DESCRIPTION:
Führer Trump may want to turn away refugees coming from war zones, but one Twitter account is using historical precedent to show that’s a bad idea.

The account @STL_Manifest is dedicated to refugees who arrived in the U.S., who were fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. It focused on the nearly 1,000 passengers on board the St. Louis, which was a German transatlantic liner carrying refugees seeking asylum in the United States from the Nazi regime.

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) notes on its website, the St. Louis’ voyage to the U.S. in May of 1939 was unsuccessful, as American authorities refused to allow passengers to disembark on U.S. soil. The ship was then forced to return to Europe, where fate of its passengers was uncertain. The USHMM found that of those 937 passengers on board the St. Louis, roughly half of them were able to find asylum outside of Nazi-occupied territory:

Jewish organizations (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers: Great Britain took 288 passengers; the Netherlands admitted 181 passengers, Belgium took in 214 passengers; and 224 passengers found at least temporary refuge in France.

However, when the Nazis occupied Western Europe, 254 of the refugees on board the St. Louis who were denied entry into the United States ended up as tragic victims of the Holocaust. The @STL_manifest account is going viral by tweeting the names and photos, if available, of those refugees who did not survive.

Trump’s signature of the anti-refugee executive order on January 27 ironically came on the same day as Holocaust Memorial Day, when the millions of people slaughtered by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are remembered and honored. In his official proclamation acknowledging Holocaust Memorial Day, Trump made no mention of Jews or anti-semitism.

From an article by Zach Cartwright from U.S. Uncut
Images gathered from St. Louis Manifest Twitter account and edited by John Smith