A Missed Chance:
Reassessing The Fort
Ontario Emergency
Refugee Shelter
by Karen j. Greenberg
Historians who study the American response to the Holocaust often find
themselves at a loss for stories of protest and constructive activity. They dig for
editorials and notices of anti-Nazi rallies; they trace attempted economic boycotts
against German companies. Most commonly, they search for moments of generosity
on the part of the u.s. government. In the latter as well as the former instances, the
quest is usually of little or no avail. The United States presented a relatively uniform
front against pleas for aid to refugees and civilian victims of Hitler. For the State
Department, the principle that the best form of aid to those in danger was to win
the war quickly characterized a series of decisions that resulted in the failure to fulfill
immigration quotas for the European countries.!
One oft-cited exception to the historians' disappointment with the general
policy of "too little, too late" comes in discussions about the Fort Ontario
Emergency Refugee Shelter. 2 Announced by presidential fiat on June 8, 1944, the
shelter opened its doors to nearly 1,000 European refugees in August of 1944. The
U.S. government oversaw the selection and the transport of the refugees from Italy
to Oswego, New York. This sole endeavor to aid the victims of Nazi Germany,
historians of the period reason, constituted a redemptive act in an otherwise
shameful story. While the establishment of the shelter is indeed a lone example of
public intervention on behalf of the refugees, historians have extended their reading
of the matter beyond mere recognition of the event. They have argued additionally
that the existence of the shelter serves as testimony to the fact that much more could
have and should have been done for the refugees. As one student of the period has
A Missed Chance: Reassessing the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter
129
written, the creation of the shelter demonstrated that "the potential existed to spare
more victims from suffering and dying than ultimately was done." 3 In the words of
the most comprehensive study of the shelter, "the Oswego story offers new insights
into what might have been, a greater sense of the enormity of the loss, and a deeper
awareness of how we could have been enriched." 4
These interpretations are based upon the assumption that the government
viewed the shelter as a successful venture. But in the final analysis, the government
authorities did not share the view of many contemporary observers or later
historians . We need, therefore, to understand what the government hoped to
accomplish with the shelter, what would have constituted a success from the official
point of view, and how such an understanding might alter our assessment of the
nature of rescue before and after the Fort Ontario experiment.
Prior to the establishment of the Fort Ontario Shelter, American efforts on
behalf of European refugees were private. The public sphere remained largely
passive. Two organizations took the lead in bringing European refugees to American
shores. The first, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars,
formed in the spring of 1933, had enabled over 300 scholars and scientists to
immigrate under the immigration laws' nonquota provisions for college professors. 5
The second, the Emergency Rescue Committee, founded in 1940 in response to the
fall of France, had enabled 1,000 artists and intellectuals to escape from France and
to arrive, in many cases, in the United States. 6
The story of these agencies helps us understand the premises upon which rescue
efforts took place in an environment otherwise ill disposed to aid refugees. In both
of these ventures the rhetoric focused only in part upon the humanitarian aspects of
the rescue. The scholars had lost their positions and were without access to
institutions where they could effectively continue their work. But underlying the
appeal to American colleges and universities was also the promise of adding, if only
for a time, illustrious individuals to their faculties. The Emergency Committee in
Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars arranged entry of theologian Paul Tillich,
philosopher Ernst Cassirer, classicist Werner Jaeger, and historian Felix Gilbert.
They went to Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton respectively. Opportunism
clearly overshadowed humanitarianism in the rescue of scholars. Repeatedly, the
universities and colleges agreed to take a refugee scholar only if he was a leader in his
field. Similarly, the Rockefeller Foundation, the major supporter of the committee,
provided funds with the guarantee that "first rate minds" would receive the support.
So, too, with the Emergency Rescue Committee. That agency aimed to bring the
most prominent intellectuals and artists out of France. Jacques Lipschitz, Marcel
Duchamp, Golo Mann, Heinrich Mann, and Hans Sahl were among those whom
the ERC aided in fleeing to the United States. Success for both organizations had
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not to do with saving lives but with pleasing the recipient institutions and
communities.
The manner in which each agency ceased its activities highlighted the emphasis
on a definition of success that favored the fortunes of the benefactor over those of
the refugee. The Rockefeller Foundation and recipient universities and colleges
agreed that by 1940 the pool of available refugee scholars had deteriorated in qualiry
and that as a result efforts on behalf of refugee scholars should come to an end. In
fact, a brief period in which humanitarian criteria took precedence over a strict
emphasis upon quality intensified the demand for an end to the Emergency
Committee. The express decision of the Emergency Committee and the Rockefeller
Foundation during the 1938-40 period had the unintended consequence of
intensifYing "a kind of negativism" toward the refugee scholars. Once qualiry was in
question, anti-Semitism and xenophobia reared their heads in implicit and explicit
forms. And by October 1940, officials at Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and UCLA voted
against the "further appointments of aliens." Mention of the increasing danger
facing such individuals given the outbreak of war did not pierce through the staunch
determination of the nation's schools not to sacrifice quality in the name of
performing good deeds'?
The overshadowing power of opportunism in the private sphere did not at first
cast its shadow over the Fort Ontario Shelter. Initially, in fact, the refugees were
selected in accordance with need, a policy that contradicted the decision-making
process of the private refugee committees. The presidential directive stated that "in
choosing the refugee to be brought to the United States," American officials should
"bear in mind that to the extent possible those refugees should be selected for whom
other havens of refuge are not immediately available." In other words, the most
needy in terms of lifesaving measures would be the first saved. 8
No doubt there was an opportunistic aspect to the decision to transport the
refugees to the United States. It lay in the State Department's conviction that the
rescue would help redress the lack of attention the United States had paid to the
refugee situation that had so plagued Europe for over ten years, yet would not
offend nativists who objected to an influx of Jewish immigrants. Moreover, as
Roosevelt's cablegram announcing the decision stated, for the first time the United
States was "ready to share the burden of caring for refugees during [the] war." But
despite the potential political capital at home and abroad, the language and even the
intent of the new policy had as its main goal the saving of lives. Roosevelt began his
announcement with an acknowledgement of the "real possibilities of saving human
lives" by aiding refugees and in so doing he refused to continue the line of
argument, prevalent in earlier refugee appeals, that any program must necessarily aid
the benefactors.
A Missed Chance: Reassessing the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter
131
The emphasis upon saving lives persisted in the details of the government plan.
For, as the authorities made clear at the outset, the United States had no intention
of allowing the refugees to become citizens. The refugees would be provided for
until war's end, at which point they would be repatriated to their home countries.
Each of the refugees signed an agreement to that effect before boarding the army
transport, the Henry Gibbons, for passage to the States. Success, then, was based on a
precisely defined, limited humanitarianism. The United States would save lives but
would not add to its own immigrant pool.
In order to reinforce that policy, those who directed the transfer of the refugees
insisted that the rescue was intended to involve maintenance and little else. Not
only would the refugees never become U.S . citizens, but they were told not to
expect any "comforts" as part of their experience on American soil. "Care should be
taken," wrote the executive director of the War Refugee Board, "not to oversell the
project. Refugees should be instructed only that they will be offered safety, security,
and shelter for the duration."9 The camp was to be administered under the same
codes and regulations as those that applied to the Japanese internment camps in the
States, a policy that confirmed the determination not to allow the residents of the
camp to make too much of a home for themselves in upstate New York. In the
spirit of a restricted hospitality, early camp policies treated the residents more like
inmates than welcome guests. Initially, the mail was censored, the residents
forbidden to participate in private enterprise. Nor were they allowed to make forays
outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the compound. They were denied the
right to visit relatives and were not at first allowed to receive visitors. lO However
much the limited rescue may have seemed harsh in its parameters, its insistence that
humanitarianism-the saving of lives-constituted the sole criterion for the plan
was as much a change in the ethics of American policy toward refugees as was the
announcement that any intervention on behalf of refugees would ensue.
The clear desire to define the success of the rescue primarily in terms of saving
lives did not last long, largely due to the realities of bringing the refugees to the
safety of the United States. The refugees themselves were among the first to expand
the definition of their relationship to their rescuers. Overwhelmed by the long
voyage to New York and the seeming largesse of the commitment to them, the
chosen residents in the camp began to dream about the many possibilities of life in
the United States. American officials contributed their share to the changed
definition of the enterprise. To compound the problem of mistaken expectations,
camp policy makers assented at least rhetorically to the idea that some amenities and
even future interactions with the land of temporary asylum might indeed be
forthcoming. The contradictions began in Italy when Department of the Interior
officials made selections of eligible refugees on the grounds of who would, in
addition to being needy, best contribute to the functioning of a working
community life at Fort Ontario. Accordingly, officials selected individuals with a
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variety of skills and occupations, ranging from optician and architect to butcher and
dentist. I I In addition, a process of encouraging acculturation began soon after the
refugees set sail for the United States with on-board tutoring in English. 12 A
greeting from Harold Ickes was read to the refugees upon their arrival at Fort
Ontario. His words betrayed a discrepancy between the commitment to rescue and
the fact that quality of life would be a factor in determining the success of the
shelter. "The United States has become a great republic and a strong democracy
through the peaceful intermingling of all races and creeds," proclaimed Ickes
proudly. "Let me assure you that we shall endeavor to make your sojourn at the
Oswego center as comfortable as it is possible to make it .... "13
Once at the camp, camp officials further encouraged the replacement of
survival as a mark of success with issues of life in the United States. They
encouraged the refugees to learn about the countty of refuge. Refugees attended
lectures on ''The Culture of America" that included sessions devoted to manners
and customs, geography, histoty, minorities in America, sports and finance. They
learned American square dancing and the rudiments of American home life. Many
were offered the opportunity to learn shorthand. 14 Dillon Myer, the director of the
War Relocation Authority, instructed the new arrivals to create a model democratic
community, complete with "some form of representation, " a reflection of their
understanding of the countty in which they were living. 15
The camp experience, in urging an acquaintance with the United States and in
acceding to demands about living and working conditions, gradually altered the
terms for assessing the success of the rescue venture. The original concern for saving
lives as a primaty reason for helping victims of Hider, a groundbreaking turn in
American policy toward refugees, yielded to a concern for the quality of the
refugees' lives in the United States. Not sutprisingly, the residents, supported by the
camp director, Joseph Smart, sought to achieve the ultimate sign of belonging to the
new environment. They began to seek ways to gain citizenship in the United States.
They were aided in this regard by Samuel Dickstein, the New York congressman
arid chair of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee during the war years.
Dickstein agreed to push their case before the Congress, thereby ignoring the initial
terms of the rescue. The appeal for citizenship was helped by the lobbying efforts of
prominent figures at various refugee and relief organizations, including Rabbi
Stephen Wise at the American Jewish Congress, L. Hollingworth Wood at the
International Rescue and Relief Committee, and Clarence Pickett of the American
Friends Service Committee, a devoted champion of refugees from Nazi-occupied
Europe. Eventually, the cause of the refugees was given a boost when Joseph Smart
resigned his post in order to lobby in Congress for their citizenship. But officials in
Washington did not accept the new direction. Roosevelt, Ickes, and Myer held fast
to the notion that the goal of the program had been to save lives. 16
A Missed Chance: Reassessing the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter
133
The president and officials at the State, Justice, and Interior Departments
resisted the pressures to allow the refugees to immigrate. The authorities had saved
lives and in so doing had lived up to the initial pledge to grant "safety and security"
to refugees in need. Roosevelt in particular refused to adopt a more lenient attitude
toward the granting of citizenship. As in other areas, the prospect of winning the
war was the only determinant for any such changes in policy.
The conflicting agendas, one of mere rescue, the other of quality of life,
eventually eroded much of the goodwill at the shelter. From August 1944 to
February 1946, camp morale declined steadily. Complaints abounded, mounting
weekly. The "invited refugees" bemoaned the quality of their living quarters, their
insufficient clothing, the disorganized labor situation, and the behavior of ethnic
groups other than their own. One resident committed suicide; another died due to
poor working conditions. 17
In response, the government authorities, who had implicitly assented to the
expectation of comfort and good treatment at the shelter, viewed their handiwork as
an unfortunate mistake. In order to verifY their misgivings, they sent a psychologist
to visit the camp. The psychologist, Dr. Curt Bondy, reported that he found there
the "typical unrealistic attitude of people in internment camps." Specifically, the
residents were "nervous and full of inferiority complexes" and "more and more
uninterested in creative activity."IB
Gradually, officials in Washington accepted the judgment of the camp
residents. And in so doing, they missed the chance to strengthen the redefinition of
refugee policy as a matter primarily of saving lives. For the first time since the
refugee experiment had begun, they considered quality-of-life issues as a measure of
success or failure. They dispensed with any defense of the action based upon the
original plan for the refugees, namely, the saving of their lives. As complaints from
the residents increased, the government authorities, having accepted the new terms
of discussion, concluded that the experiment had clearly failed. Ickes and Myer
publicly regretted the decision to involve the United States in the refugee situation.
Although Ickes maintained that he was "not impressed by Dr. Bondy's report, "
there was a noticeable shift in his attitude after the psychologist's visit. He was
becoming increasingly weary of the entire episode. "Evidently we made a mistake,"
Ickes admitted, "in bringing these people here." Myer, also one to champion the
refugee cause, agreed. He attributed the failure to the "basic paradox" of camp life,
the attempt to establish "a refuge within a democracy for victims of Fascist
aggression." 19
In the change of attitude on the part of government officials lay an underlying
discrepancy in the parts of the rescue program that had proven disappointing. In
terms of life at the camp, the experiment was largely a failure . The residents, the
camp directors, and the officials in Washington shared that conclusion. In terms of
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saving lives, the mission was never at fault. Unfortunately, those in command in
Washington did not distinguish between the original goal of the shelter and the new
ground of controversy. Indeed, all of the parties had lost sight of the initial goal of
the shelter-the rescue of refugees who were potential victims of Hitler's war.
The erosion of the issue of survival as a part of the debate has significant
implications for the conclusions that historians have traditionally made about the
Fort Ontario experiment. While the general statement that this measure was "too
little, too late" remains accurate, the idea that the experiment demonstrated how
much the States could have done is not warranted by the evidence. If anything, Fort
Ontario demonstrated not that "the potential existed to spare more victims" but
that, given the "failure" of Fort Ontario, the United States would have been
reluctant to pursue any subsequent rescue mission . Nor did the experiment
demonstrate "a deeper awareness of how we could have been enriched. " It failed
both in terms of the original premise-of being a temporary rescue-arid in terms
of the later desire that it could become a model of communiry well-being and
appreciation of the United States.
The impasse over citizenship and the confusion over the terms of success for
the venture occurred under Truman, not Roosevelt, during peace, not war. Truman
found it "inhumane" and impolitic to repatriate the refugees. There is a historical
irony in the rhetoric of the new president who found a clear benefit to the United
States in granting citizenship to the shelter's residents. While he sounded a note of
humanitarianism by expressing a desire "to relieve human misery," he emphasized
the apparent benefits to the United States in his explanation of his decision to allow
the Fort Ontario residents to become citizens. "This is an opportuniry," he declared,
"for America to set an example for the rest of the world in cooperation towards [sic]
alleviating human misery."2o By allowing the residents to become citizens, the
country could perhaps influence the behavior of the countries of Europe who faced
much greater refugee problems. As Earl Harrison, a former U.S. representative on
the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees and U .S. commissioner of
Immigration and Naturalization from 1942 to 1948 warned, repatriation would
hinder the United States in any efforts to urge that "other governments assist the
present situation by retaining people as far as possible within their borders until
some semblance of order comes out of the present chaos. "21
The erstwhile note of opportunism that had been conspicuously absent from
the government's original intentions in undertaking the rescue was once again
revived in Harrison's and subsequently Truman's rhetoric and policies. Truman
reverted to the terms that had predated the Fort Ontario episode. Humanitarianism
once again was valid only when explicitly coupled with political opportunism as was
apparent in Truman's delineation of the criteria underlying his decision to accept
the refugees as American citizens.
A Missed Chance: Reassessing the Fo rt Omario Emergency Refugee Shelter
135
The conclusions one draws from the study of Fort Ontario are not, therefore,
that rescue could have been accomplished on a much greater scale, unless one is
talking, theoretically, about the practicalities of transportation and the existence of
shelter space. On the contrary, once the focus turned from rescue to conditions of
life, the possibilities of future intervention on behalf of refugees dwindled to naught.
This is not to say that the refugees should have been repatriated, but that the issue
of rescue and the future of the camp residents should have been kept separate, both
philosophically and practically. The confusion of the two stages in the process of
rescue and the resultant frustrations and disappointments, both for the refugees and
for the United States government, merely returned discussion to the terms that
prevailed in rescue policy prior to the establishment of Fort Ontario. The real loss in
the Fort Ontario story was not to the persons involved in that circumstance, but to
refugee policy in general. The chance to move away from opportunistic reasons for
such decisions, the chance to establish a precedent for rescue based upon pure
humanitarianism, had been squandered. Historians, then, should note that rather
than set the stage for future rescue missions, the Fort Ontario Shelter merely
reinforced the belief that refugees should be saved only when their rescue would
clearly benefit the United States.
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Notes
J. The mOSt comprehensive wotk on this topic has been done by David Wyman. Paper Walls American
and the Refugee Crisis 1938-41 (Amherst, Mass., 1968) and The Abandonment of the Jews: America
and the Holocaust, 1941-5 (New York, 1985) together survey the U.S. Government's response to
the plight of Jewish refugees between 1938 and 1945. Also informative are Henry L. Feingold,
The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-45 (New Brunswick,
New Jersey, 1970) and Michael R. Marrus, Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth
Century. (New York, 1985)
2. Sharon Lowenstein, Token Refuge: The Story of a Jewish Refugee Shelter at Oswego (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1986) provides a detailed and reliable account of the Shelter. Lawrence Baron, "Haven
from the Holocaust: Oswego, New York, 1944-46," New York History (January, 1983) is a concise
overview which highlights ma~y of the major difficulties of the Shelter's existence. Ruth Gruber,
Haven: The Unknown Story of 1000 World War II Refugees (New York, 1983) and Edward B.
Marks, Jr., Token Shipment: The Story ofAmerica's War Refugee Shelter (Washington, D.C., 1946)
each offer the perspective of a participant in the creation and administration of the Shelter.
3. Baron, "Haven from the Holocaust," p. 5.
4. Lowenstein, Token Refuge, pp. 160-6J.
5. For the policies of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, see Karen
Greenberg, "The Mentor Within: the American Universities and the German Refugee Scholars,
1933-45 ," (Ph.D. dissertation , Yale University, 1987); and Charles Wetzel, "The American
Rescue of Refugee Scholars and Scientists from Europe, 1933-45 " (Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Wisconsin, 1964).
6. The story of the Emergency Rescue Committee has been told in the mOSt detail by those who were
participants in the rescue operation. See Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (New York, 1945);
Mary Jane Gold , Crossroads Marseilles:1940 (Garden City, New York, 1980); and Daniel
Benedite, La Filiere Marseillaise (Paris, 1984)
7. Louis Wirth to Tracey Kittredge, 4 December 1940, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG.1, Series
200, Folder 534; Bernhard Knollenberg to Edward Warburg, 4 October 1940, and Jerome D.
Greene to Stephen Duggan, 4 October 1940, Harvard University Archives, Harlow Shapley
Papers, Box 6A, "Asylum Fellowship Folder" ; Robert Sproul to Stephen Duggan, 29 October
1940, Papers of the Emergency Committee, Box 109, "Universiry of California."
8. President Roosevelt to Ambassador Robert Murphy, 9 June 1944; John W. Pehle to Leonard
Ackermann, 14 June 1944; Dillon S. Myer to Josep h H. Smarr, 20 July 1944, Karen J.
Greenberg, editor, Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents,
volume five, Columbia University Library, New York (New York, 1990), pp. 141 -44, 146-48.
9. John Pehle to Leonard Ackermann, 14 June 1944, Greenberg, Archives, pp. 143-44.
10. "Preliminary Policies for Emergency Refugee Shelter," 2 August 1944; Joseph H. Smart to Dillon S.
Myer, 29 August 1944, in Greenberg, Archives, pp. 164-70, 173-76, 190-9J.
11. For a statistical breakdown of those selected for the Shelter, see Dillon S. Myer to Joseph H. Smart,
20 July 1944, Greenberg, Archives, pp. 146-48.
12. Gruber, Haven, pp. 63-73.
13. "Statements of Greetings to Refugees at Fort Ontario," 6 August 1944, Greenberg, Archives, volume
7, p. 173.
14. See, for example, Golda Van Buskirk, "Report on Fort Ontario Refugee Shelter Language Center";
"The Culture of America: Tentative Schedule of Forum Meetings for Emergency Refugee"; and
Fort Ontario Trade School, Weekly Report, 2 July 1945, in Greenberg, Archives, pp. 208-213.
15. "Statements of Greetings."
A Missed Chance: Reassessing the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter
137
16. Leland Rex Robinson et a1. to President Roosevelt, 22 October 1945; Earl C. Harrison to Francis
Biddle, 16 June 1945 Refuge in Greenberg, Archives, pp. 248-51 ; and Lowenstein, Token Refoge,
pp. 108-119.
17. Lowenstein, Token Refoge, pp. 114-19.
18. "Digest of Report by Dr. Curt Bondy on the Emergency Refugee Shelter," Greenberg, Archives, pp.
78-80.
19. Harold L. Ickes to Dillon Myer, Memorandum, 12 March 1945; Dillon S. Myer to Joseph H.
Smart, 24 May 1945, in Greenberg, Archives, pp. 232-33, 243-45.
20. "Statement by the President on Immigration to the United States of Displaced Persons and
Refugees in Europe," 22 December 1945; Directive by the President on Immigration to the
United States of Certain Displaced Persons and Refugees in Europe," 22 December 1945, in
Greenberg, Archives, pp. 262-68.
21. Earl C. Harrison to Francis Biddle, 15 June 1945, in Greenberg, Archives, pp. 248-51.
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