During the night of November 6, 1922, police in Plauen, a town in the German state of Saxony, stopped a car full of undocumented migrants. The local criminal investigation department had received word that a vehicle had been regularly transporting foreigners from the German border town of Bad Elster to Plauen. From Plauen's upper train station, the surreptitious travelers would then take a 2:30 a.m. fast train bound for Berlin. The apprehended group consisted of Leon Zwilling, a merchant originally from Poland who now lived in Czechoslovakia; Abraham “Albert” Semmel, a shoemaker from Poland; Max Semmel, a salesclerk from Poland; Rudolf Gajek,Footnote 1 an upholsterer from Czechoslovakia; Michael Michavitz, a carpenter from Ukraine; Sandor Pribek, a merchant from Hungary; and Israel Kanner, a furrier from Poland. Out of the seven travelers only two, Max Semmel and Michael Michavitz, had passports (Ukrainian), though these documents did not contain the required entrance or transit visa for Germany.Footnote 2
These smuggledFootnote 3 migrants had relied on a networkFootnote 4 of people to transport them from their homelands into Germany, from where they would presumably continue to the United States. Concern over international people smuggling increased when the US Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 markedly limited the number of immigrants from the newly formed nation-states of east-central Europe and other areas of the world.Footnote 5 Determined migrants, unable to obtain a quota number, passports, or visas in their homelands, sought alternative methods and routes of transit and entry, also known as irregular migration. Sometimes these travelers were aided by people smugglers, who could provide false documents or guide the migrants secretly across borders.
Although irregular immigration has long been of interest in the field of migration history, over the last few years, historians of the United States have begun to investigate networks smuggling migrants into the Americas during the age of mass migration (ca. 1850 to 1940).Footnote 6 Libby Garland has notably focused on the years following World War I, when mass migration began to resume but the US Quota Acts, and tighter international borders in general, threatened mobility from east-central Europe. These studies have moved the historiography from the abstract realm of migration laws into what transpired “on-the-ground” with specific attempts at people smuggling.Footnote 7 Yet, despite this growing literature, gaps in knowledge still exist about the evolution of international people-smuggling networks, particularly about networks in Europe that provided fake documents or clandestinely transported migrants across borders in order to reach transit hubs or harbors.
Tracing people-smuggling networks in east-central Europe has proven especially difficult given the shifting borders, populations, and policies during and after World War I.Footnote 8 Furthermore, successful smuggling depends on surreptitiousness, which leaves few records.Footnote 9 Recent scholarship on irregular migration in east-central Europe has focused on migratory regimes of sending and receiving countries and the effects of these laws on irregular migrants and travel agents.Footnote 10 However, questions still linger about the formation of smuggling networks, the relationship between the smugglers and their clients, the strategies and methods used, and the recruitment of network actors. Network theory, or the notion that established pathways and social connections play a greater role in migrants’ decisions than proximity or immediate cost, can also explain why some emigrants from east-central Europe attempted to travel to the United States as opposed to closer countries, such as Germany or France, which also attracted immigrants during the interwar era.
A number of police reports located in the Saxon State Archives and the Czech National Archives, with descriptions of people smugglers and their clients caught in the act, provide a unique opportunity to analyze how certain people smuggling networks formed and functioned in east-central Europe. For each person in the apprehended transports, authorities recorded routine pieces of information that, when placed in context, help piece together a larger tale of the interwar era. The Saxon protocols in particular included each migrant's first and last name, occupation, date of birth, and place of birth (the city and sometimes the name of the former imperial province), as well as the nation-state to which the migrant belonged (if known) and types of documentation the migrant carried. As Caitlin Murdock points out, this information on noncitizens allowed authorities to capture the ambiguity of identities during “a period of rapid change in the nature of states, communities, and economies.”Footnote 11 Out of these details emerges a pattern: many of the recruiters and smugglers involved in this network were Ostjuden (“eastern European Jews”) who originated in the former eastern provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. Like the migrants they chauffeured, the smugglers too had left economically stagnant, war-destroyed regions, such as Galicia and Subcarpathian Rus, in an attempt to improve their lives.
Thus, using a micro-historical approach, this article seeks to expand the history of post–World War I people smuggling in Europe by examining not only the background of migrants in these networks, but also their smugglers and the connections between the two as both actors and products of social, economic, and political systems in flux. The call for a deeper examination of the complex bond between these entrepreneurs and their clients has recently come from anthropologists, driven by current concerns regarding people-smuggling into Europe and the United States.Footnote 12 The narrative of the unscrupulous criminal smuggler and naive emigrant, while a call for authorities to intercept an oftentimes dangerous and exploitative system, ignores the fact that people continue to use these networks and that the root causes of illicit movement (e.g., grinding poverty, war-torn environments, discriminatory immigration laws) linger.Footnote 13 Historical migrant-smuggling networks also warrant a more nuanced analysis than simplistic narratives of selfish agents and preyed-upon migrants suggest. For example, as Tara Zahra observes, popular rhetoric at the end of the nineteenth century portrayed travel agents in east-central Europe as human traffickers who tricked or forced people into dangerous situations, yet many emigrants testified that they left of their own volition.Footnote 14 Narratives after World War I also tended to vilify the smugglers, especially Ostjuden, as selfish opportunists and well-organized criminals. In 1923, an official from Mukachevo, the Subcarpathian town where emigration recruiters had been arrested, reported that a “large conspiracy of international agents” lured “naive” locals with “the promises of the Jews.”Footnote 15 This statement echoed transatlantic rhetoric in newspapers, literature, and pamphlets of the 1920s and 1930s that asserted that Jews were at the forefront of international criminal networks.Footnote 16 The Feldkircher Anzeiger, a newspaper for an Austrian border town, reported on July 24, 1929 that police in Berlin had infiltrated an international system of “criminals of the most dangerous sort” who smuggled people to Germany, Belgium, and the United States. The culprits facilitated Polish and East Galician immigrants, who, the paper claimed, would then “engage in scams and other serious crimes” in their new countries.Footnote 17
The details in the police reports, which tended to focus on the geographical origins of the actors instead of their ethnicity, tell a more nuanced story of former Galician Jews in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands who used their homeland connections and entrepreneurial skills to increase their income through a high-risk niche market. The smugglers were once migrants themselves and oftentimes shared similar backgrounds with their clients. The networks, in this case, were not run by a criminal mastermind organization but instead appear to have been built ad hoc through associates. Outside of these illegal activities, the suspects led seemingly normal lives. They owned legal businesses, such as hotels and shops, engaged in their local communities, and had families. A lack of German or Czechoslovak citizenship, as was the case with at least two of the smugglers on the Saxon-Bohemian border, would have limited employment options in their country of residence. Late 1922 saw a rise in inflation in Germany, and perhaps in order to supplement their incomes, the former Galicians adapted their multilingual skills and international connections to a marginal economy. Though smugglers profited off people who often had little to spare, these entrepreneurs did provide a freedom of movement that was difficult for migrants of such economic means and sociopolitical background to procure legally.
In addition to the dynamics of the smuggler-client relationship, these archival sources also provide insight into how local authorities gathered intelligence on and responded to smuggling operations. German and Czechoslovak police mirrored the very smuggling networks they pursued through their informal cooperation and exchange of information about the recruiters, brokers, drivers, and emigrants.Footnote 18 The historiography of international crime and police work during the interwar era has focused largely on formal international institutions, top-down policies, and popular press narratives.Footnote 19 This article takes a cue from the work of David Petruccelli by using “concrete events” to illustrate some of the nuances of regional issues and individual police cases, which preempted and coincided with these broad international movements.Footnote 20 That is not to say that these particular cases represented all police stations and all people-smuggling networks that operated in east-central Europe at the time. Original source methodology, or the tendency for witnesses to report and the state to prosecute particular crimes by one group of people versus another, can also skew numbers and narratives. Acknowledging these limitations, this article examines one of many real-life incidents of informal police cooperation, which cumulatively encouraged the formalization of international police institutions, such as Interpol in 1923.
In order to contextualize these police records, this article first sketches the state of post–World War I migration into and via Germany and the criminalization of transporting undocumented people over the Saxon-Bohemian border. Second, this article focuses on the migrants of two apprehended transports. Homeland circumstances, such as poverty, the military draft, and ongoing violence, spurred them to leave for a better life (or made them susceptible to travel agents and smugglers). Lastly, this article investigates the background of the migrant recruiters, in particular those in the Czechoslovak province Subcarpathian Rus, and of the organizers and drivers as Jewish migrants from Galicia, a former Habsburg province divided between Poland and Ukraine. Before World War I, a number of Galician Jews had migrated to the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands for economic opportunities. Then, after the war started, many Galician refugees fled to the area to escape the eastern front and pogroms.Footnote 21 Thus, this article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clientele to seek illegal passage had also encouraged their smugglers, who faced social marginalization, to migrate and take part in this illicit business.
Post–World War I Migration and People Smuggling
By 1922, when Plauen police stopped the migrant transport, European countries strictly required state-issued passports and visas to legally cross borders. Although passports and other forms of travel identification had existed prior to World War I, afterward the system became internationally standardized.Footnote 22 Passports meant internationally recognized, government-issued proof of citizenship and identification with a photograph. Visas meant a permit, usually obtained at an embassy or consulate in the migrants’ country of citizenship, to enter another country. In addition to an entrance visa for their final destination, emigrants needed a transit visa, valid for a few days, for any countries they crossed during their journey. The transit visa applied especially to emigrants headed to the Americas from the newly formed nation-states in east-central Europe. Contrary to Shakespeare's Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, Czechoslovakia (and also Austria and Hungary for that matter) had no shores, and any migrant planning to travel overseas also needed a transit visa. Poland had access to the port of Danzig, but circumstances such as the Polish military draft, which prevented young men from emigrating, propelled migrants to seek alternate, clandestine routes via Germany.
In addition to the limitations on US immigration, conditions in post–World War I Europe made government-issued passports and visas difficult for some travelers to obtain. Borders in east-central Europe, along with their respective state documents, did not solidify until 1921 (and for some small sections, even later). The prewar imperial political system gave way to a multitude of nation-states, wherein subjects could have multiple demographic identities: be born in an empire, reside in a nation-state, and have documents for neither. Waves of refugees fled the fronts throughout World War I and afterward as the Russian civil war continued until 1922.Footnote 23 Many registries in Galicia and Ukraine burned during battles and pogroms, and, as a result, people lost their birth records, which were needed to facilitate passports.Footnote 24 International organizations attempted to provide some form of documentation for “stateless” persons.Footnote 25 The League of Nations sanctioned the Nansen passport in 1922 for stateless Russian refugees and for Armenian refugees in 1924.Footnote 26 Even if a migrant obtained all the necessary documentation, however, excess entrance visas to the United States had been distributed in Europe to attract steamship company customers. This surplus meant people could be turned away at US shores once quotas for their countries had been filled for the year.Footnote 27 Migrants could wait for months for passports and visas, and then, even with all the necessary paperwork, lose a window of opportunity.Footnote 28 Thus, some migrants sought fake documents, sometimes with different citizenship and false names, from the black market.
The difficulty of procuring passports, transit visas, and entrance visas made people-smuggling after World War I a profitable, if risky, venture. Methods of people-smuggling varied from creating false documents to personally escorting migrants around checkpoints. Sometimes these smugglers operated alone, sometimes they built loose networks and improvised groupings, and other times they worked within a broad international network. Some networks had connections that spanned from start to finish: from the migrant's homeland, to the US-Mexican border, and into the United States.Footnote 29 Change in technology abetted people-smuggling to a certain extent.Footnote 30 Automobiles transported migrants more quickly than could happen on foot and had access to more routes than the railway. On the other hand, technology worked in favor of authorities as police telephoned other police stations to relay the license plate numbers of smugglers’ cars.
Post–World War I migrant smuggling had its roots in the high-volume transatlantic mass migration that passed through German borders at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Travel agents in Austria-Hungary and Russia who worked illicitly for German and English shipping companies spurred this movement in part. Clientele dropped during the war, but in the 1920s, with the doors of Ellis Island open again, agents capitalized on (or even stoked) the desire for passage. The post–World War I surreptitious Saxon-Bohemian border crossings mirrored in many ways the prewar smuggling of overseas-bound migrants across the Russian-Prussian border.Footnote 31 Sometimes, inhabitants of the Russian empire crossed the border with the aid of smugglers because they lacked the expensive state-issued passports required at that time for Russians but not emigrants from Austria-Hungary. Some Russians refused to undergo the humiliating disinfection and medical inspection at the emigrant border control stations in the eastern German borderlands.Footnote 32 In other cases, emigrants did not want state authorities to know they were leaving. According to US Immigration Inspector J. D. Whelpey, young Russian men, eager to escape the draft for the Russo-Japanese war, paid the equivalent of $10 to smuggling agencies for passage into Prussia.Footnote 33 Even though migrants from Austria-Hungary did not require a passport to transit through Germany, occasionally German authorities referred to the act of crossing the Saxon-Bohemian border without the properly sanctioned steamship tickets or 400 marks (proof that they would not become a public charge) as smuggling. Indeed, if migrants did not meet these travel stipulations, they would sneak across the border to avoid ticket agents or police. Despite the similarities with the prewar era, the passport requirements on the Saxon-Bohemian border more sharply defined secret crossings as criminal acts.
The smuggling networks of overseas-bound migrants operated within a larger world of illicit commerce in interwar Europe. The business of smuggling, whether of livestock, rum, or foreign factory workers, whether small- or large-scale, attracted a number of Saxon-Bohemian borderland inhabitants. Caitlin Murdock has researched several cases of illicit cross-border movement and police intervention in the region. For example, a damaged Saxon-Bohemian border fence, constructed during World War I to dissuade smuggling, was repaired yet completely disappeared shortly thereafter. Guards patrolled the border and sometimes shot at suspects who tried to evade them. In one case, a rum smuggler attacked a border guard who had intervened.Footnote 34 In 1922, Saxony increased its border police presence to deal with the smuggling of goods entering Germany from Czechoslovakia as a response to inflation. Self-appointed vigilantes confronted people they believed were undermining cross-border trade law (increased tensions in the population might explain why someone denounced the migrant transport). Police looked for suspicious vehicles and behavior at train stations.Footnote 35
The increased postwar surveillance on the Saxon-Bohemian border included investigating irregular migrant crossings. Authorities in the Saxon town of Marienberg reported that, although the majority of migrants entered and left Germany with papers, a few migrants without documentation avoided checkpoints by exiting trains right before the border:
They use the train from Czechoslovakia only until Sebastiansberg, the last train station before Reitzenhain and conversely the inlanders [German citizens] take the train only to Gelobtland, the last train station situated [in Saxony] before Reitzenhain in order to cross the border under the protection of sprawling forests. In the current year, reports against seventy-five persons on account of forbidden crossing have arrived. Besides that, two Russian refugees without documents were led before the local court of Marienberg.Footnote 36
The police report mentions that the undocumented migrants knew to take alternate routes, and the detailed steps indicate that this knowledge may have been more than implicit. Smugglers sometimes assisted with the undocumented transits, as became apparent in the case of the six men in the car.
Leon Zwilling's Transport
The driver, twenty-eight-year-old Leon Zwilling, eventually confessed his role to authorities. He had for a while accompanied people destined for the Americas across the Saxon-Bohemian border on foot, presumably to avoid checkpoints. After they reached Bad Elster, he took the migrants by car to the Plauen upper train station, and then by train to Berlin. In the capital city, a contact named Chaskel Schwalb would obtain Ukrainian passports from the consulate. Rumor had it that one could obtain Ukrainian passports in Berlin without any problem, and indeed, Berlin was a popular destination for emigrants attempting to reach the United States. Plauen police asked the State Criminal Police Office in Dresden if the latter could investigate Schwalb and the Ukrainian consulate.Footnote 37 The Plauen police stated that they could not ascertain whether the migrants truly intended to travel to the Americas or if they would just remain and work in Germany. Hungarian migrant Sandor Pribek said via translator that he believed that Zwilling, to make money, smuggled foreigners to Berlin and then left the emigrants in the capital to their own devices.Footnote 38 Though the Plauen police report did not further address this assertion, the Czechoslovak police sources mention that a group of smuggled migrants who received Ukrainian passports in Berlin were further transported to Paris and then to the port of Le Havre.Footnote 39 Thus, it seems that the smugglers did plan to relay the migrants to harbor cities.
Still, many migrants and refugees who wished to go overseas via northern ports found themselves stranded in Berlin. If they could not travel immediately to the United States, they bided their time for months or years in these “in-between places,” waiting for more opportune moments to travel.Footnote 40 The Galician-born writer Joseph Roth described their plight in a feuilleton essay:
Berlin is a point of transit, where, given compelling reasons, one may end up staying longer. Berlin has no ghetto. It has a Jewish district. This is where emigrants come who want to get to America via Hamburg or Amsterdam. This is where they often get stuck. They haven't enough money. Or their papers are not in order.Footnote 41
Roth's observation indicates that a number of migrants approached their journey to the United States as a piecemeal process. An undocumented transit involved unforeseen risks, unpredictable costs, and local contacts whom the migrants often had not met prior to departure. Zwilling's contact, Schwalb, resided at Weinmeisterstrasse 5 in the Jewish district, also known as the Scheunenviertel, where migrants in need of documentation converged. Police in Berlin often conducted raids in the Scheunenviertel to check for contraband and asked to see papers at cafes and hotels. In a May 1922 raid, police found a few migrants who had been ordered to leave Germany, yet had stayed, as well as a number of freshly made fake passports in a taproom.Footnote 42
Roth focused particularly on undocumented refugees in Berlin who had fled violence and political persecution. Sandor Pribek's testimony demonstrated migrants had economic motives as well. Pribek claimed to have owned a plot of land in Hungary but was convinced by “all kinds of promises” of an “unknown Jew” to sell his land and travel to the United States.Footnote 43 The mention of his sold land explained how Pribek could afford the journey (those without any capital oftentimes remained). Potentially as a way to endear himself to authorities, Pribek's narrative also emphasized how stable his life could have been in his homeland and how much he had relinquished in order to migrate. Yet Pribek had caught “migration fever,” which middlemen, such as agents and smugglers, used to their advantage.Footnote 44 The travel agent took him to Prague, where another Jew took responsibility for Pribek and demanded 11,000 Czechoslovak crowns for steamship tickets, passport, and service. The Czechoslovak capital had become a major gathering point for potential emigrants who visited the American consulate for visas or, like Pribek, sought illicit help in the city.Footnote 45 The agent from Prague then took Pribek to the western Czechoslovak spa town Carlsbad,Footnote 46 where Zwilling took over.Footnote 47 Pribek did not mention the names of the two agents who guided him from Hungary to the western Czechoslovak border. It is possible that he forgot their names in the stress and confusion or was told pseudonyms. The report, however, does identify both men as Jews. Police may have wanted to quote Pribek directly, yet the disaster of the war had also fanned the flames of antisemitism in areas of Europe. This testimony portrayed the Jews as the initial seed of discord in a tale of human trafficking, and the stereotypical narrative of migrants as victims and Jewish agents as deceitful predators certainly continued in this incident.
The Saxon police reports did not mention why the other migrants in Zwilling's transport chose to leave their homelands, yet their birthplaces, ages, citizenships, and names offer clues. First, the migrants came from a “shatterzone of empires,” former borderlands of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany that had seen much upheaval, violence, and instability.Footnote 48 A few of the names appear Jewish, and boycotting and pogroms affected many Jewish people in these areas. Though citizens of newly established nation-states, minorities had a multivalent relationship with Polish, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian national identities.Footnote 49 For example, Abraham Semmel also went by Albert, a Polish- or German-sounding name that would help him assimilate into Cracowian urban culture. In addition to escaping violence and antisemitism, the three youngest migrants in the transport were conceivably trying to escape conscription into the Polish army. Max Semmel, likely Abraham's relative given that they shared the same last name and were both born in Cracow, was four years older at twenty. A bit older than the Semmels, Israel Kanner at twenty-four had been born in Przemyśl, another city in Poland, and would have been expected to serve in the military. Their conscription ages would have made it less likely for them to receive a US quota number from Poland, and thus they sought fake documents. The other two undocumented migrants in the transport were almost twice the age of their fellow travelers. The Dobrotova (Galician)-born Michael Michavitz was forty-four and Sandor Pribek, from the Hungarian district of Zemplén, was fifty-three. Poor economic prospects and violence in their homelands (as well as the potential of having family already in the United States) likely influenced their willingness to emigrate at a usually more settled age.Footnote 50
The Billet Transports
The people-smuggling network extended beyond Leon Zwilling and his transport to Berlin. Zwilling claimed that a man with the last name of Guss (no first name mentioned), who lived in a Carlsbad (the Czechoslovak borderland spa city where Zwilling collected Pribek) hotel called the Goldenes Ross (“Golden Steed”), had “inducted him into this business.”Footnote 51 He claimed that Guss was a seasoned smuggler of people. Even with Zwilling's information, police were unable to locate this contact, but they did find another promising lead. The owner of the Zentral-Hotel in Bad Elster (the city where Zwilling had procured the car), Markus Billet, and his twenty-one-year-old son Samuel, a former tradesman, took part in an even larger migrant smuggling network.Footnote 52
The Billets’ occupations and location facilitated people-smuggling well. The Saxon town of Bad Elster and the famous Bohemian spa triangle of Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Franzensbad (Františkovy Lázně), and Marienbad (Mariánské Lázně) had long served as spa destinations and attracted thousands of tourists to the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands each year.Footnote 53 Migrants en route sometimes stayed in hotels, which could make identifying emigrants versus temporary visitors more difficult for authorities. Hotels, such as the one owned by Markus Billet, doubled as loci of contact for informal networks, and years prior to this investigation, police had suspected that the Zentral-Hotel harbored “dubious foreigners.”Footnote 54 The Dresden office had sent detectives to conduct surveillance on the hotel but found no condemning evidence. A resident of Saxony since at least 1912, Markus Billet had purchased the hotel in 1919 and ran the business with his wife, Cilly.Footnote 55 In addition to working as hoteliers, many Ostjuden (as were the Billets) in Germany acted as intermediary merchants who imported food, lumber, leather, and furs from the East and exported machinery and technology in return.Footnote 56 They oftentimes had international contacts and traveled across borders. As a former merchant, Samuel appeared to have adapted his talents and networks to the transporting of people. German police apprehended Samuel while he was returning from transporting some clients to Berlin.Footnote 57
The Billet smuggling network also included Samuel's sixteen-year-old brother, Jakob, whom police caught on November 11, 1922, while he was transporting four migrants by car.Footnote 58 Local police stopped Jakob in the Saxon city of Reichenbach and suspected he was en route to Berlin. Plauen police had been secretly informed that day of a transport of smuggled migrants from Bad Elster and telephoned to Reichenbach the license plate of the car the group had taken from Plauen. The police report described the smuggled migrants as “Czechoslovak citizens” without passports, though three of them had a Czechoslovak identity card with photograph. These three travelers, Fedor Halinec, Ivan Halinec, and Stephan Petrisec, had been peasant farmers. Having been convinced by an agent that there were better work opportunities in Berlin (Czechoslovak sources claimed they intended to migrate to the Americas), they sold their belongings and made their way to the Saxon-Bohemian border. Right before the border, in a town called Asch (Aš), they “coincidentally” met the Czechoslovak Izak Reizmann, who helped them cross.Footnote 59 In Bad Elster, the four met with Jakob Billet, who organized a car from Plauen to Reichenbach by collecting 20,000 marks from all. From Reichenbach they would travel (presumably by train) to Berlin. Reizmann and Billet had not yet collected payment for their services (authorities suspected this would have taken place in the capital city). Jakob claimed he had “acted out of pure human kindness and demanded nothing for his troubles.”Footnote 60
The four migrants whom Jakob had allegedly shown charity came from Subcarpathian Rus (then a region in eastern Czechoslovakia). According to a police protocol from Mukachevo, a city in the region, the migrants had kept their departures secret from family. Julča and Olena Halinec, the wives of Fedor and Ivan, respectively, stated that their husbands left home for work on November 7, 1922. Where the men exactly went, the wives claimed not to know.Footnote 61 An Ivan Petrisec (Petrisec is spelled as Petřiště in Czechoslovak language sources), brother of Stephan, appears in the Mukachevo protocol. The Petrisecs’ mother, Anna (nee Halinec), said Ivan had intended to go to work without giving her any notification of where he actually went. According to further investigation, Ivan Petrisec was taking a train with his brother Stephan from their home district of Ilnice (Il'nytsya in Ukrainian) to the bigger locale of Irshava, when Fedor and Ivan Halinec told Ivan Petrisec that they were going to America (the Saxon sources implied Berlin was the final destination). Ivan Petrisec claimed that the group paid 9,000 Czechoslovak crowns to an “unknown Jew from Bělek” for the trip.Footnote 62 Because only his brother Stephan appeared in the Saxon sources, either Ivan Petrisec did not join the group to America or was separated from the rest of the group by the time of the arrests in Germany.
Saxon police suspected dire economic straits spurred the undocumented emigration from Subcarpathian Rus:
Apparently, the employment opportunities in Czechoslovakia, especially on the border near Poland and the Ukraine, are especially bad. Unscrupulous agents use this to convince gullible and inexperienced locals to emigrate and to take them, against payment, secretly over the border to Germany … there are many people involved in this.Footnote 63
Once again, the narrative characterizes smugglers as unethical and the emigrants as incapable of making well-informed decisions, yet the young men in the Billet transport took a gamble based on real circumstances. Their home region had suffered from poverty and the effects of war for years. According to an April 1920 report by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), “gaunt figures” in rags populated Subcarpathian Rus cities while starvation worsened in the remote countryside.Footnote 64 Epidemics spread and, despite the abysmal local circumstances, refugees from even more volatile areas in Poland, Hungary, and Russia crossed into the region.Footnote 65 The JDC focused its post–World War I charitable efforts in Czechoslovakia, including economic reconstruction, public kitchens, shelter, and medical relief, especially on Subcarpathian Rus.Footnote 66 Despite these efforts to improve infrastructure and the local economy, migrants attempted to increase their luck abroad and fueled cross-border people-smuggling networks.
On December 5, 1922, the gendarme commando at Velyki Luchky (known then as Vel'ký Loučky) in Subcarpathian Rus reported a connection between their district and the arrests in Plauen (they had gotten word of the arrests via the Czechoslovak border gendarme at Franzensbad). On November 1, 1922, the local gendarme in Velyki Luchky had arrested Salomon Stern, Israel Stern, and Josef Gottesmann, “all from Mukachevo,” who had recruited people to emigrate without passports. They then passed the migrants to a steamship company agent named Max Adler, who accompanied the undocumented travelers into Germany. The migrants paid 12,000 Czechoslovak crowns for these services. Investigators also found a money trail from Subcarpathian Rus to Saxony. A father from Velyki Luchky, David Mayer, had sent money to Samuel Billet for his son, Max Mayer, while another man, named Lebovitz,Footnote 67 had sent money to Markus Billet. Both money transfers totaled a few thousand Czechoslovak crowns.Footnote 68 Salomon Stern admitted that about four weeks before the arrests, Adler had come into contact with him in Mukachevo and had asked Stern to recruit customers.
Max Adler was therefore the linchpin between the emigration recruiters in Subcarpathian Rus and the smugglers, Leon Zwilling and the Billets, in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands. A few days after the arrest of Zwilling, authorities in Bad Elster arrested the twenty-four-year-old merchant Majer “Max” Adler (born in Cieszanów-Lubaczów in Galicia) for organizing illegal border transports.Footnote 69 Czechoslovak sources confirm this connection between the smugglers with the eyewitness accounts of another migrant transport from Velyki Luchky that occurred in mid-October 1922. Salomon Stern had accompanied four emigrants (Mitro Drága, Mitro Ladzun, Mitro Fenčák, and Jurko Karol) from Subcarpathian Rus through Prague to Carlsbad, where he notified Max Adler that they had arrived. Adler then accompanied them (with Stern) from Carlsbad to the Czechoslovak border town Asch. They walked the road to the border where the “son of the innkeeper” met and brought them to the Zentral-Hotel in Bad Elster. Karol and Ladzun were given coats to cover their conspicuous folk-peasant costumes. The younger Billet, Stern, and Adler accompanied the four migrants by train to Berlin, where the smugglers left their clients in a private apartment. Forbidden to leave the premises in order to avoid raising suspicion, the migrants remained in the apartment for three days and then were transferred to a hotel. After some time a contact, described as thirty-five years old with a lame right hand and a supposed nephew of Markus Billet, informed the migrants that Adler and the two Billet sons had been arrested. The contact said he would transport the migrants to America if they could recover money they had transferred to Adler under Adler's pseudonym, Jakob Länder.Footnote 70 Another contact named Arnold Blan told the migrants to return to Plauen and seek a lawyer named Márkus Kröner, who could retrieve their money. Afraid of making their journey without Adler or of being detained, the migrants decided instead to return to their homeland.Footnote 71
Authorities from Velyki Luchky asked Saxon police for details and testimonies from captured migrants and smugglers in order to confirm their findings and locate more accomplices. The gendarme warned Plauen authorities that, according to trusted sources, future transports into Germany were planned.Footnote 72 The police protocol from Mukachevo detailed other smugglers who were apprehended for illegally recruiting emigrants and transporting them through Czechoslovakia into Germany. In one case, the networks even involved state officials on the Saxon-Bohemian border who received a cut from smugglers. A female Czechoslovak customs officer would wait until the border guard left and then would transfer migrants across the border to a German customs officer (also her lover), who would take them to a safehouse to receive false passports.Footnote 73 Overall, the police reports convey some sympathy for the migrants smuggled into Germany and caught. In the protocols, the travelers appear desperate and naive and, though they technically broke the law, they seemed to lack the devious intentions of serious criminals. Additionally, lines between emigrants' complicity or innocence sometimes became blurred as the journey progressed. For example, Pribek paid to emigrate to America yet said that he worried that the smugglers would abandon him in Berlin without further aid (though there was no evidence that they would do so). On the other hand, the reports portray the smugglers and recruiters as conmen who willfully opposed the law and took advantage of the migrants’ trust.
Certainly, the negative portrayal of the smugglers has something to do with the nature of police reports. Authorities usually have little good to say about law infringement. Smugglers and their clients would likely try to distance themselves from any notion of deliberate wrongdoing. Apprehended migrants whose smugglers failed to help them might also feel less positively inclined about those smugglers than those migrants who successfully reached their final destination. Thus, in order to more fully understand the motives and methods of these smugglers in post–World War I Europe, the subsequent section contextualizes the recorded background information concerning emigrant recruiters and smugglers. Their hometowns and dates of birth hint at why they became involved in people-smuggling and how the networks formed. Although economic incentive had its appeal to be sure, social factors, personal connections, and political circumstances played a role as well. This contextualization challenges “essentialist and culturally deterministic readings,” which can be dangerous in their own way, as will be shown later in the fates of some of the Ostjuden migrants and smugglers during World War II.Footnote 74
Ostjuden, Immigrants, and Marginal Economies
The Saxon-Bohemian borderland smugglers, like their clients, had originated from the former provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. The Billets, Leon Zwilling, and Max Adler had more specifically come from Galicia, a province that by this time had been divided between the nation-states of Poland and Ukraine. Markus Billet was born in the Galician city of Brody in 1872 and his wife, Cilly (nee Billet), in 1868 in Sambor, Galicia.Footnote 75 In addition to their sons Samuel and Jakob, a daughter Rosa (born in 1899) and a son Arnold (born 1896) were all born in Brody.Footnote 76 Due to its proximity to the Russian border, the city had a reputation as a migration and smuggling hub, and the Billets might have gained knowledge of the marginal economy before their time in Saxony. Unlike many urban centers during the nineteenth century, however, Brody had experienced population and economic decline from its previous status as a major trade center in east-central Europe, thus giving the Billets economic incentive to relocate.Footnote 77 Additionally, though the family had been part of a sizeable Jewish population in Brody (65 percent of the populace after 1900), the Habsburg and Russian borderlands had a history of pogroms and discrimination against Jews, further reason for the Billets to move to a rumored more-tolerant West. The Billet family likely had some capital to emigrate as the poorest of the poor usually stayed. By 1912, they had relocated to the Saxon town of Zwickau, about sixty kilometers northeast of Bad Elster. They joined thousands of other Galicians who hoped for better prospects in the fast-industrializing German empire. Although proportionally a small number compared to the rest of the population in Germany, the Ostjuden, or Jews from Austria-Hungary and Russia, garnered attention in Saxony partly because of the increase in numbers during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The Jewish population of Saxony increased from 17,587 in 1910 to 23,252 in 1925, with many of these newcomers immigrating from foreign countries.Footnote 78 Though the numbers of Ostjuden immigrants in Saxony grew most in the late imperial era, a spike of refugees occurred due to the sudden onset of war in Galicia in the fall of 1914.Footnote 79
H. W. Katz's autobiographical novel The Fishmans provides a template for the experiences of Jewish Galician refugees who arrived in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands during and after World War I and the challenges they faced as immigrants. The Fishman family flees their fictionalFootnote 80 Galician town Strody (presumably a portmanteau of Stryj and Brody), about “half an hour's distance” from where Leon Zwilling was born in the town of Stryj.Footnote 81 Initially, Galicians in the novel flee (and fled in real life) to other parts of the Habsburg monarchy,Footnote 82 and the Fishmans reach a town in the Carpathian Mountains. When the area falls under attack (“All the windows in the village were shattered in the same instant.”),Footnote 83 the family squeezes into a refugee train and is sent to barracks deeper in the empire. At first, the local population lauds and pities the Galicians as fellow imperial citizens in need, yet later exhibits compassion fatigue as the Russians withdraw from Galicia and supplies on the Austrian home front dwindle. Desperation drives refugee children into forming a gang of thieves who steal cabbages from local fields.Footnote 84 Galician refugees begin crossing the border from Bohemia into Germany because of rumors that factories there need workers. The Fishmans move to an unnamed town in Saxony (the author H. W. Katz moved to Gera in Thuringia). The family matriarch, Leah, works in a factory churning out grenades for the war while her sons attend school. Let go from her factory position and unable to find other work, she becomes a peddler for a well-liked Russian Jew, who runs his own “junk and rag business.”Footnote 85 Like the fictional Fishmans, Katz's family remained in Germany even though many refugees returned to their homeland when the Habsburgs reclaimed Galicia in 1915. Germans initially welcomed the Galician refugees into Saxony, but, as in Austria-Hungary, their welcome soured as the war continued. Locals grew resentful of immigrants and refugees from the East whom, they claimed, occupied scarce apartments and competed with local businesses.Footnote 86 Refugees spilled into Germany again when the Polish-Ukrainian war, in dispute over eastern Galicia, started in 1918.Footnote 87
Though most Galician refugees returned willingly or were forced back to their homeland, some settled in German or CzechoslovakFootnote 88 lands if they felt it was a better (or the only) option. The migrants may have longed for familiar social networks and surroundings, but their homeland region had faced massive destruction during World War I and the Polish-Soviet war. During his November 1924 visit, Joseph Roth, born in Brody, reported that “Galicia, as one of the great battlefields of the Great War, is a long way from being rehabilitated.”Footnote 89 Given the major infrastructural damage, it is little wonder that the Billets and then Leon Zwilling chose not to live in Galicia after the war. Zwilling, born in the Galician city of Stryj, had spent time in Franzensbad as a medical orderly of the Habsburg army during World War I. Afterward, he returned to the border town with his wife, Franziska (nee Guttenplan), born in 1892 in Kalush (also in Galicia). They then had two sons, Max (born in 1922) and Isu (born in 1927). Zwilling initially owned a shop for kosher groceries and Jewish ritual pieces, and then, after 1923, operated a restaurant that served both kosher and vegetarian food.Footnote 90
Both Leon Zwilling and Markus Billet owned midsized businesses at a time when postwar inflation of the German mark had shrunk prewar savings.Footnote 91 The rise in the value of the Czechoslovak crown, though in part artificial,Footnote 92 made payments from Czechoslovakia appealing. They might have, for that reason, sought to subsidize their income through smuggling. Because the Billets and Zwilling had experience and skills in markets and trade, a logical step would have been to adapt these networks to the movement of people, despite the illicitness, as opposed to entering a different line of work, such as factory labor or government. As immigrants they would have also been limited in these alternative careers. Jakob Billet's unknown citizenship status means he likely had not been naturalized into Germany (or in any other country, for that matter). Other legal, political, and social factors marginalized the Galician immigrants in German and Czechoslovak borderlands. Despite the assimilation of Jews within Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, recurrent antisemitism challenged their integration into local networks. Jews had a reputation as Habsburg loyalists, which irritated fervent nationalists who had gained clout during the war. For example, a Galician refugee, Max Wald, took advantage of a free train ticket that was offered to imperial subjects to attend Francis Joseph's funeral in 1916. Wald's mother thought it would be an excellent opportunity for him to visit his father and her brothers in Vienna. “I paid for that ride later on,” said Wald as his Czech nationalist instructors thought the trip meant Wald identified as a monarchist when he just wanted to visit his father.Footnote 93 In Germany, supporters of the young Weimar democracy in 1919 feared that the waves of migrants from the East would bring Bolshevik rabble rousers among the refugees.Footnote 94 Additionally, even though German Jewish charities accepted them, a fear of and prejudice against Ostjuden as backward and hyper-religious still existed, to some extent, within the assimilated western Jewish community.
Thus, smuggling networks in Czechoslovakia and Germany became part of a self-fulfilling prophecy—with fewer resources and legal means through which to earn a living, the former Galicians turned to illicit activities. The central bank of Germany blamed Ostjuden for spreading counterfeit money in early 1921, though authorities had not yet found the people producing the fake marks.Footnote 95 The chief of police in the Czechoslovak province of Bardejov complained in 1919 that Jewish refugee families in the impoverished district engaged in racketeering and smuggling into Poland. Decreasing resources and a rising Jewish population fueled resentment from the local Slovaks.Footnote 96 Although the chief of police blamed the Jewish refugees and their illegal businesses for the poverty, reality was certainly more complex. For many immigrants, the black market became a survival mechanism in response to scarce resources. Joseph Roth describes how a refugee family eventually entered illicit trade:
They were in Budapest, six months in constant dread of the expatriation that might come at any hour of day or night; finally it came and they were chased to Vienna, where they hung on for a year in a basement hole on Kleine Schiffergasse. Here they too were viewed as a burden on the state—the son engaged in unauthorized selling of clothes—and they drifted on to the wretched east of Berlin, to Hirtenstrasse, where the black market promises undreamed-of riches and doesn't deliver.Footnote 97
The refugees had entered a different territory with few of the local connections, cultural capital, or stability needed to enter gainful employment. War combined with desperation made lucrative illegal businesses appealing.
Conclusions
Leon Zwilling remained in jail until December 18, 1922, and any further reports regarding arrests, investigations, trials, convictions, and expulsions of the migrants involved in this smuggling network remain to be found.Footnote 98 Zwilling and Markus Billet appear to have remained in Franzensbad and Bad Elster, respectively, after their arrests and were not expelled. An address book from 1925 lists “Marcus Billet” as the proprietor of Zentral-Hotel, which means the continuing investigation, if any, did not affect his ability to maintain his hotel.Footnote 99 Werner Pöllmann's extensive research on Jewish families in the Saxon-Bavarian-Bohemian borderlands provides further information on the fates of the individuals involved. In order to make ends meet, after 1925 Billet expanded the use of the hotel, which had initially catered to kosher guests, to non-Jewish guests, and hosted local dances. When in 1928 another Bad Elster hotel canceled on the visiting NSDAP candidate Adolf Hitler, organizers moved his speech to the Zentral-Hotel. There, according to an eyewitness account, Markus, wearing a kippa, poured beer while Hitler pontificated on his plans for the German nation.Footnote 100 In early 1929, Cilly Billet, who had been sick for almost five years, died. A new owner took over the Zentral-Hotel, and Markus moved to Berlin, where he died in 1939.Footnote 101
The fates of other participants in the smuggling network described here fit what is known to have happened to many other Jews who remained in interwar Europe. In 1938, Leon Zwilling and his family joined their son Max in Prague to escape the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland. In 1940, Max managed to procure a place on a refugee ship to Palestine. Zwilling was shot in March 1945 in the Vyhne concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 102 An Abraham Semmel with the same birthplace, occupation, and birthdate, off by a year (possibly a clerical error), as one of the undocumented emigrants in Zwilling's transport died in the Melk subcamp of Mauthausen.Footnote 103 An Izrael Kanner with the same birthplace, birthdate, and occupation as another undocumented emigrant in Zwilling's transport registered for Jewish identification cards in Cracow on January 20, 1940.Footnote 104 A Majer Adler with the same birthplace and birthdate as the main contact between the recruiters and drivers, Majer “Max” Adler, registered for Jewish identification cards in Cracow on March 3, 1941.Footnote 105 Documents on other individuals, such as Jakob and Samuel Billet, remain to be found.
Even though historians have made great strides in illustrating bottom-up perspectives of illegal migration in interwar east-central Europe, less literature exists on how migrant smuggling networks formed and functioned. This micro-history, using police reports on an apprehended ring, adds nuance to the smuggler-client dynamic. The background of the smugglers of undocumented emigrants in post–World War I Saxon-Bohemian borderlands overlapped with the people they transported in that they, too, had sought to migrate from contentious regions to seek better opportunities westward. People on the margins of east-central European societies, such as stateless refugees and Ostjuden, engaged in marginal economies partly in response to a system that placed great constraints on movement. While acknowledging the systemic marginalization of these smugglers and their clients, this article does not seek to take away their agency. Zwilling, Adler, and the Billets certainly knew what they were doing was illegal and profited from people who oftentimes had little to spare. High-risk activities meant high prices. From one angle, smuggling dehumanized people by turning them into commodities, yet, from another viewpoint, smugglers also helped people realize freedom of which movement, which from some ethical standpoints is a human if not a legal right.Footnote 106 As scholars have noted, smugglers provided a service to people that the legal market did not. Smuggling also provided a way to make a living when the legal market did not. In a 1920 essay, “Refugees from the East,” Joseph Roth who, like the Billets, was from Brody, expressed concern about the inability of immigrants and refugees in Berlin to find work:
There are no jobs for these people with German companies, even though the only way they pose any sort of threat is if they are not allowed to work. Then of course they will become black marketeers, smugglers, and even common criminals.Footnote 107
The same prophesy could be applied to the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands. While certainly an opportunistic business that turned people into commodities, people-smuggling provided a way to make a living for those, both the migrants and smugglers, with limited opportunities.
