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Second
of Four Parts
Walter Lilienfeld,
born under Hitler's rule, was 4 years old the day World War II
began. 
He lived in the small
town of Neustadt, Germany, with his parents, Max and Rosel Lilienfeld.
They were a handsome couple, once prosperous. Both of them were
blonde, and his mother had blue eyes.
They wanted to go
to Alaska.
Walter's father used
to work with the farmers in the countryside, buying and selling
cattle. But the Nazis wouldn't let the farmers sell to him any
more because he was Jewish. Now there was hardly any work for
him. Because he was a strong worker, he could sometimes get hired
as a day laborer at construction sites. It was better than getting
paid to sweep the streets, like the other Jews in town.
Walter's brother no
longer lived with them. The previous winter, after the Nazis burned
the synagogue in town and his father returned from the Buchenwald
concentration camp with his head shaved, 9-year-old Hans had been
sent away to Belgium for safety.
But on Sept. 1, 1939,
Panzer tanks rolled across Germany's eastern frontier into Poland.
The war began. It wouldn't be long until Hans came home to rejoin
the family in Neustadt.
The Lilienfelds wanted
to leave Germany, but no country would take them in. The line
for visas to the United States had grown longer after the anti-Jewish
Kristallnacht riots of 1938.
One of the Lilienfelds'
cousins, Alice Pfeffer, had managed to get a U.S. visa and left
Neustadt in 1937. Pfeffer lives in New York City today and remembers
the growing panic of the relatives she left behind.
Her cousin Max, she
recalls, had fought for Germany in World War I. He grew up as
an only child after his sister died of scarlet fever. He met Rosel,
from Thuringen, through relatives. Their son Hans was an unusually
bright young boy. And Walter, even as a 2-year-old, had formed
a special attachment to his cousin.
"How that little boy
loved me," Pfeffer recalled recently.
By 1939, there could
be no school for Jewish children. In a rush of new laws after
Kristallnacht, Jews had been expelled from schools, excluded from
libraries and theaters, and barred from driving automobiles. Their
property had been confiscated.
And so the Jewish
families of Neustadt prepared for a hungry winter as they waited
for word on their bid to reach Alaska.
Bruno Rosenthal, one
of the town's most prominent Jews, had learned of a new program
promising to allow a certain number of additional Jewish refugees
to enter the U.S. territory of Alaska.
Rosenthal was writing
letters to the American government. He included the Lilienfelds
on his list of applicants.
Rosenthal, once a
merchant in a fine mansion, now worked day jobs. His once-wealthy
wife, Bianca, supplemented their income giving English lessons
to people like themselves who wanted to emigrate.
Finally, in the beginning
of November, Rosenthal received a reply to one of his letters
to Washington. It was a two-paragraph note saying his inquiry
was being forwarded to the proper authorities. It was stamped
with the name of Harry Slattery, undersecretary of the Interior.
Rosenthal was ecstatic.
Not because of the bloodless official reply, but because of what
came with it in the big envelope: a 70-plus page government report
signed by Slattery describing the need for settlement in Alaska.
Rosenthal read the
report with the help of his wife. He was especially struck by
the report's account of the Tsimshian Indians who came from Canada
with Father William Duncan to found a reservation at Metlakatla
in Southeast Alaska. The report portrayed these Indians as victims
of religious persecution. In his prompt reply to Slattery, Rosenthal
wrote:
"I have read this
Report with highest interest, because we German Jews are just
in the same situation as at that time were the Canadian refugees,
headed by Father Duncan. Like these refugees, once settled, we
can't return to our fatherland we are obliged to leave. Like them
we are willing to 'take our courage in both hands and pray for
it with both hands too.' "
He begged for a reply
by Air Mail telling how many Jews would be allowed to go to Alaska.
"In case the High
Government will give us this chance, it will not be deceived,
then, neither coldness nor other nature-forces shall prevent us
to do our duty."
REFUGEES WOULD
'BUILD UP ALASKA'
Alaska in the 1930s
had not changed much since the Gold Rush days. If anything, the
pace of life was slower. The population was still only 70,000
and nearly half Native. Prices for gold, furs and fish were big
news. The Kennecott copper mines were closing down, leaving new
ghost towns behind. Whenever a ship left Seattle for the territory,
the names of all Alaska-bound passengers were reported on the
front page of The Anchorage Daily Times.
But change was coming
by 1939. The economy stirred as the U.S. military began to fortify
the territory for war. 
On a tour of Alaska
the previous summer, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes had been
badgered by business leaders to provide more roads, airfields
and other improvements. The imperious Ickes brushed off most of
the suggestions at the time, but he capitalized on Alaskans' pro-business
sentiments in August 1939 when he released the Slattery Report,
whose official title was "The Problem of Alaskan Development."
"Immigration to Alaska
supported by industries properly financed will bring both capital
and man power to the Territory. Both are prerequisites for social
and economic stability," the report said. "The number of new settlements
will increase each year. The course of Alaskan development, once
under way, cannot be stopped."
The Interior report
proposed creating public purpose corporations, like those that
once settled the American colonies - chartered by the government,
but financed privately - to found industries in mining, forest
products and fishing, among others. The report examined Baranof
Island in Southeast, the Kenai Peninsula, and the Matanuska-Susitna
valleys as possible sites for new settlements.
The demand for skilled
labor would draw unemployed Americans and workers from "the four
corners of the earth," particularly the oppressed of Europe, the
report glowingly predicted. Americans would remain in the majority
to ease assimilation of the others, but along with Americans there
would be need "for boat builders and fishermen from the shores
of the Mediterranean, for trained toy makers and machinists, skilled
leatherworkers and cabinetmakers from central Europe, and workers
in wood from north Europe, who can transplant to Alaska the industries
of their native lands."
Alaskans would accept
these "new settlers of various races, creeds and stations," the
report predicted, because people on the American frontier had
always been ready to accept someone who could join in the work
at hand.
Release of the Slattery
Report did not mean the Roosevelt administration fullybacked the
idea of Alaska settlement by refugees. The State Department remained
opposed. Some diplomats expected trouble because the nonquota
immigrants would be required, under such a plan, to remain in
Alaska as second-class citizens.
But President Roosevelt,
who had weighed Jewish resettlement schemes for places like Angola
and the Dominican Republic, seemed intrigued.
In November, as Rosenthal
was reading the Slattery Report for the first time in Germany,
Secretary Ickes went to see Roosevelt about the idea. Ickes wrote
that he came away "astonished at the thought that the President
had given to a comparatively minor problem ... and his cleverness
in working it out."
According to Ickes'
published diaries, Roosevelt wanted to move 10,000 settlers to
Alaska each year for five years, half of them immigrants. Ickes'
account offers a rare look at Roosevelt's political sensitivities
on the immigration question: he said only 10 percent should be
Jewish, "to avoid the undoubted criticism" of any system bringing
too many Jews. Several thousand refugees from the Nazis might
be saved by such a plan.
Interior began drawing
up legislation for Congress to consider. Newspaper editorials
from around the country and letters to the government were generally
enthusiastic about the proposal to develop Alaska. Several hundred
inquiries were received from overseas, Ickes announced.
But Congress would
want to hear what reception the idea was getting in the Alaska
territory.
Already, two major
Washington policy-makers on Alaska in the Roosevelt administration
were lining up in
opposition to the plan. Both of them happened to be Jewish.
'LOUD CRYING
FOR MANKIND'
The 21 German Jews
from Neustadt who wanted to emigrate to Alaska in 1939 included
eight children, a doctor who spoke three languages, and an "expert
for trout fishery." 
In late November,
two weeks after writing Undersecretary of the Interior Harry Slattery,
Bruno Rosenthal wrote again. This time he included a list of six
families "praying for entry" to their "new fatherland and home
Alaska."
In addition to Rosenthal
and his wife, Bianca, both in their mid-50s, the list included:
* Max Lilienfeld,
43, cattle dealer, "expert for hides and furs," his wife, Rosel,
34, and their boys Hans and Walter, all from Neustadt;
* Leo Rosenthal, 50,
farmer and "soap boiler," who still lived in Bruno's home state
of Prussia, along with Frieda Michaelis, a widow hatmaker, and
her son, Herbert, a student;
* Hermann Spangenthal,
53, a manufacturer of whips and walking sticks, trout fisherman,
his wife Erna, 43, sons Helmut, 18, a farmer, and Kurt, 15, a
locksmith apprentice, and daughter Ruth, 11, a student;
* Kurt Heilbrunn,
41, a doctor, his wife, Margarete, 37, and son Guenter, 6;
* Alfred Rosenberg,
51, a merchant, his wife, Stella, 44, daughter Ruth, 16, and son
Walter, 9.
His letter indicated
the Spangenthals and Heilbrunns lived in the nearby city of Kassel,
and the Rosenbergs in the nearer town of Marburg.
The adults in the
group were older than the usual newcomer in Alaska. But then,
younger Jews had tended to emigrate first from Germany. And even
if their skills were not exactly the kind envisioned by the authors
of the Slattery Report, Rosenthal stressed idealism and willingness
to work.
"It is no selfishness
that I do all the work by writing and thinking for all the people.
It is only the sorrow and the grief for all my co-religionaries
which are of the same mind as I and are willing, like myself,
to bear with courage, energy and patience our heavy destiny, us
awaiting in Alaska."
If the list seemed
too long, Rosenthal wrote, perhaps numbers 1-13 could go in the
first "pioneer wave" and the others could follow a little later.
"So I beg once more
imploringly the High Government of the United States in the name
of us all, not to delay our hope and to permit us the entry into
Alaska as soon as possible, into this land, which, as I read in
the 'Report on Alaska' is loud crying for mankind."
Interior's reply,
written in December 1939, took three months to reach Germany.
A single paragraph informed Rosenthal that the matter was still
under consideration.
GRUENING TAKES
A STAND
When Interior Secretary
Ickes wrote a preface to the Slattery Report on Alaska, one key
name was missing from his thank you list: Ernest Gruening, director
of Interior's Division of Territories and Island Possessions.
Gruening was a Harvard-trained
doctor, crusading journalist and veteran New Dealer. He had been
the Washington bureaucrat directly in charge of policies for Alaska
as well as possessions like Puerto Rico. Now he was in the process
of being named governor of the Alaska territory. He would go on
to play a major role in the statehood drive and win election as
one of Alaska's first two U.S. senators.
As editor of The Nation,
Gruening had issued some of the earliest warnings about Hitler's
rise to power. He had served on the board of New York's University
in Exile, which had given a home to scholars who had fled the
Nazis. Both of Gruening's parents had been German Jews.
But the new governor
of the territory saw nothing but problems with the refugee resettlement
plan.
"This provision would
be universally resented in Alaska," Gruening wrote to Ickes in
October 1939.
Why not start with
a smaller project, Gruening asked Ickes, by bringing up immigrants
who had already come to America? Admission of immigrants outside
the normal quota would be a mistake. It would make Alaska a special
case, stir resentment in the territory and arouse national opposition
to Alaska development in general. Moreover, a new enforcement
agency would be necessary to make sure the immigrants did not
sneak away to the mainland. The plan, he wrote, would turn Alaska
into a virtual "concentration camp."
Gruening's reasons
for opposing the refugee plan could have been partly personal.
If Ickes was for something, Gruening was likely to be skeptical.
They were stubborn men with strong opinions. After a staff meeting
on the Alaska refugee plan, Gruening wrote in his journal that
Ickes refused to tolerate opposition even when he invited his
staff to speak frankly: "The freedom of expression that (Ickes)
sought he would be as likely to get as Hitler would when asking
his generals to make comment on a policy he had already announced."
For his part, Ickes
eagerly endorsed Gruening's appointment as Alaska governor to
get him out of Washington. The Alaska post was seen as "exile
to Siberia," writes Robert David Johnson, a historian at Williams
College, in a new biography of Gruening. (In his index, Johnson
lists only three categories under Ickes' name: "alienation from
Gruening," "attempts to oust Gruening," and "tensions with Gruening
as governor.")
During his five years
at Interior, Gruening had visited Alaska only twice, compared
with 60 visits to Puerto Rico. But Gruening had powerful friends
and couldn't be fired. Alaska was the greatest humiliation Ickes
could contrive.
Gruening's motives
on the refugee plan were largely political, Johnson said in a
recent interview. Reluctant as he was to take the Alaska post,
he knew it was his last chance for a political career, and he
recognized that it would be political suicide to push a plan that
was stirring opposition in Alaska.
Then, too, Gruening
was an atheist who later, as a senator, had an aide call up magazines
to complain if they identified him as "Jewish." He may have been
afraid of losing votes if he were associated with a Jewish cause,
given his parents' heritage, his biographer said.
"His reaction to the
refugee question was not one of the high points of his career,"
said Johnson, noting that Gruening had written sympathetically
of the refugees' cause in his private journal before getting the
Alaska appointment.
Not that there weren't
practical problems with the refugee plan. In public, Gruening
dismissed the Slattery Report as "wishful thinking" by bureaucrats.
The report was actually written by two Interior Department lawyers:
Nathan Margold, Interior's solicitor, and the Indian law expert
Felix Cohen, dismissed by a friend of Gruening's as an "unbalanced
enthusiast" who gets swept away by causes. None of the federal
bureau heads in Alaska supported the plan, Gruening noted, and
Assistant Secretary Oscar Chapman refused to release the report
under his name. Undersecretary Harry Slattery was called in to
sign it instead.
Slattery had come
to Interior from the National Conservation Association, making
him one of Interior's leading pro-conservation voices. But the
report that bore his name alarmed some conservationists. In fact
the Roosevelt administration's most famous voice for Alaska wilderness
protection spoke out loudly against the refugee plan.
Robert Marshall, chief
of recreation for the Forest Service and founder of the Wilderness
Society, had outraged many Alaska business leaders when he proposed
in 1937 that the Brooks Range north of the Yukon be preserved
as a roadless frontier, open only to small-scale homesteading,
trapping and gold panning.
Marshall had spent
a year in the village of Wiseman and wrote a book about that idyllic
"pre-industrial" community, where popular topics of conversation
ranged from the rise of Hitler to "the curse of Rah and its devastating
effect among the Tutankhamen excavators." Marshall hoped to preserve
such "pioneer conditions" for future generations.
Like other proposals
to promote development in Alaska, the refugee plan was a "dodge,"
Marshall wrote in The New Republic. Once again, politicians were
avoiding the nation's real economic problems with talk of a new
frontier.
His article, which
appeared shortly after his sudden death of a heart attack at 38,
concluded that federally sponsored settlers would diminish the
opportunity for individualism and self-sufficiency that still
flourished in the isolated, unmapped expanse of the north.
Marshall surely understood
the plight of the European Jews. His father was Louis Marshall,
a prominent New York constitutional lawyer and the longtime president
of the American Jewish Committee, a quiet, elite pressure group.
Like Gruening, Marshall
was ready to put humanitarian concerns second to his more immediate
programs for Alaska.
In fact, most of the
Alaska hands in prewar Washington seemed to feel there was little
they could do to help the German Jews. That was the sentiment
around the dinner table one night in 1939 at Marshall's house,
where the guests included Gruening and Anthony J. Dimond, Alaska's
delegate to Congress.
Gruening wrote of
the dinner party in his journal: "The conclusion seemed to be
that refugee problem could be solved only by defeating the Fascist
forces which originated it. But otherwise the problem was quantitatively
too overwhelming. Later Bob showed us the movies of his trip to
Alaska last summer and his unsuccessful effort to scale Mt. Dunorok."
Today's story
is drawn from the following sources:
- The letters
of Bruno Rosenthal and other European Jews regarding Alaska,
along with Interior Department memos on the Slattery Report,
are available at the National Archives. The file is available
on microfilm at University of the Alaska Fairbanks archives,
Elmer E. Rasmuson Library.
- The Slattery
Report is available from library sources in Alaska: "The Problem
of Alaskan Development," United States Department of the Interior,
Harold L. Ickes, Secretary, Washington, 1939/1940.
- Information
on key Washington figures in this story was drawn from the following
books: Ernest Gruening, "Many Battles," Liveright, NY, 1973;
Robert David Johnson, "Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting
Tradition," Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1998;
T.H. Watkins, "Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Time of Harold
L. Ickes, 1874-1952," Henry Holt, NY, 1990; Robert Marshall,
"Arctic Village," University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks, 1991,
and "Alaska Wilderness, University of California Press, Berkeley,1970.
Ernest Gruening's unpublished diaries are available at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks archives, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library.
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