Refugees, Inc.

Bleakest prospect facing the permanent Refugee Organization, which gets down to work this week in London, is to persuade the German Government to allow refugee Jews to carry out of the country most of their property or cash. Despite warm words of idealism doled out at Evian-les-Bains few weeks ago when the permanent Organization was set up, the hard fact remains that no nation is willing to receive penniless Jews.

Speaking for His Britannic Majesty's Government during a closing session of the House of Lords last week, the Earl of Plymouth, Parliamentary Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, gloomed: "Unless collaboration [by Germany] is forthcoming, this problem--already a difficult one-may possibly be rendered quite insoluble." Jewish supporters were quick to retort that even penniless Jews would prove a benefit to any nation.

Not so ready to believe the problem "insoluble" last week was U. S. Pundit Dorothy Thompson, whose publishers seized the occasion to release her 122-page, fact-packed book, Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?*. No secret is it that Miss Thompson's magazine and newspaper crusade stimulated President Roosevelt to call the Evian meeting. Into her book Newspundit Thompson crams a survey of the post-War history of the refugee problem and a grandiose proposal to deal with it.

Miss Thompson, ever a brilliant rationalizer of ideas, says that her plan developed largely from conversations with German Credit Expert Moritz Schlesinger, friend of the late great Refugee Worker Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. It consists, in its simplest terms, of an international corporation for trading in refugees. Capital for this company, tentatively called "International Resettlement Co.," would take the form of billions of dollars of blocked German marks, Hungarian pengos, Rumanian lei, etc., now owed refugees and foreign investors who cannot collect them outside the countries in question. The corporation would contract to evacuate a batch of refugees, offering the emigrating country a sizable sum in blocked currency which would be spent within that country for industrial and capital goods which the emigrants would take along to their new homes.

In her enthusiasm, Miss Thompson suggests: "Viennese industrialists might not only bring over their trained employes who would compete with no class of workers in existence in America, but also their lists of customers [in South America, etc.]. . . . This sort of industry does not compete with any existing American industry."

To prove that such a scheme has worked out on a small scale, and that Germany could be persuaded to enter into it, Miss Thompson cites the little-known Ha'avara arrangements between Germany and the Jews in Palestine. Ha'avara, an organization for the transfer of .capital of German-Jewish emigrants, five years ago succeeded in getting Germany to accept frozen German-Jewish funds to pay for exports. German exporters get paid for the goods they ship to Palestine out of earmarked emigrant funds (blocked marks). By this method, some 82,000,000 marks in goods have been transferred to Palestine in the last five years and 14,000 refugee families have been shipped there, who otherwise would not have been able to raise the needed capital.

A far simpler scheme than Miss Thompson's for getting Jews out of Germany, and one already in use has been discovered by German Jews themselves. Every day dozens of Jews file into U. S. consulates and offices of U. S. firms to pore over New York City and Chicago city directories. From these they copy addresses of U. S. Jews to whom they might be related, hoping that letters to the U. S. will bring new-found relatives and sympathizers willing to arrange their passage.

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