Schroeder Gustav

Schroeder, Gustav Gustav Schroeder was captain of the fateful voyage of the St. Louis, which, in May 1939, set sail from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, with more than 900 Jewish passengers aboard. The Jewish passengers who had applied for US visas and had to wait until their quota numbers became valid before they could enter the United States, were hoping to stay in Cuba until that time. Many of them had already been arrested in the wake of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and had to leave Nazi Germany in order to prevent being arrested again. The hopeful passengers who had bought Cuban landing permits and transit visas from a Cuban official, were not aware that these documents were invalidated by Cuba’s president several days before the ship sailed. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana on May 27, 1939, only 22 Jewish passengers with valid US visas were allowed to disembark. The others were refused entry. Another Jewish passenger tried to commit suicide and was taken to a hospital in Havana. The plight of the ship’s passengers was reported in the media, and Jewish organizations tried to negotiate on behalf of the passengers but in vain. The pariah ship was forced to turn back to Europe. However, knowing that his passengers risked being arrested if they returned to Germany, Captain Schroeder decided not to head straight back to a German harbor. Refusing to return to Germany until he had found a safe haven for his Jewish passengers, the Captain stalled on the voyage back, and took a route sailing so close to the Florida shore, that the passengers could see the lights of Miami, in the hope that the United States would agree to let the desperate Jewish refugees land.. Schroeder even went so far as to develop a contingency plan by which the St. Louis was to be spectacularly shipwrecked near the English coast in order to force the British authorities to take some action. Finally, however, a solution was found, and the passengers were allowed to disembark in Antwerp, after Belgium, Great Britain, and France had come to an agreement with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to each take in a certain number of people. Belgium and France were occupied by Germany in 1940 and the passengers, who had landed there were again under Nazi rule, but since they already had immigration quota numbers, most of them were able to reach the United States before immigration of Jews was suspended by the Nazi authorities. It was, thus, primarily thanks to Captain Schroeder’s courage and determination not to abandon his Jewish passengers to their fate that many of them were able to escape the Nazi death trap. On March 11, 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Captain Gustav Schroeder as Righteous Among the Nations