Holocaust and Australia, The: Refugees, Rejection, and Memory (Perspectives on the Holocaust) - Hardcover

Bartrop, Paul R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350185140 ISBN 13: 9781350185142

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Synopsis

Paul R. Bartrop examines the formation and execution of Australian government policy towards European Jews during the Holocaust period, revealing that Australia did not have an established refugee policy (as opposed to an immigration policy) until late 1938. He shows that, following the Evian Conference of July 1938, Interior Minister John McEwen pledged a new policy of accepting 15,000 refugees (not specifically Jewish), but the bureaucracy cynically sought to restrict Jewish entry despite McEwen’s lofty ambitions. Moreover, the book considers the (largely negative) popular attitudes toward Jewish immigrants in Australia, looking at how these views were manifested in the press and in letters to the Department of the Interior. The Holocaust and Australia grapples with how, when the Second World War broke out, questions of security were exploited as the means to further exclude Jewish refugees, a policy incongruous alongside government pronouncements condemning Nazi atrocities. The book also reflects on the double standard applied towards refugees who were Jewish and those who were not, as shown through the refusal of the government to accept 90% of Jewish applications before the war. During the war years this double standard continued, as Australia said it was not accepting foreign immigrants while taking in those it deemed to be acceptable for the war effort. Incorporating the voices of the Holocaust refugees themselves and placing the country’s response in the wider contexts of both national and international history in the decades that have followed, Paul R. Bartrop provides a peerless Australian perspective on one of the most catastrophic episodes in world history.

About this title

About the Author

Paul R. Bartrop is s a multi-award-winning scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, and Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, USA. He is also an Honorary Principal Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and formerly Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. The author and co-author of several books, his published works with ABC-CLIO include The Holocaust: The Essential Reference Guide (2022), Children of the Holocaust (2019), and Perpetrating the Holocaust: Leaders, Enablers, and Collaborators (2019). All three of these works were co-authored with Eve E. Grimm. In addition, he has published Modern Genocide: Analyzing the Controversies and Issues (2018); The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection (edited with Michael Dickerman, 2017); and Resisting the Holocaust: Upstanders, Partisans, and Survivors (2016). He is a former Vice-President of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association and is a Past President of the Australian Association of Jewish Studies. In 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350185140
• ISBN 13: 9781350185142
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296