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Prof. Vincent Publishes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

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Jewish refugees peer from a porthole in the MS St. Louis while the ship waited in the port of Havana
Jewish refugees peer from a porthole in the MS St. Louis while the ship waited in the port of Havana

Dr. Paul Vincent, chair of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Keene State College, published the article “The Voyage of the St. Louis Revisited,” in the current issue (Fall 2011) of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, one of the journals of Oxford University Press.

In 1939, the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner with 937 German-Jewish refugees aboard, all of whom had landing permits for Cuba, was denied entry into Havana. Following difficult negotiations, the ship disembarked its passengers in Antwerp, Belgium. Some passengers were granted refuge in England, while the others were divided between Belgium, France, and the Netherlands-all destined to come under Nazi occupation a year later. The event was the subject of a 1974 book, Voyage of the Damned, by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, adapted for a film with the same title in 1976. Dr. Vincent delves deeply into the diplomacy associated with the voyage, challenging some widely held suppositions about the incident.

Dr. Vincent did much of his research for the article while on sabbatical in 2007–2008 as a Pinchas and Mark Wisen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. His research was focused on American refugee policy in the year preceding the outbreak of the Second World War.

A forum for scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides, Holocaust and Genocide Studies is an international journal featuring research articles, interpretive essays, and book reviews in the social sciences and humanities. It serves, in part, to address the issue of how insights into the Holocaust apply to other genocides.

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