Jewish Refugees Begin Reaching Shanghai after Kristallnacht

After the November 1938 pogroms in Germany and Austria, Shanghai became one of the few ports that still accepted Jewish refugees without visas. Arrivals rose from late 1938 into 1939. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that about 17,000 German and Austrian Jews reached the city in that wave. By 1941 the broader Central and East European refugee population in Shanghai was about 20,000.

10 November 1938 is the date of Kristallnacht, not a documented single landing in Shanghai. This article records the post-pogrom flight after November 1938.

Ho Feng-Shan, Chinese consul general in Vienna, issued thousands of visas that helped Austrian Jews leave after the Anschluss and the November pogroms. After Japan occupied Shanghai, authorities in 1943 forced stateless refugees into a restricted area in Hongkew; that later confinement is a separate story. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee maintained relief kitchens in the city and, after the war, helped most of the refugees leave for Israel or the United States.