It has long been an axiom of historical writing on the Holocaust that the liberal states of western Europe did not do enough to help refugees from Nazi Germany during the run-up to the outbreak of World War II. Particular criticism has been made of the failure of the Évian conference of July 1938 to achieve any coordinated international response to the Third Reich's increasing persecution of German Jews. Worse still was the use of internment camps against antifascist refugees in the Netherlands in 1938-39, in France in 1939-40, and in Britain in 1940-41. This culminated in the notorious Arandora Star incident in July 1940, when a ship being used to deport German and Italian refugees and POWs from Britain to Canada was sunk by a German torpedo with the loss of more than seven hundred lives. Both Arthur Koestler and Hannah Arendt made it clear that those forced to wander Europe in the 1930s in search of a new home were typically regarded not only by the Nazis, but by policy makers in the host democratic countries, as the “scum of the earth.”

Without denying the considerable element of truth that lies behind this picture, the new volume of essays edited by Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore offers a more nuanced view, one that allows for comparisons between the strategies pursued by a number of different liberal states in the 1930s, both inside and outside Europe, and for a recognition of the kind of constraints, domestic and international, under which they had to operate. The range of countries investigated—Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as well as parts of the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas—is impressive and allows for the development of a genuinely global and transnational perspective. Thus, as the volume makes clear, in addition to comparing administrative practices in different national settings, one also needs to look at how they related to each other. In particular the existence of a huge range of formal and informal cross-border agencies and networks of communication demonstrates that decisions were rarely made in a national context only. In some countries, moreover, regional factors also have to be taken into consideration, as policy was devolved away from central government to local authorities. This applied especially in the case of Denmark and the Netherlands, but less so in Switzerland, where, according to Regula Ludi, “the federal authorities continuously curtailed cantonal room for manoeuvre” (p. 98).

As the editors establish in their introduction, each western European nation responded differently to the refugee challenge of the 1930s. Furthermore, the work of comparison is made more difficult “by the fact that there was no single policy in any country, but an agglomeration of measures related to citizenship, residence, entry and employment” (p. 7). Even so, there were a number of important commonalities, based in part on the legacy of older liberal norms and values that proved surprisingly resilient, especially where political refugees were concerned. Jews seeking shelter from persecution were not looked upon so kindly, being generally regarded as “unwanted” migrants rather than people forced to leave their country against their will. In many cases they were denied visas by western consular officials operating in Germany or Austria, or—in instances where visas were still not required to cross particular frontiers—were refused entry at the border for having a “J”-stamp in their passports. Deportation of illegal Jewish immigrants or those who had outstayed visa permits was less common, partly because sending them back to Nazi Germany was often ruled out by government officials on humanitarian grounds, partly because progressive public opinion was capable of mobilizing opposition to deportations in countries that still had a free press, and partly because sending “uninvited” refugees on to other states without the requisite papers risked diplomatic embarrassments and reprisals. Nonetheless, Belgium was planning a mass expulsion of illegal entrants when war was declared in September 1939, France and the Netherlands had established camps to deter further asylum seekers, and all liberal states reserved the right to deny entry or permanent residency to aliens, including those who had genuine fear of persecution in their home country.

Even where policy became more relaxed and tolerant, as it did in Britain in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, governments were at pains to make it clear that refugees would have to support themselves or rely on private charity; under no circumstances could they become a burden on the public purse. Jewish refugees, where they were granted temporary asylum, often received this on inferior terms to non-Jewish persecutees. This in turn reflected fears about rising levels of domestic anti-Semitism, coupled with protectionist attitudes toward national labor markets and traditional hostility in conservative circles toward left-wing aliens and especially left-wing Jews. Even so, Caestecker and Moore partly revise the Koestler/Arendt view by suggesting that the move toward greater restrictionism in the 1930s “has to be seen primarily as a continuation of the policies designed to counter the effects of economic recession” rather than as evidence of a shared, toxic revulsion toward those arriving stateless and penniless from Nazi-dominated central Europe (p. 315).

In most cases, then, the western democracies did not receive Jewish or antifascist refugees on their own merits. Where limited numbers were allowed in, this was only “to keep up the appearance of being liberal regimes” (p. 324). By 1938-39 those Jews still living within the expanded borders of the Third Reich became increasingly desperate to leave. Some made exceptional decisions, such as agreeing to send their children unaccompanied to countries willing to take them in, or seeking refuge in Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that still allowed entry to German Jews without visas. Occasionally there were “good news” stories, such as the fate of those refugees on the St. Louis in May-June 1939 who were (reluctantly) offered asylum by Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium after being denied entry into Cuba, or the refusal of the social democrat-oriented canton of Basel-Stadt to carry out deportations in spite of being ordered to do so by the Swiss federal authorities. Such instances were few and far between, however. Most of the Jews left in continental Europe in September 1939 faced a very bleak future, ending in their deportation and murder. Even so, as the editors of the volume rightly remind us, from the vantage point of the 1930s “the outcome was by no means preordained” (p. 323). The messy reality is that policy makers in the liberal states of western Europe were not irreversibly hostile to offering shelter to greater numbers of refugees from Nazi Germany, if only they could get more support from charities and governments outside Europe and if only they could find more effective ways of enforcing what they considered to be necessary border controls and restrictions as well.