The exodus of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s has received far more attention from historians, social scientists, and demographers than many other migrations and persecutions in Europe. However, as a result of the overwhelming attention that has been given to the Holocaust within the historiography of Europe and the Second World War, the issues surrounding the flight of people from Nazi Germany prior to 1939 have been seen as Vorgeschichte (pre-history), implicating the Western European democracies and the United States as bystanders only in the impending tragedy. Based on a comparative analysis of national case studies, this volume deals with the challenges that the pre-1939 movement of refugees from Germany and Austria posed to the immigration controls in the countries of interwar Europe. Although Europe takes center-stage, this volume also looks beyond, to the Middle East, Asia and America. This global perspective outlines the constraints under which European policy makers (and the refugees) had to make decisions. By also considering the social implications of policies that became increasingly protectionist and nationalistic, and bringing into focus the similarities and differences between European liberal states in admitting the refugees, it offers an important contribution to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices.

Greg Burgess's important new study explores the short life of the High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming from Germany, from its creation by the League of Nations in October 1933 to the resignation of High Commissioner, James G. McDonald, in December 1935. The book relates the history of the first stage of refugees from Germany through the prism of McDonald and the High Commission. It analyses the factors that shaped the Commission's formation, the undertakings the Commission embarked upon and its eventual failure owing to external complications. The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany argues that, in spite of the Commission's failure, the refugees from Nazi Germany and the High Commission's work mark a turn in conceptions of international humanitarian responsibilities when a state defies standards of proper behaviour towards its citizens. From this point on, it was no longer considered sufficient or acceptable for states to respect the sovereign rights of another if the rights of citizens were being violated. Greg Burgess discusses this idea, amongst others, in detail as part of what is a crucial volume for all scholars and students of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and modern Jewish history.

German Jews and Migration to the United States, 1933–1945 is a collection of first-person accounts, many previously unpublished, that document the flight and exile of German Jews from Nazi Germany to the USA,. The authors of the letters and memoirs included in this collection share two important characteristics: They all had close ties to Munich, the Bavarian capital, and they all emigrated to the USA, though sometimes via detours and/or after stays of varying lengths in other places of refuge. Selected to represent a wide range of exile experiences, these testimonies are carefully edited, extensively annotated, and accompanied by biographical introductions to make them accessible to readers, especially those who are new to the subject. These autobiographical sources reveal the often-traumatic experiences and consequences of forced migration, displacement, resettlement, and new beginnings. In addition, this book demonstrates that migration is not only a process by which groups and individuals relocate from one place to another but also a dynamic of transmigration affected by migrant networks and the complex relationships between national policies and the agency of migrants.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been 'solved' and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a 'forty years' crisis' for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories focusses on exiles and forced migrants in British colonies and dominions in Africa or Asia and in Commonwealth countries. The contributions deal with aspects such as legal status and internment, rescue and relief, identity and belonging, the Central European encounter with the colonial and post-colonial world, memories and generations or knowledge transfers and cultural representations in writing, painting, architecture, music and filmmaking. The volume covers refugee destinations and the situation on arrival, reorientation–and very often further migration after the Second World War–in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Palestine, Shanghai, Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand. Contributors are: Rony Alfandary, Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Albrecht Dümling, Patrick Farges, Brigitte Mayr, Michael Omasta, Jyoti Sabharwal, Sarah Schwab, Ursula Seeber, Andrea Strutz, Monica Tempian, Jutta Vinzent, Paul Weindling, and Veronika Zwerger.

Julius Fein examines the French response to the large number of German refugees between 1933 and 1938. Fein demonstrates how the Quai d’Orsay sought a compromise between the Republican canon, which said France must help the persecuted, and the factors that limited its willingness to accept refugees, including economic depression, mass unemployment, anti-Semitism, and anti-German sentiment.

This book presents a multidimensional case study of international human rights in the immediate post-Second World War period, and the way in which complex refugee problems created by the war were often in direct competition with strategic interests and national sovereignty. The case study is the clandestine immigration of Jewish refugees from Italy to Palestine in 1945–1948, which was part of a British–Zionist conflict over Palestine, involving strategic and humanitarian attitudes. The result was a clear subjection of human rights considerations to strategic and political interests.

An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

This book investigates the first time Ireland, with an autonomous legislative parliament, met with large inward migration in the modern era. In 1933, Ireland was a young state in its turbulent teens attempting to establish itself on the international stage. The people were scarred by recent memories of revolution, a War of Independence and a civil war, but they had lived through 10 years of relative peace. Two influential statesmen came to power in their respective countries: de Valera in Ireland and Hitler in Germany. Due to the latter, a large scale movement of people began. Ireland, under the leadership of de Valera, with the civil service established before him and a diverse population living there, had an unprecedented inward migratory issue to address. This book looks at the role of the civil service at home and abroad, its development and implementation of government policy and its involvement with international efforts to address the movement of German-speaking exiles fleeing the expanding National Socialist territory. It also explores the experiences of people around Ireland as they learn about the people fleeing and their responses to them. This study lays bare the foundation stone in the history of Ireland’s policy and public opinion toward inward migration, and allows us to understand the treatment of and reaction towards migration today. The impact of that fledgling refugee policy as examined here continues to echo in the current experiences of those fleeing persecution and war and those set to receive them.

This book provides the first dedicated study of the Evian Conference of July 1938, an international initiative called by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While on the surface the conference appeared as an attempt to alleviate the distress faced by Jews being forced out of Germany and Austria, in reality it only served to demonstrate that the nations of the world were not willing to accept Jews as refugees. Since the Holocaust, a generally-held assumption has been that the Evian Conference represented a lost opportunity to save Germany’s Jews, and that the conference failed to rescue the Jews of Europe. In this study, Paul Bartrop argues that in fact it did not fail when measured against the original reasons for which it was called. Exposing many of the myths surrounding the meeting, this work addresses a glaring lacuna in the literature of the Holocaust, and places the so-called 'failure' of the Evian Conference into its proper context.