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Stowaways at Bohemia's Shores: Undocumented Emigration and People-Smuggling Networks in Interwar East Central Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2020
Abstract
This article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.
Dieser Beitrag untersucht ein in der Zwischenkriegszeit in Deutschland und der Tschechoslowakei operierendes Schleppernetzwerk, das undokumentierte Migrant*innen von Ostmitteleuropa nach Nordeuropa schmuggelte, von wo aus diese per Schiff in die USA weiterreisen wollten. Viele der in diesem im sächsisch-böhmischen Grenzland agierenden Schmugglernetzwerk involvierten Personen waren Einwander*innen bzw. Flüchtlinge aus Galizien, die ihr vom Ersten Weltkrieg und der darauffolgenden Gewalt verwüstetes Heimatland verlassen hatten und sich in Gesellschaften wiederfanden, in denen ihre Möglichkeiten, sich einen Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen, begrenzt waren. Das “Othering” dieser galizischen Immigrant*innen wurde zur selbsterfüllenden Prophezeiung, da sie sich als Folge ihrer gesellschaftlichen Marginalisierung illegalen Verdienstmöglichkeiten zuwandten. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die gleichen schlechten wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen und anhaltende Gewaltgefährdung, die Emigrant*innen zur undokumentierten Flucht veranlassten, auch deren gleichfalls an den Rand der Gesellschaft gedrängten Schlepper*innen in die Auswanderung und das Geschäft mit dem Menschenschmuggel trieb.
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- Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020
Footnotes
Thank you to Nathan Wood, Eve Levin, Roberta Pergher, Erik Scott, Sheyda Jahanbani, Lorie Vanchena, Andrea Schmidt, Monica Black, Kayla Riddleberger, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on drafts (and to Rosamund Johnston for the title suggestion). Funds from Fulbright, the University of Kansas, the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC), SUNY-Oswego, and the Munich Centre for Global History made possible the time and means to research this article.
References
1 The police report reads “Grjek,” likely a typographical error.
2 Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (HStAD), Ministerium des Innern (MdI) 11751, 48, written report by the Polizeiamt Plauen, Kriminalamt, to the Landeskriminalamt in Dresden, November 10, 1922. All translations are the author's own unless otherwise stated.
3 “Smuggled” or “undocumented” within the parameters of this article means that the migrant did not have the required passport or visas. Sometimes migrants had identification documents but not documents for legal international travel to the United States or Germany. “People smuggling” is another migration category that does not appear verbatim within the archival sources used in this article, though the term appears in other contemporaneous places. Police described the migrants as “foreigners” who were “led,” “transported,” “delivered,” or “accompanied” from one location to another. The German sources used here rarely use the words “illicit” or “illegal,” though smuggling activities fell within the jurisdiction of criminal police bureaus. For further discussion on categories of (un)documented migration, see “Introduction” in Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, ed. Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen, and Chris Quispel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 9–29.
4 “Network” is another term not explicitly used in the sources, but it serves as a useful category for analysis. See Castles, Stephen, de Haas, Hein, and Miller, Mark J., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th ed. (New York: The Guilford Press, 2014), 39–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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12 Gabriella Sanchez, while validating instances of victimization, argues that people-smuggling operations give irregular migrants and their facilitators greater mobility in a legal context that constantly limits them in Human Smuggling Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 2015), 6; Luigi Achilli discusses the migrant-facilitator dynamic in “Irregular Migration to the EU and Human Smuggling in the Mediterranean: The Nexus between Organized Crime and Irregular Migration,” in IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook 2016: Mobility and Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean (IEMed: Barcelona, 2016), 98–103.
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14 Tara Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in East Central Europe, 1889–1989,” Past & Present 223.1 (2014): 176. People-smuggling differed from the human trafficking associated with so-called white slavery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter being a moral panic alleging that young European women were being seduced or kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Human smuggling presumably involves the consent of the smuggled and oftentimes, payment, whereas human trafficking does not, though a single situation can involve both. Human trafficking infringes upon both the trafficked person and the law whereas human smuggling violates just the law (thank you to Laura A. Dean for this definition). Recent historical research on “white slave” traffic has demonstrated that, while certainly systematically pressured into selling sex for money, some of these women migrated voluntarily to work as prostitutes overseas. See Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), and Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
15 Quoted in Zahra, Great Departure, 121.
16 Paul Knepper, International Crime in the 20th Century: The League of Nations Era, 1919–1939 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 49–50.
17 “Menschenschmuggel in Europa,” Feldkircher Anzeiger, July 24, 1929, accessed via AustriaN Newspapers Online (ANNO) (http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=fan&datum=19290724&seite=2&zoom=33).
18 Knepper discusses “informal police cooperation” as a method of tracking trans-border criminal operations in International Crime, 57.
19 In addition to Knepper's work, see Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
20 David Petruccelli, “Banknotes from the Underground: Counterfeiting and the International Order in Interwar Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 51.3 (2016): 510.
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26 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 127–29.
27 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 119.
28 Tobias Brinkmann, “Permanent Transit: Jewish Migration in the Interwar Period,” in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. Hasia R. Diner and Gennedy Estraikh (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 56.
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31 Likewise, migrants who wanted to return to Russia needed a passport or were smuggled over the border. US Immigration Inspector Philip Cowen reported on the danger of smuggling people into Russia: “Mr. S. Berlowitz Jr. of Eydtkuhnen told me that a deported immigrant from the United States had sought to smuggle over the border back of their house the night before in order to get back into Russia. He was shot by a guard, and so badly used afterward that he died the next morning. Mr. B. had endeavored to find out if he was a Jew so as to give him Jewish burial, but the soldiers had hastily buried him in order to prevent the news from getting out. This, he said, was not an uncommon occurrence.” Cowen report, European Investigation Entry No. 9, File No. 51411/56, Record Group 85, National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
32 For more information on German control and registration stations for eastern European emigrants, see Schmidt, Allison, “‘The Long March through Leipzig’: Train Terminal Chaos and the Transmigrant Registration Station, 1904–1914,” Journal of Migration History 2 (2016): 307–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allison Schmidt, Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914, ed. Tobias Brinkmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); and Katja Wuestenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, ed. Andreas Fahrmeier, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 223–36.
33 Letter from J. D. Whelpley to US Commissioner General of Immigration, June 8, 1904, European Investigation Entry No. 9, File No. 52714, Record Group 85, National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
34 Murdock, Caitlin E., Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 118–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Murdock, Changing Places, 122–24.
36 HStAD, MdI 11751, 34, report from the Amtshauptmannschaft in Marienberg to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior in Dresden, November 19, 1921.
37 HStAD, MdI 11751, 48, written report by the Polizeiamt Plauen, Kriminalamt, to the Landeskriminalamt in Dresden, November 10, 1922.
38 HStAD, MdI 11751, 48. Police might have recorded only Sandor Pribek's migrant testimony in case they were unable to find a Hungarian translator for future inquiries.
39 Narodní Archiv, Prague (NA), Ministerstvu sociální péče (MSP), Carton 3862, report to Panu Guvernéru Podkarpatské Rusi in Užhorodě, December 29, 1922.
40 Sinn, Elizabeth, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Roth, The Wandering Jews, 68
42 Reinecke, Grenzen der Freizügigkeit, 322.
43 HStAD, MdI 11751, 48.
44 Stauter-Halsted, The Devil's Chain, 140–41.
45 Prague had been a major transit point in nineteenth-century overseas emigration, though Vienna eclipsed the city in mass movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During World War I, Prague became a gathering point for refugees from the eastern front. Its role as a transit hub continued after the war. In 1923, the year after the smuggling network in Saxony had been infiltrated, Prague police began a crackdown on emigration agents who aided illegal migration, and authorities eventually amassed six thousand names. Zahra, Great Departure, 123.
46 “Karlovy Vary” in Czech and “Karlsbad” in German. Because many of these locations in east-central Europe had different names in different languages, this article uses English-language spellings unless otherwise noted.
47 HStAD, MdI 11751, 48.
48 See Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, ed., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
49 Martin, Sean, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–1939 (Portland: Frank Cass, 2004), 16Google Scholar.
50 The police suspected that this transport was one branch of a larger system and that international smuggling networks required an international response from authorities. Plauen police suggested to the Saxon State Office of Criminal Investigations that it send out warnings about people-smuggling in the region through the international Esperanto-language police magazine La policisto. This publication was founded in 1922 as a way for police to communicate internationally about cross-border crimes. Theoretically, the artificial language Esperanto put everyone on an equal footing in communication because the language was no one's native tongue and did not belong to any particular nation-state. Most of the articles in the magazine celebrated the founding of new Esperanto-learning police clubs in cities across the world and the growing international cooperation of law enforcement. Saxony had been a major hub of Esperanto-learning and law enforcement participation—Plauen police suggested contacting the representative of the police Esperanto group in Dresden, main constable Pohle, for further assistance. Although a notification did not appear in subsequent publications, the suggestion of using an Esperanto-language apparatus indicates an interest in formalizing international policing. Police instincts proved correct in that more people were involved. Thank you to the University of Amsterdam library staff for making the 1922 and 1923 issues of La policisto available for reference.
51 HStAD, MdI 11751, 48.
52 HStAD, MdI 11751, 49, report from the Polizeiamt Plauen to the Polizei-Präsidum in Dresden, November 12, 1922.
53 Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture, trans. by William Templer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 4.
54 Triendl-Zadoff, New Year in Marienbad, 48.
55 Werner Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern. Rekonstruktion der Lebenswege der Familie Brandt und anderer Juden im vogtländisch-egerländischen Grenzgebiet zwischen 1790 und 1950 (Markneukirchen: Heimatverein Markneukirchen e.V., 2012), 105.
56 Die Einwanderung der Ostjuden. Eine Gefahr oder ein Sozialpolitisches Problem (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920), 5.
57 A transport “of migrants” is implied though not completely clear. HStAD, MdI 11751, 48.
58 HStAD, MdI 11751, 49.
59 HStAD, MdI 11751, 50, report from the Polizeiamt Plauen Kriminalamt to the Landeskriminalamt Dresden, November 15, 1922. The trio might have gotten word of Reizmann elsewhere, but it is very possible, as stated, that they met by chance. People-smugglers kept watch in areas where they could avail themselves of potential clients; and they still use this tactic today.
60 HStAD, MdI 11751, 50.
61 NA, MSP, Carton 3862, protocol from the Županksý ůřad in Mukachevo to the Ministry of Social Affairs in Prague, November 30, 1922.
62 NA, MSP, Carton 3862.
63 HStAD, MdI 11751, 50.
64 Quoted in Raz, Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 30Google Scholar.
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66 Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, “Beyond the ‘Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy’: Jewish Refugee Policy from Wartime Austria-Hungary to Interwar Czechoslovakia,” in Austrian History Yearbook 45 (214): 153.
67 Likely mistyped as “Lebovite.”
68 HStAD, MdI 11751, 51, report from the gendarme in Velyki Luchky to the Kriminalpolizei in Plauen, November 20, 1922.
69 HStAD, MdI 11751, 50. The report likely mistypes Majer as “Major.”
70 Thank you to Rosamund Johnston for assistance with translating this passage.
71 NA, MSP, Carton 3862, report from the Županksý ůřad in Mukachevo to the Ministry of Social Affairs in Prague, January 13, 1923.
72 HStAD, MdI 11751: 51.
73 HStAD, MdI 11751: 51.
74 Luigi Achilli, “The ‘Good’ Smuggler: The Ethics and Morals of Human Smuggling among Syrians,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 676. 1 (2018): 80.
75 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 105.
76 Markus and Cilly also had either a niece or daughter, Friede Freund (nee Billet), born in 1892 in Brody, who lived in Berlin. Arnold died in 1921. Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 105.
77 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 75.
78 Solveig Höppner, “Politische Reaktionen auf die Einwanderung ausländischer Juden,” in Antisemitismus in Sachsen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Solveig Höppner (Dresden: DDP Goldenbogen, 2004), 136.
79 Höppner, “Politische Reaktionen auf die Einwanderung ausländischer Juden,” 130.
80 Ena Pedersen, “Persecution, Exile, and the Mental Ghetto: Katz,” in Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 158.
81 H. W. Katz, The Fishmans, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 54.
82 For more information on Galician refugees see Michal Frankl, “Prejudiced Asylum: Czechoslovak Refugee Policy, 1918–60,” Journal of Contemporary History 49.3 (2014): 537–55; Habartová, Klára, “Jewish Refugees from Galicia and Bukovina in East Bohemia during World War I in Light of the Documents of the State Administration,” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2007): 139–66Google Scholar.
83 Katz, The Fishmans, 186.
84 Katz, The Fishmans, 198.
85 Katz, The Fishmans, 214.
86 HStAD, MdI 11707, 99, report of the Saxon Landtag inquiry number 447, November 22, 1921.
87 H. W. Katz mentions the 1918–19 refugees in Saxony in his sequel to The Fishmans, No. 21 Castle Street (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 115–16.
88 An example of a Galician refugee who stayed in Czechoslovakia was Jiří Nezval, Interview 42303, Visual History Archive, USA Shoah Foundation Institute, accessed online at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 1, 2017.
89 Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years, ed. and trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2015), 66.
90 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 150.
91 Trude Maurer, “From Everyday Life to a State of Emergency: Jews in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 307.
92 Murdock, Changing Places, 120.
93 Max Wald, Interview 21320, Visual History Archive, USA Shoah Foundation Institute, accessed online at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 1, 2017.
94 Reinecke, Grenzen der Freizuegigkeit, 322.
95 HStAD MdI 11707, note from Ministerium des Innern, II. Abteilung to the civil districts, police headquarters in Dresden, and town councils, March 19, 1921.
96 Klein-Pejšová, “Beyond the ‘Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy,’” 159.
97 Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years, 16.
98 NA, MSP, Carton 3862, report from the Županksý ůřad in Mukachevo to the Ministry of Social Affairs in Prague, January 13, 1923.
99 Adressbuch des oberen Vogtlandes umfassend die Städte Oelsnitz i.V (1925), digitized by the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB) (http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id394572807).
100 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 105.
101 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 105.
102 Pöllmann, Verstreut unter allen Völkern, 150–51. Thank you to Joel Koenig for access to Zwilling family records.
103 AMM Y/43, Austria, Mauthausen/Gusen Concentration Camp Death Record Books, 1938–1945, Mauthausen Gedenkstätte. Thank you to Peter Egger for assistance in finding information about Abraham Semmel.
104 RG-15.098M, Starosta Miasta Krakowa, 1939–1945. Wykazy dowodow osobistych (Kennkartenlisten) wydanych Żydom: City captain of the city of Krakow, 1939–1945, ID card list, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, DC.
105 RG–15.098M, Starosta Miasta Krakowa, 1939–1945.
106 See Carens, Joseph, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
107 Roth, Joseph, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, trans. Hofmann, Michael (New York: Norton, 1996), 38Google Scholar.