ST LOUIS 1929

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aukepalmhof
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Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:28 am

ST LOUIS 1929

Post by aukepalmhof » Thu Nov 29, 2018 7:52 pm

Sierra Leone is one of the countries which is flooding the market with new issues, which are not worth the paper were she are printed on.
One of the new issues shows us the ST LOUIS and in the margin a Mississippi river steamer.

The ST LOUIS was built as a passenger-cargo vessel under yard no 670 by the Bremer Vulkan Werft in Vegesack near Bremen for the Hamburg Amerika Line (HAPAG), Hamburg.
16 June 1925 keel laid down.
02 August 1928 launched as the ST LOUIS.
Tonnage 16,732 gross, 9,637 net, dim. 174.90 x 22.10 x 8.66m. (draught), length bpp.165.7m.
Powered by four 6-cyl. MAN diesel engines each 3,000 hp, twin shafts, speed 16 knots.
Passenger accommodation for 270 first class, 287 second class and 413 tourist class.
March 1929 completed.

28 March 1929 she made her maiden voyage from Hamburg to New York, thereafter mostly used in the Nord Atlantic service between Hamburg to Halifax and New York.
In the autumn and winter made 16-17 days cruises to Madeira, Canarias Islands and Morocco.

MS ST.LOUIS was a German ocean liner. In 1939, she set off on a voyage in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany. They were denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada. The refugees were finally accepted in various European countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and France. Historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them died in death camps during World War II. The passengers' experience has been treated in film, opera, and fiction.

Background
Built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line, ST.LOUIS was a diesel-powered ship (as opposed to a diesel-fired steamer) and properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, but she is often known as SS ST.LOUIS. The ship was named after the city of ST.LOUIS, Missouri. (Her sistership, the MS MILWAUKEE, was also a diesel motor ship/motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line). ST.LOUIS regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia and New York and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira and Morocco. ST.LOUIS was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.

"Voyage of the Damned"
ST.LOUIS set sail from Hamburg to Cuba on May 13, 1939. The vessel under command of Captain Gustav Schröder was carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi ill-treatment of Jews in Germany (→ Kristallnacht, Racial policy of Nazi Germany). Captain Schröder was a non-Jewish German who went to great lengths to ensure dignified treatment for his passengers.
The passengers aboard ST.LOUIS had suffered abuse in Germany, but on board, they were treated very well, at the insistence of Captain Schröder. Food served included items subject to rationing in Germany, and childcare was available while parents dined. Dances and concerts were put on, and on Friday evenings, religious services were held in the dining room. A bust of Hitler was covered by a tablecloth. Swimming lessons took place in the on-deck pool. Lothar Molton, a boy traveling with his parents, said that the passengers thought of it as "a vacation cruise to freedom".
The ship dropped anchor at 04:00 on May 27 at the far end of the Havana Harbor but was denied entry to the usual docking areas. The Cuban government, headed by President Federico Laredo Brú, refused to accept the foreign refugees. Although passengers had previously purchased legal visas, they could not enter Cuba either as tourists (laws related to tourist visas had recently been changed) or as refugees seeking political asylum. On May 5, 1939, four months before World War II began, Havana abandoned its former pragmatic immigration policy and instead issued Decree 937, which "restricted entry of all foreigners except U.S. citizens requiring a bond of $500 and authorization by the Cuban secretaries of state and labor. Permits and visas issued before May 5 were invalidated retroactively. None of the passengers were aware that the Cuban government had retroactively invalidated their landing permits.
After five days in the harbor, only 29 passengers were allowed to disembark in Cuba. Twenty-two of them were Jews that had valid US visas; of the others, four were Spanish citizens and two were Cuban nationals, all with valid entry documents. The last was a medical evacuee who, after attempting to commit suicide, was taken to a hospital in
Telephone records show American officials Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, and Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury had made some efforts to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. Their actions, together with efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were not successful.

Prohibited from landing in Cuba, ST.LOUIS and the remaining 907 refugees headed towards the United States. Captain Schröder circled off the coast of Florida, hoping for permission to enter the United States. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, advised Roosevelt not to accept the Jews, however. Captain Schröder considered running aground along the coast to allow the refugees to escape, but, acting on Cordell Hull's instructions, US Coast Guard vessels shadowed the ship and prevented such a move.
After ST.LOUIS was turned away from the United States, a group of academics and clergy in Canada tried to persuade Canada's Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to provide sanctuary to the ship's passengers, as it was only two days from Halifax, Nova Scotia. But Canadian immigration official Frederick Blair, hostile to Jewish immigration, persuaded the prime minister on June 9 not to intervene. In 2000, Blair's nephew apologized to the Jewish people for his uncle's action.
The situation of the vessel deteriorated as Captain Schröder negotiated and schemed to find them a safe haven. At one point he formulated plans to wreck the ship on the British coast to force the passengers to be taken as refugees. He refused to return the ship to Germany until all the passengers had been given entry to some other country. US officials worked with Britain and European nations to find refuge for the travelers in Europe. The ship returned to Europe, docking at the Port of Antwerp (Belgium) on June 17, 1939, with 907 passengers.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to take 288 (32%) of the passengers, who disembarked and traveled to the UK via other steamers. After much negotiation by Schröder, the remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp; 224 (25%) were accepted by France, 214 (23.59%) by Belgium, and 181 (20%) by the Netherlands. The ship returned to Hamburg without any passengers. The following year, after the Nazi German invasions of Belgium, France and the Netherlands in May 1940, all the Jews in those countries were at renewed risk, including the recent refugees.
Based on the survival rates for Jews in various countries, historians estimate that 180 of ST.LOUIS refugees in France, 152 of those in Belgium, and 60 of those in the Netherlands survived the Holocaust. Including the passengers who landed in England, of the original 936 refugees (one man died during the voyage), roughly 709 survived the war and 227 did not. More detailed research tracing each passenger has determined that 254 of those who returned to continental Europe were murdered during the Holocaust:

Of the 620 ST.LOUIS passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war. Of the 288 passengers sent to Britain, the vast majority were alive at war's end
Legacy
After the war, Captain Gustav Schröder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1993, Schröder was posthumously named as one of the Righteous among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. A display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of the voyage of the MS ST.LOUIS. The Hamburg Museum features a display and a video about ST.LOUIS in its exhibits about the history of shipping in the city. In 2009, a special exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia entitled "Ship of Fate" explored the Canadian connection to the tragic voyage. The display is now a traveling exhibit in Canada.

In 2011 a memorial monument called the Wheel of Conscience, was produced by the Canadian Jewish Congress, designed by Daniel Libeskind with graphic design by David Berman and Trevor Johnston. The memorial is a polished stainless steel wheel. Symbolizing the policies that turned away more than 900 Jewish refugees, the wheel incorporates four inter-meshing gears each showing a word to represent factors of exclusion: antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, and hatred. The back of the memorial is inscribed with the passenger list.[24] It was first exhibited in 2011 at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Canada's national immigration museum in Halifax. After a display period, the sculpture was shipped to its fabricators, Soheil Mosun Limited, in Toronto for repair and refurbishment.
In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized in a ceremony attended by Deputy Secretary Bill Burns and 14 survivors of the incident. The survivors presented a proclamation of gratitude to various European countries for accepting some of the ship’s passengers. A signed copy of Senate Resolution 111, recognizing June 6, 2009 as the 70th anniversary of the incident, was delivered to the Department of State Archives.
In January 2017, software engineer Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz set up a Twitter account which tweeted the name of each passenger who was not allowed to disembark and subsequently killed. The format of each tweet included the passenger's name, the sentence "The US turned me away at the border in 1939" and the location where each was killed.
In May 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the Government of Canada would offer a formal apology in the country's House of Commons for its role in the fate of the ship's passengers. The apology was issued on November 7
Later career
The MS ST.LOUIS was adapted as a German naval accommodation ship from 1940 to 1944. She was heavily damaged by the Allied bombings at Kiel on August 30, 1944, was beached and refloated and repaired in 1946 where after she was used as a hotel ship at the Altonaer Landungsbrücke in Hamburg. She was later sold and towed to Bremerhaven and was scrapped there in 1952.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
Sierra Leone 2018 Le 40,000 sgMS?, scott?
Attachments
st louis 1929 photo.jpg
2018 St Louis.jpg

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