MS St. Louis

MS St. Louis in its home port of Hamburg[1]
History
Germany
Name	St. Louis
Owner	Hamburg-America Line
Port of registry	Hamburg (1928–1933) Hamburg (1933–1945) Hamburg (1945–1949) Hamburg (1949–1952)
Builder	Bremer-Vulkan Shipyards in Bremen, Germany
Laid down	June 16, 1925
Launched	August 2, 1928
Maiden voyage	March 28, 1929
Fate	Scrapped in 1952
General characteristics
Type	Passenger Liner
Tonnage	16,732 gross register tons (GRT)
Length	574 ft (175 m)
Beam	72 ft (22 m)
Propulsion	MAN diesels, twin triple-blade propellers
Speed	16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph)
Capacity	973 passengers (270 cabin, 287 tourist, 416 third)

MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered passenger ship properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line. The ship was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Her sister ship, MS Milwaukee, was also a diesel powered motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line. St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco. St. Louis was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.^[2]

During the build-up to World War II, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 intending to escape anti-Semitic persecution. The refugees first tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. After Cuba, the captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, accepted some refugees. Many were later caught in Nazi roundups of Jews in the occupied countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps during World War II.^[3] These events, also known as the "Voyage of the Damned", have inspired film, opera, and fiction.