On the morning of 8 September 1947 the British Royal Navy transport ships Empire Rival, Ocean Vigour, and Runnymede Park entered Hamburg harbour with 4,512 Jewish Holocaust survivors locked below decks. The ships had sailed from the southern French coast on 21 August after the passengers had refused for twenty-four days to disembark in France. The British Cabinet had then ordered them to be sent to the British zone of occupation in Germany. The disembarkation was carried out by force. British soldiers used water cannon, batons and tear gas to remove the survivors from the ships. The forced disembarkation was photographed by international press correspondents and the resulting images were reproduced in newspapers across the world. The 4,512 survivors were then loaded onto British army lorries and driven northwards approximately seventy kilometres to two camps near the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. The camps were known as Pöppendorf and Am Stau. The survivors were held there under British military administration for a period that ran, in some cases, into the early summer of 1948. The conditions in the camps were a closing chapter of the Bevin policy in the Mandate period. They were also the moral catastrophe that effectively foreclosed any continuing British defence of the policy.
The location and the buildings
Pöppendorf was a former Wehrmacht installation built in 1939 as a military training facility on a heath approximately five kilometres north-east of the centre of Lübeck. It comprised approximately forty wooden barracks of standard German military construction, each designed for the housing of approximately fifty men, set in three rows behind a wire perimeter fence with watchtowers at the corners. It had been used during the war first as a Wehrmacht training facility, then from 1942 onwards as a forced-labour camp for Soviet prisoners of war assigned to construction work in the Lübeck area. The buildings had not been substantially modified since the war. The barracks contained the original German military bunks and the original wood-burning stoves. The wire perimeter and the watchtowers were the original Wehrmacht installations.
Am Stau, the smaller of the two camps, was approximately three kilometres further north on the road to Travemünde. It comprised approximately twenty barracks of similar construction, in a former labour camp that had been associated with the Lübeck dockyards during the war. The conditions at Am Stau were, on the available reports, slightly better than those at Pöppendorf in respect of the building stock, but the food, sanitation, and medical provision were broadly the same. The British zonal authorities had administered both camps as a single operation from the Pöppendorf headquarters.
The administration
The two camps were placed under the formal administration of the British Control Commission for Germany and operationally under the local British military commander, Major-General R. K. Exham of the British Army of the Rhine. The Control Commission’s Public Welfare Branch had nominal responsibility for the welfare of the displaced persons; in practice the operational decisions were taken by Exham’s command on the basis of broad guidance from London. The operational instructions from London, transmitted through Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s office, had been that the survivors were to be held in conditions that would discourage further Aliyah Bet operations from the British zone, that would not provide a sympathetic political environment for the Mossad LeAliyah Bet operatives among the population, and that would limit the political costs to the British government of the wider Exodus 1947 affair.
The operational consequence of these instructions was a regime of administered privation. The food rations were set at the basic German civilian level, which was at the time approximately 1,550 calories per person per day, well below the World Health Organization recommended minimum for adult populations. The medical provision consisted of a single British military medical officer for each camp and a small number of German civilian nurses; there were no Jewish doctors permitted on staff in the early months. The sanitation arrangements consisted of the original Wehrmacht latrines, which had not been refurbished since the war and which produced sustained outbreaks of dysentery in the population through October and November 1947. The internal organisation of the camps was discouraged; the British administration declined for several weeks to recognise the Mossad LeAliyah Bet committees that the survivors organised among themselves to negotiate with the camp authorities.
The Red Cross reports
The International Committee of the Red Cross sent two delegations to Pöppendorf and Am Stau, the first in October 1947 and the second in February 1948. The reports of the delegations are the foundational documentary record of the conditions in the camps. The October 1947 report noted: barracks designed for fifty persons housing between eighty and ninety; sanitation facilities that had not been adequately refurbished and were producing sustained outbreaks of intestinal disease; food provision below the World Health Organization minimum; insufficient medical staff; insufficient bedding; insufficient clothing for the autumn weather; the absence of any organised educational provision for children; the absence of any organised work arrangements for adults; the absence of any of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration provisions that applied in the displaced-persons camps in the American zones.
The October 1947 report was forwarded by the Red Cross to the British Foreign Office, to the United Nations relief authorities, and to the American government. The American Joint Distribution Committee, on receipt of the report, dispatched a senior delegation to the British zonal authorities requesting permission to provide direct humanitarian assistance to the camps. The request was initially declined; the British zonal authorities took the position that the Joint Distribution Committee’s involvement would be a political concession that would encourage further Aliyah Bet operations. After sustained pressure from the American government, including a personal communication from President Truman to the British Foreign Office in November 1947, the British position was modified to allow limited Joint Distribution Committee provision of food, medical supplies, and educational materials. The provision improved the conditions in the camps from late November 1947 onwards. The conditions had not, in the assessment of the Red Cross, become acceptable.
The February 1948 Red Cross report, prepared in light of the modified British position, recorded improvements in food provision, medical staff, and sanitation, but continued to note the substantial gap between the conditions at Pöppendorf and Am Stau and those at the comparable American-zone displaced-persons camps. The February report also recorded that approximately fifteen per cent of the original 4,512 population had departed the camps voluntarily for other locations in the British or American zones, and that the population still in the camps amounted to approximately 3,800 persons.
Survivors’ accounts
The most extensive single body of survivors’ accounts of the Pöppendorf and Am Stau experience was collected by the historian Aviva Halamish for her 1998 study The Exodus Affair. The accounts indicate that the survivors had understood the British zonal policy as a deliberate continuation of the indignity that had begun with the disembarkation at Hamburg. The shift from the relatively decent conditions of the displaced-persons camps from which most of them had originated, through the boarding at Sète, the voyage on the Exodus, the boarding by Royal Marines, the return to France, the twenty-four days at Port-de-Bouc, the transit to Hamburg, the forced disembarkation, and the journey to Pöppendorf, had been a sustained sequence of administered humiliations. The conditions at Pöppendorf were the closing element of that sequence.
One survivor, Yitzhak Tabenkin, recorded the impression in his memoir From Mauthausen to Pöppendorf (Tel Aviv, 1979): the barracks at Pöppendorf, with their original Wehrmacht fixtures, the wire perimeter, the watchtowers, the British soldiers in the place where the SS men had been three years earlier, had produced for the survivors a sense that they had been moved from one form of enemy custody to another. The British soldiers were not the SS. The British administration was not the Reich. The conditions, however, had echoes that the survivors did not need to be told about. The political damage done to the British case by the photographs of the Hamburg disembarkation was reproduced, on a smaller scale, in the conditions at Pöppendorf.
The transfers to Cyprus and to Israel
The British zonal policy on the Pöppendorf and Am Stau population shifted gradually through the autumn and winter of 1947 to 1948. The original policy of containment in the British zone was modified, under sustained pressure from the American government and the Red Cross, to allow gradual movement of the population to the Cyprus detention camps. The transfers began in November 1947 and continued through the spring of 1948. By the time of the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, approximately two-thirds of the original 4,512 had been transferred to Cyprus. The remaining one-third were dispersed to other displaced-persons camps in the British zone and the American zones, or had departed voluntarily for other destinations in Europe and North America.
The Cyprus camps were closed by the British in the first half of 1949 after the establishment of the State of Israel had opened legal channels for the survivors’ transfer to Israel. Almost all the former Pöppendorf and Am Stau population reached Israel in the period 1948 to 1949, mostly through the Cyprus route, with smaller numbers reaching Israel directly from Germany after the establishment of the state. A small minority of the population, estimated at approximately three hundred, chose other destinations including the United States, Canada, and Argentina.
What the camps produced
The Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps did not, in the strict numerical sense, contain a substantial part of the postwar Jewish refugee population. Approximately 4,512 survivors out of a total European Jewish displaced-persons population of approximately 250,000 passed through them. The administrative consequence of the camps was therefore relatively small. The political consequence was substantial.
The camps were, in the political iconography of the closing months of the Mandate, the place where the British policy completed its journey from defensible administrative restriction to indefensible moral failure. The forced return of the Exodus passengers to Germany; the forced disembarkation at Hamburg with water cannon and tear gas; the holding of Holocaust survivors in barracks behind wire fences and watchtowers in the territory from which most of them had been deported during the war; the provision of inadequate food, sanitation, and medical care to a population that had survived the killing camps of Eastern Europe; these were the elements of the case that the international press, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, and the wider international community could not accept. The Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps were the operational expression of the political failure.
The British government’s announcement of 11 December 1947 of its intention to withdraw from Palestine came three months after the forced disembarkation at Hamburg. The Mandate ended on 14 May 1948, eight months after the forced disembarkation. The State of Israel was declared on the same day. The camps at Pöppendorf and Am Stau closed shortly afterwards. The buildings were eventually returned to the German civilian authorities and the sites were redeveloped over the following decades. A small commemorative plaque was installed at the Pöppendorf site in 1998 by the city of Lübeck, recording the use of the camp during 1947 to 1948 and the names of those who had died there. Approximately twenty-three persons had died in the two camps over the period of their operation, mostly of complications of the dysentery outbreaks of October and November 1947 and of the existing health conditions that had been worsened by the British administration’s failure to provide adequate medical care. The victims included three children under the age of five.
The Lübeck reckoning
The city of Lübeck, in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel, undertook a sustained engagement with the history of the camps. The city archives have produced two substantial studies of the period, in 1985 and 2007, and the city’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations have included specific reference to the Pöppendorf and Am Stau population since 1998. The studies have established the documentary record of the British administration of the camps in detail. The findings have been the basis for the modest commemorative work undertaken on the sites.
The British government has not undertaken any comparable engagement with the period. The relevant Cabinet papers, including the records of the Cabinet meetings of 18 July, 21 August, and 8 September 1947, were declassified in the 1970s and are accessible at the National Archives at Kew. The Foreign Office records on the operation of the camps, including the Bevin correspondence with the British Control Commission, were declassified in the late 1980s. There has been no formal British government acknowledgment of the policy or of the conditions in the camps. The most prominent British engagement with the period has been the work of independent historians, particularly the late Sir Martin Gilbert in his 1998 study Israel: A History, which gave the affair the prominent treatment it deserves.
What the affair shows
The Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps, considered alongside the Cyprus detention camps, the Hamburg disembarkation, and the wider operation of the Bevin policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, were the closing failure of British policy in the Mandate period. The policy had been defensible in 1939, in the context of the Arab Revolt and the political compromises of the period. By 1947, after the killing of six million European Jews, the policy had become indefensible. The British government did not, on the documentary record, give the change in moral context the weight it deserved. The continuation of the 1939 policy into the postwar period produced the events at Hamburg, Lübeck, and Cyprus. The events foreclosed the political case for the policy. The Mandate ended.
The wider lesson is the lesson of policy continuity in the face of changed moral context. The Bevin Cabinet had inherited a policy framework that had been defensible at the time of its adoption. They had failed to recognise that the killing of European Jewry had changed the moral context in which the policy had to operate. The result was a sequence of operational decisions that, taken individually, might have been defensible on the merits of the moment, but that, taken cumulatively, produced the moral catastrophe that ended the British position in Palestine. The Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps were the small administrative facility in which the moral catastrophe had its closing chapter. The 4,512 survivors who passed through them were the witnesses to the failure of the policy that had brought them there.
See also
- The Red Cross Reported Only 300000 Deaths
- The Exodus 1947
- Soviet Prisoners of War
- Holocaust Memorial Day
- The Displaced Persons Crisis
Sources
- Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, Syracuse University Press, 1998
- Christian Streit, Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Jüdische Displaced Persons in Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2018
- Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation, Times Books, 1948 (revised 1999)
- International Committee of the Red Cross, reports on Pöppendorf and Am Stau, October 1947 and February 1948, ICRC Archives, Geneva
- British Cabinet papers, CAB 128/10 and CAB 129/20, The National Archives, Kew
- British Foreign Office records on the displaced-persons camps in the British zone, FO 371/61824 to 61828, The National Archives, Kew
- Yitzhak Tabenkin, From Mauthausen to Pöppendorf, Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1979 (in Hebrew)
- Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History, Doubleday, 1998
- Lübeck City Archives, studies of 1985 and 2007 on the Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps