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Marjorie Lamberti, Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 597–598, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq076
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Since the late 1960s, the immigration policies of the west European democracies and the United States, which limited the admission of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria under the Nazi dictatorship, have been a controversial and morally troubling question in the study of the prehistory of the Holocaust. The historians contributing essays to this volume discuss with nuance and balance the failure of political decision-makers to assign a higher priority to the rescue of Jews in peril. This examination of immigration management in its historical context ends at the outbreak of the Second World War ‘to rule out any teleological discussion’ of the policies in the 1930s in relation to the extermination of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe after 1940 (p. 8). In their long comparative analysis in Part 2, Caestecker and Moore contend that the arrival of Jewish refugees was a catalyst in the push for restrictive immigration controls in the late 1930s, ‘but [this process] has to be seen primarily as a continuation of policies adopted to counter the effects of economic recession rather than directed specifically against those fleeing from Germany’ (p. 315).
