presidential blunders

One of Franklin D. Roosevelt's worst moments came in 1939 when he refused entry to the St. Louis, a German ship filled with 937 Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. The ship was first denied entry into Cuba. Then, despite desperate and repeated pleas to President Roosevelt, the ship was turned away from American soil. Canada was the next country to turn a cold shoulder to the St. Louis, forcing the ship to return to Europe where passengers finally disembarked in the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands. While the majority of the passengers survived World War II, research by Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie, as documented in their book Refuge Denied, estimates that 254 were eventually killed in the Holocaust. The story of the St. Louis has been told in the movie Voyage of the Damned.