Stephanie Hinnershitz:
On January 13, 1944, Treasury Department employees delivered a report titled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of the Government in the Murder of the Jews" to their boss, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. Their investigation into the State Department inspired Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and an unlikely group of bureaucrats to save Europe's Jewish refugees. The War Refugee Board and a new American policy was born. I'm Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, fellow with The National WWII Museum's Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. As more became known about the fate of Jews in Europe through gripping news reports from war correspondents and public events like the We Will Never Die pageant, pressure began to build on the Roosevelt administration to take action.

But as early as 1938, one man, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., pushed FDR to help Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. Morgenthau used the words, "Those terrible 18 months," to describe the bureaucratic inaction and frustration he endured between the summer of 1942 and the creation of the War Refugee Board in January of 1944. Dr. Michael Bell, executive director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, is here to tell us about Morgenthau and what made it possible for him to advocate for policy change.

Mike Bell:
Yeah, so Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a family friend of the Roosevelts from Dutchess County in New York in the Hudson Valley. He had been a writer on farm policy, and so Morgenthau was tapped to head the Farm Credit Administration in 1933 when FDR came to the White House. And then FDR appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1934, and he remained Secretary of the Treasury throughout FDR's time in office. As the Secretary of Treasury, he was really instrumental in setting up the Works Progress Administration, which was a key New Deal agency, the Public Works of Art Project in the ’30s, and then in World War II, it's Morgenthau that came up with this elaborate system of war bonds to really raise money for the war. And then toward the end of the war, he chaired the Bretton Woods Conference that set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. So really an instrumental player. I should note, Eleanor Roosevelt praised him at one point as one of the very few who could disagree with her husband.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
As a Jewish American member of FDR's administration, he was frequently the target of antisemitic remarks and avoided as much as possible being seen as an activist for the Jewish community. Unfolding events in Europe, however, made it difficult for him to remain silent on the challenges facing Europe's Jewish population. John W. Pehle, who had become the first director of the War Refugee Board, discussed when the atrocities of the Holocaust became known and an attempt to stall American aid to Jewish refugees in his speech at the 1981 International Liberator Conference.

John Pehle:
Discovering the final solution. I can only tell this audience how the enormity of this tragedy came home to me and my colleagues in the United States Treasury Department. In 1943, I was serving as assistant to Secretary of Treasury Morgenthau, and as director of the Foreign Funds Control, this agency had the responsibility of controlling the assets in the United States of persons and institutions in enemy occupied countries. It also had the responsibility of passing on people's communications with enemy and enemy-occupied territory. But in due course, some of the Jewish relief organizations came to us and said they needed desperately to be able to communicate with their people in occupied France who were assisting Jews who were fleeing over the mountains into Spain, where they were welcomed by the Spanish people. And they needed the right to communicate with their agents, and this could only be done through State Department channels and they needed a license from us to do it.

So after some soul searching, we granted such licenses, and we discovered after a period that none of these communications were going forward. When we asked some of our sympathetic friends in the State Department concerning the State Department policy which seems to be blocking these communications, we were supplied with a cable recently received from the United States delegation in Switzerland, sent on behalf of one of the Jewish relief organizations. This cable described the wholesale murder of Jews by the Germans. And the minister went on to say in the cable that he was sending this information forward despite the instructions he had received previously from the State Department not to forward such information for Jewish relief organizations except in the case of emergency, but that the reports were so grave that he felt that he should send it anyway.

When Secretary Morgenthau asked the State Department for a copy of the cable that had previously been sent saying, "Don't allow your facilities to be used for this purpose," he was furnished with a cable from which these instructions had been deleted. Obviously the State Department was not prepared to defend its censorship edict. And this was the series of events that first brought a group of us in the Treasury Department, brought to our attention what was going on, what was happening in Europe to the Jews, and what was being kept from the American people.

Mike Bell:
Now, you have several key individuals—Henry Morgenthau Jr., Bernard Baruch—who had been spokespersons with the administration for Jewish issues, but they hadn't really been active in Jewish causes, I think would be a way to think about them. And for FDR, he tends to follow the polls. The 1938 poll, for example, thought that the immigration restrictions, two-thirds of Americans that were in the poll thought that the immigration restrictions were fine, and then only about 4.9% actually favored raising the quotas. And so FDR used those polls as a bellwether on what he thought was possible in this process. And what's interesting, after German racial policies become obvious or Kristallnacht, several key Jewish figures such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter begin to lobby FDR to really permit greater numbers of European refugees, and Jews in particular, to come to the United States, to loosen the restrictions.

So a couple things happen that I think are important in this story, and we'll start to see a shift into greater activism on some because of the frustration over the administration's policies. And Roosevelt will create the Presidential Advisory Committee. And interestingly enough, he lets State Department select the members of the committee, so they tend to select more Catholics than Jews. But the head of the committee, a guy by the name of James G. McDonald, who had been the representative to the League of Nations and had resigned in protest over Germany's treatment of the Jews, really was an activist that was really trying to push this forward. And you could see, I think in many ways McDonald is probably not dissimilar to Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s views that over time you get frustrated because at each step you think you're making some progress, and it's difficult to see that.

So for example, in 1939 FDR tells McDonald that he's going to ask Congress to appropriate $150 million for a large-scale refugee resettlement program. But there's really no evidence that that ever really went forward, that it went to Congress and did that. He's pushing very hard at State Department for special visas in 1940 after Germany overruns France and the Low Countries. How can we bring the European political culture and labor leaders to the United States? And I think that part of the piece to understand, there's two sides to the State Department resistance, if you will, and immigration policy. On one hand, there's an idea in State Department that how Hitler is treating the Jewish population is an internal affair in Germany and they shouldn't get involved, and that this would be inappropriate.

And this is the view of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who interestingly enough, his wife is Jewish and he looks on Hitler's policies with distaste, but he doesn't think this is the proper role. So that limits it as well. And then I think even more detrimental is that Roosevelt's policies in immigration and visas is really run by an individual who looks distastefully upon the Jews and is not sympathetic to the implementation of the full piece of law. So this is Breckenridge Long.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Samuel Breckenridge Long was an assistant secretary in the US State Department. Long's duties in the State Department were to oversee and issue visas, but as he expressed in a memo to his department, "We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. Postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas." Long was formally the ambassador to Italy and thus had a unique experience with the rising fascism there. He was not appalled by it, but rather he saw fascism, as he wrote in a letter later to a friend, as "the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formulation of our constitution." Long had also read Mein Kampf and concluded his thoughts in a diary entry in 1938: "It is eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of communism and chaos." Though Morgenthau's hands were tied in terms of shaping immigration policy, by 1942 reports of genocide in Europe inspired some of Morgenthau's employees to take action.

Mike Bell:
And so where that leads you then, Treasury then is involved in the process by which organizations, private organizations such as the World Jewish Congress, could transfer money to Switzerland, which would allow rescue efforts, say from countries like France or Romania. And so you say, Well, why is Treasury involved? Well, of course they're involved. This is the transfer of money to other governments. It's coming from private organizations here in the United States. And so this reaches a head in July 1943 then. So you already have this pressure. The administration had tried to dampen the pressure by calling a conference in Bermuda in April of 1943. This is the US and British Bermuda Conference to deal with the refugee crisis. And so the Bermuda Conference, they say, "Well, we had very sensitive discussions, but we really made great progress. We'll have a press release that says that." But nothing changes.

And so I think there's also this incredible frustration, but Treasury is now trying to figure out why is State Department dragging their feet approving this, which should be a very straightforward piece? It's consistent with policy. This is a transfer that should have gone right through. It doesn't get approved until December 1943. And so in the meantime, there's some young, pretty aggressive lawyers at the Treasury Department that are now given the carte blanche from the Secretary to start investigating, what's the bottleneck? Which I think is really straightforward. Of course you're going to try to overcome the bottlenecks in the interagency process. How do we do this? And as they do that, I think the first thing that sets them out is they uncover that, when they get from Breckenridge Long a copy of the correspondence with Geneva, they realize that he's doctored the correspondence he gave them.

And so once you determine that folks aren't really being totally truthful in this piece, I think they really saw this had a moral aspect to it. Before State had actually approved the request for the fund transfer, Breckenridge Long appears in Congress and testifies in November of ’43. And there's another one, he's before the House Foreign Relations Committee. And there's a resolution which was urging the president to create a US government rescue agency. And Long's testimony is really, I would say disingenuous, misleading at best. And he tries to make it seem that the government had somehow ensured that over 580,000 persecuted Jews had found haven in the United States under these policies, which is woefully out there. And so now you have this testimony along with the doctored communique to Geneva, and then immediately this backfires on Long. I think he thinks that we're going to make this go away by this testimony. And the next thing you know, the nation, the New Republic, are refuting what he's now come out and said. So he becomes a bit of a liability for the administration very quickly.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
By the end of 1943, Morgenthau's employees compiled their findings into a report and handed it to their boss, who agreed to pass it along to President Roosevelt. In January 1944, they met at the White House. John Pehle describes that meeting.

John Pehle:
When Secretary Morgenthau, Randolph Paul, who was general counsel of the Treasury, and I met with President Roosevelt at a special meeting one Sunday afternoon, we brought these facts forcibly to the president's attention. He directed us to take immediate action in remedying the situation. The Treasury staff prepared and the president signed an executive order, number 9417, establishing the War Refugee Board.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Finally, after years of activism from the Jewish community, the US government directly intervened in assisting refugees from the Holocaust, thanks to the help of a few government bureaucrats and their decisions to put their careers on the line to save lives.

Mike Bell: 
Morgenthau may have a reputation for disagreeing with the president, but this is a really big issue and it involves huge policy. You just had a conference, a lot of fanfare that did nothing, and you're also talking about a longtime friend that clearly had used his links with FDR and had used his financial resources to get favorable people elected, things like that. And so I think on a number of levels, this would have been very hard. You also have a challenge where State Department's responsible for visas and immigration policy, but people would argue, "Hey, this isn't your responsibility under policy." And so you have a bureaucratic piece as well. Yeah, this is hard. And there's a tendency, I think, certainly the government is much smaller than it is today, so very personal, but also some of these things are incredibly difficult.

You don't have computers, you have very difficult coordination. There's no National Security Council yet where you'd have a routine forum where some of these come out. That's why this War Refugee Board, I think, is interesting in that it really establishes a similar one to do that. So some of the things that we take for granted policy-wise today really don't exist, or they're in their wartime infancy. There's also a sense which I think overlays this, is the best way that you can help these beleaguered populations, particularly by early 1944, is win the war. And clearly FDR is under incredible stress during the war. His health is rapidly declining. And so in these critical moments, there really is no process that allows us to move forward.

Marvin Kalb:
Ladies and gentlemen, as you all know, this is the concluding panel of the International Liberators Conference. It is called “Discovering the Final Solution.” In a way, for all of us in the last two or three days, this could be regarded as a culmination point. Late yesterday I met an American participant at this conference, neither a survivor of the camps nor a liberator. He had spent most of the day here, not all of it. It was too painful, he explained. Then after a moment he said, "It made me think back, Where was I during 1942, 1943? What did I know? What did I do?" He shook his head, and again there was a look of pain, perhaps some embarrassment, that passed through his eyes. He went on, "I kept thinking I must have known, I must have read stories in the papers, but I don't remember."

Sometimes we don't remember, those of us who are on the fringes of this mass murder, we don't remember what we cannot accept. When one of our panelists, professor Jan Karski, briefed Justice Felix Frankfurter in late 1942 about the massacre of Jews in Poland, the distinguished jurist said, "I can't believe you." A Polish friend with Karski told Frankfurter that Karski was telling the truth. Frankfurter answered, "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I cannot believe him. There is a difference." It pushes the writer's ability, the speaker's eloquence, the witness's testimony, the listener's credulity beyond what is natural, beyond the outermost limits of tolerance, to absorb the enormity of the crime and at the same time, the simplicity of the fact. Six million Jews were killed during World War II. What did the world know about the Holocaust and when did it know it?

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
The War Refugee Board was the first federal agency dedicated to assisting those fleeing persecution and raised awareness of the plight of European Jews. But in 1945, the United States and the world would be forced to confront the horrors of the Holocaust when Allied troops liberated the concentration camps. Join us next time for the final episode in this series.