The American James G. McDonald entered the spotlight of world history for a short twenty-six months when the League of Nations named him High Commissioner of Refugees from Germany (HCRfG) in October 1933. In this study, Greg Burgess diagrams in explicit detail the network of competing organizations, states, and individuals with which and with whom McDonald had to wrestle in an effort to manage the escalating outflow of refugees from Germany following Adolf Hitler's so-called seizure of power in 1933. The story is a sad and complicated tale of the League of Nation's ambivalence toward McDonald's mandate, of internal squabbling between the Commission's Governing Board and Advisory Council, of rivalries among refugee relief organizations and representatives of the involved nation states.
McDonald traveled a timeline toward failure at a rapid clip. No sooner had the president of the League of Nations, the French diplomat Joseph Avenhol, named McDonald to his post, that Avenhol committed an “original sin” against the HCRfG, distancing the League from all HCRfG functions and withholding any significant financial support or politically legitimating clout. Moreover, the League's attitude toward the German refugee crisis had been articulated even before McDonald assumed his responsibilities—for example, when Jonkheer de Graeff of the Netherlands warned, in September 1933, that the HCRfG should seek only technical solutions to the refugee crisis. “‘We are not called upon to judge’ the reasons why so many refugees had fled Germany,” he declared (43).
The League's tepid response to German internal policies of discrimination, which fueled refugee departures, failed to moderate German belligerent action. On October 13, 1933, in reaction to the installation of the HCRfG's authority, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. The League nevertheless continued to tolerate German discrimination by encouraging McDonald to open the HCRfG's offices—not in Geneva, but at a “safe” distance in Lausanne. With the opening of the Commission's Lausanne offices on December 5, 1933, a second enduring weakness of the HCRfG's organizational structure emerged, namely, its lack of a dedicated leadership support team.
Burgess introduces a large supporting cast of international accomplices who hastened McDonald's failure. For example, the HCRfG's Governing Body, which was supposed to be run by a group of high-profile statesmen and international leaders representing individually affected countries, often undermined McDonald's initiatives. Lord Robert Cecil, First Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, delayed his agreement to chair the Governing Body, insisting that he had little time for the job and refusing to travel from London for meetings. Ideological splits further aggravated the structural governing issues and hampered the body's action: British Zionist Chaim Weizmann hoped to use his influence on the Governing Body to steer German refugees to resettlement in Palestine, whereas another British Jew, Neville Laski, sought a neutralizing position on the Board to counter Weizmann's Zionism. Laski also tried to thwart the efforts of “American Jews” (60–61)—such as Felix Warburg, who, he feared, was too zealous a champion of Palestinian resettlement. McDonald ultimately chose as his Deputy High Commissioner Norman Bentwich, a person with the weakest profile and influence. McDonald hoped Bentwich could bring operational stability, ideological neutrality, and Jewish unity. He achieved none of these goals.
French government representatives and private aid organizers represented on the Advisory Council were no easier to unite. Seemingly obvious French candidates for the Governing Board included Jacques Helbronner of the Consistoire Central Israelite de France, or Baron Robert de Rothchild and Leo Motzkin of the Comité National de Secours aux Refugiées. But French Foreign Minister Joseph Paul Boncour and politicians like Henri Bérenger dragged their feet when it came to agreeing to allow these Jewish French representatives join the Board, preferring to name them instead to the Advisory Council—thus deliberately stalling any progress. Non-European representation on the Governing Board was also poorly conceived. Only one person from South America, Alberto Guani of Uruguay, was given a seat—a stumbling block given ambitious plans to resettle large populations of refugees in Latin America. On Avenhol's instructions, German-Jewish refugees were deliberately excluded from sitting on the Governing Board for fear of further annoying the Germans. Instead, German Jews received a voice on the less powerful Advisory Council. The appointment of representatives from private aid organizations to the Advisory Council proved challenging as well, and McDonald had to strike a solid balance between Jewish Zionist groups and those advocating relocation to and resettlement (i.e., absorption) by other European and overseas countries.
Frustrated with the lack of assistance from Avenhol and the League, McDonald ultimately moved the HCRfG offices to London to have more independence. The office instead became less relevant. In his discussion of these crucial membership, logistics, and agenda-setting aspects of the HCRfG's governing bodies, Burgess relies too heavily on McDonald's minute-to-minute correspondence. These chapters would have been stronger had the author imposed his own timeline and structure on the material, segregating themes and crafting momentous turning points pertinent to the slide into failure of these two dysfunctional bodies. Still, Burgess's meticulous reliance on McDonald's daily memos underscores just how disjointed and confusing the HCRfG's administration was—something that ultimately undermined its success.
The greatest obstacle McDonald encountered in his efforts to mitigate the refugee crisis was financial in nature. Burgess deftly shines light on the wide array of international actors, especially the Germans, who failed to deliver financing for refugee relocation when the persecution of German Jews worsened. After all, the German Denationalization Law of July 1933 stripped Eastern Jews of naturalization rights that had been granted during the Weimar Republic, and the infamous Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 were responsible for prompting many frightened Jews to flee Germany. Understanding the implications of harsher policies for German Jews, McDonald courageously flew to Berlin in February 1934, where he met with German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath to discuss the emigration and planned resettlement of some ten to fifteen thousand German Jews annually. McDonald pressed to ease financial restrictions on future refugees, requesting a relaxation of the so-called Reich flight tax, which basically confiscated a large percentage of the liquid and capital assets of Jews as they left the country—thus compromising the ability of these refugees to cover their own resettlement costs. The United States also added to the financial challenges of would-be refugees. Already in 1930, under President Herbert Hoover, the US Congress adopted a “no public charge” test to restrict immigration by anyone who would need to depend on public or private assistance. German Jews whose money had been confiscated by the Nazi regime could not satisfy this requirement. Learning that the German government would not back down, McDonald pivoted to change US policy: if Congress would not change the requirement, perhaps the American president would grant subsidies. On December 17, 1934, McDonald returned to the United States to petition Franklin Roosevelt to contribute to the costs of refugee relocation and to the HCRfG budget. Roosevelt promised $10,000 over dinner, but when McDonald approached the US State Department to collect the check, he received word that an act of Congress was required to release the funds promised by the president. McDonald saw that potential host countries were not going to subsidize refugee relocation if the German government continued to garnishee the wealth of potential refugees. In 1935 the French similarly began to close their borders and regulate their bank accounts more tightly. In the context of the German flight tax, Bérenger, France's representative to the Governing Board and to the League of Nations, increased his opposition to the resettlement work of the HCRfG: he energetically rejected increasing French asylum quotas and pushed for repatriating refugees already living in France back to Germany.
Burgess adeptly charts McDonald's growing demoralization in light of international paralysis. By September 1935, he determined that the best hope for the refugees was for him to submit his resignation, and he decided to use his resignation letter to the League of Nations as a policy platform. Submitted on December 27, 1935, and published simultaneously in New York, Geneva, and London, McDonald's resignation letter insisted upon the creation of a League of Nations’ agency led by an “eminent personality” charged with integrating, under one well-financed agency, the efforts by nation-states and private aid organizations to relocate refugees. Not until January 1939 would the League act on McDonald's advice, however, later merging the High Commission for Refugees from Germany with the Nansen International Office for Refugees, created in 1930, to form the High Commission for Refugees (HCR). For displaced German refugees, as well as for those scattered in Poland and elsewhere after September 1, 1939, the League's efforts amounted to too little, too late. As the foregoing suggests, Burgess does a fine job identifying a key failure of interwar international relations—one that led not only to the demise of the League of Nations but also ultimately to the Holocaust.
