The passenger steamer St. Louis in 1939. The photographs show scenes on the ship’s deck. The MS St. Louis was a passenger ship operated by the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), which entered service in 1929. The ship gained worldwide historical fame through its tragic odyssey in the spring of 1939: under the command of Captain Gustav Schröder, it left Hamburg on 13 May 1939 with over 900 Jewish refugees seeking to escape the terror of National Socialism in Germany. Their destination was Cuba, but the Cuban authorities refused entry to the vast majority of them. The United States and Canada also turned the ship away, so that after weeks of waiting off the coast of Florida, the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. The passengers were distributed among the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and the Netherlands; many of them nevertheless fell victim to the Holocaust following the German occupation of Western Europe. To this day, the St. Louis’s odyssey is regarded as a symbol of the failure of the international community in the face of the plight of Jewish refugees.