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The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development nongovernmental organization. Founded in 1933 as the International Relief Association, at the request of Albert Einstein, and changing its name in 1942 after amalgamating with the similar Emergency Rescue Committee, the IRC provides emergency aid and long-term assistance to refugees and those displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster. The IRC is currently working in about 40 countries and 26 U.S. cities where it resettles refugees and helps them become self-sufficient. It focuses mainly on health, education, economic wellbeing, power, and safety.
Cordell Hull was an American politician from Tennessee and the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of State, holding the position for 11 years (1933–1944) in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during most of World War II. Before that appointment he represented Tennessee for two years in the United States Senate and twenty-two years in the House of Representatives.
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was the first of five Americans to be recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honorific given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government. Importantly the British government waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government put no number limit on the programme – it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, at which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the United Kingdom.
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Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with Civil Rights was a complicated one. While he was popular among African Americans, Catholics and Jews, he has in retrospect received heavy criticism for his internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by Roosevelt, official Federal Housing Administration (FHA) property appraisal underwriting standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites-only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods, and the FHA used its official mortgage insurance underwriting policy explicitly to prevent school desegregation.
Martha Ingham Dickie Sharp Cogan was an American Unitarian who was involved in humanitarian and social justice work with her first husband, a Unitarian minister, Waitstill Sharp, and others of her denomination, and so helped hundreds of Jews to escape Nazi persecution, through relocation and other efforts. On September 2005, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were named by the Yad Vashem organization as "Righteous Among the Nations", the second and third of five Americans to receive this honor. The subsequent ceremony involved the presentation of a medal and certificate of honor to the Sharps' daughter, Martha Sharp Joukowsky, amidst a large audience that included one of the children that her parents had helped get out of France, Eva Esther Feigl.
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The One Thousand Children (OTC) is a designation, created in 2000, which is used to refer to the approximately 1,400 Jewish children who were rescued from Nazi Germany and other Nazi-occupied or threatened European countries, and who were taken directly to the United States during the period 1934–1945. The phrase "One Thousand Children" only refers to those children who came unaccompanied and left their parents behind back in Europe. In nearly all cases, their parents were not able to escape with their children, because they could not get the necessary visas among other reasons. Later, nearly all these parents were murdered by the Nazis.
Œuvre de secours aux enfants, abbreviated OSE is a French Jewish humanitarian organization which was founded in Russia in 1912 to help Russian Jewish children. Later it moved to France.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
The Children's Overseas Reception Board (CORB) was a British government sponsored organisation. The CORB evacuated 2,664 British children from England, so that they would escape the imminent threat of German invasion and the risk of enemy bombing in World War II. This was during a critical period in British history, between July and September 1940, when the Battle of Britain was raging, and German invasion forces were being amassed across the English Channel.
Varian's War is a 2001 joint Canadian/American/United Kingdom film made-for-television drama. The film was written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd, based on the life and wartime exploits of Varian Fry who saved more than 2,000 Jewish artists from Vichy France, the conquered ally of Nazi Germany. Varian's War stars William Hurt, heading an all-star ensemble cast of Julia Ormond, Matt Craven, Maury Chaykin, Alan Arkin and Lynn Redgrave.
Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews was the initial title of a government memorandum prepared by officials of the United States Department of the Treasury. Dated January 13, 1944, during the Holocaust, its primary author was Assistant to the Secretary Josiah E. DuBois Jr. Focusing on the period from late 1942 to late 1943, the report argued that certain officials within the US State Department not only had failed to use US government tools to rescue Jewish European refugees but instead had used them to prevent or obstruct rescue attempts, as well as preventing relevant information from being made available to the American public. Described as "scathing" and as "political dynamite", the memorandum, re-titled Personal Report to the President, helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve the creation of the War Refugee Board.
The Union générale des israélites de France was a body created by the antisemitic French politician Xavier Vallat under the Vichy regime after the Fall of France in World War II. UGIF was created by decree on 29 November 1941 following a German request, for the express purpose of enabling the discovery and classification of Jews in France and isolating them both morally and materially from the rest of the French population. It operated in two zones: the northern zone, chaired by André Baur, and the southern zone, under the chairmanship of Raymond-Raoul Lambert.
References
- ↑ "The United States Committee for the Care of European Children". gwu.edu . However, this reference conflates the work of CORB to rescue British children, and USCOM which worked with children in mainland Europe.
- ↑ United States Committee for the Care of European Children, Report of the Executive Director to the Board of Directors