On 26 October 1936 the Stuttgart docked in Cape Town, carrying 537 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. They were among roughly 6,000 German-speaking Jews who eventually found refuge in South Africa amid a climate of rising Afrikaner nationalism and antisemitism. Drawing on archival materials and hundreds of personal accounts, this talk will follow the refugees’ trajectory from Nazi Europe and the lives they went on to build, and explore why the Stuttgart’s arrival marked a turning point in South African Jewish history.

Shirli Gilbert is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. She obtained her D. Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She is a historian of modern Jewish life and has published widely on the Holocaust and its legacies; Jews, ‘race’, and racism; and Jews in South Africa. Her books include From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2017), Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World, with Avril Alba (2019), and The Holocaust and Sub-Saharan Africa: A Documentary History, with Roni Mikel-Arieli (forthcoming). She is currently writing a book about refugees who fled from Nazi Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the 1930s and 40s.