German Ocean

Yet another said it was on the German ocean liner the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, headed to New York: the Germans had stolen the Mona Lisa and put it on a ship named after their emperor—the very emperor whose ships were threatening the French off Morocco.

Those eager to start a new life elsewhere are part of the Windrush generation that flocked to Britain after World War II — named after the former German ocean liner the initial wave arrived on — and were later recognized as legal permanent residents under a 1971 immigration act.

A 1939 drawing by Liesl J. Loeb, age 11, depicts the German ocean liner on which she and her family escaped from Europe only to be turned away at Havana harbor and sent back.

Ruth B. Mandel did not remember her transatlantic passage on the St. Louis, a German ocean liner that set sail from Hamburg for Cuba in May 1939 carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees.

“Of course I believe in more leisure for workers,” General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan told reporters upon disembarking from the German ocean liner Europa after three weeks’ vacation in the south of France in 1934.