It is true that the United States has placed stateless immigrants on a footing of complete equality with other foreigners, but this has been possible only because this, the country par excellence of immigration, has always considered newcomers as prospective citizens of its own, regardless of their former national allegiances.
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22 The American Friends Service Bulletin (General Relief Bulletin, March, 1943) prints the perplexed report of one of their field workers in Spain who had been confronted with the problem of “a man who was born in Berlin, Germany, but who is of Polish origin because of his Polish parents and who is therefore ... Apatride, but is claiming Ukrainian nationality and has been claimed by the Russian government for repatriation and service in the Red Army.”
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23 Lawrence Preuss, “La Dénationalisation imposée pour des motifs politiques,” in Revue Internationale Française du Droit des Gens, 1937, Vol. IV, Nos. 1, 2, 5.
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24 An Italian law of 1926 against “abusive emigration” seemed to foreshadow denaturalization measures against anti-Fascist refugees; however, after 1929 the denaturalization policy was abandoned and Fascist organizations abroad were introduced. Of the 40,000 members of the Unione Popolare Italiana in France, at least 10,000 were authentic anti-Fascist refugees, but only 3,000 were without passports. See Simpson, op. cit., pp. 122 ff.
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25 The first law of this type was a French war measure in 1915 which concerned only naturalized citizens of enemy origin who had retained their original nationality; Portugal went much farther in a decree of 1916 which automatically denaturalized all persons born of a German father. Belgium issued a law in 1922 which canceled naturalization of persons who had committed antinational acts during the war, and reaffirmed it by a new decree in 1934 which in the characteristically vague manner of the time spoke of persons “manqitant gravement a leurs devoirs de citoyen beige.” In Italy, since 1926, all persons could be denaturalized who were not’”worthy of Italian citizenship” or a menace to the public order. Egypt and Turkey in 1926 and 1928 respectively issued laws according to which people could be denaturalized who were a threat to the social order. France threatened with denaturalization those of its new citizens who committed acts contrary to the interests of France (1927). Austria in 1933 could deprive of Austrian nationality any of her citizens who served or participated abroad in an action hostile to Austria. Germany, finally, in 1933 followed closely the various Russian nationality decrees since 1921 by stating that all persons “residing abroad” could at will be deprived of German nationality.
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25a The quotation is taken from an order of Hauptsturmfuhrer Dannecker, dated March 10, 1943, and referring to the “deportation of 5,000 Jews from France, quota 1942.” The document (photostat in the Centre de Documentation Juive in Paris) is part of the Nuremberg Documents No. RF 1216 Identical arrangements were made for the Bulgarian Jews. Cf. ibidem the relevant memorandum by L. R. Wagner, dated April 3, 1943, Document NG 4180.
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26 S. Lawford Childs (op. cit.) deplores the fact that the Covenant of the League contained “no charter for political refugees, no solace for exiles.” The most recent attempt of the United Nations to obtain, at least for a small group of stateless—the so-called “de jure stateless”—an improvement of their legal status was no more than a mere gesture: namely, to gather the representatives of at least twenty states, but with the explicit assurance that participation in such a conference would entail no obligations whatsoever. Even under these circumstances it remained extremely doubtful whether the conference could be called. See the news item in the New York Times, October 17, 1954, p. 9.
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27 The only guardians of the right of asylum were the few societies whose special aim was the protection of human rights. The most important of them, the French-sponsored Ligue des Droits de l’Homme with branches in all democratic European countries, behaved as though the question were still merely the saving of individuals persecuted for their political convictions and activities. This assumption, pointless already in the case of millions of Russian refugees, became simply absurd for Jews and Armenians. The Ligue was neither ideologically nor administratively equipped to handle the new problems. Since it did not want to face the new situation, it stumbled into functions which were much better fulfilled by any of the many charity agencies which the refugees had built up themselves with the help of their compatriots. When the Rights of Man became the object of an especially inefficient charity organization, the concept of human rights naturally was discredited a little more.
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28 The many and varied efforts of the legal profession to simplify the problem by stating a difference between the stateless person and the refugee—such as maintaining “that the status of a stateless person is characterized by the fact of his having no nationality, whereas that of a refugee is determined by his having lost diplomatic protection” (Simpson, op. cit., p. 232)—were always defeated by the fact that “all refugees are for practical purposes stateless” (Simpson, op. cit., p. 4).
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29 The most ironical formulation of this general expectation was made by R. Yewdall Jermings, “Some International Aspects of the Refugee Question” in British Yearbook of International Law, 1939: “The status of a refugee is not, of course, a permanent one. The aim is that he should rid himself of that status as soon as possible, either by repatriation or by naturalization in the country of refuge.”
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30 Only the Russians, in every respect the aristocracy of the stateless people, and the Armenians, who were assimilated to the Russian status, were ever officially recognized as “stateless,” placed under the protection of the League of Nations’ Nansen Office, and given traveling papers.
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31 Childs, op. cit. The reason for this desperate attempt at promptness was the fear of all governments that even the smallest positive gesture “might encourage countries to get rid of their unwanted people and that many might emigrate who would otherwise remain in their countries even under serious disabilities” (Louise W. Holborn, “The Legal Status of Political Refugees, 1920–38,” in American Journal of International Law, 1938).
See also Georges Mauco (in Esprit, 7e année, No. 82, July, 1939, p. 590): “An assimilation of the German refugees to the status of other refugees who were taken care of by the Nansen office would naturally have been the simplest and best solution for the German refugees themselves. But the governments did not want to extend the privileges already granted to a new category of refugees who, moreover, threatened to increase their number indefinitely.”
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32 To the 600,000 Jews in Germany and Austria who were potentially stateless in 1938, must be added the Jews of Rumania (the president of the Rumanian Federal Commission for Minorities, Professor Dragomir, having just announced to the world the impending revision of the citizenship of all Rumanian Jews) and Poland (whose foreign minister Beck had officially declared that Poland had one million Jews too many). See Simpson, op. cit., p. 235.
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33 It is difficult to decide what came first, the nation-states’ reluctance to naturalize refugees (the practice of naturalization became increasingly restricted and the practice of denaturalization increasingly common with the arrival of refugees) or the refugees’ reluctance to accept another citizenship. In countries with minority populations like Poland, the refugees (Russians and Ukrainians) had a definite tendency to assimilate to the minorities without however demanding Polish citizenship. (See Simpson, op. cit., p. 364.)
The behavior of Russian refugees is quite characterisic. The Nansen passport described its beare
r as “personne d’origine russe,” because “one would not have dared to tell the Russian émigré that he was without nationality or of doubtful nationality.” (See Marc Vichniac, “Le Statut International des Apatrides,” in Recueil des Cours de l’Académie de Droit International, Vol. XXXIII, 1933.) An attempt to provide all stateless persons with uniform identity cards was bitterly contested by the holders of Nansen passports, who claimed that their passport was “a sign of legal recognition of their peculiar status.” (See Jermings, op. cit.) Before the outbreak of the war even refugees from Germany were far from eager to be merged with the mass of the stateless, but preferred the description “réfugié provenant d’Allemagne” with its remnant of nationality.
More convincing than the complaints of European countries about the difficulties of assimilating refugees are statements from overseas which agree with the former that “of all classes of European immigrants the least easy to assimilate are the South, Eastern, and Central Europeans.” (See “Canada and the Doctrine of Peaceful Changes,” edited by H. F. Angus in International Studies Conference: Demographic Questions: Peaceful Changes, 1937, pp. 75–76.)
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34 Jermings, op. cit.
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35 A circular letter of the Dutch authorities (May 7, 1938) expressly considered each refugee as an “undesirable alien,” and defined a refugee as an “alien who left his country under the pressure of circumstances.” See “L’Emigration, Problème Révolutionnaire,” in Esprit, 7e année, No. 82, July, 1939, p. 602.
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36 Lawrence Preuss, op. cit., describes the spread of illegality as follows: “The initial illegal act of the denationalizing government ...puts the expelling country in the position of an offender of international law, because its authorities violate the law of the country to which the stateless person is expelled. The latter country, in turn, cannot get rid of him ...except by violating ...the law of a third country.... [The stateless person finds himself before the following alternative]: either he violates the law of the country where he resides ...or he violates the law of the country to which he is expelled.”
Sir John Fischer Williams (“Denationalisation,” in British Year Book of International Law, VII, 1927) concludes from this situation that denationalization is contrary to international law; yet at the Conference pour la Codification du Droit International at the Hague in 1930, it was only the Finnish government which maintained that “loss of nationality ...should never constitute a punishment ...nor be pronounced in order to get rid of an undesirable person through expulsion.”
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37 Childs, op. cit., after having come to the sad conclusion that “the real difficulty about receiving a refugee is that if he turns out badly ...there is no way of getting rid of him,” proposed “transitional centers” to which the refugee could be returned even from abroad, which, in other words, should replace a homeland for deportation purposes.
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38 Two instances of mass naturalization in the Near East were clearly exceptional: one involved Greek refugees form Trukey whom the Greek government naturalized en bloc in 1922 because it was actually a matter of repatriation of a Greek minority and not of foreign citizens; the other benefited Armenian refugees from Turkey in Syria, Lebanon, and other formerly Turkish countries, that is, a population with which the Near East had shared common citizenship only a few years ago.
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39 Where a wave of refugees found members of their own nationality already settled in the country to which they immigrated—as was the case with the Armenians and Italians in France, for example, and with Jews everywhere—a certain retrogression set in in the assimilation of those who had been there longer. For their help and solidarity could be mobilized only by appealing to the original nationality they had in common with the newcomers. This point was of immediate interest to countries flooded by refugees but unable or unwilling to give them direct help or the right to work. In all these cases, national feelings of the older group proved to be “one of the main factors in the successful establishment of the refugees” (Simpson, op. cit., pp. 45–46), but by appealing to such national conscience and solidarity, the receiving countries naturally increased the number of unassimilated aliens. To take one particularly interesting instance, 10,000 Italian refugees were enough to postpone indefinitely the assimilation of almost one million Italian immigrants in France.
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40 The French government, followed by other Western countries, introduced during the thirties an increasing number of restrictions for naturalized citizens: they were eliminated from certain professions for up to ten years after their naturalization, they had no political rights, etc.
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41 Simpson, op. cit., p. 289.
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42 In practical terms, any sentence meted out to him will be of small consequence compared with an expulsion order, cancellation of a work permit, or a decree sending him into an internment camp. A West Coast Japanese-American who was in jail when the army ordered the internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry would not have been forced to liquidate his property at too low a price; he would have remained right where he was, armed with a lawyer to look after his interests; and if he was so lucky as to receive a long sentence, he might have returned righteously and peacefully to his former business and profession, even that of a professional thief. His jail sentence guaranteed him the constitutional rights that nothing else—no protests of loyalty and no appeals—could have obtained for him once his citizenship had become doubtful.
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43 The fact that the same principle of formation of an elite frequently worked in totalitarian concentration camps where the “aristocracy” was composed of a majority of criminals and a few “geniuses,” that is entertainers and artists, shows how closely related the social positions of these groups are.
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44 In France, for instance, it was a matter of record that an order of expulsion emanating from the police was much more serious than one which was issued “only” by the Ministry of Interior and that the Minister of Interior could only in rare cases cancel a police expulsion, while the opposite procedure was often merely a question of bribery. Constitutionally, the police is under the authority of the Ministry of Interior.
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44a “In February, 1938, the Reich and Prussian Ministry of Interior presented the “draft of a law concerning the acquisition and loss of German nationality” which went far beyond the Nuremberg legislation. It provided that all children of “Jews, Jews of mixed blood or persons of otherwise alien blood” (who could never become Reich citizens anyway) were also no longer entitled to the nationality, “even if the father possesses German nationality by birth.” That these measures were no longer merely concerned with anti-Jewish legislation is evident from an opinion expressed July 19, 1939. by the Minister of Justice, who suggests that “the words Jew and Jew of mixed blood should if possible be avoided in the law, to be replaced by ‘persons of alien blood,’ or ‘persons of non-German or non-Germanic [nicht artverwandt] blood.’” An interesting feature in planning this extraordinary expansion of the stateless population in Nazi Germany concerns the foundlings, who are explicitly regarded as stateless, until “an investigation of their racial characteristics can be made.” Here the principle that every individual is born with inalienable rights guaranteed by his nationality has been deliberately reversed: every individual is born rightless, namely stateless, unless subsequently other conclusions are reached.
The original dossier concerning the draft of this legislation, including the opinions of all Ministries and the Wehrmacht High Command, can be found in the archives of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York (G-75).
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45 On the role of the Jews in formulating the Minority Treaties, see Macartney, op. cit., pp. 4, 213, 281 and passim; David Erdstein, Le Statut juridique des Minorités en Europe, Paris, 1932, pp. 11 ff.; Oscar J. Janowsky, op. cit.
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46 This was by no means only a notion of Nazi Germany, though only a Nazi author dared to express it: “It is true that a refugee question will continue to exist even when there is no longer a Jewish question; but since Jews form such a high percentage of the refugees, the refugee question will be much simplified” (Kabermann, “Das Internationale Flüchtlingsproblem,” in Zeitschrift für Politik, Bd. 29, Heft 3, 1939).
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47 Pathetic instances of this exclusive confidence in national rights were the consent, before the second World War, of nearly 75 per cent of the German minority in the Italian Tyrol to leave their homes and resettle in Germany, the voluntary repatriation of a German island in Slovenia which had been there since the fourteenth century or, immediately after the close of the war, the unanimous rejection by Jewish refugees in an Italian DP camp of an offer of mass naturalization by the Italian government. In the face of the experience of European peoples between the two wars, it would be a serious mistake to interpret this behavior simply as another example of fanatic nationalist sentiment; these people no longer felt sure of their elementary rights if these were not protected by a government to which they belonged by birth. See Eugene M. Kulisher, op. cit.
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48 The few chances for reintegration open to the new migrants were mostly based on their nationality: Spanish refugees, for instance, were welcomed to a certain extent in Mexico. The United States, in the early twenties, adopted a quota system according to which each nationality already represented in the country received, so to speak, the right to receive a number of former countrymen proportionate to its numerical part in the total population.