Experimental Blog # 215

Quotations from  "The Great Departure - Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World" by Tara Zahra

"Between 55 and 58 million Europeans moved to North and South America in the period 1846-1940. < > The great departure from Eastern Europe was not unique: millions were on the move in other parts of the world as well. Between 48 and 52 million people, mostly from India and Southern China, moved to Southeast Asia and to islands in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific between 1846 and 1940. Another 46-51 million people left northeastern Asia and Russia for Manchuria, Siberia, Central Asia, and Japan."

"Well before the Nazi conquest of the East, a broad consensus had developed - among Western diplomats, Zionists, humanitarian organizations, and East European officials, as well as ordinary Jews desperate for a better life - that the "solution" to the so-called "Jewish problem" would entail the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. < > When the Nazis successfully made Jews disappear, under the pretext that they were being "relocated" to the distant East, it is hardly surprising that so few East Europeans protested: the notion of emigration as a "humanitarian" solution to the "Jewish problem" had long been established, and it helped make the departure of Jews palatable to their neighbors."

" "It must be frankly recognized that the larger Eastern European problem is basically a Jewish problem," he{President Franklin Roosevelt} maintained in January 1939."

"But in order to understand why so little was done to save Jewish refugees, even once the immediate menace to their lives was apparent, it is necessary to understand the logic of population politics in the 1930s, itself an outgrowth of decades of emigration policies. That logic envisioned the large-scale emigration of Jews as a "humanitarian" solution to the "Jewish problem" in Europe. Well before the Nazis occupied Eastern Europe, moreover, many Polish, Czech, Romanian, and Hungarian officials and citizens had been hoping {and planning} for the evacuation of Jews from their territory. It is therefore hardly surprising that there was so little organized protest when Hitler fulfilled these fantasies."