Asylum policies requiring proof of resistance excluded the most endangered refugees

Evidence

How dangerous it can be to be innocent from the point of view of the persecuting government, became very clear when, during the last war, the American government offered asylum to all those German refugees who were threatened by the extradition paragraph in the German-French Armistice. The condition was, of course, that the applicant could prove that he had done something against the Nazi regime. The proportion of refugees from Germany who were able to fulfill this condition was very small, and they, strangely enough, were not the people who were most in danger. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2534

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the Israel-Palestine literature’s critique of ‘innocence’ as a category; also parallels the logic of ‘proving loyalty’ that Arendt later applies to statelessness and the nation-state.
• ADDENDUM: The mechanism of requiring victims to prove resistance before granting asylum is a concrete instance of how state categories determine who counts as worthy of protection — relevant to the scaffold on exclusion and bureaucratic rationality.