MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered ocean liner built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for Hamburg America Line (HAPAG).

St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco.

[2] In 1939, during the build-up to World War II, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany intending to escape antisemitic persecution.

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 the Holocaust.

Four double-acting six-cylinder two-stroke diesel engines (MAN type, built under license from Bremer Vulkan) each with an output of 3150 hp gave her a speed of 16.5 knots (30.6 km/h).

Under the command of Captain Gustav Schröder, St. Louis set sail from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba on May 13, 1939, carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees[4][5] seeking asylum from Nazi persecution in Germany.

The Cuban government, headed by President Federico Laredo Brú, refused to accept the foreign refugees, although they held legal tourist visas to Cuba, as laws related to these had been recently changed.

On May 5, 1939, four months before World War II began, Havana had abandoned its pragmatic immigration policy, by virtue of decree 937, which "restricted entry of all foreigners except U.S. citizens, unless authorized by Cuban secretaries of state [and] subject [to] a bond of US $500.

[11] After most passengers were refused landing in Cuba, Captain Schröder directed St. Louis and the remaining 907 refugees towards the United States.

[13] After St. Louis was turned away from the United States, a group of academics and clergy in Canada tried to persuade Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to provide sanctuary to the passengers.

Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis.

[6] A display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., tells the story of the voyage of the MS St. Louis.

In 2009, a special exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, entitled Ship of Fate, explored the Canadian connection to the tragic voyage.

Symbolizing the policies that turned away more than 900 Jewish refugees, the wheel incorporates four inter-meshing gears, each showing a word to represent factors of exclusion: antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, and hatred.

[27] In May 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the Government of Canada would offer a formal apology in the country's House of Commons for its role in the fate of the ship's passengers.