On 26 August 1938, Zionistische Rundschau, a Jewish newspaper in Vienna, ran a two-paragraph article under a tantalising headline: “Jewish artisans for Northern Ireland”.
The authorities in Belfast were seeking immigrants from central Europe with skills to train local people and set up enterprises, said the article. “Applications for the registration of startups should be sent to the Northern Ireland Ministry of Commerce, which will examine them in a careful but supportive manner.”
It was, one reader recalled, “like a sign from destiny”. Five months earlier, Adolf Hitler’s troops had annexed Austria and unleashed a campaign of confiscations, intimidation and violence against Vienna’s 170,000 Jews. Now, for some artisans and business owners, came the possibility of sanctuary in a corner of the UK, an escape ahead of the Holocaust.
Around 300 applications with the names of 730 men, women and children landed at Stormont, the seat of Northern Ireland’s government. A handful of civil servants processed the applications. Most ended up inscribed with one of two brief, dry responses: “Regret” or “No reply”.
The first was an instruction to junior civil servants and typists to send a letter of rejection. The second was an instruction to not bother sending any reply. Just a few dozen applications were accepted before the scheme ended. Northern Ireland’s chance to save hundreds and potentially thousands of Jews, and give an example to the rest of the world years before Oskar Schindler, slipped away.
A new book, The Saved and the Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust by Noel Russell, has told the full story for the first time. Based on archives, unpublished family memoirs, letters and interviews with survivors, it tells a heartbreaking story of lost opportunity as evil seeped across Europe.
“It was shocking to learn that people turned away had been murdered in the Holocaust,” said Russell. “It was very emotional to read the letters. Your heart bleeds when you find out what happened to them.”
There is inspiration in the tales of those who did reach Northern Ireland and made an outsized economic and cultural impact, but the overriding sense is regret at what might have been, said Russell, a journalist-turned-author.
“Civic society was not unified enough to put pressure on the government to allow in refugees. There was a chance missed. For people to be saved, you’ve got to be more openminded than the bureaucracy. I think there would have been a more generous response had more people known what was happening.”
The Stormont authorities, using their limited autonomy from Westminster, conceived the initiative in response to a moribund economy and crippling unemployment. There was a precedent: two centuries earlier, Huguenots fleeing persecution in France had founded a linen industry.
And earlier in 1938, a Jew named Alfred Neumann had brought in seven workers from Austria to train locals at a fabric factory in Newtownards, County Down, providing a template for a wider scheme.
The Zionistische Rundschau news item came as Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann, ratcheted up pressure on Vienna’s Jews. They were hounded from homes and jobs, forced to scrub pavements, jeered at, beaten and detained.
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The Belfast Telegraph and other Northern Ireland newspapers chronicled the persecution – there were vivid, syndicated reports – but Stormont’s bureaucrats viewed the scheme in narrow economic terms, said Russell. “They weren’t operating as humanitarian appraisers, they were operating as civil servants with a job creation scheme to implement.”
Neumann advised the officials yet they still rejected applicants with valuable skills, said Russell, a former BBC producer and documentary maker. One reason was a fear of duplicating existing businesses. “I don’t think they showed much imagination.” Another was that the Home Office in London tightened rules on admitting refugees from Austria.
After the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, some applicants strayed from the usual neutral tone and betrayed anguish – “please help a despaired family,” said one – but the rejections continued. “Synagogues burned, murders, it was just a hellhole for Jews. People were clutching at any straw to get out,” said Russell.
Of the 730 people named in petitions, about 630 were rejected. Of them, around 125 were murdered in extermination camps such as Sobibor and Treblinka, with the fate of others unclear, said the author.
The hundred or so Jews who were admitted to Northern Ireland settled, found jobs and some built factories. Neumann was credited with bringing about 70 of them. After war broke out, he was interned as an enemy alien and put on a ship, the SS Arandora Star, with Italian, German and Austrian detainees that in July 1940 was sunk by a German submarine. He drowned.
The anti-immigrant riots in Belfast and other parts of the UK last month showed a depressing lack of humanity, said Russell. “It makes you realise that terrible things that happened can easily be inflamed again.”