While no exact figures are available, it is estimated that approximately one third of the exiles eventually lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps, while the rest were able to survive the War and settle all over the world, including many who eventually came to the United States where they had been rejected years before. Eventually the ship was forced to sail back to Europe, where the passengers were dispersed between Great Britain, France, Belgium and The Netherlands. officials, under pressure from unsympathetic forces inside President Franklin Roosevelt's government who would not change pre-War immigration quotas, refused to allow the over nine-hundred passengers to land. Louis sat in Havana harbor for weeks, its voyagers virtual captives aboard the vessel, while the Cuban government and U.S. Hitler was right, as it turned out the St. The issue of Jewish refugees was a problem the Allies had not come to terms with, despite the obvious humanitarian necessity to do so. would be reluctant to offer sanctuary to the passengers, therefore the Nazi policy of persecution would be validated and the world would accept their heinous treatment of Germany's Jewish citizens. Louis, out of Hamburg, and the voyage was actually a Nazi-crafted ruse straight from the warped mind of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. What they found when they arrived was a shocking and ultimately deadly slap-in-the-face that still reverberates today, nearly seventy years later. Based on a chilling real-life incident from the early days of World War II, Voyage of the Damned (1976) told the dramatic story of a shipload of European Jews expelled from Hitler's Germany who sailed across the Atlantic in 1939 in a quest to gain asylum in Havana, Cuba, and eventually the United States.

Voyage of the Damned by Frances White