1 Two Wars Nazi Germany fought two simultaneous wars: the military war against the Allies and the genocidal war against the Jews. It launched the first on September 1, 1939, riding roughshod over Poland and daring the British and French to protest. Americans argued for more than two years over whether to join the conflict, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended the debate. The second war began in 1941 when a decade of racial and religious persecution morphed into a plan to annihilate the Nazis' innocent enemies. The U.S. government confirmed the ongoing mass murder in 1942, and for more than a year Americans--to the extent they were paying attention--debated how and whether to respond. Finally, in 1944, the United States began fighting the second war. On a drizzly Sunday in the middle of January, John Pehle, a young assistant to the secretary of the Treasury, walked from his office to the White House at lunchtime, and when he emerged, the United States had entered the war against the Nazi extermination of European Jews. When the war in Europe ended seventeen months later, tens of thousands of people--Jewish and non-Jewish--were alive due to the outcome of Pehle's meeting: a new government agency, the War Refugee Board (WRB), had been born. Pehle and his colleagues never became famous and spent the rest of their lives hearing--and agreeing--that the United States should have done more to help save the Jews of Europe. At the same time, few people ever knew what the War Refugee Board had actually done. -- The odds that day--January 16, 1944--were stacked against John Pehle. President Franklin Roosevelt had the flu. Rumors flew around official Washington about his ill health, a topic of particular concern because the Democratic National Committee met that weekend to debate nominating him for an unprecedented fourth term. The president felt physically weak and postponed things he wasn't up to doing. Pehle, a tall midwesterner with a deep voice and light brown hair already starting to recede, had never had an official White House meeting, even though he had worked in Washington for a decade, rising through the ranks at the Treasury Department. Since 1940, when he was just thirty-one, Pehle had overseen Foreign Funds Control, responsible for keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of America's enemies. With a staff of nearly fifteen hundred, Foreign Funds Control also supervised the small amounts of relief money sent from the United States into Europe. This did not exactly qualify Pehle, or any of his colleagues, as humanitarian aid specialists. Many people, including military officials, believed the United States could only truly help the victims of the Nazis and their collaborators by winning the war as soon as possible. Everything else was a distraction and a diversion of resources. Pehle thought they could do more than just fight militarily, but would Roosevelt? Most worryingly, Pehle's news would undoubtedly upset the president. His friends had been lying to him, and Pehle--a man Roosevelt couldn't have picked out of a lineup--had the proof. Pehle's plan--an incredibly risky one--was to argue that if the president did not act immediately and follow the Treasury Department's advice, his legacy as a defender of the downtrodden would be forever marred. Millions had already died, but millions of lives were still at stake. Pehle felt convinced that some could still be saved, but only if Roosevelt acted quickly. Pehle entered the White House, stomped his shoes clean, hung up his hat and coat, still damp with wintry drizzle, and climbed the stairs to the president's private study. He readied himself for the most important meeting of his life. -- In the summer of 1942, a year and a half before Pehle's meeting, news of the ongoing massacre of the Jews began to reach the United States. Most Americans had known that Nazi Germany made life impossible for Jews, but the idea of a systematic mass murder plan seemed absurd. And even if it was true, what could Americans do about it? Helping refugees escape Europe had never been a priority for the American government or the American people. Bigger problems--the Great Depression, war in Europe, war in Asia--stole most Americans' focus. Restrictive immigration laws instituted in the 1920s hadn't been written to target German Jews--and were in place long before the refugee crisis began in the late 1930s--but as a result of these laws many thousands of people who might have been able to escape couldn't do so. They were still in Europe waiting for immigration visas when they were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis. The doors to the United States began to close in the 1920s. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, was born from intense postwar isolationism and eugenic theories. The law capped the number of immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere at about 154,000 people per year, a far cry from the more than 10 million who had arrived in the United States in the decade prior to World War I. The act also applied "national origins" quotas and categorized applicants based on country of birth, not country of residence or citizenship. The quotas severely restricted persons from southern and eastern Europe, who had formed the majority of the immigrant population in recent decades, and kept most Asian and African people out entirely. Countries with large populations of Jews, Slavs, and people thought to be racially undesirable, poorer, and harder to assimilate were specifically targeted. Great Britain had the largest quota, and Germany was second, with a cap of 25,957. The 1924 law also moved power over immigration to the State Department. Though the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) stayed in the Labor Department until June 1940, applicants for immigration visas had to present all their paperwork--identification, financial records, medical exams--to State Department officers at designated consulates around the world. Immigrants received their visas before leaving Europe, so Ellis Island became merely a holding area for illegal or sick passengers. As ships steamed past the Statue of Liberty, those on board could wave with ease; the hardest part of the process was already over. Then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit the United States and the world. As had happened before and has happened since, politicians blamed immigration for exacerbating American economic problems. President Herbert Hoover instructed the State Department to strictly interpret an obscure clause from a 1917 law about people "likely to become a public charge." Visa applicants who did not have sufficient financial resources were no longer eligible, because one could not assume they would ever find employment in America. The year before Hoover's restriction, 25,957 German immigrants entered, completely filling the quota allotment. By 1933, the number had fallen to 1,324. On March 4, 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt recited the oath of office, the front pages of major newspapers reported on his laundry list of New Deal legislation but also on increasing antisemitism in Nazi Germany, where a new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had taken power five weeks earlier. Jews were being kicked out of their jobs, stores boycotted, books burned. In protest, tens of thousands of Americans marched in major cities around the country, held rallies, and began an anti-German boycott movement. Roosevelt's State Department staff, still settling into the massive Department of State building just west of the White House, felt that diplomatic tensions were too fraught to make any formal protest. Germany owed American investors $2 billion in loans after World War I, and the new Nazi regime acted on whims. Germany was a sovereign nation, and anyway it was not a crime to persecute your own citizens. From Berlin, the U.S. consul general George Messersmith sent a warning to his colleagues in Washington in June 1933: The persecution of the Jews "is one of the most serious and one of the saddest problems that has arisen in a civilized country in modern times . . . I personally can see no hope for the Jews in Germany for years to come and all those who can possibly get out of the country, will wish to do so." In the first full year of Nazi control, fewer than 4,400 Germans had been granted U.S. immigrant visas, while 83,013 persons, mostly Jews, sat on the waiting list. The State Department loosened the "likely to become a public charge" instruction and reminded consular officials to be sympathetic. Otherwise, the process stayed the same. The United States had an immigration policy, but no refugee policy. Those fleeing persecution had to qualify, with the same paperwork and under the same strict rules as everyone else. Soon, Nazi persecution stopped being front-page news, and most Americans stopped paying attention. Five years later, on March 12, 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in a territorial grab known as the Anschluss. Hitler rode triumphantly through Vienna, with swastika flags hanging from every building and people lining the streets to cheer. There were 1,413 immigration spots available under the Austrian quota each year, but the consulate had been a sleepy one, issuing only an average of 15 per month prior to the Nazis' arrival. In the next four months, 40,000 Austrians applied, the vast majority of them Jews. Between 500 and 4,000 people waited in the gardens outside the consulate every day for an appointment with the small--and now frantic--State Department staff. Eight hundred letters arrived every day, all needing responses. The desperate Jews of Vienna were being evicted from their homes and constantly threatened with arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps. Suicide grew increasingly common. Though the State Department controlled the issuance of visas, Congress determined immigration law and set the quotas. In the spring of 1938, three Democrats, all representing parts of Brooklyn, proposed bills to assist refugees. Samuel Dickstein wanted to carry over unused quota slots from year to year, reassigning them to countries according to need; Emanuel Celler wanted to remove the "public charge" consideration entirely for those escaping persecution; and Donald O'Toole thought that all physically and mentally healthy refugees should be granted visas. Hearings on their bills were scheduled for April 20-22, 1938. Before they could take place, Messersmith, now assistant secretary of state, made the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol at Celler's request. After the hearings had been scheduled, both Messersmith and Celler had heard from frantic refugee advocates, all warning that the bills were dangerous. They shouldn't hold any debate regarding immigration, Messersmith warned the Jewish congressmen gathered in Celler's office, not in committee and definitely not on the House floor. Immigration was simply too unpopular, and any proposal to increase the quotas would likely result in laws to cut or end immigration entirely. It was better to keep quiet and keep the quotas as they were. The congressmen listened and argued among themselves for a long time. All were hearing from constituents, many with Jewish family members in Germany. But they made a unanimous decision: Celler would pull his bill, and Representative Adolph Sabath of Illinois would tell Dickstein and O'Toole to do the same. No hearings, no debate. The Jewish members of Congress would not propose any new legislation to change the immigration laws. It was just too risky. At the end of April, President Roosevelt instructed the State Department to combine the Austrian and German quotas. Though Austria no longer existed--the busy consulate found itself in Vienna, Germany--Austrians were eligible for one of the now 27,370 quota slots available to the German-born. To most Americans, that number seemed far too high. In a Roper poll, 67 percent of respondents felt that German, Austrian, and "political refugees" (non-Jews being persecuted by the Nazis) should be kept out entirely--never mind the quotas. The 1937 recession had reversed some of the New Deal economic gains, and unemployment in early 1938 shot back up to 19 percent. Many Americans were feeling sympathetic but not charitable. To address the worsening crisis, President Roosevelt called for an international conference in Évian-les-Bains, France, in early July. Thirty-two countries participated, discussing ways to assist Jews still in Germany who wanted to immigrate. But when individual countries were asked about accepting refugees, most--including the United States--demurred. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take German Jews, though the invitation wasn't quite an altruistic one. General Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, had initiated a massacre of poor black Haitians less than a year earlier and specifically sought to bring white wealth into his country. Rich Jews would do just fine. The Évian Conference did have one tangible result: the formation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGC). But its work streamlining emigration met with little success. At one point, George Rublee, the seventy-year-old American director of the IGC, wrote to the State Department, "With the exception of the United States, which has maintained its quota, and the British Isles, which are admitting immigrants at a current months rate equal to the rate immigrants are being admitted to the United States, doors have been systematically closed everywhere to involuntary emigrants since the meeting at Évian." Though the Nazis officially encouraged emigration, they demanded refugees surrender the majority of their wealth and assets first, which meant many didn't have the money to be desirable immigrants. On the evening of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis instigated a violent pogrom known as Kristallnacht . The attacks and the subsequent mass arrest of Jewish men and boys received widespread press coverage in the United States--upwards of a month of front-page newspaper stories. Roosevelt condemned the violence, adding that he "could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization." The president recalled American ambassador Hugh Wilson from Berlin and announced he would extend the expiration on tourist visas for Germans--including many Jews--visiting the United States who did not feel safe returning home. But while a Gallup poll in the wake of Kristallnacht showed that 94 percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, this still did not translate into a public appetite for increasing the quotas. Senator Robert Reynolds, a North Carolina Democrat, decided he would fix the immigration laws. In the six years since he had entered the Senate, Reynolds had grown more isolationist, racist, and admiring of Nazi Germany. In January 1939, the same month he started his own antisemitic newspaper, the American Vindicator , Reynolds introduced five bills in the Senate, all dealing with immigration. Two were particularly spiteful: immigration quotas should be cut by 90 percent, Reynolds argued, and moreover all immigration should cease for ten years or until unemployment fell to three million people. During Senate hearings on the bills, speakers testified that America was traditionally a country of exclusion, not acceptance. A month after Reynolds, Senator Robert Wagner, a New York Democrat, and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, introduced a very different piece of legislation. The Wagner-Rogers bill proposed allowing twenty thousand German refugee children to enter the United States above the quota. Carefully worded by sympathetic relief organizations, the bill originally found a lot of support, and hearings in April went well. Unsurprisingly, Robert Reynolds repeatedly gave oppositional speeches on the Senate floor and recruited patriotic organizations like the American Legion to register their disapproval. Finally, Reynolds found his trump card, proposing a tragic compromise. Wagner and Rogers could have their twenty thousand children, but only by merging their bill with one of his: to end all quota immigration for five years. Shaken, Robert Wagner pulled the bill from consideration. None of Reynolds's bills ever came up for a vote. As prospects for the Wagner-Rogers bill began to sour, Americans learned of the plight of the St. Louis , a ship that had sailed from Hamburg carrying 937 mostly Jewish passengers and at the beginning of June sat in Havana harbor. Many of the refugees had hoped to stay in Cuba while waiting their turns for an American visa, but by the time the ship arrived, Havana had canceled their landing permits. Even though a prominent relief organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), offered to make substantial financial guarantees for the passengers, Cuban officials refused to permit 907 of them to disembark. The United States would not take them either. Allowing them to enter the United States would set a precedent--that a group of refugees could board a ship, create an emergency, and jump the quota line. Instead, American diplomats worked with the JDC staff to persuade France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Great Britain to each admit a share of the passengers. The St. Louis refugees threw a party on board, thrilled no one would be forced to return to Germany. The JDC, founded in 1914 to distribute aid to Jewish communities abroad, was not alone in trying to help refugees. Hundreds of organizations, large and small, local and international, expanded to assist refugees in Europe struggling to emigrate. Some organizations, like the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers), divided their efforts between relief work like food distribution and medical care--where a little money could help many people--and helping individual refugees, where a lot of money might only assist a few. Others, like the Unitarian Service Committee and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), had types of refugees they preferred to assist: HIAS, like the JDC, was established to aid only Jews; the Unitarians preferred to aid people of some sort of renown. All of these organizations formed a loose network to prevent stepping on toes and duplicating efforts. Thanks to them, tens of thousands of refugees were able to escape. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland by land and air, beginning a war that had seemed inevitable for months. American civilians fled the Continent, while American diplomats wrote from Warsaw, "Continuing examination of such immigrants as reach Warsaw in order avoid disappointing persons." When Nazi Germany turned west and invaded Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France the following spring, German Jews who had sought safety in these countries in the 1930s--including most of the passengers on the St. Louis --now found themselves under Nazi rule again. Many fled south and tried to escape over the French border to Spain and Portugal or across the Mediterranean to Casablanca. American relief organizations tried to reunite families and provide small amounts of money, clothing, and food. The efforts were emotionally stressful. One relief worker wrote home, "Day after day, men and women just sat at my desk and sobbed. They are caught and crushed, and they know it." Between July 1, 1938, and June 30, 1940, the United States filled nearly every German quota slot available. Of the 54,740 German immigrant visas legally allowed under American immigration law over those two years, the State Department issued 54,725. The vast majority of these immigrants were Jewish. Passengers on vessels bound for the United States were asked to classify themselves by race, and until 1943 "Hebrew" was an option. From 1938 to 1940, 100,131 self-identified "Hebrews" immigrated to the United States. Most were refugees escaping persecution, and this figure is undoubtedly low, because many people persecuted as Jews under Nazi racial laws did not consider themselves "Hebrew." June 30, 1940, marked the end of the quota year; on July 1, a new year's allocation of quota slots became available. A few days earlier, a French-German armistice formally separated France into a Nazi-occupiedzone in the north (which included Paris) and an unoccupied zone controlled by Nazi collaborators in the south, known as Vichy France. France had fallen in just six weeks. Americans saw its surrender as an unfathomable nightmare. The French army's 117 divisions had mobilized 5 million men. The American army at that time numbered 269,023. To most Americans, only one explanation made sense: France must have been brought down from within--a fifth column of spies and saboteurs secretly working to ensure Nazi victory. Many made a connection between refugees seeking haven in the United States and spies wishing to do the country harm. So did the president. At a press conference in early June, Roosevelt told reporters, "Now, of course, the refugee has got to be checked because, unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies--it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they have found a number of definitely proven spies . . . the refugee has left Germany and then has been told by the German Government, 'You have got to conduct this particular spy work and if you don't make your reports regularly back to some definite agent in the country you are going to--we are frightfully sorry, but your old father and mother will be taken out and shot.'" With fifth column hysteria sweeping the country, the State Department reexamined the procedures for screening refugees and issued new instructions to consular officers: "All applications for immigration visas must be examined with extreme care and during the present period of emergency no such visa should be issued if there is any doubt whatsoever concerning the alien." Many refugees would now be disqualified, and "quotas against which there is a heavy demand will be under issued," but national security had to come first. Immigration under the quotas of Nazi-occupied and collaborationist countries dropped 38 percent between 1940 and 1941, from 42,686 to 26,490. Even after the fall of France, when Great Britain stood virtually alone in opposition to Nazi Germany, many Americans did not want to get involved in the war. Congress authorized the nation's first peacetime draft in September 1940 but mandated that none of the drafted boys would serve longer than a year, nor deploy outside the Western Hemisphere. In the absence of weaponry, many soldiers were trained using wooden sticks as guns. America was not mentally or physically equipped for war, and those opposing involvement wanted to defend the Americas, not save England. In the spring of 1941, Roosevelt and his allies struggled to pass Lend-Lease, even naming the bill "House Resolution 1776" to convince opponents that supplying Great Britain would not weaken American sovereignty. That September, Congress reauthorized the peacetime draft in a nail-biter: it passed by a single vote. The job of refugee advocates only got harder. Additional State Department scrutiny demanded more coordination and, for many refugees, led to more heartbreak. Officials began enforcing a new "relatives rule" in June 1941, rendering applicants with immediate family still in Nazi-occupied territory ineligible for visas. At the end of that month, the State Department suddenly announced that all applications now had to be approved by Interdepartmental Visa Review boards in Washington, due to national security concerns. Marjorie McClelland, who would soon move with her husband, Ross, to work in southern France, wrote to the Quakers from Rome, "All immigration to the U.S. stopped on June 30, thereby robbing many people of their hopes . . . Our office has served as a sort of mourning ground for these people. We can't do a thing in the world to change the situation . . . and [it] almost breaks your heart." American consulates in occupied territory closed entirely in mid-July 1941, cutting off thousands from access to the only diplomatic personnel who could have granted them visas. The only refugees who could still escape Europe were those who had already made it to ports in southern France, to Lisbon, or to Casablanca. The Atlantic remained a battleground as Nazi U-boats attacked ships indiscriminately, and America debated whether the country should participate in convoys delivering Lend-Lease supplies. Fewer and fewer passenger ships made the crossing: in June 1939, 123 ships arrived in New York harbor from all over Europe; in June 1941, only 12 appeared, almost all from Lisbon. Then, on a sunny Sunday morning in December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. For most Americans, the plight of European Jews slipped entirely from view. Excerpted from Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
