The Unwanted

Historian Michael Dobb's new book, "The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between", is one of the best works of non-fiction I've read in a while. Dobbs writes about the fight to get Jewish refugees into the United States in the years right before WW2 (and extending into 1941), using the plight of Jews from the small German village of Kippenheim as they realised what was happening to them.Kippenheim is located in the German area of Baden. It's not far from the French/German border of the Rhine River. (Dobbs helpfully puts maps of both the village and it's location in Germany). Jews and Christians lived peacefully with each other for generations. The town's synagogue was right down the street from the Catholic Church. However, by the mid-1930's, as the Nazis consolidated their hold on the government and the people, Kippenheim's Jews began to feel the regime's oppression. Some residents - perhaps more omniscient than others - left Kippenheim for safer places. But by 1938 and the Kristallnacht pogrom, Jews all over Germany woke up to the deep threat of the Nazis. Plans were made to leave Germany, but those plans entailed getting approvals from nations to emigrate to and approvals to leave Germany. (It was still the official German policy to encourage Jewish emigration rather than extermination. That came later.)Dobbs details three or four families from the village and the attempts they made to "get out". Many were successful and were able to leave before and slightly after the breakout of war on September 3, 1939. But most of the remaining Jews were sent to Gurs - a holding camp in the southwest part of France. From there, attempts by United States charities and government entities to save these few thousands of German Jews ( including Kippenheim's contingent) and send them to safety in the US or Mexico or Martinique.By concentrating on the fates of a hundred or so German Jews in the morass of Gurs and Marseilles, and interspersing the activities being carried on by the US to both save them from being "sent East" OR foil that attempt because of prejudice by some American officials, Michael Dobbs has delivered a dandy of a book. He's an incredibly smooth writer and he seems to know that readers appreciate maps and pictures and charts because he includes them in the text. His story of the village of Kippenheim is complete when he looks at the village today.(By the way, I have always thought that this Michael Dobbs was the same author who wrote "House of Cards" and other works of fiction. I just thought he was a very prolific writer. But they're not the same guy though they may be cousins.)

My mother was a refugee from Germany in 1941 prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This book explained how the Jews of Germany were treated between Crystal night in 1938 and December 7, 1941. Incredible research was done to tell the exact story. I loved the book so much I have sent multiple copies to friends and relatives. My heart broke many times as I read the cruelty that these educated and smart members of society were treated. I also felt I was actually part of the story.

This is the interplay of German, Vichy French, and American policy on the fate of German Jews from 1938-42. Michael Dobbs, a former Washington Post reporter, is using those journalistic skills as a staff researcher/writer for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Dobbs focuses on the widely varied fates of about four extended families from a German village on the edge of the Black Forest, just across the Rhine from Alsace in France. Chapters alternate focus between approachable individuals and broad national policies of the three countries.Some of the village's Jewish residents made it to freedom in the U.S. or other countries through a range of different routes; others perished in Germany, or in detention camps in southern France or Auschwitz. Dobbs follows each person through the agony of seeking visas and ships before or after war broke out.Starting in the 1980's, there have been many books arguing whether FDR could have done more to save the Jews of Europe. For a quarter century, those were based on cherry-picked facts to provide a veneer of objectivity to "prove" strongly held beliefs, pro or con.Only since 2013 have popular histories based on deep dive research brought an objective view of the competing interests that FDR dealt with. It was not always pretty, but it did retain his viability to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.First was "FDR and the Jews," a 2013 broad overview written by American University scholars Breitman and Lichtman. Then "Rescue Board" by Holocaust Museum historian Rebecca Erbelding, covering FDR administration rescue efforts in 1944-45. Finally, this book, The Unwanted, covering the late 1930's to 1942.All three books are significant advances on the topic -- based on in-depth research and more objective in showing cause and effect.

Did FDR betray the Jews of Europe? Did he turn a blind eye toward the Nazi "Final Solution" by preventing thousands of Jewish refugees from entering the United States? Clearly, there is ample evidence that President Roosevelt resisted pressure to admit German Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and on more than one occasion. But the context in which he made those decisions suggests he had little choice. That's one of the dominant themes of Michael Dobbs's illuminating new book on the Holocaust, The Unwanted.Dobbs's subject is the immigration policy of the United States, focusing on the years 1938 to 1943. These years spanned the period between Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938) and October 23, 1941, when Reichsführer "Heinrich Himmler issued a decree banning Jewish emigration from the Reich." The official Nazi practice from that date onward was systematic annihilation rather than expulsion.Did FDR betray the Jews of Europe?Americans tend to seek simple answers to complex questions. But that's not possible in evaluating the response of the United States government to the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Many believe that FDR deliberately and callously rejected efforts to admit thousands of refugees on the St. Louis and other ships and that he repeatedly refused to increase immigration quotas that would permit many more to be saved. But did FDR betray the Jews? Dobbs makes it abundantly clear that the President had little or no choice in these matters. Four out of five Americans opposed increased immigration; many were especially hostile to Jewish refugees. And Congress was dominated by isolationists, many of them overtly anti-Semitic. FDR was convinced that any effort to circumvent the immigration quotas laid down in decades of restrictive policies would trigger an effort by Congress to restrict the inflow of immigrants even more harshly.For FDR, the priority was to steer the United States toward its inevitable place among the Allies before Pearl Harbor and, after that, to keep Congress from shrinking the immigration quotas. Despite often intense pressure from his wife, the organized American Jewish community, and sympathetic allies such as the Quakers, he did in fact decline to open the rolls wider. But that practice must be seen in the wider context of the times. FDR believed the country was doing the most it possibly could to accommodate Jewish refugees.The United States admitted more Jewish refugees than any other country except PalestineAs Dobbs reports, from 1933 to 1942, "162,575 'Hebrew immigrants' had been admitted to the United States since Hitler's rise to power in Germany. A hundred thousand had arrived in the three years following Kristallnacht. Adding visitor visas, the total number of self-identified Hebrew admissions for the decade came to 204,085." This number was far greater than that of any other country. "The only territory that accepted more Jews than the United States during the same decade was British-administered Palestine."It's well known that the US State Department under Cordell Hull (1933-1944) was riddled with anti-Semitism. Clearly, some of the consular officials who served on the front lines in Europe in vetting visa applicants were themselves deeply prejudiced and dragged their feet when Jews appeared before them. But Dobbs reports that others played key roles in facilitating the escape of German Jews. Similarly, some officials based in Washington used every bureaucratic trick in the book to slow down or halt the admission of refugees from the Nazis. But others weighed in in support of the Jews, and often with success, sometimes with strong support from the President himself. It's clear that, whatever else might be said of FDR's actions, he was not acting dishonorably or in any way that might be termed prejudiced. To the question, Did FDR betray the Jews?, the direct answer is No.Forty-one individual human beings caught up in the HolocaustTo bring his subject down to human scale, Dobbs illustrates the impact of the rapidly shifting currents of US immigration policy on the tiny Jewish community of a village called Kippenheim, near the French border in western Germany. In 1933, 144 Jews lived there among a total population of about 1,800. By the end of the decade, only forty-one remained in the village. And Dobbs keeps them all squarely in his sights as he traces American policy through those years.A teenage girl survived. Millions didn't.The Unwanted opens and closes through the eyes of Hedy Wachenheimer. Fourteen years old, she witnessed the madness unleashed throughout Germany by Kristallnacht. Although "she was used to being treated like a pariah," that event proved to be a watershed. Her life and that of her family and friends was never the same afterward. Yet through good fortune and the resolute action of loving parents, Hedy not only survived but, six years after fleeing Germany, she returned in an American military uniform as a translator for the Occupation.Because her parents had forced her to leave on a Kindertransport to England (May 18, 1939), Hedy was among the survivors of Kippenheim's Jewish community. One hundred had left the village before her, although many simply moved to larger towns and cities and were later sent to the death camps. But most of those who remained after that event were not so lucky. Thirty-one were gassed at Auschwitz. They were among the 6,500 Jews deported from the state of Baden to concentration camps in unoccupied France in October 1940. "Roughly one in four of the deportees died [there] . . ., many from typhus or malnutrition. Four out of ten were deported to Auschwitz. Eleven percent found refuge overseas, mostly in the United States. A further 12 percent, mainly children and elderly women, succeeded in hiding out in France until the end of the war."About the authorMichael Dobbs is best known on both sides of the Atlantic as the author of a book called House of Cards, on which both the British and American hit TV shows were based. At various times he has been involved in politics, journalism, advertising, and public speaking. He holds a doctorate from Harvard and Tufts Universities and sits in Britain's House of Lords.

Through the eyes of residents of Kippenheim, a German village not far from the French border, Michael Dobbs illuminates the fate of the Jewish population under Nazi policies and -- for those unable to leave in time -- in concentration camps in France. We follow individuals as they try to navigate the twists and turns of increasingly restrictive U.S. immigration policies -- and the stories are often heartbreaking. Some of my relatives from Germany were also interned in French concentration camps in 1940; later to be deported to Auschwitz, and I am so grateful to read this important book. Dobbs is very knowledgeable and tells this history in a clear and compelling way.