The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers. The Board was, in the words of historian Rebecca Erbelding, "the only time in American history that the US government founded a non-military government agency to save the lives of civilians being murdered by a wartime enemy."[1]
There was increasing and persistent significant publicity and pressure on the Roosevelt administration to help the abandoned Jews of Europe. The campaign was led by the Bergson Group led by Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson). The activist group had significant support by many leading senators and congressmen mostly from states without significant Jewish voters, from Eleanor Roosevelt, famous Hollywood and Broadway personalities and other prominent citizens. President Roosevelt acted after considerable additional pressure from his friend, Secretary of the TreasuryHenry Morgenthau Jr. and his team at the Treasury. Roosevelt "stressed that it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe".[2]
The WRB was created when a group of young Treasury Department lawyers, including John Pehle, Ansel Luxford, and Josiah E. DuBois Jr., grew frustrated by State Department delays surrounding a license for relief funds to help Jews escape Romania and France. While the Treasury Department had granted the World Jewish Congress permission to send the money to Switzerland in July 1943, the State Department used various excuses, delaying permission until December, a full eight months after the program was first proposed. Josiah DuBois also found evidence that the State Department had actively tried to suppress information about the murder of the Jews from reaching the United States.
When the Treasury staff learned of the State Department obstructions, they submitted a Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government to the Murder of the Jews, first drafted by DuBois, aiming to convince Morgenthau to meet with the President. Morgenthau, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul met with Roosevelt on January 16, 1944, where he agreed to create the War Refugee Board, issuing Executive Order 9417.[3] Credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied countries, through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg and others, the War Refugee Board is the only major civilian effort undertaken by the United States government to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.[2]
Creation
The immediate cause for Roosevelt's action was pressure from the staff of the Treasury Department's office of Foreign Funds Control and its chief, John W. Pehle. Pehle's office had authorized a number of charitable groups to use funds in the U.S. regulated under the Trading with the Enemy Act to pay for food, medicine, and other aid to refugees and other civilian victims of the war in Europe. Those efforts were systematically blocked by some officials in the U.S. State Department. Specifically, in July 1943, the Treasury Department issued a license to the World Jewish Congress to use funds in the United States to pay some of the costs of evacuating Jews from Romania and France. (This should not be confused with another initiative, by the Romanian government, to "sell" Jews for approximately $50 a head, with which it had no connection.)
Various State Department officials delayed the license for the next five months. Treasury officials, led by a staff lawyer, Josiah E. DuBois Jr., investigated how and why the license had been held up. In their research, which was aided by some whistleblowers in the State Department, they discovered that in addition to blocking licenses for use of money to aid refugees, the State Department had also sent foreign missions orders not to forward information about Nazi atrocities—specifically about the Holocaust—to Washington. At the end of 1943, DuBois wrote a memorandum, "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews", which said the State Department was "guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler".
DuBois took his memorandum to Treasury General Counsel Randolph E. Paul, who agreed to put his signature on it and forward it to Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. After a series of meetings, Morgenthau agreed to take his staff's concerns to the President. Morgenthau, Paul, and Pehle met with President Roosevelt in the White House on Sunday, January 16, 1944.
Roosevelt got an oral briefing on the facts and conclusions in the Treasury Department's memorandum, and immediately agreed to deal with the issues by creating a War Refugee Board, consisting of three cabinet members, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary Morgenthau, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson (Morgenthau had suggested that instead of Stimson, Leo Crowley, Director of the Foreign Economic Administration be appointed, but Roosevelt decided to appoint Stimson instead.) On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417 creating the Board.[3] The Treasury Department did not act in a vacuum. By the end of 1943, Roosevelt was also getting intense pressure to act on the issue from members of Congress, including Sol Bloom and Emanuel Celler; Jewish organizations, most notably Stephen Wise and the American Jewish Congress, and Peter Bergson and the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe. Two Congressional resolutions had been introduced in November 1943, calling on Roosevelt to create a commission to formulate and effectuate plans for the relief and rescue of Jews. The Senate was scheduled to vote on the resolution in late January; the House Committee on Foreign Affairs held hearings, and testimony from these hearings further discredited Breckinridge Long of the State Department.
Establishment of the Board was thanks to the team at the Treasury Deportment and relentless long-term information campaign and pressure by Hillel Kook's high-level rescue activist group.
Composition
John W. Pehle, the assistant to the secretary of treasury, was appointed executive director of the board, which was directly responsible to the president. Its members included the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War, and a staff, mainly pulled from inside the Treasury Department. Though they were officially restricted to a maximum staff of thirty, some government employees (including Pehle) were considered "detailed" to the WRB, raising their staff to seventy in the summer of 1944. Brigadier General William O'Dwyer later succeeded Pehle as executive director until its dissolution at the end of World War II.
The WRB developed and implemented various plans and programs for:
Rescuing, transporting, and relieving victims of enemy oppression
Establishing of havens of temporary refuge for such victims
The War Refugee Board enlisted the cooperation of foreign governments and international refugee and rescue organizations in carrying out these functions. Such neutral countries as Switzerland, Sweden, and Turkey were of particular importance, serving as bases of operation for the rescue and relief program. The Vatican rendered some assistance, mostly towards the very end of the war, primarily as a channel of communication to enemy regimes, such as the fascist government of Slovakia. The board obtained the cooperation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and the International Committee of the Red Cross in rehabilitating and resettling refugees, finding temporary shelters for rescued victims, transporting these victims to the shelters and providing for their maintenance in transit, and making relief deliveries inside enemy territory.
The WRB worked closely with private U.S. relief agencies in formulating, financing, and executing plans and projects. A Treasury Department licensing policy that permitted established private agencies to transfer funds from the United States to their representatives in neutral countries aided in financing the rescue of persecuted peoples living under Nazi control. Under this licensing policy, it was possible to communicate with persons in enemy territory and to finance rescue operations with certain controls designed to bring no financial benefit to the enemy. Approximately $15 million in private funds was made available in this way. The board obtained blockade clearances for food shipments of private relief agencies for distribution by the International Red Cross to detainees in Nazi concentration camps and supplemented these private projects with a food-parcel program of its own financed from the emergency funds of the president.
Through the efforts of the War Refugee Board, refugee camps were prepared in North Africa and safe haven was arranged in Palestine, Switzerland, and Sweden.
In August 1944 the WRB brought 982 Jewish refugees, who were in Italy from many countries, to The Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, in New York. These refugees were admitted outside the immigration quota laws, but given no status, and it was intended that they would be repatriated to their home countries at a (successful) war's end.
The WRB used the example of Fort Ontario to influence other countries to also allow additional refugees over their borders.
The WRB lobbied Roosevelt to publicly condemn the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, which he did on March 24, 1944.[5]
By attracting international attention to the Hungarian government and putting pressure on them, the WRB contributed to the cessation of deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz, possibly saving many of the Jews of Budapest. The Board sent the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, and others to protect the Jews of Budapest. Through the WRB, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint,) funded Wallenberg's rescue work there. The work by Wallenberg in Hungary was one of the most successful and important rescue efforts by the War Refugee Board.
It is difficult to determine the exact number of Jews rescued by the War Refugee Board, since so much of their work was done behind enemy lines and involved psychological warfare and other intangible rescue activities. One historian, David Wyman, credits them with saving as many as 200,000 people; the WRB staff themselves estimated they saved tens of thousands. However, near the end of his life, WRB director Pehle described the work as "too little, too late" in contrast with the totality of the Holocaust.
With the close of the war in Europe, the work of the board was at an end. By the terms of Executive Order No. 9614 the board was abolished on September 15, 1945.[6]
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.
Henry Morgenthau Jr. was the United States Secretary of the Treasury during most of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He played a major role in designing and financing the New Deal. After 1937, while still in charge of the Treasury, he played the central role in financing United States participation in World War II. He also played an increasingly major role in shaping foreign policy, especially with respect to Lend-Lease, support for China, helping Jewish refugees, and proposing measures to deindustrialise Germany.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as Joint or JDC, is a Jewish relief organization based in New York City. Since 1914 the organisation has supported Jewish people living in Israel and throughout the world. The organization is active in more than 70 countries.
Hillel Kook, also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.
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.
Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long was an American diplomat and politician who served in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Long is noted by Holocaust historians for making it difficult for European Jews to enter the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.
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 the ethnic cleansing of Mexican Americans in the 1930s known as the Mexican Repatriation and 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.
The issue of why the Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp by destroying it or its railways by air during World War II has been a subject of controversy since the late 1970s. Brought to public attention by a 1978 article from historian David Wyman, it has been described by Michael Berenbaum as "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust", and whether or not the Allies had the requisite knowledge and the technical capability to act continues to be explored by historians. The U.S. government followed the military's strong advice to always keep the defeat of Germany the paramount objective, and refused to tolerate outside civilian advice regarding alternative military operations. No major American Jewish organizations recommended bombing.
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 is a 1984 nonfiction book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wyman was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Abandonment of the Jews has been well received by most historians, and has won numerous prizes and widespread recognition, including a National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award."
James Clement Dunn was an American diplomat and a career employee of the United States Department of State. He served as the Ambassador of the United States to Italy, France, Spain, and Brazil. President Dwight Eisenhower characterized him as providing "exceptionally capable service".
Arthur David Morse was an author and television producer for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and a World War II historian. As a journalist, he worked both in print and television and concerned himself with investigating the social issues of his day. As an author, he is best known for While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (1968), his book concerning the inaction and disregard of the United States government, especially the State Department, for the genocide of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War.
Josiah Ellis DuBois Jr. was an American attorney at the U.S. Treasury Department who played a major role in exposing State Department obstruction efforts to provide American visas to Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe. In 1944, he wrote the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, which led to the creation of the War Refugee Board. After the war, he was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials prosecuting Nazi war crimes, particularly in the prosecution of holocaust chemical manufacturer IG Farben.
Randolph Evernghim Paul (1890–1956) was a name partner of the international law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was a lawyer specializing in tax law. He is credited as "an architect of the modern tax system."
Benjamin Akzin (1904–1985) was an early Zionist activist and, later, an Israeli professor of law.
Avraham Kalmanowitz was an Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva (dean) of the Mir yeshiva in Brooklyn, New York from 1946 to 1964. Born in Russian empire, he served as rabbi of several Eastern European Jewish communities and escaped to the United States in 1940 following the German occupation of Poland. In the U.S. he was an activist for the rescue of the millions of Jews trapped in Nazi-ruled Europe and in the Soviet Union. He arranged the successful transfer of the entire Mir yeshiva from Lithuania to Shanghai, providing for its support for five years, and obtaining visas and travel fare to bring all 250 students and faculty to America after World War II. He established the U.S. branch of the Mir in 1946. In the 1950s he aided North African and Syrian Jewish youth suffering from persecution and pogroms, and successfully lobbied for the passage of a bill granting "endangered refugee status" to Jewish emigrants from Arab lands.
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 Josiah E. DuBois Jr., Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. 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 "political dynamite", the memorandum, shortened and re-titled Personal Report to the President, helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve the creation of the War Refugee Board.
John W. Pehle was an American United States Department of the Treasury lawyer and one of the authors of the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, a 1944 document exposing the United States Department of State's alleged cover-up of the Holocaust. As the first director of the War Refugee Board, Pehle helped save the lives of tens of thousands of European Jews who would have otherwise died at the hands of the Nazis in the last two years of the Second World War.
A neutral state, the United States entered the war on the Allied side in December 1941. The American government first became aware of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe in 1942 and 1943. Following a report on the failure to assist the Jewish people by the Department of State, the War Refugee Board was created in 1944 to assist refugees from the Nazis. As one of the most powerful Allied states, the United States played a major role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent Nuremberg trials. The Holocaust saw increased awareness in the 1970s that instilled its prominence in the collective memory of the American people continuing to the present day. The United States has been criticized for taking insufficient action in response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s and the Holocaust during World War II.
Sweden was a neutral state during World War II and was not directly involved in the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Swedish government maintained important economic links with Nazi Germany and there was widespread awareness within the country of its policy of persecution and, from 1942, mass extermination of Jews.
References
↑ Erbelding, Rebecca (2018). Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe. New York: Doubleday. p.273. ISBN978-0385542517.
War Refugee Board: Day by Day (sample of primary sources compiled by the author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe.
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