In 1938, as the Nazis laid plans to annihilate European Jewry, a few desperate Jews dreamed of escaping to the other side of the world: Alaska. Joachim Hein, from Breslau, Germany, was one of many who wrote to the American Department of Interior for permission to immigrate to the vast northern territory with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Henny. “We shall in no way [be] a burden for the country,” he wrote in a letter now in the National Archives, “because we take our electric machines from here and furnish a manufacture in aprons and linen, like we have had here. But if this business is not agreeable to your Excellency, we are prepared to [do] every work.”
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and a few others in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration liked the idea of resettling German Jews in Alaska. Despite the isolationist and anti-Jewish sentiments prevalent at the time, they proposed to establish “a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions.” According to Ickes’s diaries, President Roosevelt wanted to move 10,000 settlers to Alaska each year for five years, but only 10 percent would be Jewish “to avoid the undoubted criticism” the program would receive if it brought too many Jews into the country. With Ickes’s support, Interior Undersecretary Harold Slattery wrote a formal proposal titled “The Problem of Alaskan Development,” which became known as the Slattery Report. It emphasized economic-development benefits rather than humanitarian relief: The Jewish refugees, Ickes reasoned, would “open up opportunities in the industrial and professional fields now closed to the Jews in Germany.”
A book can be a very powerful agent; and where it may lead is unpredictable. Consider the case of Ruth Gruber, a remarkable woman who had an impact on post-WWII Alaska.
Born into an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1911, after high school Gruber won a fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, and then another to the University of Cologne in Germany, where she completed her studies. In 1932, at age 21, she became the youngest doctorate in the world.
Opting for a career in journalism, she went to work for the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. The publisher sent her in 1935 to Germany and Soviet Russia for a series of articles on women under Fascism and Communism. The Soviets in particular claimed to have advanced dramatically the equality of women. Not one to leave stones unturned, Gruber often spent months, sometimes years, on her assignments. In Russia she eventually worked her way as far north and east as Igarka, a newly founded sawmill town on the Yenesi River in western Siberia. When she returned home, she wrote the book that would bring her to Alaska, "I Went to the Soviet Arctic."
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