This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMoeu.

The story was already familiar by the time the passengers could see the lights off Miami Beach.

The first article about the St. Louis, an ocean liner owned by the Hamburg America line,

in the more than 900 refugees at Bore, appeared in American papers in May of 1939,

not long after the ship left Germany for Cuba.

The Cuban papers had the story weeks before. It's right wing press had been warning about an invasion.

It printed the same sorts of anti-Semitic screeds and cartoons that had been weaponized by

the German state whose program of terror just the previous year alone had burned synagogues,

had looted Jewish homes, and validated Jewish passport which closed all Jewish owned businesses,

forced Jewish men and women to change their names, remove their children from German schools,

stripped German Jews of the right to own property, the right to rent property,

which served to lay the groundwork for their imminent forced removal.

They had already built a handful of concentration camps including Buchenwald,

and were already killing Jews there, and dissidents and homosexuals and disabled people in African Germans too.

But the right could not yet industrialize the process.

Did it with forced labor and beatings and pistols and firing squads?

Heinrich Himmler hadn't yet mechanized the process for maximum efficiency in order to protect

German soldiers from the mental toll of having to kill people one by one.

People knew those stories. Many thousands of Cubans applauded them,

rallied in Havana against the looming arrival of the St. Louis,

cheered as a spokesman for the country's former president pledged to fight the Jews until the

last one was driven out. The more sober press didn't focus on the Jews, they weren't anti-refugee.

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