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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]PART FOUR: THE WAR REFUGEE BOARD
12. "WHEN ARE THE AMERICANS COMING?"
Launching the WRB[/b]
Executive Order 9417, which created the War Refugee Board, endowed it with great potential. It directed the State, Treasury, and War departments to provide whatever help the board needed to implement its programs, subject only to the stipulation that they be "consistent with the successful prosecution of the war." it also required all other government agencies to comply with the board's requests for assistance. [i] [1]
This order, which carried the force of law, should have opened the way for a powerful rescue campaign. But the WRB did not receive the cooperation that was promised. Consequently, its capacity for rescue was always substantially less than it should have been.
Only the Treasury Department met its full responsibilities. Besides housing the WRB and providing most of its staff, the Treasury was a constant source of assistance. Moreover, Morgenthau himself kept in close touch with the board. [2]
Secretary of War Stimson believed in the WRB's mission, but could spare almost no time for it because of his other heavy duties. The job of War Department liaison with the board fell to Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy. Although he seemed concerned about the European Jews, McCloy was privately skeptical that the military should take a role in their rescue. The War Department's contribution to the work of the board was very small. [3]
Cordell Hull, who preferred a limited State Department connection with the WRB, designated Undersecretary Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., to represent him. Stettinius had enthusiastically welcomed the board's formation. But he, too, had little time for rescue matters. So George Warren of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees served as the State Department's main liaison with the WRB. Despite his long service in the area of refugee aid, Warren did little to counteract the opposition to the board that prevailed among the department's middle-level officials. The way was left open for them to interfere with its activities. [4]
The War Refugee Board staff, which never numbered more than thirty, revolved around a dozen people, mostly non-Jewish and mostly veterans of the Treasury's battles with the State Department over the rescue issue. They were, as one observer remarked, "young, dynamic, bold, clear and a bit brash." They were also hindered during the board's first two weeks by unnecessary delay in the selection of its executive director. [5]
Morgenthau and the rest of the Treasury group wanted John Pehle in the post. However, attracted by the President's suggestion that they find a nationally prominent person for the job, they decided on a combined leadership. Pehle could head the actual rescue work, while a public figure in the executive director's position would be invaluable in the board's relations with high government officials, Congress, and the public. [6]
Roosevelt presented several names himself but kept putting off a decision. After thorough deliberation, Morgenthau and his staff concluded that Wendell Willkie was the ideal choice. He was nationally and internationally known and respected, and he had already demonstrated deep concern about the refugee problem. But Roosevelt rejected Willkie out of hand. Presidential secretary Grace Tully, referring to Willkie's recent global tour for the President and his resulting book, One World, told Morgenthau, "I think he has had all the build-up he has coming to him on that trip." That ended an unparalleled chance to develop the board into a highly visible, high-powered rescue unit. [7]
Morgenthau then recommended Frank P. Graham, a southern liberal who was president of the University of North Carolina and a member of the War Labor Board. When Roosevelt rejected him, Morgenthau pressed for the appointment of Pehle. Hull and Stimson concurred. The President agreed, but insisted on holding the news for his press conference the next morning. His interest in the issue must have evap orated overnight, however, for he made no announcement about the board at the news conference. In fact, when a reporter asked whether the director had been named yet, Roosevelt said no. The President, after delaying the choice for nearly two weeks and then insisting on releasing the news himself, had thrown away an opportunity for a valuable burst of publicity for Pehle and the fledgling board. [ii] [8]
Meanwhile, the WRB had begun to organize for action. During February and March, it chose representatives to direct its overseas opera tions and assigned them to locations on the borders of Axis Europe: Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden, North Africa, Italy, and Portugal. They were granted diplomatic status as special attaches to the American missions in those· countries. But efforts to place representatives in Russia, Spain, and Egypt failed. The Soviet government was unresponsive to the plan. The American ambassador to Spain, Carlton J. H. Hayes, opposed such a move. And the State Department blocked the board's attempt to send Charles R. Joy to Egypt. Joy (and his employer, the Unitarian Service Committee) had been too outspoken and too politically active to satisfy State Department standards for that appointment. [10]
From the start, the WRB solicited advice from the many private agencies involved in rescue and relief activities. Nearly a score of them submitted comprehensive suggestions for rescue. [iii] Once in action, the board regularly coordinated its projects with those of the private groups. And, whenever possible, it used its status as a government body to facilitate their work. For instance, the board arranged to use the State Department's coded telegraphic communications system not only for its own purposes but also for transmission of messages between the American private agencies and their representatives overseas. [11]
Under pressure from Stettinius, the State Department furnished some valuable early help to the WRB. State sent cablegrams, drafted by the board and ordering full cooperation with it, to all American diplomatic missions abroad. Soon afterward, special instructions were dispatched to American missions in neutral nations close to Nazi territory. They were directed to urge the neutral governments to permit entry of all refugees who reached their borders and to publicize their willingness to take them in. To reinforce the message, the board immediately assured the neutral powers that it would provide maintenance for the new refugees and would arrange their evacuation as soon as possible. In another early step, the WRB offered its assistance to the International Red Cross. The State Department quickly approved the message and dispatched it via the American legation in Switzerland. [13]
But middle-level State Department officials, thrust aside in the first rush of WRB action, soon moved to reestablish their grip on diplomatic affairs. By mid-March, six urgent WRB cablegrams were stuck in the State Department awaiting clearance. Delays of a month and more hobbled such important measures as warnings to Axis satellites to refrain from collaborating in atrocities and efforts to persuade the British to set up a refugee reception camp in Libya. [14]
The problem eased somewhat by April. But the board had to press constantly to obtain State Department cooperation and even then could never count on it. Yet that cooperation was vital, both to secure the crucially important assistance of the American diplomatic missions abroad and to carry on negotiations with neutral and Allied governments, Instead of providing the nearly unlimited help promised in Executive Order 9417, the State Department often stood in the way of board operations. The same was true, less frequently, of the War Department. [15]
Another impediment was the negative response of the British. They refused to establish a parallel rescue committee to work with the WRB. Only grudgingly did they cooperate with the board's efforts to evacuate refugees from the Balkans through Turkey to Palestine. They attempted to restrict the activities of the WRB representative assigned to southern Italy. And they persistently tried to block the board's program of licensing private agencies to transmit money to Europe for rescue and relief projects. [16]
Probably the most crucial difficulty to confront the WRB concerned funds. From the beginning, the board acted mainly as facilitator and coordinator of projects carried out by the private organizations. Even when it initiated rescue operations itself, it usually called on the private agencies to fund them. In sum, government funding was very limited, the board's work was mainly administrative, and the predominately Jewish private agencies financed and implemented most projects. Rescue had finally become official government policy. Yet American Jews, through contributions to their own organizations, had to pay most of the costs. [iv] [17]
Jewish leaders realized at the outset that the Jewish organizations lacked the resources needed for a comprehensive rescue program. Soon after the WRB was formed, officials of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) met with the board's staff to explore the problem. [v] They were disheartened to hear Pehle state emphatically that the board would not look to government funds for rescue operations but would depend on the private agencies for most of the financing. The reason was not stated explicitly, but apparently the WRB feared that Congress would refuse to appropriate funds for rescue. Earlier, when a WRB inner-staff meeting had touched on the funding question, Pehle had asserted, "The last thing I think you want to do is go to Congress." [18]
For weeks, the JDC and UJA attempted to convince the board of the need for "the maximum use of Government funds." But the WRB insisted it would not seek a congressional appropriation unless and until it succeeded in developing "a large-scale systematic program" of rescue. That time never came. [19]
In its sixteen months of action, the War Refugee Board spent $547,000 of government funds, drawn from $1,150,000 set aside for it in the President's Emergency Fund. The $547,000 went largely for salaries and other administrative expenses of the board. In addition, the President allotted the board $1,068,750 specifically to buy and ship food parcels to concentration camp inmates. [vi] The other projects sponsored by the WRB were funded almost entirely by the Jewish organizations. The Joint Distribution Committee spent in excess of $15,000,000; the Vaad Hahatzala (Orthodox rescue committee) supplied over $1,000,000; the World Jewish Congress expended more than $300,000; and other groups provided lesser amounts. [vii] [20]
A minor problem for the WRB in its opening weeks involved the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. According to Stettinius, Myron C. Taylor had been "very angry" on learning of the establishment of the WRB, partly because he feared it would eclipse the ICR's work. Taylor wanted the WRB to agree to confer with the ICR before initiating projects and to channel all its approaches to foreign governments through the ICR. Pehle rejected such time-consuming procedures and offered only to keep the ICR informed of the board's activities. [23]
To clarify the situation, the top ICR officials, Sir Herbert Emerson and Patrick Malin, came to Washington in April 1944. The resulting understanding left the WRB free to develop its programs independently. The two organizations agreed to cooperate whenever possible and to keep each other informed of their respective operations in order to prevent duplication. The WRB thus avoided a clash with the ICR; but its more critical problems remained. [24]
Several factors, then, diminished the War Refugee Board's effectiveness. Although Executive Order 9417 clearly required their full cooperation, the State and War departments offered almost as much encumbrance as help. The Russians would not participate. The British were obstructive. Roosevelt took little interest except as a source of occasional favorable publicity. Morgenthau soon realized that his influence with the President on rescue matters was very limited, and he lessened pressures in that direction. Moreover, the funding situation weakened the board from the start. [25]
What looked at first as though it might become a potent government rescue machine turned into a valuable, but limited, collaboration between the government and the private agencies. And the relatively weak private organizations carried most of the load. Nevertheless, the WRB staff was determined to do all it could, despite the difficulty of the assignment and the handicaps under which it had to operate.
Working mainly with proposals that the Jewish organizations had long been urging, the War Refugee Board forged a wide-ranging rescue program. Its main contours included (1) evacuating Jews and other endangered people from Axis territory, (2) finding places to which they could he sent, (3) using psychological measures (especially threats of war-crimes trials) aimed at preventing deportations and atrocities, and (4) shipping relief supplies into concentration camps. [26]
As for evacuation, the obvious potential outlets were Turkey, Spain, Allied-occupied southern Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.
[b]Turkey[/b]
The first WRB. representative to see action overseas was Ira Hirschmann, a prominent New York department-store executive who had attended the ill-fated Evian Conference of 1938 and had continued to be deeply concerned about the European Jews. His post, Turkey, offered important possibilities for rescue, for hundreds of thousands of Jews were still alive -- and in danger -- in the nearby Balkans. In Hirschmann's words, Turkey was "a window into the Balkans, The job, as I saw it, was to attempt to make out of the window, a door." [27]
When he reached Ankara, in mid-February 1944, Hirschmann found the movement of Jews out of the Balkans, into Turkey, and on to Palestine distressingly small. Since 1940, Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency had worked to open this route to safety. Finally, during 1943, he managed to evacuate as many as 1,100 Jews. Most came by railroad via Bulgaria, the rest by small boats from Greece. Hirschmann learned that Barlas had to contend with an obstacle course of restrictions; red tape, and delays devised by Rumanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Turkish- based British officials. Spurred by the realization that the Balkan Jews lived under constant threat of deportation, and aware that tens of thousands of them were penned in disease-ridden camps, the WRB representative focused his first efforts on widening the outlet through Bulgaria. [28]
The British agreed to permit all Jews who reached Turkey to go to Palestine. Hirschmann then persuaded the Turkish government to let 200 Jews enter from Bulgaria and continue on to Palestine every ten days. But the results were not very encouraging. Only 131 came during the first month of the arrangement, and the numbers decreased in subsequent months. Although much of the problem stemmed from a tight Bulgarian policy on the exit of Jews, Turkey also kept the influx down by insisting on advance procurement of Turkish transit visas while quietly making them practically unavailable. By the end of the summer of 1944, the WRB had brought only about 450 Jews out via Bulgaria. [29]
In the meantime, late in February, the WRB in Washington had telegraphed its basic plan for Turkey to the American ambassador there, Laurence A. Steinhardt. It called for diplomatic pressures on Ankara to relax its immigration controls and to announce publicly that all fleeing Jews would be permitted to enter the country. In return, the board would agree to maintain the refugees while in Turkey, possibly in temporary reception camps, and move them on to other havens. [30]
Hirschmann, who had received only the most meager and grudging cooperation from the Turks, advised the board that no chance whatever existed that they would assent to this plan. Drawing on the excuse that American and British policymakers had invoked so often, Ankara had already insisted that easing border controls would open the way for Axis agents to flood into Turkey and then scatter throughout the Allied world. Time and again thereafter, Turkish officials relied on this pretext to justify their nation's reluctance to serve as an escape channel. [viii] When leaders of the World Jewish Congress in New York learned about Turkey's recalcitrance, they urged the WRB to ask President Roosevelt to raise the problem with the Turkish head of government. But nothing in the records indicates that the board did so. [31]
Hirschmann next tried to open an evacuation route across the Black Sea. His plan was to charter a good-sized passenger vessel and use it over and over again to ferry Jews directly from Rumania to Turkey. From there they would travel by rail to Palestine. The search led to the Vatan, a privately owned Turkish ship capable of carrying 800 people. But the Turkish government, pleading a shortage of ships and the danger of mines, stood in the way of leasing it. Strong pressure by Ambassador Steinhardt forced Turkish consent, but only on condition that the United States agree to replace the vessel if it should be sunk. [ix] The WRB in Washington obtained such a commitment from Admiral Emory S. Land of the War Shipping Administration. Land also dispatched a WSA shipping expert from Cairo to Ankara to assist Hirschmann with Black Sea shipping problems. [33]
Before arrangements for the Vatan were completed, Hirschmann located and shifted his attention to the Tari, a vessel that could hold 1,500 passengers. But weeks passed before the WRB could persuade Admiral Land to guarantee replacement of such a large ship. Even with that assurance, Steinhardt had to threaten Turkish authorities with an anti-Turkish press campaign in the United States to extract permission to lease the Tari. [x] By then, two months had elapsed since Hirschmann had begun the search for a ship. Yet one crucial problem still remained. The Turkish government would not let the Tari sail without safe-conduct assurances from the belligerents. Although the others agreed, Germany rebuffed all requests. Thus the plans and hopes that had grown up around the Tari evaporated. Concurrent efforts to borrow Swedish and other ships operating in the eastern Mediterranean failed. [35]
While the board unsuccessfully sought to open its sea route, another evacuation program was achieving some results. In late March, the Jewish Agency (with WRB support and Joint Distribution Committee funds) initiated a limited exodus from Rumania to Turkey by hiring three Bulgarian boats (at exorbitant rates). These tiny vessels, unseaworthy and overloaded, running belligerent waters without safe-conduct assurances, brought out 1,200 people. Included were a few score orphans from the Transnistria concentration camps. The New York Times correspondent in Istanbul described them: "The children had a scared look in their eyes. They jumped at the slightest noise and often raised their hands to protect their faces as if expecting beatings. They said they had been beaten by German and Rumanian soldiers." [37]
Returning without passengers after a mid-May trip to Turkey, one of the three boats, the Maritza, sank in a Black Sea gale. Fearing more ship losses, the Bulgarian government forbade further open-sea voyages by small vessels. At about the same time, the WRB and the Jewish Agency decided to redirect their attempts at Black Sea evacuation to small Turkish boats whose owners (and the Turkish government) were willing to let them sail without safe-conducts. Four vessels were located. During July and early August, they moved 1,500 refugees from Rumania to Turkey. [xi] [38]
But disaster struck shortly after midnight on August 5. Not far off the Turkish coast, three German gunboats sank one of the tiny vessels, the Mefkura, then machine-gunned its passengers in the water. Of 295 refugees on board, a hundred were children. There were five survivors. Among the dead were two sisters, eleven and seven years old. The parents, who had been separated from their children and were in New York, had gone to enormous lengths to get the two girls and their two older brothers out of Rumania. The boys reached Istanbul safely in October. They, too, had been scheduled to sail on the Mefkura, but had been turned back at the last minute for lack of room on the boat. [40]
Almost all of the 2,700 who reached Turkey by sea between late March and August 1944 arrived without Turkish transit visas. Many had to board the boats secretly in Rumania, so they could not apply for visas. But a major difficulty was that the Turkish consulate in Rumania, undoubtedly on orders from Ankara, issued transit visas extremely sparingly. When the first boat, with 239 of these "illegal" refugees, appeared in Istanbul harbor, the Turkish authorities refused to let it land. The Turkish foreign minister maintained that to do so would "open the flood gates" to ships full of illegal refugees, including spies. Following forceful intervention by Ambassador Steinhardt, the foreign minister, as a special exception, allowed this group to land and move on to Palestine by rail. When the pattern repeated itself with the arrival of the second boatload, it was clear that Steinhardt's pressure had broken the transit-visa roadblock. Steinhardt doubted, however, that he could prevail upon the Turks to extend the arrangement to more than 500 "illegals" per month. [41]
Another escape route, across the Aegean Sea from Greece to Turkey, saved about 900 Jews during the year before Greece's liberation in October 1944. These refugees also went on to Palestine. This project, set up by a Jewish organization before Hirschmann arrived in Turkey, relied on small fishing craft and other tiny boats. It could have been expanded if it had been possible to obtain a definite landing and reo fueling base in Turkey. Hirschmann sought Turkish permission for this, but Ankara stalled on it until the Germans left Greece. In addition, the British, who controlled the coastal area, opposed the whole project on security grounds. [42]
Hirschmann's most impressive achievement did not directly involve Turkey. In early 1943, the State Department and the British Foreign Office had brushed aside a Rumanian offer to release 70,000 Jews from terrible camps in Transnistria and turn them over to the Allies. Later, pressures from Jewish organizations persuaded the State Department to take steps to help these desperate Jews. Assisted by the International Red Cross, the State Department induced the Bucharest government late in 1943 to begin transferring them from Transnistria to Rumania proper. But after evacuating 6,400, the Rumanians gave in to German pressure and ceased the operation. [43]
The situation reached the point of extreme danger soon after the WRB came into existence. Rampant disease and starvation continued in the camps. Even worse, the German army, falling back before the Soviets, was entering Transnistria. The Jews were in the path of the retreat. The WRB used all available diplomatic channels to press the Rumanian government, but the break came through Hirschmann's personal intervention with Alexander Cretzianu, Rumania's minister to Turkey. [44]
Hirschmann told Cretzianu that America was outraged at Rumania's treatment of Jews and warned him that his nation would be well advised to turn about and help save them. Cretzianu said, "If this means so much to you in the United States, why didn't you come sooner? You could have saved more lives." He agreed to urge his government to transfer the Jews from Transnistria to the interior of Rumania. The Rumanian government responded positively and in March recommenced the evacuations. Thus the 48,000 Jews still alive in Transnistria were safeguarded. The weakening German position in the Balkans con tributed importantly to this outcome, but the WRB had played a key role in the episode. [xii] [45]
In July, Hirschmann met again with Cretzianu. He also held talks with Nicholas Balabanoff, the Bulgarian minister to Turkey. With German power close to collapse in the two Balkan countries, Hirschmann sought to play on their governments' hopes to gain American goodwill. From Rumania, he received a commitment to accept, secretly, Jews fleeing from Nazi terror in Hungary. The Rumanians also agreed to cooperate in the exit of Jews from their country. [47]
Hirschmann believed that evacuation was nor the best answer for Bulgaria's 45,000 Jews, now that the threat of deportation was over. Rather, he sought an end to the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria and the extension of full rights to them. He urged these steps on Balabanoff. In late August, partly because of Hirschmann's efforts, Bulgaria abolished its anti-Jewish laws and reinstated Jewish property rights. Bulgarian Jews had the possibility of rebuilding their lives. [48]
Rumania surrendered to Russia on August 23, and two weeks later the Soviets took control of Bulgaria. Hirschmann concluded that the main WRB mission in Turkey had ended. The Jews of Rumania and Bulgaria needed aid, but they were safe. He departed for home in early October, leaving Herbert Katzki to complete the board's work. [49]
Kataki, a person of wide experience with the Joint Distribution Committee, had joined the WRB in Turkey in early summer. After Hirsch mann left, Katzki tried to place JDC relief teams in Rumania and Bulgaria. But the Soviets blocked that plan. [50]
Because of the widespread destitution among Balkan Jews, the Jewish Agency reinstituted its evacuation efforts in fall 1944. With Kataki's cooperation, it soon brought out 2,000 more Jews. But the British halted this exodus, insisting that, with the Germans gone, Jews in Rumania and Bulgaria were now safe and thus not eligible for admission to Palestine. The WRB closed its office in Turkey in February 1945. [51]
In all, nearly 7,000 Jews left the Balkans and reached Palestine via Turkey under the aegis of the WRB. Hirschmann's diplomatic negotiations affected far larger numbers by breaking up the abominable Transnistrian camps and bargaining for the greatest possible protection for Jews who Were still alive in Rumania and Bulgaria. Hirschmann pointed out that the very formation of the WRB had accomplished something else of importance. Its birth, according to numerous Jews passing through Turkey, had "injected new life and hope into ... refugees throughout the European continent." One group of fugitives explained, with obvious emotion, "For two years there has been only one phrase on everyone's lips, 'When are the Americans coming?'" [52]
[b]Spain[/b]
After Turkey, Spain appeared to be the most important escape hatch from Axis Europe. Deportations of Jews from France to the gas chambers had continued, with interruptions, since the great roundups of the summer and fall of 1942. And they would go on until France's liberation. A rush of escapes to Spain had followed the 1942 roundups. But after early 1943 only a few hundred Jews a month managed to cross the Pyrenees. The WRB planned to change that trickle into a steady flow. [53]
Germany's occupation of Vichy France in November 1942 had sent another wave of refugees, mostly non-Jewish, into Spain. The new exodus, much larger than the earlier one, ultimately numbered about 25,000 people. They were predominantly French males of military age who hoped to reach North Africa to join the Allied forces. For military reasons, the American and British- diplomatic missions in Spain acted to help them and to hasten their evacuation. [54]
Only infrequently had Spanish authorities turned refugees back. But neither had they done anything to facilitate their escape. [xiii] Rather, they discouraged it by incarcerating the fugitives-men, women, and children -- in prisons and concentration camps. Conditions were wretched. An American embassy report told of the vast overcrowding and pointed out that inmates were "sleeping, despite the bitter cold of winter, without blankets on cold concrete floors, crowded together with inadequate sanitary facilities, and forced to subsist on a starvation diet." In one prison, three toilets served 1,900 men. Each man slept in a nearly airless space only one foot by five and one-half feet. A three-year-old girl suffered through scarlet fever and typhoid in a prison cell with her mother. [xiv] [55]
In January 1943, under American and British pressure, Spanish authorities agreed to allow prisoners to transfer to hotels and boardinghouses, but only if their support was assured and arrangements were under way for their departure from the country. Thanks to funds provided by the American, British, and French North African diplomatic missions, the male French escapees (along with some Dutch, Belgian, and Polish nationals) left the prisons. During 1943, the Allies evacuated them to North Africa. [58]
But most of the Jewish refugees had no source of help. The Joint Distribution Committee and the American Friends Service Committee managed to place a Friends worker, David Blickenstaff, in Madrid in late January 1943. With full cooperation from the American ambassador, Carlton]. H. Hayes, Blickenstaff established the Representation in Spain of American Relief Organizations and took responsibility for these refugees. Blickenstaff's organization freed hundreds of them by supplying money for their maintenance, sent aid to those still incarcerated, and worked persistently to locate emigration possibilities for the fugitives. [59]
By the time the War Refugee Board came into existence, the American and British embassies had virtually resolved the French non-Jewish refugee crisis, and Blickenstaff had the problem of the Jewish refugees under control. Furthermore, emigration plans for the bulk of the 2,500 Jewish refugees still in Spain appeared to be falling into place. As few new fugitives were entering the country, the refugee situation had been stabilized. Hayes considered the problem solved. But the WRB saw removal of the earlier refugees as only the first step. Spain was to become a channel for bringing many more threatened people out of Axis Europe. [60]
The basic WRB plan for Spain called for the American ambassador to urge the Spanish government to relax its border restrictions and publicly announce its willingness to receive refugees. Spain should also be asked to set up three reception camps along the French border. They would remain under Spanish control, but the WRB would finance them and would see that the refugees moved promptly through them and out of Spain. [61]
The Treasury and War departments agreed to the plan, but State Department officials resisted it at first. They claimed that any pressure on Spain would threaten the nearly completed, but very sensitive, wolfram negotiations. Wolfram (tungsten), necessary for hardening steel, was essential for production of vital war materials such as machine tools and armor plate. Germany depended on Spain and Portugal for its supply. For several months, a program of large American and British purchases of Spanish wolfram had almost foreclosed its availability to the Nazis. Hayes was now in the midst of negotiations with Spain for full stoppage of wolfram exports to Germany. In early February, he arranged a temporary embargo. [62]
With help from Stettinius, the board succeeded in mid-February in persuading the State Department to instruct Hayes to press the WRB rescue plan with the Spanish government. Hayes was expressly advised to present. the refugee matter on humanitarian grounds, move it along rapidly, and keep it entirely separate from other negotiations with Spain. [63]
Hayes replied that he did Rot believe the plan would increase the refugee flow and that he was not presenting it to the Spanish govern ment. He asserted that relaxation of Spain's border controls would only facilitate entry of German agents and encourage efforts to smuggle wolfram out to German purchasers. He did not explain how German agents could avoid detection in the proposed reception camps. Nor did he reveal how easing controls on the entry of persons would weaken restrictions on the exit of bulky goods. [64]
No amount of pressure could change Hayes's position. He only responded with additional unsubstantiated arguments against the plan. It would somehow jeopardize Blickenstaff's work. It would hinder the escape from France of downed Allied airmen. It would antagonize the Spanish government. [65]
Hayes's reaction to the rescue plan was only one part of his noncooperation. Immediately after the WRB was formed, the State Department ordered all its diplomatic missions to inform their host governments of the new American rescue policy and to ask them to specify ways in which they would be willing to help. Hayes refused. He explained that he had regularly kept the Spanish government informed of American refugee policy, so special action on that part of the instructions was unnecessary. As to requesting Spanish cooperation, the time was inop portune because of "the present crisis in our relations with Spain." He promised to take it up some other time, "when a better opportunity presents itself." He did, after a fashion, five months later. [66]
Hayes also kept the board from placing a representative in Spain. Blickenstaff seemed the appropriate choice, and his sponsoring group, the American Friends Service Committee, stated that it could find a replacement for him. But Hayes, insisting that Blickenstaff could not be spared from his current assignment, consented to ,accept him as WRB representative only if he held both posts. The board replied that it needed a full-time person and offered to send James J. Saxon, a Treasury officer then in French Africa. Hayes answered that he saw no need for a full-time representative in Spain, that there was nothing the WRB could accomplish there that he and Blickenstaff were not already doing. If a person were appointed, though, it should be Blickenstaff -- on a part-time basis. (Blickenstaff himself saw plenty of reason for a full-time WRB representative, but Hayes did not consult him on the question.) [67]
The stalemate continued until Hayes visited the United States in mid-July 1944. He then admitted to Pehle that more could have been done for rescue in Spain, and he reluctantly agreed to accept the WRB's James H. Mann as representative-for a two-month trial period. A month later, the State Department approved Mann. But by then the Allies were far along in the reconquest of France. The chance for important rescue work through Spain had passed. [68]
Hayes also tried to keep funds for rescue from going into Spain. In March, the WRB approved a license authorizing the Joint Distribution Committee to send $100,000 for evacuation of refugees, mostly children, from France to Spain. Part of the money was to hire border guides to smuggle the fugitives through the Pyrenees. Hayes refused to trans mit the license to the JDCs agent, Samuel Sequerra. If a private agency sponsored such clandestine operations, he claimed, the Spanish government might close down all refugee-relief work, including Blickenstaff's program. In addition, Sequerra's activities might help German agents posing as refugees to penetrate Spain and move on to Allied territories. (In fact, Germany had no trouble infiltrating agents into Spain.) Furthermore, the ambassador asserted, Sequerra's loyalty to the Allies was doubtful. (WRB investigations found this charge entirely without basis.) Fortunately for the few hundred brought out with the funds, the license took effect despite Hayes's opposition. [xv] [69]
The board tried, but failed, to budge Hayes. Pehle persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to seek the President's help. She reported, "I spoke to Franklin & asked if perhaps a change might be advisable & Franklin said wearily 'well the complaints are mounting.''' Morgenthau approached Roosevelt directly, asking that he send Wendell Willkie to set Hayes straight on this and other American problems in Spain. FDR, who could readily have brought Hayes into line if he had cared to, shunted Morgenthau off to Hull. In June 1944, the WRB sent James Mann to Spain to confer with Hayes. Mann made virtually no progress. The following month, while Hayes was in Washington, Pehle saw him twice, but failed to gain any cooperation apart from the acceptance of Mann as the WRB representative in Spain on a trial basis. [71]
Hayes's behavior remains a riddle. He was not entirely insensitive toward Jewish refugees, or he would not have supported Blickenstaff's work so strongly. Nor can he be considered anti-Semitic; his service as a co-chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews continued even while he was ambassador to Spain. Furthermore, Hayes interceded with the Spanish government on two rescue matters. In 1943 and 1944, he encouraged Spain to furnish safe haven for a few hundred Sephardic Jews, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain five centuries earlier. And when the Hungarian Jews were confronted with terror and death, his approaches in Madrid helped stimulate efforts to protect Jews by the Spanish legation in Budapest. [72]
Hayes's failure to cooperate with the WRB apparently stemmed from his view of his mission in Spain. In April 1942, just before taking up his post, Hayes told a small gathering of Americans involved in rescue and relief work that he had accepted the assignment in order to expedite the winning of the war. His main goal was going to be to stop Spanish sales of strategic materials to Germany. He also intended gradually to swing Spain away from the Axis and toward the Allies. [73]
Hayes's official communications regarding rescue and the WRB reveal an undertone of anxiety that a diplomatic misstep on his part might antagonize the Spanish government and impede progress toward his main objectives. To get French men of military age out of Spain to North Africa, he would run this risk. That would contribute to his cardinal aim, victory over the Axis. He would even approach the Spanish authorities on behalf of other imprisoned refugees, for that pointed toward their emigration &om Spain, a goal ardently desired by the Spanish government. But to press for cooperation in bringing about an influx of new Jewish refugees would, in Hayes's view, provoke the Spanish government and jeopardize his central policy. [74]
In reality, Hayes was too timid. During early 1943, caution might have been necessary. But after the Axis surrendered in North Africa in May 1943 (and even more by January 1944, when the WRB emerged), Spain knew who would win the war and acted accordingly. Moreover, by December 1943, Hayes had achieved virtually all his prime objectives. As he reported to the State Department that month, Spain had rechanneled most sales of strategic materials (including wolfram) away from Germany and to the Allies, had withdrawn its Blue Division from the Russian front, and was cooperating in numerous other ways. Final agreement on a total stoppage of the small remaining flow of wolfram to Germany was incomplete. But by the time the WRB's requests reached Hayes, a temporary embargo was in effect. Its continuation was virtually guaranteed-not by Hayes's restrained diplomacy, but by an American threat to sever Spain's oil lifeline. [75]
Hayes nonetheless concluded that diplomatic pressures for the WRB's programs might interfere with the final steps of his wolfram negotiations. He apparently considered the board's work of too little significance to justify any risk. To Carlton Hayes, a renowned historian, the battle over Spanish wolfram, a battle that was already won, loomed far larger than the genocide of the Jews. [76]
It is impossible to determine what the WRB might have accomplished in Spain with Hayes's cooperation. With minimal outside help, a handful of people working in Spain for the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Agency, and the Joint Distribution Committee proved that escapes from France were still possible. But their isolated and usually secret operations had no support services, no WRB coordination. and no diplomatic backing. Only a few score refugees came through each month-probably not many more than 1,000 altogether between the beginning of 1944 and late August, when the need for flight to Spain ended. [77]
The main refugee action in Spain in 1944 involved the evacuation of stateless escapees who had arrived there in 1943 and earlier. Although the WRB facilitated it somewhat, this movement was not a board project. It represented the fruition of plans that Blickenstaff and others had worked on for over a year. One ship sailed for Palestine in January and another in October. They carried a total of 875 refugees to permanent haven. In the spring, Canada took 220 others. And in May, a small refugee camp near Casablanca, the only achievement of the Bermuda Conference, finally opened its gates. During the next two months, it received 630 people from Spain. Adding the handful who managed to obtain U.S. visas and the few others who went to England and Latin America raises the total evacuated in 1944 to 1,800. A thousand others remained in Spain at the start of 1945. The WRB had visualized Spain as a conveyor belt, moving thousands and thousands to freedom. That hope was dashed utterly. [78]
In contrast, the WRB encountered no difficulties in the other Iberian nation, Portugal. The American minister there, R. Henry Norweb, cooperated fully. On the WRB's assurance that the United States would move them to other places, the Portuguese government agreed to open its doors to all refugees coming through from Spain. The board's representative, Robert C. Dexter of the Unitarian Service Committee, had long experience in refugee work and was thoroughly familiar with Lisbon. Dexter arrived in April and began preparations for the expected flow of refugees. But very few arrived, for the conduit through Spain never opened. Dexter occupied himself with a variety of minor projects, but for the most part he waited in Lisbon for a task that failed to materialize. [79]
[b]Southern Italy[/b]
Allied advances in Italy following the invasion of September 1943 opened another escape route from Axis Europe. By November, refugees were streaming across the Adriatic Sea from Yugoslavia to southern Italy. Most of this exodus was organized by the Tito-led Yugoslav resistance movement. [80]
Until March 1944, the Allied military cooperated fully with the Yugoslav evacuation. The British navy transported thousands of refugees across the Adriatic. Thousands more came in small partisan boats. (Later, some were flown out in Allied aircraft.) The British army sheltered and fed the fugitives in Italy and, using two troopships, transferred them to camps at El Shatt and Khatatba, in Egypt. Nearly all of these refugees were Yugoslav civilians. Few were Jewish. (The Nazis had exterminated most Yugoslav Jews.) The Jews among them (500 of the first 15,000) remained in Italy because the British camp administration in Egypt opposed bringing Jews there. [81]
By spring 1944, El Shatt and Khatatba were three-fourths full, and refugees were still entering Italy at the rate. of 1,800 per week. Concerned that the camps in Egypt would reach capacity and the escapees then pile up in Italy and overburden Allied facilities there, the military authorities issued orders to discourage further refugee movement across the Adriatic. The instructions did not stop Yugoslavs from sailing to Italy. But the absence of Allied assistance cut the influx by two-thirds. [82]
Even before the military moved to stem the refugee flow, the War Refugee Board began to look into the situation in Italy. In March, a Treasury Department agent based in Africa made an exploratory trip. Soon afterward, Leonard E. Ackermann, the WRB's representative in North Africa, was appointed its representative in Italy as well. The board's inquiries found the Tito forces willing to try to open an escape route through partisan areas of Yugoslavia and out to the Adriatic for the gravely endangered Jews of Hungary. But the Yugoslavs themselves were hampered by insufficient boats, funds, and supplies. [83]
While seeking solutions to those problems, Ackermann learned of the military's order to slow the refugee flow into Italy. He and the board in Washington recognized that a crisis had arisen. Additional temporary havens were essential to keep the Adriatic route open. If it closed, the chance for an outlet from Hungary would also disappear. At that time, May 1944, Eichmann and his henchmen were concentrating massive numbers of Hungarian Jews for deportation. The long, crowded death trains had already started to wind through the Slovakian mountains to Auschwitz. [84]
In Washington, Morgenthau called the situation to Roosevelt's attention at a Cabinet meeting. The President responded instantaneously that under no circumstances should the refugee flow across the Adriatic be hindered. Directly afterward, instructions went to the military in Italy to lift the restriction discouraging the influx. To help relieve the pressure, the President agreed to a WRB proposal to move a thousand refugees from Italy to an emergency internment camp in the United States. He also ordered an intensive search for havens in the Mediter ranean area, including in Italy itself. [85]
One brief statement in a Cabinet meeting rapidly dissolved the problem in Italy. Allied military authorities quickly found that they could accommodate many more refugees in Italy than previously estimated. They also initiated steps to open a camp at Philippeville, in French North Africa, to harbor up to 7,000 people. And UNRRA, which had recently taken over the Egyptian camps, increased their capacity from 30,000 to 40,000. The refugee movement across the Adriatic recommenced in June and continued through the summer. By late August, though, the Nazi threat to Yugoslav civilians had virtually ended. When the exodus stopped, in September 1944, over 36,000 Yugoslavs, nearly all non-Jews, had escaped to Italy. About 28,000 of them had moved on to the camps in Egypt; the rest remained in Italy until they were repatriated. [xvi] [86]
Little came of the hopes for opening an escape route out of Hungary. Tito's forces wanted to help. But the only partisan-held territory close to the Hungarian border, an area along the Drava River, was tightly guarded on the Hungarian side. Furthermore, the partisans in that sector were nearly isolated and were too hard pressed themselves to initiate rescue operations. They did take in and protect the few Jews who managed to get through. [88]
With WRB support, an attempt was made, through the Pope, to save the Jews in German-occupied northern Italy. In August 1944, Sir Clifford Heathcote-Smith, the Intergovernmental Committee's delegate in Italy, and Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt's personal representative to the Vatican, spoke with the Pope. They asked him to urge the German government to stop the deportations from Italy and to release the Jews to the Allied-held part of the country. [xvii] [89]
The Pope agreed unhesitatingly. He told Heathcote-Smith that neither his conscience nor history would forgive him if he did not make the effort. But his approach, made through the nuncio in Berlin, brought nothing but an evasive response. [91]
[b]Sweden[/b]
In Sweden, determined work by the WRB representative, Iver C. Olsen, brought disappointingly limited results. Olsen, previously the American legation's financial attache, received close cooperation from the American minister in Sweden, Herschel V. Johnson. The Swedish government was also helpful. But the WRB came too late; comparatively few Jews remained alive in the northern tier of Axis Europe by 1944. And the obstacles to reaching them and getting them out of Axis territory were immense. [92]
Olsen organized and funded committees that sent rescue teams across the Baltic Sea into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to bring out Jews and non-Jewish political refugees. These units developed underground contacts and obtained fast cabin cruisers, fuel, supplies, and false identification papers. But although the program operated throughout the summer of 1944, it rescued only 1,200 people, none of them Jews. Most Jews still alive in the Baltic states were in hiding and afraid to come out. Non-Jewish escapees reported that many Jews could have fled on WRB boats, but they suspected a German trap and would not take the risk. [93]
Plain bad luck also plagued the Baltic Sea rescue effort. Action did not get under way until mid-June, and by then the short summer nights hindered operations. The Lithuanian program suffered from the start because Olsen's key agent did not return from a preliminary trip to make rescue· arrangements. In time, the Germans captured five of the boats running to Lithuania. One launch used in the Latvian project was caught by the Nazis, who threw its crew and fifty refugees into a concentration camp. Eight others who worked in the Latvian rescue effort were killed or disappeared. At the end of September, Olsen called off the Baltic operations. As the Russians advanced, military action in that region made further rescue attempts impossible. [xviii] [94]
Olsen transferred the Baltic Sea boats to another operation that was already ferrying endangered Norwegians to Sweden. This project, financed from America and sponsored by the AFL and the CIO, moved several thousands to safety. Evacuations from Norway, both across the land border and by sea in the south, proved to be the WRB's main achievement in Sweden. Ultimately, the board helped bring 15,000 refugees out of Norway. Again, none were Jews. [96]
Rescue efforts could not count on much help from the small, but comfortably situated, Swedish Jewish community of about 7,000. The main Jewish communal organization was not very interested in rescue. Olsen believed the Swedish Jews feared that an influx of refugees would put a financial burden on them. They also worried that anti-Semitism, not then a problem, would develop if more Jews came in. Olsen reported that the Swedish Jews had been "most apathetic" to the rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943. They had done nothing for the Norwegian Jews who managed to flee to Sweden. And even when thirty Jewish orphans reached Sweden from Central Europe in 1943, the Swedish Jews "did not want to be bothered." The children went into Christian homes. [97]
Several difficulties, then, impeded Olsen's plans. But the WRB's Swedish effort did accomplish a little for Jewish refugees. With Minister Johnson's assistance, Olsen persuaded the Swedish government to bring in the 150 Jewish refugees in Finland. This was a precaution against possible danger in that Axis nation. Together, Johnson and Olsen developed an aid program for needy refugees in Sweden, three· fourths of whom were Jewish. [xix] They also organized a relief system for thousands of anti-Nazis in Norway. Despite its illegality, it operated with the full cooperation of the Swedish Foreign Office and the Swedish diplomatic mission in Oslo. [98]
Near the end of the war in Europe, Olsen and Johnson lent their support to a series of secret negotiations that led in April 1945 to the transfer of two groups of concentration camp inmates to Sweden. First to come out were 425 Jews whom the Nazis had deported from Den mark. Soon afterward, 7,000 women, half of them Jews, arrived in Sweden from the wretched Ravensbruck camp. This resulted from talks between SS Chief Heinrich Himmler; Felix Kersten, Himmler's doctor and confidant; Hillel Storch and Norbert Masur of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress; and Count Folke Bernadotte, represent ing the Swedish Red Cross. [100]
Because the WRB's Swedish operations helped few Jews, Olsen was sharply criticized in some quarters. But a representative of the Joint Distribution Committee who went to Sweden in the fall of 1944 looked carefully into the situation and concluded that Olsen had done all that anyone could have. The WRB leadership in Washington was also convinced that he did the best job possible under the circumstances. [101]
[b]Switzerland[/b]
The WRB accomplished more in Switzerland than it was able to in Spain, Italy, or Sweden. Because of its location close to much of Nazi Europe, the small mountain nation became the nerve center of the board's overseas work. It was the best corridor for sending funds into Europe. It served as a vital relay point for communications into and out of Axis territory. And the Swiss government, which maintained relations with the Axis nations, provided a channel for diplomatic contacts with Germany and its satellites. [102]
The WRB was fortunate to find a person already in Switzerland who was highly qualified to serve as its representative. Roswell McClelland, director of the American Friends Service Committee's refugee-relief program there, brought to the WRB post a thorough knowledge of refugee matters and experience in dealing with high government officials. He also enjoyed good relations with several rescue and relief organizations. Many of them had underground connections and communications networks reaching into Nazi Europe. These contacts would become essential to much of his activity. [103]
From a discretionary fund of $250,000 supplied by the Joint Distribution Committee, McClelland financed numerous undercover programs: relief operations in Axis territory, production of false documents, an underground courier service, and escape projects. (The escape work required small-scale bribery of border officials and police as well as payments to "passeurs" who guided refugees through the mountains and across the Swiss border.) Financial transactions often involved what McClelland called "dime store" goods. Pocket knives, bars of soap, razor blades, cheap Swiss watches, and other small commodities were far more valuable than money, because of their scarcity in Axis countries. They were smuggled out of Switzerland in secondhand suitcases under the averted eyes of "a sterling Swiss customs guard:' Conducted for the most part by already existing underground and resistance groups, board operations extended into France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. They enabled thousands of endangered people in Axis Europe to survive and other thousands to escape. [104]
In France, Jews and anti-Nazis who were in hiding received essential supplies, money, and forged documents (identification cards, work permits, birth and baptismal certificates, ration cards). The WRB also furnished badly needed supplies to French resistance workers and their families in return for their help in protecting Jews. Similarly, McClelland sent funds to non-Jewish resistance groups located along the French-Spanish frontier who assisted Jews trying to cross the Pyrenees. [105]
The nearly 8,000 Jewish orphans who were hidden in France in Christian homes, schools, and convents were a matter of deep concern to the WRB. It sent funds from Switzerland to contribute to their maintenance. When the Nazis unleashed a campaign to track them down for deportation, WRB money helped persuade minor officials and local authorities to cooperate in keeping the hunters off the trail. [106]
The WRB was anxious to move the most endangered of the children to Switzerland. But the Swiss government would not accept them unless a responsible government guaranteed to remove them when the war ended. The British refused, insisting that they could not reserve Palestine certificates for after the war. The State Department also declined, claiming that it could not bind a future administration to issue visas. But WRB pressure induced State to authorize postwar immigration of up to 4,000 of the children, and the program went forward. By August 1944, when the threat had passed in France, 650 of the orphans had reached Switzerland and about 600 other Jewish children had entered with their parents or relatives. [107]
In German-occupied northern Italy, resistance forces and religious leaders used funds supplied by McClelland to conceal and care for Jews and other endangered people. WRB money enabled Hechaluz, a Swiss-based Zionist underground organization, to arrange the escape of 2,000 Jews from Hungary into Rumania and of a few hundred others into Yugoslavia. The facilities of Swiss, Swedish, and Turkish diplomatic couriers and even the papal nunciature's pouch were made available to smuggle the Hechaluz funds into Axis territory. [108]
In general, WRB efforts to help Jews escape to Switzerland had limited success. Yet several thousand did reach Swiss territory during 1944 and 1945. Besides the 1,250 children, more than 3,000 Jewish adults entered from France before that country became safe for Jews, in the late summer of 1944. Attempts to bring refugees in from northern Italy were mostly ineffective because of tight German controls along that frontier. In August 1944, during the Hungarian Jewish crisis, the American and British governments guaranteed refuge for all Jews allowed to leave Hungary. With that assurance, the Swiss government agreed to ease its immigration restrictions to let in up to 13,000 additional Jews on a temporary basis. Complex negotiations between Swiss Jewish leaders and Nazi officials led to the release from Nazi concentration camps and delivery to Switzerland of nearly 3,000 Jews. Finally, in April 1945, another 1,400 camp inmates, mostly non-Jewish French women, reached Switzerland. [109]
Until August 1944, the refugee question was the focus of a heated dispute between the Swiss government, which restricted the entry of Jews, and influential segments of the Swiss public, which objected strongly to that policy. Social-welfare organizations, Christian church groups, newspapers, and some political leaders argued on humanitarian grounds for opening the borders to all fleeing Jews. They were incensed that their government turned many Jews away at the frontier, leaving them to the mercy of the Gestapo or the French police, and even expelled some who had succeeded in entering the country secretly. [110]
Exact figures are not available, but in relation to its size Switzerland was unquestionably more generous in taking in refugees than any other country except Palestine. At the end of 1944, some 27,000 Jewish refugees were safe in Switzerland -- so were approximately 20,000 non-Jewish refugees and about 40,000 interned military personnel. What upset many people, however, was the basic Swiss policy. The country's borders were wide open to all who were in danger because of their political beliefs, to escaped prisoners of war, and to military deserters. Usually, the following categories of Jews were also allowed to enter: young children (and their parents if accompanying them), pregnant women, the sick, the aged, and close relatives of Swiss citizens. All other Jews who managed to reach Switzerland were liable to be turned back at the border and left more exposed to peril than if they had not attempted to escape. [111]
That the Swiss authorities turned back many Jews is indisputable. Moreover, whenever significant numbers of Jews began to arrive at the borders, as at the time of the great deportations from France in 1942, the Swiss government tightened its controls on Jewish immigration. The purpose, Swiss officials explained, was to discourage more from coming, because the country could not absorb everyone who wanted asylum. Actually, Switzerland had the capacity to take in many more Jews than it did, according to an authority on Swiss policy, Edgar Bonjour. In his view, the stringent policy was caused by the government's fear of antagonizing Germany (a compelling problem, given Switzerland's economic and military vulnerability) and by the anti-Semitism that was widespread in Swiss society. If the policy had really been unacceptable, he maintains, the people could have overturned it. Like that of other countries, the general population of Switzerland was not disposed to sacrifice very much to help Jews. [xx] [112]
The number of Jews turned back will never be known. Also unknown is the number who, aware of Switzerland's policy, were deterred from risking flight and ultimately fell to the Nazis. [114]
During its sixteen months of active service, the War Refugee Board encountered an endless procession of difficult problems. But it never confronted any greater challenge than the Nazi campaign to annihilate the 760,000 Jews in Hungary. The Hungarian crisis began when the board was only eight weeks old. It lasted nearly a year. [115]
_______________
[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] Executive Order 9417 charged the WRB with carrying out "the policy of this Government [which is] to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war." The order also specified, "It shall be the duty of the State, Treasury and War Departments, within their respective spheres, to execute at the request of the Board, the plans and programs [developed by the board]. It shall be the duty of the heads of all agencies and departments to supply or obtain for the Board such information and to extend to the Board such supplies, shipping and other specified assistance and facilities as the Board may require in carrying out the provisions of this Order."
[ii] No such carelessness marked Roosevelt's intervention on behalf of a former official of the discontinued National Youth Authority. The WRB placed her in one of its top staff positions. [9]
[iii] A promising effort to develop rescue plans came from a new group, the Committee on Special Refugee Problems. This largely non-Jewish, New York-based initiative was partially funded by the board. Its three dozen members included several emigre political, educational, and labor leaders who were familiar with the European scene and had vital underground contacts in Axis Europe. The WRB dissolved the committee after four months, though, because the State Department and the board were worried that publicity might surface concerning the leftist political connections of a few of the members. [12]
[iv] In contrast, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which aided people who were already liberated, could count without question on American government appropriations. No such support was accorded the War Refugee Board, the agency charged with saving captive people from mass murder.
[v] The JDC was by far the largest Jewish organization conducting overseas relief. The UJA was the major American Jewish fund-raising agency and the main source of the JDC's income.
[vi] This $1,068.750 came from the general appropriation for foreign war relief voted by Congress annually from 1940 through 1945. The total amount appropriated was $85,000,000. The American Red Cross and the International Red Cross disbursed the rest of the funds in a great variety of projects, mostly unrelated to Jewish refugees. [21]
[vii] When drafting legal papers for the establishment of the WRB, Oscar Cox and his assistant, Milton Handler, originally planned $25,000,000 from the President's Emergency Fund for the board's expenses. This could have paid for rescue operations on a fairly large scale, as well as for administration. For reasons that are not clear, the idea was dropped before the board was formed. [22]
[viii] The argument was preposterous. Refugees could have been detained and carefully checked. In fact, those who did get through were thoroughly screened. No Axis government would have been so stupid as to send its agents into such a trap.
Incidentally, permanent Jewish residents in Turkey (non-refugees) received such bad treatment that a small but steady flow of them moved to Palestine during 1944. [32]
[ix] In 1940 and 1941, while ambassador to Russia, Steinhardt, himself a Jew, had pressed for tighter American restrictions on refugee entry and had hindered Jewish immigration from eastern Europe to the United States. Writing in the newspaper PM in the fall of 1943, journalist I. F. Stone drew on government documents to expose Steinhardt's actions. Stone's article received wide attention in the Jewish press. As ambassador to Turkey in 1944, however, Steinhardt worked to facilitate rescue. On a trip to the United States in spring 1944, Hirschmann spoke with numerous Jewish opinion leaders in an effort to rehabilitate Steinhardt's reputation."
[x] At the same time, Steinhardt was extremely critical of the Allied governments. In an acid message to Washington, he pointed out that, despite several requests from him and Hirschmann, no American or British vessel, not even a small one, had been made available for the Black Sea route. He underscored the incongruity of the American and British failure to furnish as much as a single 4,000-ton boat at the very time they were "posing as the saviors of the refugees before the rest of the world," and while "incessant U.S. propaganda" was boasting of American construction of over 1.5 million tons of shipping a month. [36]
[xi] The WRB worried about operating without safe-conduct assurances, but saw no alternative in view of German unwillingness to issue them. The Jewish Agency and the JDC agreed with the board's decision. Refugees were forewarned of the risk. In actuality, Jews were ready to sail on any kind of vessel to get out of Rumania. [39]
[xii] To encourage him to cooperate, Hirschmann offered Cretzianu asylum in the United States. Later, while in Washington for consultation, Hirschmann quietly arranged for immigration visas for the Rumanian diplomat and his family. [46]
[xiii] Spain made it abundantly clear during World War II that it did not want to shoulder any of the refugee burden. A Quaker representative summed it up in a report from Madrid in late 1943: "The attitude here seems to be limited to the demand: 'Get out!' and 'Now!'" [56]
[xiv] An inmate described conditions at the largest camp, Miranda de Ebro: "We sleep on the floor, without mattress, without pillow, tortured by innumerable flies and bedbugs. Everything is covered with a thick stratum of dust which, when raised by the wind, penetrates everywhere and especially in the food. The most terrible thing is the almost complete lack of water." [57]
[xv] The WRB was not alone in clashing with Hayes. The Office of Strategic Services and the Office of War Information had trouble keeping agents in Spain because of conflicts with the American embassy there. On the basis of experience in Lisbon, a Unitarian Service Committee official advised the board as early as February that opening Spain as an escape channel would be nearly impossible unless Hayes was replaced or the Franco government fell. A little later, Myron C. Taylor informed Morgenthau that he and the Intergovernmental Committee "have not been able to do anything in Spain, thanks to Mr. Hayes." [70]
[xvi] In 1944, over 4,000 Jewish refugees were in southern Italy. Most were there before the Allied invasion. Some came with the Yugoslavs. In May, 571 left for Palestine; in July, 874 sailed for the internment camp in the United States. Most of the rest eventually went to Palestine. [87]
[xvii] The British objected to the plan, claiming that southern Italy could not accommodate more refugees. Later, after learning from the military in Italy that room was available, the Foreign Office yielded."
[xviii] Because Olsen's main projects developed in the summer of 1944, a serious, if ludicrous, handicap to his work was the near sanctity in Sweden of the summer vacation. Especially in July, he found it extremely difficult to transact business in Stockholm. "There was," he reported, "scarcely a brain left in town." One Swedish Jewish leader departed on schedule for his month's vacation the very next day after Olsen gave him the $10,000 he needed to proceed with a rescue assignment he had agreed to carry out. The man's financial integrity was unimpeachable. [95]
[xix] From January 1944 until April 1945, Jewish refugees in Sweden numbered about 12,000: roughly 8,000 from Denmark, 1,000 from Norway, and 3,000 who had come from Central Europe before the war. [99]
[xx] Government concern about the postwar situation was also a factor. Jewish refugees, most of whom were stateless, might very well not be repatriated, or otherwise removed. Almost all other fugitives would. [113]
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