[BroJoeK]

af_vet_1981: "In post 34 you wrote 'Just so we're clear about this: there were no Nazi death camps in 1939, none.' "

Beginning at the end of 1941 Nazis set up six mass killing centers in Poland -- Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno & Majdanek -- in which about half of all murdered Jews died.
The rest died in other camps -- so called "work camps" -- in Einsatzgruppen shootings and from starvation & disease in restricted ghettos.

None of this was going on before September 1939.
Yes, during the 1930s Jews were harassed, restricted & persecuted, but they were not being mass-murdered in the way that only began after two years of European war.

[af_vet_1981]

Yes, during the 1930s Jews were harassed, restricted & persecuted, but they were not being mass-murdered in the way that only began after two years of European war.

This is the immediate context for your not being mass-murdered world for the the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis and occurred just previously in November 1938. The Jewish refugees were able to arrange for passage and fled in May 1939.

These photographs show the German annexation of the Sudetenland. In Germany, open antisemitism became increasingly accepted, climaxing in the "Night of Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht) on November 9, 1938. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels initiated this free-for-all against the Jews, during which nearly 1,000 synagogues were set on fire and 76 were destroyed. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses and homes were looted, about one hundred Jews were killed and as many as 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps to be tormented, many for months. Within days, the Nazis forced the Jews to transfer their businesses to Aryan hands and expelled all Jewish pupils from public schools. With brazen arrogance, the Nazis further persecuted the Jews by forcing them to pay for the damages of Kristallnacht