The “J” stamp in passports

On 5 October 1938 the Reich Ministry of the Interior issued a decree on the passports of Jews. Every German passport for foreign travel held by a Jew as defined by the Nuremberg Laws became invalid, and holders living in the Reich had to surrender theirs to the authorities within two weeks. A passport could become valid again only once it bore an identifying mark: a large red letter “J” stamped into it. From then on any border official anywhere in the world could see at a glance that the person before him was a Jew from Germany – in all likelihood a refugee who wanted to stay in his country.

Some accounts state that the change was introduced “at the request of Sweden and Switzerland, which wanted an easy way to refuse Jews entry”. This is a simplification, though not a falsehood. The impetus did indeed come from Swiss demands to stem the influx of refugees, but the marking of passports itself was proposed by the German side, in order to avoid visas for all its citizens. Sweden adopted the arrangement only after the fact.

The refugees of 1938

By 1938 some 150,000 Jews had left Germany. That year brought a sharp acceleration of persecution. After the Anschluss of Austria in March, Vienna saw the public humiliation and robbery of Jews on a hitherto unknown scale, and thousands of people fled. From April new regulations obliged Jews to register their property, from July to carry special identity cards, and an August decree required that from 1 January 1939 every Jew whose first name was not “Jewish” add the name Israel or Sara.

Neighbouring countries responded by closing their borders. From 1 April 1938 Switzerland demanded visas from holders of Austrian passports. When in August Germany began exchanging Austrians’ passports for German ones, the Swiss visa requirement lost its point. Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Swiss Aliens’ Police, who had represented his country at the Évian Conference in July and had been fighting the “over-foreignisation” (Überfremdung) of Switzerland since the 1920s, pressed for visas for all citizens of the Reich. The Federal Council threatened to impose them.

For Berlin this would have been awkward: visas for all Germans would have hampered trade and tourism and been an affront to the Reich’s prestige. In talks held in September, first in Bern and then in Berlin, the Germans offered to mark the passports of their citizens of Jewish descent. Rothmund had legal and moral doubts about rules aimed solely at Jews, but judged the solution technically workable. On 29 September 1938 – the same day on which the conference that ended in the Munich Agreement met in Munich – the delegations signed a protocol in Berlin. Germany undertook to mark Jews’ passports, and Switzerland to admit them only if a Swiss consulate had previously entered permission for residence or transit. On a reciprocal basis the Reich could demand that the passports of Swiss Jews be marked; Switzerland never did so. The Federal Council approved the agreement on 4 October, and the following day Germany issued its decree.

Sweden

Sweden, which since 1937 had drawn an ever sharper distinction between political refugees and those fleeing persecution “only” because of their origins, also feared an influx of Jews from the Reich and was considering a general visa requirement for Germans. According to Swedish historians, in October 1938 the authorities in Stockholm adopted a solution modelled on the Swiss–German agreement: a confidential instruction to border posts ordered them to turn back holders of passports stamped with a J unless they had an entry permit issued in advance. Scholars differ on how far Sweden itself sought the marking of passports and how far it merely made use of a ready-made solution; there is no doubt, however, that it wanted to use it for the same purpose as Switzerland. Other countries, for which the letter J made selection at the border and in consulates easier, behaved similarly in practice.

The trap closes

The decree of 5 October was part of a broader process of marking and segregating Jews that the Reich authorities pursued throughout 1938, but its consequences reached far beyond Germany. The letter J turned the passport – a document meant to protect a citizen abroad – into a brand. Countries that, after the failure of the Évian Conference, did not want to take in refugees were handed a simple tool for refusing them. In the following years Switzerland admitted thousands of refugees but turned thousands of others back at the border, and in August 1942, when deportations to the death camps were already under way in occupied Europe, Rothmund ordered the border closed to those fleeing “solely on racial grounds”.

A few weeks after the introduction of the J passports, the trap closed in the east too. On 6 October 1938 the Polish government announced that the passports of Polish citizens living abroad would lose their validity unless they received a special inspection stamp by the end of the month; the main aim was to keep Jews from the Reich out of the country. In response, the Gestapo, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, arrested some 17,000 Polish Jews between 27 and 29 October and dumped them at the border (the Polenaktion). Many of them spent months stranded in a camp at Zbąszyń. Among those expelled was the family of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who on 7 November shot a German diplomat in Paris. The Nazis used the attack as a pretext for the pogrom that went down in history as Kristallnacht.

Significance

The J passports killed no one directly, but they show how little room was left in the world for the Jews of the Reich in the last year before the war. Germany wanted to be rid of them, robbing them before they left, while the countries they fled to increasingly closed their borders to them. When the war cut off most escape routes, those who had not managed to leave were trapped in the Reich and, from 1941, deported to the east, where most of them perished in the Holocaust.

Switzerland’s role was disputed for decades. From 1954 the invention of the “J” stamp was attributed to Rothmund; later research showed that the idea had come from the Germans and that the Swiss had accepted it. On 7 May 1995 the President of the Confederation, Kaspar Villiger, apologised on behalf of the state for Switzerland’s acceptance of the 1938 agreement. An independent commission of historians chaired by Jean-François Bergier concluded in its report on refugees that by closing the borders to people threatened with death, the Swiss authorities had helped the Nazis achieve their aims.