In June 1939, a German ocean liner called the MS St. Louis sailed slowly along the coast of North America. Most of its 937 passengers were Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and they were looking for any country that would let them land. Cuba turned them away. The United States turned them away. Canada turned them away. The ship returned to Europe, and after Germany conquered much of the continent, 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. To understand how that happened, you need to understand both the Nazi campaign against Europe's Jews and the antisemitism that shaped decisions here in Canada.
Antisemitism in Canada in the 1930s
Antisemitism is hostility, prejudice or discrimination directed at Jewish people. In the 1920s and 1930s it was widespread and often open in Canada. McGill University set higher admission standards for Jewish applicants from 1926 and limited Jewish students in medicine. Many hotels, resorts, beaches, golf clubs and neighbourhoods excluded Jews, sometimes with signs. Property deeds could contain restrictive covenants forbidding sale to Jews or other minorities. Banks, law firms, department stores and hospitals often would not hire Jewish workers or doctors; Montreal's Jewish community opened the Jewish General Hospital in 1934 partly so Jewish doctors could practise. Fascist groups such as Adrien Arcand's spread antisemitic propaganda, and in Toronto the Swastika Clubs and the Christie Pits riot of 1933 showed how quickly hatred could turn violent.
From persecution to genocide
- 1933: Hitler's Nazi Party takes power in Germany. Jews are pushed out of government jobs, professions and public life, and Jewish businesses are boycotted.
- 1935: the Nuremberg Laws strip German Jews of citizenship and forbid marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
- November 9–10, 1938: in the attacks known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), Nazi mobs burn synagogues, smash Jewish shops and homes and kill Jewish people; up to 30,000 Jewish men are sent to concentration camps.
- 1939–1941: after Germany invades Poland, Jews in occupied lands are forced into overcrowded ghettos. After Germany invades the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units shoot Jews in mass shootings.
- January 20, 1942: at the Wannsee Conference, senior Nazi officials coordinate the "Final Solution", their name for the plan to murder all of Europe's Jews. Jews are deported by train to killing centres such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
- 1944–1945: as Allied armies advance, prisoners are forced on death marches. Soviet troops reach Auschwitz on January 27, 1945; other camps are liberated in the spring of 1945.
Canada's response: closed doors
As Jews tried desperately to escape, Canada made it almost impossible for them to come. Immigration was already restricted during the Depression, but officials applied the rules especially strictly to Jewish refugees. Frederick Charles Blair, director of the Immigration Branch, firmly opposed Jewish immigration, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King feared that admitting refugees would anger voters, particularly in Quebec, and threaten national unity. At the Évian Conference in July 1938, called to discuss refugees from Nazi Germany, Canada made no commitment to accept more. In their study None Is Too Many, historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper found that Canada admitted fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945, one of the worst records of any refugee-receiving country. Their title comes from the reply they report an unnamed senior official gave in early 1945 when asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war: "none is too many".
The MS St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939. When Cuba refused to honour most passengers' landing papers and the United States also refused them, a group of prominent Canadians in Toronto urged King in June 1939 to offer the refugees sanctuary. Blair and Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe opposed it, and the government did nothing. The ship returned to Europe, where Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each took some passengers. After German armies overran western Europe in 1940, 254 of them were murdered. On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized in the House of Commons for Canada's refusal.
Liberation, survivors and change after the war
- Liberation: Canadian troops liberated the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands on April 12, 1945, freeing several hundred prisoners. Canadian soldiers, airmen and medical staff also helped care for survivors after British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. Many Canadians came home determined that people should know what they had seen.
- Survivors in Canada: as Canada slowly opened its doors after 1947, roughly 35,000 to 40,000 Holocaust survivors settled here, including 1,123 Jewish orphans brought between 1947 and 1949 through the War Orphans Project, supported by the Canadian Jewish Congress. Survivors rebuilt their lives and later spent decades teaching Canadians about the Holocaust through their testimony.
- Human rights: a Canadian law professor, John Humphrey, wrote the first draft of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948. Ontario's Racial Discrimination Act (1944) banned signs and notices that discriminated by race or creed, and in 1945 an Ontario court in Re Drummond Wren refused to enforce a covenant barring sale of land to Jews.
- Laws against hate: in 1970 Parliament added offences to the Criminal Code against advocating genocide and promoting hatred against identifiable groups, after a committee studied the spread of antisemitic and racist propaganda.
- Remembrance: Parliament made Yom ha-Shoah a national Holocaust Memorial Day in 2003, and the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa opened on September 27, 2017.