Unbelievable Canadian War Stories by Pat MacAdam

Author:Pat MacAdam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Canada / General
Publisher: Lorimer
Published: 2011-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The Fuhrer’s Yacht

After World War II, Bob Rodney of Ottawa was a teenage dropout from Westboro’s Churchill Public School on his first visit to New York. Hitler’s yacht was pointed out to him in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. He literally shot from the hip when he photographed the 86-foot wooden tall ship with a cheap plastic Brownie camera. The navy shore patrol was hard on his heels. “Military brass were not anxious for the public to see the yacht they ‘liberated’ and generals used as their plaything.”

Adolf Hitler’s yacht, the Ostwind, went to join the Valkyries in 42 fathoms of water off Miami 44 years after the war ended. At least, that’s what the game plan called for. But Hitler must have enjoyed the last laugh. Because of human error and rough one-metre seas, the clapped-out hull was dropped off a barge onto a six-metre high healthy reef of coral and sponges in only six fathoms of water.

Miami Commissioner Abe Resnick, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, had organized the event to mark the 50th anniversary of the June 5, 1939, “voyage of the damned.” A plane flew overhead trailing a banner that read: “NEVER AGAIN.”

The Voyage of the Damned was the saga of the passenger ship St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg on May 15, 1939, with 907 German Jews on board. The entire ship’s complement had been given Cuban entrance visas before leaving Hamburg, but when the St. Louis docked in Havana, her passengers learned that their visas had been revoked. One after another, South American nations Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Panama denied them entry. The United States not only refused them entry, but also sent a Coast Guard cutter to ensure the captain did not run the ship aground to allow refugees to swim ashore. Canada’s King government also turned the St. Louis away.

Canada’s Immigration Branch was a minor agency attached to the Ministry of Mines and Resources. The minister, Tom Crerar, was a 32-year Commons veteran awaiting a summons to the Senate. He left the day-to-day responsibility for immigration to a public servant, Frederick Charles Blair. Blair was a one-man band. He considered immigration his personal fiefdom. Blair’s anti-Semitism was in the open. He was on the record stating the term “refugee” was a code word for Jew and warned his minister that, unless safeguards were adopted, Canada was in danger of being “flooded with Jewish people.” Crerar relied totally on Blair, whose personal immigration policy was that immigrants should be kept out. Referring to Jewish immigrants, Blair wrote in a letter: “None is too many.” The phrase later became the title of a best-selling book by Toronto university professor, Irving Abella.

Blair had an ally in nationally known social worker and future mayor of Ottawa Charlotte Whitton. Dr. Whitton repeatedly admonished members of the National Refugee Committee to focus on non-Jewish refugees. She sent a memo to all welfare councils warning of large numbers of non-British refugee children.

Oscar Cohen, prominent Jewish activist, almost broke up the

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