Josie’s Story: The Alaska plan

Seventh of eight parts. This series tells the untold story of Josie Rudolph, the first settler girl born under the U.S. flag in Alaska — and how her birth here helped her escape from Nazi Germany. Read the first six parts and more about this series here.

In November 1938, a proposal was floated in the U.S. Congress to open Alaska to Germany’s Jews, as an exception to America’s tight quotas for immigrants from Europe. Nine months later, an official report promoting that plan was released by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which had jurisdiction over the Alaska territory.

Immigration to the U.S. was controversial in the 1930s, given high unemployment during the Depression. Even the strict immigration quotas imposed on German refugees by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act were not being filled. Nativism, racism and antisemitism played a part, and so did political calculations: The Roosevelt administration was split internally between sympathy for Jewish refugees and concern about alienating support for bigger political priorities — including preparation for a likely war.

Like other pleas for refugee relief, the Alaska plan got a cool reception in Congress and was dropped.

Josie Thurnauer had been working since 1936 to get out of Germany on a different Alaska plan.

Josie’s two adult children, Martin and Lilly, managed to emigrate with their families through the normal visa process early in the years of Nazi rule. But Josie had remained behind with her husband, who was approaching 80 and in poor health. When Bernhard Thurnauer died, in January 1936, she was at last free to depart — but strict U.S. immigration quotas stood in her way.

Josie hoped to get around this by making a claim of birthright U.S. citizenship.

She had no official records to prove where she was born. But her late mother, Fanny Rudolph, lacking a birth certificate in 1888 to satisfy local bureaucrats at the time of her daughter’s wedding, had filled out an affidavit with the American consul in Nuremberg, attesting that Josie’s birthdate was Aug. 4, 1869, and her birthplace Sitka, Alaska.

There was another impediment to Josie’s effort to leave Germany, however. In 1907, Congress had passed a law saying any woman who married a foreign national thereby lost her citizenship. The measure was part of an attempt to limit dual nationalities at a time of growing worldwide immigration (though it did not strip citizenship from men who married foreign women; in fact, foreign women who married American men received citizenship). The law, criticized today for its “striking gender disparity,” was repealed in 1922 — two years after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.

But the 1922 repeal did not restore citizenship retroactively to brides like Josie Thurnauer. Congress caught up just in time. In June 1936, five months after her husband’s death, a follow-up law repatriated any widowed or divorced woman who had lost her citizenship under the old law. The way was finally clear for Josie to bring her birth affidavit to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.

Josie’s descendants have a carbon copy of her application, typed out on two pages of onion-skin paper and dated Aug. 9, 1937. She renounced allegiance to the German Reich and pledged to defend the U.S. Constitution. She signed it Josephine Rudolph Thurnauer.

She found an American vice consul in Berlin, a Princeton man, who was sympathetic. He stamped her paperwork with an embossed seal. Even so, her application lingered for 14 months. In the meantime, Jewish emigration was now being managed by the Gestapo police.

Not surprisingly, things were getting especially bad in Nuremberg, where Julius Streicher, the virulently antisemitic publisher, was now the regional Nazi chief. In August 1938, Gauleiter Streicher ordered the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg to be destroyed. The towering structure, built in 1874 to mark Jewish emancipation after a 400-year ban, was “architecturally offensive,” Streicher explained during his war crimes trial.

On Oct. 5, 1938, a Nazi decree invalidated all German passports held by Jews. All Jews were ordered to turn in their passports and get a replacement stamped with a “J.” Many of those who received the new passports would be dead within a few years. Josie Thurnauer never bothered to reapply. Two days after the decree, she had received her U.S. passport from the Berlin embassy.

She made arrangements immediately to leave. But her family was concerned — Josie was now 69 and they worried about her crossing the Gestapo-run border on her own. Josie’s teenaged granddaughter, Hilde, was sent from London to guide her out.

From today’s perspective, it may seem a bold move to send an 18-year-old Jewish girl back into Hitler’s Germany to have her tonsils removed — and secretly retrieve a grandparent. But Hilde Joseph was eager to go. She couldn’t wait to see her friends. She was still furious that her parents had ruined her life by making her leave Nazi Germany.

“Not anger, it was beyond that. I was devastated that I had to leave,” Hilde recalled in a taped conversation decades later. “I was very self-involved at that time. I didn’t realize their ultimate goal was to destroy people like myself.”

With her granddaughter at her side, Josie reached the German border at the Dutch town of Oldenzaal. She had been wealthy for most of her adult life, but now she traveled light: By November 1938, Jews were no longer allowed to leave with cash or significant personal belongings.

Historians have said this policy seemed inconsistent with the efficient expulsion of Jews, which had once been a high German priority. Other countries were less likely to accept immigrants if they arrived without a pfennig to their name. But the policy was consistent with what was now a higher Nazi priority — to make a show of avenging themselves against the Jews — as the logic of their antisemitism barreled toward its horrific conclusion.

Josie presented herself to the German customs officials that day cloaked “head to toe” in the black dress of a widow, Hilde recalled, but with an American flag draped like a shawl over her shoulders. Beneath her black mourning vestments she had secretly pinned a fortune in jewelry to what her father, a lifetime ago in a newspaper advertisement in Alaska, had referred to as “ladies’ Understandings.”

Josie’s granddaughter suspected nothing. “It was better for me not to know,” Hilde said.

On Nov. 10, 1938, the world was shocked as the violent anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht swept across Germany. The small surviving synagogue in Nuremberg was burned to the ground. For months after, more than half the Jewish deaths in Germany would be suicides.

On Nov. 18, Rep. Charles Buckley of New York responded with a public letter calling for the Alaska territory to be opened to Jewish refugees fleeing the violence. “I am sure that these immigrants will build Alaska as this country was built by immigrants who came to the United States from many lands during periods of persecution in the past,” the congressman wrote.

Buckley’s Alaska plan would end up going nowhere. But Josie’s Alaska plan worked. The day Buckley released his letter, Josephine Rudolph Thurnauer stepped off a ship in Harwich, England — a U.S. citizen bound for New York.

Next: Return to Alaska in search of a family’s roots.

[From 1999: SANCTUARY — Alaska and the Holocaust]

Support for this project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.