Germany’s presence in modern Shanghai did not take the form of a territorially bounded concession. Instead, it developed through a dispersed network of institutions, finance, communications, commerce, and community life. Decades later, the meaning of “Germany in Shanghai” changed profoundly when Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria arrived in the city. The following history traces this movement from imperial networks to forced exile, and finally to the everyday coexistence of refugees and Shanghainese residents in Hongkou.
No German Concession, Yet a German Network
Modern Shanghai, after the Opium War, was drawn into a semi-colonial system composed of unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, and concession self-government. Britain first opened Shanghai’s treaty-port and juridical space; France later established an independent concession; and the British and American settlements subsequently merged to form the International Settlement. The semi-colonial concessions forced Shanghai open through imperial aggression and damaged Chinese sovereignty. Yet, objectively, they also compelled Shanghai into the world system, forced the city toward modernization, economic internationalization, and cultural pluralism, and shaped the basic character of modern Shanghai as open, inclusive, and marked by a fusion of Chinese and Western elements.
If one asks whether Germany left behind a colonial history in Shanghai, a simple answer of “yes” or “no” risks distorting the past. A more accurate formulation would be this: modern Shanghai never had a “German concession” or a “German colony” exclusively occupied by Germany in the way Qingdao did. The spatial order of modern Shanghai’s foreign community was defined primarily by the Anglo-American International Settlement and the French Concession. Although Germany obtained the privilege of requesting the establishment of a concession in 1896, this agreement on paper never became an exclusive territory under German jurisdiction. Yet this does not mean that Germany occupied a marginal position in Shanghai. On the contrary, Germany was deeply embedded in the semi-colonial order of this treaty-port city. Its influence could not be materialized as a continuous German district, but it wove together a dense network of banks, consulates, post offices, schools, clubs, and foreign firms.
At the height of German power in Shanghai, this presence displayed a highly developed modern urban structure. The German Consulate General once stood on the Hongkou Bund. In yellowed historical images, the flag above the consulate echoes the tower of the German Protestant church behind it. The former Club Concordia at No. 23 on the Bund witnessed the flourishing of German expatriate social life. At the intersection of Middle Sichuan Road and Fuzhou Road, the German Post Office building still stands today. When these scattered coordinates are linked together, a clearly recognizable map of German urban nodes emerges: diplomacy was mediated through the consulate, religion was anchored in the church, social life was connected through the club, and communication was secured by the post office. These institutions were distributed across Shanghai’s most central waterfronts, thoroughfares, and expatriate activity zones. Through this system, Germany, though lacking the name of a concession, inserted a highly organized physical presence into the urban fabric of Shanghai.
The foundation that allowed this network to operate efficiently lay in Shanghai’s position as the leading treaty port of modern China. During the treaty-port era, Shanghai handled roughly half of China’s total foreign trade. Germany keenly grasped the pulse of this historical moment and concentrated its key institutions here. In 1889, the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, founded to develop the East Asian market, was established; the following year, it set up its main branch in Shanghai. In 1904, the electrical giant Siemens also located its first permanent office in China in Shanghai. In other words, Germany’s period of greatest strength in Shanghai did not depend on direct administrative control, but on capital networks of finance, communications, commerce, and industry. Germany did not aim to “govern” Shanghai. It sought instead to “operate” Shanghai: to finance and settle transactions, transmit telegrams, and use the city as a springboard to open the Chinese market more fully.1
If one marks the historical interval, the period from the 1890s to the eve of the First World War may be regarded as Germany’s golden age in Shanghai. Germany did not dominate the International Settlement as Britain did, nor did it create an independent concession administration as France did. Yet it did, in practice, turn Shanghai into one of its most important commercial, financial, and diplomatic hubs in China. Germany’s true colonial base in China lay far to the north, in Jiaozhou Bay. In 1898, Germany leased Jiaozhou Bay and began to build Qingdao into a naval base in the Far East. By comparison, Shanghai functioned more like an invisible operational center, serving with precision and efficiency the German Empire’s commercial expansion, expatriate maintenance, and political expression.
The First World War, however, became the historical dividing line at which this German network collapsed. Article 134 of the Treaty of Versailles explicitly required Germany to renounce its property in the German school located within the Shanghai French Concession. This provision indirectly confirms that Germany had once built up a substantial institutional system and community foundation in Shanghai, even though all of it was later stripped away and dismantled under the shadow of defeat.
From that moment onward, Germany’s presence in Shanghai rapidly contracted from a vibrant imperial network into historical remnants that people today can identify only with effort through photographs, old maps, and a small number of surviving sites. Thus the German imprint in Shanghai came to assume a distinctive historical form. It did not leave behind an immediately visible colonial cityscape like Qingdao. Instead, in more dispersed, more hidden, and also more modern dimensions, it became deeply embedded in the city’s financial bloodstream, transportation framework, communication nerves, and educational and community life.
Germany ultimately failed to turn Shanghai into colonial territory of the empire. Yet it succeeded in making the city a key springboard for network expansion in China. Through commercial penetration and institutional construction, it quietly participated in the modern reshaping of an Eastern metropolis. Shanghai never assigned Germany a clearly bounded exclusive territory, but it preserved a more thought-provoking historical archive.
The collapse of Germany’s imperial network marked a decisive change in the meaning of its presence in Shanghai. Germany would reappear in the city not through commercial expansion, but through the forced movement of people fleeing persecution.
How Exile Brought Germany to Shanghai
How did political persecution in Germany drive a group of intellectuals and middle-class families, originally settled in Berlin, Vienna, and other Central European cities, toward the Far Eastern port of Shanghai? And how did Shanghai, through this forced migration, miraculously become an important site in the history of German-language exile, or Exilgeschichte? What Shanghai preserves today is not only the traces of German power’s expansion, but also an external echo of a period of rupture in German history.
In 1933, Nazi Germany began its persecution of Jews, and a small number of German and Austrian Jews set out for Shanghai. After Kristallnacht in 1938, the need to escape rose sharply, and large numbers of refugees poured into the city. For many, the question was no longer where life might be better, but where entry was still possible. In the 1930s, the Nazi regime generally encouraged Jews to leave Germany, yet in practice visa applications were blocked by quotas, waiting lists, consular review, and the tightening of border policies by many countries. Under these circumstances, Shanghai was one of the few destinations that did not require an entry visa.2
From the perspective of escape routes, Shanghai was also a destination that could actually be reached. Apart from traveling eastward by the Siberian Railway, the most common route was to leave Germany, Austria, or other parts of Europe by train, and then board a ship to Shanghai from an Italian port. Many ships departed from Genoa, Venice, or Naples. In other words, although Shanghai was distant, around the years 1938 to 1940 it still belonged to a transport network that was practically operable.
Prewar Shanghai was a divided and highly unusual city, with areas such as the International Settlement and the French Concession that bore the marks of extraterritoriality. Precisely because of this complex and ambiguous status, Europeans could long enter Shanghai to a considerable extent without an entry visa in the ordinary sense. This made Shanghai exceptionally prominent within the global network of refuge. At a time when many countries expressed sympathy for refugees in words while effectively closing their borders, Shanghai became one of the few places where people could still truly set foot.
Openness alone, however, is not enough to explain why Shanghai became a haven for European Jewish refugees. Another important reason was the existence of a community foundation capable of receiving them. Before the arrival of refugees from Germany and Austria, Shanghai already had Sephardi and Russian Jewish communities. This meant that the newly arrived refugees, though poor, unfamiliar with the city, and diverse in language and cultural background, did not fall into a place entirely without support. In 1938, local Jews established the Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees and sought funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York. By 1939, the JDC had greatly increased its allocations to Shanghai, using the funds for shelters, canteens, and housing relief. Shanghai was not an ideal refuge, but it combined legal accessibility, practical transport routes, and a minimum level of community support.3
In terms of population scale, the depth of Shanghai’s acceptance of refugees is beyond dispute. Between 1938 and 1941, Shanghai received around 20,000 European Jewish refugees. More than 17,000 came from Germany and Austria, while others arrived from Poland and elsewhere; the city also already contained several thousand Russian Jewish residents. Shanghai did not merely happen to shelter scattered strangers from foreign lands. It substantially received a large-scale cultural migration from Central Europe. For this reason, Hongkou is not only a fragment in Shanghai’s local history; it is also anchored in a prominent position on the map of twentieth-century German and Austrian Jewish exile.4
The most concrete point of entry into this history is the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. Established in 2007, the museum is centered on the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, completed in 1927. As one of the two surviving synagogues in Shanghai, Ohel Moshe was not only a center of religious consolation during the war, but also a spiritual gathering place for the refugee community. After its expansion in 2020, the museum covered more than 4,000 square meters. Its more than one thousand artifacts and over 160 fragments of individual life stories together construct a three-dimensional field of memory. The memorial wall in the courtyard, engraved with 18,578 names, carries powerful symbolic meaning. It restores the once vast and abstract “refugee wave” to specific, vivid, and independent lives. Standing before this wall, “Germany in Shanghai” becomes a series of life trajectories that were forcibly interrupted and then continued here with difficulty.
To understand this history simply as a story of “reception” would underestimate its cultural complexity. What deserves attention is that these exiles did not merely reside passively in Shanghai. Instead, they reorganized social life in the Hongkou area. Many relied on their original professional skills: doctors opened clinics, craftsmen ran workshops, and intellectuals founded educational institutions. As the community grew, schools, hospitals, newspapers, and various mutual-aid organizations emerged. Materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum show that many German and Austrian refugees opened small shops in Hongkou and even became involved in property leasing.
Shanghai thus displayed a dual character. It was a “place of refuge” in the physical sense, but it was also a real “German-language social space.” People made a living here, ran newspapers, and organized cultural and sports activities, allowing the social structure of exile life to be partially restored amid extreme scarcity.
This struggle and reconstruction can still be identified today through several spatial nodes. The reconstructed White Horse Inn inside the museum was originally a restaurant founded by a Viennese couple in 1939 and once served as a social hub where refugees sought a sense of continental European warmth. Although the original building was demolished in 2009, its full-scale reconstruction in 2015 reflects Shanghai’s regard for this cultural history. Other sites, such as the Roy Roof Garden on the top floor of the Broadway Theatre, once offered exiles a brief moment of elegance within a cramped reality. These places show that the refugees refused to become mere pieces moved about by history. Even under extremely limited conditions, they still tried to rebuild, in a foreign land, the dignity of continuing to live.
It must be noted, however, that the maintenance of exile life in Hongkou did not arise entirely spontaneously. The Shanghai branch of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on Huoshan Road served as one of the most important nodes of international assistance, supporting the operation of refugee camps, soup kitchens, and medical systems. Shanghai’s place in German-language exile history should not be simplified into a naturally formed “humanitarian myth.” Rather, it was sustained by multiple forces: the accommodation offered by local residents, the aid provided by existing Jewish communities, and the intervention of international organizations. Together, these forces upheld the minimum conditions for survival.
Yet the limited warmth of this historical narrative was brutally shattered again in February 1943, when the Japanese occupation authorities established the “Designated Area for Stateless Refugees” in Hongkou and forced more than ten thousand Jewish refugees into a cramped area of less than three square kilometers. The monument in today’s Huoshan Park commemorates the “residential area for Jewish refugees during the Second World War,” recording the oppressive years of this designated zone. History here presents a subtle dialectic: Shanghai was neither an unshadowed “Eastern paradise” nor a Nazi-style “death ghetto” of Europe. It was instead a marginal condition between shelter and restriction. People had escaped Nazi persecution in Europe, yet still had to struggle for survival under the shadows of poverty, infectious disease, and political uncertainty.5
Looking back today, what is often most moving is not grand rhetoric about internationalism, but the stubborn persistence of these historical echoes within the fabric of the city. The brick walls of Ohel Moshe, the stone memorial engraved with names, the shade of the trees in Huoshan Park, and the reconstructed café together form a network of memory that can be concretely identified and felt. The history of German exile is not sealed only in archival boxes in Europe. Part of its living flesh truly fell among the lanes of Hongkou.
When twentieth-century Central Europe began to expel its own citizens from public life, Shanghai, within an extraordinarily specific fissure of time and space, received these exiled lives. Therefore, the deepest imprint Germany left in Shanghai was not the grand European-style offices, but the will to survive reconstructed on foreign soil, and the memories that were at once broken and continuous.
The history of exile in Shanghai was sustained not only by legal accessibility, organized relief, and refugee institutions, but also by the daily relations that formed in Hongkou between European refugees and local residents.
Hongkou: Refugees and Shanghainese Living Side by Side
After Kristallnacht in 1938, large numbers of German and Austrian Jewish refugees poured into Shanghai. Since many had been stripped of most of their property when leaving the German-speaking world and could not afford the higher cost of living in the concessions, they had little choice but to concentrate in the Hongkou area. Polish Jewish refugees who arrived later found that approximately 17,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees were already struggling to survive there, alongside an earlier Russian Jewish community. Living in the same neighborhoods with them were also around 100,000 existing Chinese residents. Hongkou was not a closed island belonging only to Jewish refugees. This already crowded and impoverished district was forced, during the war, to absorb still more exiles from Europe. The relationship between Jewish refugees and local Shanghai residents was never an abstract encounter from the beginning. It was a more concrete form of cohabitation: sharing streets, markets, stoves, noise, disease, and the pressure of survival within limited space. In this urban space, already damaged by the Sino-Japanese War and then repeatedly layered with different refugee groups, many vivid and real stories unfolded.
Under such conditions, it would have been difficult for any grand narrative of friendship to emerge. Yet the smallest forms of friction and mutual assistance filled everyday life. Oral histories and museum materials describe exchanges of water and food, the adoption of a locally made fuel known as “soil coal,” instruction in Chinese cooking, children’s games, and the learning of Shanghainese. These details matter because they show that Shanghai residents were no longer temporary helpers standing outside the lives of Jewish refugees. They gradually came to carry the meaning of real neighbors. Published academic research also supports this observation. Kimberly Cheng argues that Jewish refugee children often adapted to life in Shanghai more quickly than adult family members because daily life in densely populated Chinese neighborhoods gave them direct access to local language, habits, and social practices.6
On February 18, 1943, the order issued by the Japanese occupation authorities establishing the “Designated Area for Stateless Refugees” did not directly use the word “Jew,” but in practice targeted European Jewish refugees who had fled to Shanghai after 1937. Jewish refugees lacked food, medicine, and stable income, while Chinese residents in Hongkou were also living under rationing and wartime poverty. The Japanese army strictly controlled the entrances and exits of the designated area, using barbed wire and sentry posts to block the movement of supplies. Chinese neighbors outside the wire tied food to long bamboo poles and passed it in, or, when the guards were not watching, pushed bread, fruit, and pieces of sugar through the gaps. After the American bombing of Hongkou by mistake in 1944, refugees were trapped among the ruins. Chinese neighbors wrapped pancakes, steamed buns, rice balls, and vegetables, and threw them across streets or over walls into the lanes where refugees lived.
This help did not come from the prosperous giving charity to the weak. It was mutual support among people in hardship. These small gestures change the meaning of the phrase “Shanghai Ark.” Shanghai became a place of refuge not only because it once allowed refugees to enter through gaps in the system, nor only because Jewish relief organizations, schools, and synagogues sustained community life. It also became such a place because, in the most ordinary relations of the lane neighborhoods, strangers preserved a minimum sense of responsibility toward one another. A rice ball, a bamboo pole, a word of comfort across a wall—none of these was a grand political act. Yet through such gestures, exiles retained the hope of survival, rather than being reduced to the administrative label of “stateless refugees.”
At the same time, the historical record does not support turning this relationship into a seamless picture of harmony. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s entry on Jewish refugees in Shanghai emphasizes that parts of Hongkou were overcrowded and dilapidated, and that many people had to depend on collective shelters and relief in order to survive. By the end of 1939, around 2,500 people were already living in collective refugee shelters, known as Heime, while another approximately 4,500 lived in rented housing outside the shelters but still relied on them for food. Whether Chinese residents or European refugees, both sides encountered one another within an environment of tense resources. The museum’s documents on interactions in Hongkou also clearly acknowledge that language barriers and harsh living conditions remained constant. Therefore, what deserves emphasis in this history is not a later, elevated narrative of “natural friendliness,” but the fact that under conditions of poverty, crowding, and mutual unfamiliarity, the two sides nevertheless formed enough everyday cooperation that their shared life did not collapse into hostility.
Museum materials show that this cooperation later extended into more public spaces. Refugees organized football teams and amateur leagues in Hongkou, and matches attracted Chinese players as well as large audiences. Local cinemas operated by Chinese residents also became important places where refugees passed time, learned English, and participated in the public culture of the neighborhood. Interaction did not revolve only around suffering; it also developed around entertainment, sport, and curiosity. There is no need to imagine Hongkou solely as a space of disaster. It was also a real, functioning neighborhood. People competed for coal briquettes, looked for work, and learned how to cook there; they also watched films, played sports, and learned one another’s words.
The Jewish refugees of Hongkou and the Shanghai residents were neither two completely isolated groups, nor a community that later memory can imagine as having naturally fused into one. They were forced by war and poverty to live in close proximity. Within that proximity, help, trade, imitation, observation, language learning, cooking, childcare, and shared entertainment gradually created intersections of survival. What makes this historical memory moving is not that it proves perfect acceptance, but that it preserves something smaller and more credible: a cup of water, a piece of rice cake, a method for making fuel, a sentence learned in Shanghainese. Taken together, these small things constituted the true way in which Shanghai received the exiles. Germany’s historical trauma entered Shanghai here, and Shanghai responded to that trauma with its own urban ethics. What Germany left in Shanghai is a city memory of shared burden and mutual recognition.
Notes
- On treaty-port Shanghai as a transnational commercial and cultural system rather than a collection of self-contained national enclaves, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially the introduction and chap. 1.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘German and Austrian Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,’ Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed June 26, 2026, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-and-austrian-jewish-refugees-in-shanghai.
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, ‘Refuge in Shanghai (1938–1953),’ accessed June 26, 2026, https://archives.jdc.org/our-stories/refuge-in-shanghai-1938-1953/.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘German and Austrian Jewish Refugees in Shanghai’; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, ‘Refuge in Shanghai (1938–1953).’ The figures for newly arrived Central European refugees should be distinguished from Shanghai’s pre-existing Russian Jewish community.
- Irene Eber, Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), especially chaps. 5–7.
- Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, ‘The Ark of Shanghai,’ February 10, 2025, https://www.shhkjrm.com/en/info/1271/9383.htm; Kimberly Cheng, ‘Learning the Ropes of Life in Shanghai: Jewish Refugee Children in Second World War China,’ Journal of Contemporary History 60, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094241263780.