During the build-up to World War II, the Motorschiff St. Louis was a German ocean liner which carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 intending to escape anti-Semitic persecution. The refugees tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. 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. These events, have inspired film, opera, and fiction
United States did not like communism in the 50's and 60's. So they fought proxy wars with the U.S.S.R., now dissolved in to different countries.<span />
