Germany’s laws of “racial hygiene” came into effect in 1933, and Adolf Hitler’s government subsequently approved the policy of forced sterilization. About 20 percent of the population was considered to have genetic or racial defects. First, the Nazis began by sterilizing the mentally ill. Next were the mischlings: those with one Aryan parent and one of another race, principally Black or Jewish. In 1935, the government unanimously passed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which classified citizens according to their racial heritage.
Eugenics is the quest for a superior race through the enhancement of hereditary traits. Eugenics policy in Germany was inspired by research being carried out in the United States and worldwide from the end of the nineteenth century. Nazis created the Aktion T4 program to kill or sterilize over 275,000 people. Females were sterilized using X-rays and males by vasectomy, often without anesthesia. Many Afro-German children, labeled “Rhineland bastards,” were removed from school or gathered up in the streets and taken to medical facilities to be sterilized. Racial mixing, especially with colonial Africans, was deemed a racial offense.
German laws of eugenics were specifically based on the research of doctors from Pasadena, California. In the first half of the twentieth century, the method these doctors had developed gave rise to the involuntary sterilization of some 70,000 people in the United States. Sterilization continued to be practiced in certain states, including Virginia and California, until 1979.
On the evening of May 13, 1939, the transatlantic ocean liner St. Louis of the Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) set sail from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Some nine hundred passengers were onboard, the majority German Jewish refugees. Some were children traveling without their parents.
The refugees all had permits to disembark in Havana issued by Manuel Benítez, the general director of the Cuban Department of Immigration, with the support of the army commander Fulgencio Batista. The permits had been obtained through the HAPAG company. However, a week before the liner sailed from Hamburg, the president of Cuba, Federico Laredo Brú, issued Decree 937 (named after the number of passengers aboard the St. Louis), invalidating the landing permits signed by Benítez.
The ship arrived at the port of Havana on Saturday, May 27. The Cuban authorities would not allow it to dock in the area assigned to the HAPAG company, and so it was forced to anchor in the middle of Havana Bay. Only four Cubans and two non-Jewish Spaniards were allowed to disembark, together with twenty-two refugees who had obtained permits from the Cuban State Department prior to the ones issued by Benítez.
The St. Louis sailed for Miami on June 2. As it approached the U.S. coast, Franklin Roosevelt’s government denied it entry into the United States. The Mackenzie King government in Canada also refused the ship entry.
The St. Louis was therefore forced to return to Hamburg. A few days before it arrived, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) negotiated an agreement for several of its member countries to take in the refugees. Great Britain accepted 287; France 224; Belgium 214; and the Netherlands 181. In September 1939, Germany declared war and the countries of continental Europe that had accepted the passengers of the St. Louis were soon occupied by Hitler’s forces.
Only the 287 passengers taken in by Great Britain remained safe. Most of the other passengers from the St. Louis suffered the horrors of German occupation or were killed in Nazi concentration camps.
Between December 1960 and October 1962, some 14,048 children left Cuba without their parents, on commercial airplanes, as part of an operation coordinated by the Catholic Church and supported by the United States government. The U.S. Department of State authorized Brian O. Walsh, a young Catholic priest in Miami, to bring the Cuban children into the country without visas. Many of the parents who sent their children to the United States faced political persecution under Fidel Castro’s regime, which was established by force on January 1, 1959. Others were involved in clandestine activities and feared they would lose their parental rights, or that their children would fall victim to political indoctrination at school. The Communist government closed Catholic schools, seized all property belonging to the church, and took control of private companies.
Operation Pedro Pan takes its name from the classic J. M. Barrie novel about a boy who never grows up and who lives on the mythical island of Neverland. The program constituted the largest politically driven mass exodus of children in the Western Hemisphere in modern history.
In October 1962, as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis involving the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, all air traffic between Havana and Miami ceased, leaving many child refugees in limbo, awaiting the arrival of their parents. Many of these children were sent to different cities across the United States. Some remained under the care of the Catholic Church; others were taken in by families, placed in homes for juvenile delinquents, or sent to orphanages. A large number of them forgot how to speak Spanish, and some never saw their parents again.