" separate from the nationality quotas. However there were no quotas om immigration from the western hemisphere, so the State Department did not want Jews to go to Central and South America (and the Caribbean) as they assumed that many would then come to the USA from these countries which had no quotas. The desire of the State Department, and many in the USA and the government 1933-39 was that zero was the desired number of Jews to be allowed in (exceptions for folks like Einstein was grudgingly allowed).
 
If Germany is really interested in getting rid of its Jews there are plenty of places for them to go to. The Germans might work a deal out with France to deposit their Jews in Madagascar like some had planned. If Germany doesn't have territories stolen from the Poles and Soviets, there would be less Jews in their territory, and as a result wouldn't be able to build as many concentration and or Death camps.

Perhaps you should read about the Évian conference. Nobody wanted jews in significant numbers and the Madagascar plan was as good as a death sentence.
 
Perhaps you should read about the Évian conference. Nobody wanted jews in significant numbers and the Madagascar plan was as good as a death sentence.

Completely from hindsight one must wonder the power of antisemitism. I wonder what were they smoking? Who would not want well-educated, hard working, entrepreunial immigrants more than capable of not only paying taxes but a proven resource for science, art and business?

Could there be a POD in which, for sake of discussion, Argentina, recognizes this resource and decides to offer citizenship for any Jewish refugee? Or Imperial Japan, deciding Jews would be good for Manchuria?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
When the world shut its door on the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, there were some interesting proposals for where the Jews could relocate.

>Trujillo's Dominican Republic was willing to take in 150,000 Jews, but he wanted right-wing agrarian Jews. There weren't too many of these in Germany.
>Some Japanese officials, inspired both by Nazi Propaganda and the actions of Jacob Schiff during the Russo-Japanese War, thought of bringing a number of Jews to Manchuria. About 17,000 Jews were in Manchuria by 1940.
>The Japanese ambassador to Lithuania Chiune Sugihara, was deemed righteous among the nations for his actions during the war in which he enabled a great many Jews to emigrate
>There were no limits on the number of Jews who could go to Shanghai. As such about 20,000 Jews managed to make their way to Shanghai in the 1930s.
>The Dutch had no limits on immigration to the ABC islands in the Caribbean. Many Jews made their way to Curacao.
>Many Jews illegally migrated to mandatory Palestine.
>A number of Jews relocated to Switzerland, France, Britain, Belgium, etc


So lets say Hitler dies post-Munich but before he can start a war and Germany ends up an isolated North Korean style state. What sort of places would the many Jews of Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, and Slovakia end up? This is about 1.1 million people.

Didn't 400K of the 500K German Jews leave Germany proper before the war? Unfortunately, most of them went to nearby friendly countries that the Germans would conquer. So the world did not shut out the Jews until the war started, roughly speaking. The scenario you are calling for involves the French and others refusing the Jewish refugees prewar, and some other country who is willing to accept them. You just need some large nation with urban areas willing to accept the refugees. I am not 100% sure that a nation like Japan/Brazil would have turned down these highly skilled refugees in the late 1930's if France and other nations were not so accepting.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
My understanding is that the Germans just wanted the Jews gone. Before the war, there were only so many Jews in Germany and there were ways to get rid of them. As the war raged the Germans came to control more Jewish populations and lost the means to get rid of them due to there being a war going on.


If the final solution were pursued, sadly I don't think anybody would take action to stop it.

I have to go from memory here, but prewar, the Nazi terms were that you had to leave 90% of your assets behind. Seems your fare was paid out of the 10%. About 80% of the Jews were wise/lucky enough to leave. And this is why you get the crazy ideas like Madagascar. It was just a continuation of older policies. By June 1941, it had switched to the death groups which proved impractical from a labor perspective. By late 41, we see the industrialization of the process.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Could there be a POD in which, for sake of discussion, Argentina, recognizes this resource and decides to offer citizenship for any Jewish refugee? Or Imperial Japan, deciding Jews would be good for Manchuria?

People ask questions like this all the time. And the answer is that changing a single government policy is a trivially easy POD to do. There are literally dozens of POD's that would allow this to happen.
 
People ask questions like this all the time. And the answer is that changing a single government policy is a trivially easy POD to do. There are literally dozens of POD's that would allow this to happen.

One TL imagined the Uganda Scheme succeeding and Kenya becoming a Jewish state.

The result was that millions of Jews were able to escape to Kenya between 1934-1941. The only Jews who couldn't be saved were Soviet Jews massacred during Operation Barbarossa.

Had there been a single state that willingly accepted Jews, many millions could've been spared.

Completely from hindsight one must wonder the power of antisemitism. I wonder what were they smoking? Who would not want well-educated, hard working, entrepreunial immigrants more than capable of not only paying taxes but a proven resource for science, art and business?

A lot of it is envy combined with too many "Christ killers" stories.
 
Let's say that the Japanese are able to successfully make Manchuria a major site of Jewish immigration. Assuming that the Sino-Japanese war ends in a Japanese defeat it's possible that Manchuria would still end up coming under Soviet influence. With a much larger Jewish population I could see the Soviet authorities resettling the Manchurian Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
 
Let's say that the Japanese are able to successfully make Manchuria a major site of Jewish immigration. Assuming that the Sino-Japanese war ends in a Japanese defeat it's possible that Manchuria would still end up coming under Soviet influence. With a much larger Jewish population I could see the Soviet authorities resettling the Manchurian Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.

How many do you envision?
OTL there were some 24'000 in two years.

Even without the war they'll still have to traverse the whole of Russia: do you see the Soviets creating special transports for a question that doesn't concern them?
Otherwise, who's going to pay?
 
As far as I can tell about 50% of the Jewish population of Germany/Austria left before 1939. Very few of the Czechoslovak Jewish population which was approximately 350,000 left between 1938 and the incorporation of Czech lands in to the Reich and the founding of Slovakia. What this means is that as of spring 1939, there are roughly 600,000 Jews or so living in the boundaries of the Reich (not counting Jews in Slovakia). Even assuming you could move that number of people out of the Reich before the war breaks out in September, where do they go? (1) Nobody wants them, and if they go to anywhere in continental Europe (except Sweden, Finland, or Switzerland) leaving the Reich does them no good.

While saving another 600,000 human beings is a good thing, the Jews of continental Europe other than these Jews are doomed. While between 1939 and December, 1941 had the USA been willing to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied areas, or even allowed them to be sent to some neutral country in South/Central America, more could have been saved but that would require Skippy and friends to work overtime. The Nazis won't let Jews go to British controlled areas as that provides useful manpower to the enemy even if they go to Uganda etc. In any case any Nazi offers for release of Jews OTL were ransom deals for raw materials, or trucks etc which they Allies were not going buy in to. After all if they would not take the Jews "for free" why would they pay for them. (2)

(1) Look at what happened to the passengers on the MS St Louis (sailed May, 1939).
(2) While the argument that the best way to save Jews was to end the war as quickly as possible, thus don't divert bombing from "real" targets, has some merit, the reality is that even modest efforts to hit rail junctions and the camps would have saved significant numbers of folks. Frankly, it was a lack of desire to do anything as much as honest military logic. There were lots of bombing raids that could have been redirected with no negative effect.
 
As far as I can tell about 50% of the Jewish population of Germany/Austria left before 1939. Very few of the Czechoslovak Jewish population which was approximately 350,000 left between 1938 and the incorporation of Czech lands in to the Reich and the founding of Slovakia. What this means is that as of spring 1939, there are roughly 600,000 Jews or so living in the boundaries of the Reich (not counting Jews in Slovakia). Even assuming you could move that number of people out of the Reich before the war breaks out in September, where do they go? (1) Nobody wants them, and if they go to anywhere in continental Europe (except Sweden, Finland, or Switzerland) leaving the Reich does them no good.

While saving another 600,000 human beings is a good thing, the Jews of continental Europe other than these Jews are doomed. While between 1939 and December, 1941 had the USA been willing to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied areas, or even allowed them to be sent to some neutral country in South/Central America, more could have been saved but that would require Skippy and friends to work overtime. The Nazis won't let Jews go to British controlled areas as that provides useful manpower to the enemy even if they go to Uganda etc. In any case any Nazi offers for release of Jews OTL were ransom deals for raw materials, or trucks etc which they Allies were not going buy in to. After all if they would not take the Jews "for free" why would they pay for them. (2)

(1) Look at what happened to the passengers on the MS St Louis (sailed May, 1939).
(2) While the argument that the best way to save Jews was to end the war as quickly as possible, thus don't divert bombing from "real" targets, has some merit, the reality is that even modest efforts to hit rail junctions and the camps would have saved significant numbers of folks. Frankly, it was a lack of desire to do anything as much as honest military logic. There were lots of bombing raids that could have been redirected with no negative effect.

My OP is that war doesn't break out in 1939 and the Jewish population slowly trickles out of the lands the Reich controls.
 
@Jackson Lennock: OK now in 1939 you have maybe 600,000 Jews in Reich controlled lands. The word "trickle" is the operative word. The Jews who left Germany early on after Hitler took power managed to keep out with at last some of the finances, as time went on this stopped. Likewise any Jews who left Austria before the Anschluß got out in relatively good shape. As of 1939 Jews wishing to emigrate from Reich control leave as paupers. I expect that even those who leave will need to be financed by Jews from elsewhere in the diaspora, in terms of job guarantees, money for setting up etc. However, the main problem remains - where will all these Jews go?
 
@Jackson Lennock: OK now in 1939 you have maybe 600,000 Jews in Reich controlled lands. The word "trickle" is the operative word. The Jews who left Germany early on after Hitler took power managed to keep out with at last some of the finances, as time went on this stopped. Likewise any Jews who left Austria before the Anschluß got out in relatively good shape. As of 1939 Jews wishing to emigrate from Reich control leave as paupers. I expect that even those who leave will need to be financed by Jews from elsewhere in the diaspora, in terms of job guarantees, money for setting up etc. However, the main problem remains - where will all these Jews go?

THAT IS THE POINT OF THIS THREAD. :)
 
The only way you come up with enough money to relocate perhaps 600,000 Jews and find someplace to put them (and dumping them in some undeveloped spot with no housing or services does not count) beginning in 1939, and even assuming WWII never starts will require Skippy and the ASB battalion. The Jewish diaspora simply does not have that kind of money, and absolutely nobody wants those Jews. A few here and there, maybe even a few thousands, but 600,000. Nope, nada, etc. The level of antisemitism in the world in 1939 was pretty huge...
 
Philippine President Quezon wanted to relocate Jews in the Philippines. They did this OTL(around 1,200 saved between 1937-41) only limited upto the time the Japanese invaded the Philippines. If my reading is right Quezon wanted the Jews to populate Mindanao. Frieder-McNutt selection rescue plan was around 10,000 Jews.

This could probably increase upon 1946 since the granting of Visas to the Philippines was still approved by the US State Department. No Antisemitism in the Philippines.
 
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