Contemporary Authors

• Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe Doubleday (New York, NY), 2018

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039969 Erbelding, Rebecca, author. Rescue Board : the untold story of America's efforts to save the Jews of Europe / Rebecca Erbelding. First edition. New York : Doubleday, [2018]©2018 pages cm D809.U5 E73 2015 ISBN: 9780385542517 (hardback)

• Rebecca Erbeldinghttp://www.rebeccaerbelding.com/contact/ - http://www.rebeccaerbelding.com/about-me/

  About Me

  I am a historian of American response(s) to the Holocaust and an archivist and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I am the author of the authoritative history of the War Refugee Board, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018).

  I have a PhD in American history from George Mason University. My research interests focus on the ways in which communities deal with historical incidents of widespread and unexpected destruction, violence, and death. I am interested in the ways in which people, acting without the hindsight of history, react to outbreaks, try to protect themselves and loved ones, and what pieces of their lives they fight to retain and rebuild. Though most of my work focuses on the Holocaust (the ultimate example), I am also interested in epidemic disease, criminal activity, and natural disasters.

  I present frequently on the War Refugee Board, American responses to the Holocaust, and other Holocaust-related issues.

  Despite all of this, I am quite a happy person.

• Atomic Heritage - https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/rebecca-erbelding

  Rebecca Erbelding
  Historian, Archivist, and Curator
  , Washington, DC
  Expert
  Dr. Rebecca Erbelding
  Listen to Rebecca Erbelding's Oral History on Voices of the Manhattan Project
  Rebecca Erbelding

  Dr. Rebecca Erbelding is a historian of American responses to the Holocaust. Erbelding is the author of the forthcoming book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, and currently an archivist and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She received her PhD in history from George Mason University.

• Voices of the Manhattan Project - https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/rebecca-erbeldings-interview

  QUOTED: "It is on the history of the War Refugee Board, which is a little-known agency that FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] created in 1944, and tasked with trying to figure out way to rescue Jews in Europe."
  "They opened a refugee camp in upstate New York. They hired and funded Raoul Wallenberg for his work in Budapest. They basically took over most of the humanitarian aid that the United States was trying to do at the time, and started all of these new projects. We’ve kind of completely forgotten about this one moment in which the U.S. is trying to save Jews."
  "The board isn’t so active in getting people physically out, other than they get them out of Spain, so that Spain will allow more Jews to cross over from France at the time. They open a refugee camp in North Africa, and shuttle refugees who are living in Spain down to North Africa, so that the Spanish government was more willing to let more people in. That’s the kind of work that the War Refugee Board is doing, but I think it’s a little bit later than the period of the refugee crisis for sure."
  "They claimed after the war—and I think this is probably right—that they saved tens of thousands of people and helped hundreds of thousands more. I think the stories bear that out, the statistics that I found bear that out."

  Dr. Rebecca Erbelding is a historian of American responses to the Holocaust. Erbelding is the author of the forthcoming book, "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe," and currently an archivist and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In this interview, Erbelding describes in great detail the challenges and difficult decisions that thousands of Jews faced when trying to immigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States, such as U.S. immigration laws and quotas, as well as financial and wartime barriers. She describes the similarities and differences between American immigration debates during World War II and in America today. She also explains the experiences and challenges of Jews living in wartime France, and how the Holocaust and immigration processes and policies affected Manhattan Project scientists.
  Rebecca Erbelding's Profile
  Manhattan Project Location(s):
  Date of Interview: December 22, 2017
  Location of the Interview: Washington Collections: Atomic Heritage Foundation
  Transcript:
  Alexandra Levy: We’re here in Washington, D.C. on December 22, 2017, with Dr. Rebecca Erbelding. My first question for you is to please say your name and spell it.

  Rebecca Erbelding: My name is Rebecca Erbelding. R-E-B-E-C-C-A E-R-B-E-L-D-I-N-G.

  Levy: Great. If you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your career, including your current work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and your forthcoming book.

  Erbelding: I am an archivist and curator and now a historian at the Holocaust Museum. I started with the museum in 2002, became a full-time staff member in 2003, and was working in the archives to work with families and survivors who had material that they wanted to donate to the museum. I was the paper specialist. I would take in collections ranging from a photo to the personal papers of some major figure.

  In 2015, I finished my PhD. That was around the time that the museum was putting together our next major exhibit, which will open in April, on Americans and the Holocaust. My doctoral dissertation was on American rescue efforts during the war. As a specialist, I moved over to be a historian on that project. For the past three years, I’ve been working as a historian putting together material for the museum’s website, and historical material for our forthcoming exhibit.

  I have a book coming out. It is a separate thing from my museum work. I fixed up my doctoral dissertation. That book is entitled Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe. It is on the history of the War Refugee Board, which is a little-known agency that FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] created in 1944, and tasked with trying to figure out way to rescue Jews in Europe.

  They opened a refugee camp in upstate New York. They hired and funded Raoul Wallenberg for his work in Budapest. They basically took over most of the humanitarian aid that the United States was trying to do at the time, and started all of these new projects. We’ve kind of completely forgotten about this one moment in which the U.S. is trying to save Jews. That book will come out on April 10th with Doubleday.

  Levy: Wonderful. We’re looking forward to reading it. We want to have you talk about the history of World War II and the Jewish refugees. I guess the first very general question is to talk a little bit about why Jews and people of Jewish descent wanted to leave Europe because of persecution in the 1930s.

  Erbelding: What we would call the refugee crisis and the persecution of the Jews really spreads throughout the 1930s. When we’re talking about Jewish refugees in 1933, 1934, and 1935, we’re talking about German Jews. We’re talking about a small percentage of the German population. But one that Hitler, as soon as he came to power in January 1933, started targeting almost immediately.

  In the spring of 1933, even American newspapers are reporting daily on attacks on German Jews in the streets, boycotts, and book burnings. By 1935, German Jews had lost their citizenship. They were kicked out of the public service. They couldn’t teach non-Jewish students. If they were a doctor, they couldn’t help non-Jewish patients. Slowly, slowly—well, quickly, and then also slowly, the Nazi party really makes life unbearable for German Jews.

  By 1938, Germany has taken over Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, it takes over all of Czechoslovakia. Then the war begins with Poland in September 1939.

  This movement of Jews being threatened really expands, so that by 1941 it’s almost all of Europe. Jews are being threatened, and these same laws that started in the early 1930s in Germany have really spread almost across the continent.

  Levy: Why was it so difficult for Jews who wanted to leave first Germany and then greater Europe to immigrate to the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s? What barriers were put up by the U.S. and other countries?

  Erbelding: To understand why it was so difficult for Jews to leave Germany and Europe, you need to step back and understand the U.S. immigration law at the time. At the time, and really from 1924 until 1965, the U.S. is operating under the same law. There is no new law in the 1930s to keep Jews out, or to welcome Jews into the U.S. They are only operating under this 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act.

  What that Act did was set quotas for each country for people born in those countries. If you were born in Germany, you fell under the German quota. There was a set number of spots for people born in Germany who could immigrate to the U.S. in a given year.

  For most of the 1920s, the quotas were filled. It capped all immigration at about 155,000 people per year, total, throughout the world. But Germany, for example, had the second highest quota of any country in the world. Germans were considered “good” immigrants. We wanted immigrants from Germany. We wanted immigrants from Great Britain. We did not want immigrants from Eastern Europe, however.

  Romania had a quota of 377. Three hundred seventy-seven people born in Romania could come in a year. Many countries had quotas of 100, or even 50 for the Philippines. Some areas of Asia, you could not immigrate at all, if you were born in those countries, to the United States.

  Those are the barriers that are in place, and those are what German Jews who are being threatened in the 1930s are coming up against. There are, until 1938, 25,957 slots. If you are one of the lucky almost 26,000, you can come to the U.S. If you are among the many other hundreds of thousands of people who want to immigrate, you are waiting in a very long line.

  In 1938, Roosevelt combines the German and Austria quota once Germany takes over Austria. But that still only puts a cap at 27,370. That is the amount of slots that there are. There is no public appetite to make them any larger. Americans are asked in a poll in January 1939: would they support someone in Congress who wanted to raise the immigration quotas, who wanted to enlarge them? And 83% of Americans said no, they would not support their congressperson to open any immigration any further.

  A big part of that is the Great Depression. As I said, the quotas were mainly filled through the 1920s. Starting in 1931, President [Herbert] Hoover put in place what was called the “Likely to Become a Public Charge” clause. From that moment on, if you wanted to come to the U.S., you either needed to have a job already waiting for you there, a financial sponsor in the United States who would guarantee your support, or you had to be independently wealthy enough to support yourself indefinitely once you came. Those financial strictures really kept out a lot of people, who didn’t have American relatives, and didn’t have the type of work that allowed them to be able to get a job once they got here.

  There were many economic barriers. There’s numeric barriers. There’s paperwork barriers. You had to gather a lot of different kinds of paperwork: a ship ticket, before you could get your visa. Everything had to be done in a specific order. It was all costly. It all had to be done correctly. It all had expiration dates.

  You had to navigate this very difficult bureaucratic system. This is a system in which, as part of your German paperwork, you had to enumerate all of your assets and then turn over something like 70, 80% of them. You had to liquidate everything. Your entire net worth, Nazi Germany would seize most of it. Finding a place that would take you was difficult because you're being stripped of any wealth that you had, so you were likely to become a public charge once you got to your new country.

  When the refugee crisis really kicks off in 1938 and 1939, and after 1939, there’s 300,000 people on the waiting list for Germany. It’s something like almost an eleven-year wait, if you want to come from Germany after a certain point. South American countries shut down their borders entirely to Jewish immigrants. They say, “Jewish immigrants are businessmen. We don’t want them to compete with our businesspeople. If they want to come as farmers, maybe they can come as farmers.” For most people, they could not qualify. They didn’t have any experience in agriculture.

  It’s kind of amazing that between 1938 and 1941, there are over 111,000 Jews who do make it to the U.S., who are able to go through that bureaucratic maze and are on the waiting list long enough and their paperwork comes up and they’ve got their American sponsor, or enough money to show that they don’t need one. It’s amazing that so many people actually did navigate the system.

  Because I think so many people think that in 1939, the U.S. just outlawed Jewish immigration, and religion never really played a part in it. It plays a part in 1924, when they’re setting up the quotas, because they’re trying to keep out “undesirable” immigrants. And Jews are “undesirable” immigrants at the time. So countries with large Jewish populations have smaller quotas. They didn’t expect that the “problem” would come from Germany. They didn’t expect that German Jews would need to get out.

  Levy: Can you talk a little bit about the War Refugee Board’s role in helping Jews escape Europe?

  Erbelding: The War Refugee Board isn’t created until 1944. By that point, it’s very difficult for people to get out, almost impossible. People are trying to get out of Lisbon. That’s really the only port at that point where you can actually escape. Most of the War Refugee Board’s work is actually fairly irrelevant to the issue of refugee scientists coming, or refugees as a whole.

  They’re called the War Refugee Board because the U.S. at the time—there’s no refugee status. You are coming as an immigrant. There is no political asylum. You can’t come as a refugee. That status does not exist until after World War II. The U.S. at the time called “refugees” anyone who wanted to get out, anyone with whom the U.S., after the War Refugee Board is founded, is trying to help. They talk very openly about refugees in concentration camps, which seems weird to us now. We talk about prisoners in concentration camps. But anybody that they were trying to help was a “refugee.” The word kind of doesn’t translate in the same way.

  The board isn’t so active in getting people physically out, other than they get them out of Spain, so that Spain will allow more Jews to cross over from France at the time. They open a refugee camp in North Africa, and shuttle refugees who are living in Spain down to North Africa, so that the Spanish government was more willing to let more people in. That’s the kind of work that the War Refugee Board is doing, but I think it’s a little bit later than the period of the refugee crisis for sure.

  Levy: How successful was the War Refugee Board?

  Erbelding: It’s really hard to put a number on it. So much of their work was helping the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] who were in place in Europe already. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had a whole network of underground agents and operatives in occupied territory, in neutral territory.

  A lot of what the Board was doing was facilitating their work, so that they could get relief money where it was needed and to the projects that needed to happen. They cleared communications. They cleared permission to send money into enemy territory, cutting lots of bureaucratic red tape in the States and in Great Britain to allow all of this to happen. Even if Nazi Germany seized the money, they figured, “We’re winning the war. It’s worth it to try to help people.”

  They claimed after the war—and I think this is probably right—that they saved tens of thousands of people and helped hundreds of thousands more. I think the stories bear that out, the statistics that I found bear that out. Some historians say 200,000. That feels very high to me. If you believe 200,000, then you’re crediting them with saving the entire surviving Jewish community of Budapest, which was the largest and last intact community. I don’t think you can credit the Americans far across the sea necessarily with saving the Jews in Budapest directly. They certainly have a role in it, but there’s so many factors in play that I think you’re very safe with 10,000 to 20,000.

  Levy: Can you discuss a little bit the stances of President Roosevelt and the State Department toward the Jews who were trying to flee Europe?

  Erbelding: Roosevelt’s stance towards Jewish refugees really evolves over time. I think I would classify it as, he took significant but limited measures. Roosevelt is a consummate politician, first, last, and always. Everything he is doing has political calculations. He is in and with an American population that does not want increased immigration.

  He does small things. He makes the Likely to Become a Public Charge Clause less strict. He asks the State Department to interpret it much more loosely. He merges the Austrian and German quota, rather than getting rid of the Austrian quota when Austria no longer exists.

  In the wake of Kristallnacht—the attacks in November 1938 against Jewish synagogues and businesses, when 30,000 Jewish men are arrested in one evening—he recalls the U.S. ambassador, as a sign of protest. The U.S. is the only country to recall its ambassador as a protest to Nazi Germany. We don’t have an ambassador there until after World War II again.

  These are small measures, but they’re significant. After Kristallnacht too, he invites Germans—mainly Jews, who are in the U.S. on visitor’s visas as tourists and people who were coming to try to find a job, so that they could them immigrate with their families—he tells them that they can stay. He tells reporters that he can’t with good conscience send them back to Germany. That’s 12,000 to 15,000 people who are allowed to stay because the President decided so.

  At the same time, he doesn’t make public stances in favor of increasing immigration. From the time the war begins in September 1939 to U.S. involvement in December 1941, he really spends his political capital trying to get the U.S. prepared for war, and not to increase immigration, or to try to bring over more Jewish refugees. Even though Eleanor [Roosevelt] is always trying to get him to do so, he does not.

  The State Department has been, I think, publically brushed with one stroke. There’s a story of the State Department being such an anti-Semitic organization at the time. The State Department is really a conservative organization, little “c” conservative.” The rest of Washington changes with the New Deal. The State Department really doesn’t. It’s in the Eisenhower Executive Building downtown and it’s a very old, fussy, Victorian building. In the ‘30s, it was filled with very old, fussy, Victorian men, all white.

  They really saw themselves largely—there are certainly exceptions, there are American diplomats who are risking their lives to try to help people. But for the State Department in Washington, the visa division in particular, they see themselves as the bulwarks of national security. They are going to make sure that no one comes into this country who is a security threat.

  Once the war begins, there are all of these rumors floating around, and most people believe them. J. Edgar Hoover is writing propaganda encouraging people to believe these rumors that there are Nazi spies and saboteurs coming in to the country. That’s true. There are. There’s an enormous spy ring trial in 1942. They are not coming in as Jewish refugees. There’s only one case of a Jewish refugee who becomes a spy.

  But even Roosevelt talks about these potential “slave spies,” they called them—Jewish refugees who would come to the U.S. and commit acts of spying and sabotage in exchange for the lives of their loved ones back in Europe. They thought that the Germans were holding families hostage in exchange for spying and sabotage in the U.S.

  The State Department put in additional restrictions in the name of national security. They wanted more paperwork. They wanted an interdepartmental visa review committee at one point, so all visa applications had to be reviewed in Washington before they could be approved back in Europe. All of that slowed things for people who were desperately trying to get out. The State Department certainly by and large did not help the matter.

  At the same time, as the refugee crisis is going, they are actually filling the quotas. More than 80% of total immigration to the U.S. in 1940 is coming from Nazi-occupied countries. In 1939 and 1940 more than 50% of all immigration are Jewish refugees.

  Levy: Can you talk about the refugee scientists who fled Europe, many of whom went on to work on the Manhattan Project, and the contributions they made? Was the U.S. more likely to accept European scientists and intellectuals, or was that not considered at all in the visa process?

  Erbelding: What I’ve described is the quota immigration process. There’s a separate process that’s called a Non-Quota Visa, which doesn’t have a numerical limit. It was very difficult to get. At the max, there are maybe 10 to 12,000 people a year worldwide who would get one of these Non-Quota Visas. They’re set aside for college professors, for rabbis and religious leaders, for teachers, for people who would make a significant contribution to the U.S.

  The problem for refugee scientists is, a lot of the people who were working on the Manhattan Project were not professors. They were working in labs. They were not teachers. The majority of the scientists that the Atomic Heritage Foundation has identified as refugee scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project came in as quota immigrants. They were not put in any different line than anybody else.

  I was looking at some of the shipping manifests that show their quota numbers. You can tell a lot from that. Enrico Fermi, who came in 1933, came as a quota immigrant from Italy. That year actually was the lowest number of total immigration ever in American history, since we started recording immigration. There were 8,220 immigrants to the U.S. that year. Fermi was one of them and he came as a regular immigrant passing through the same paperwork as everybody else. [Note: Fermi came to the US in 1933 for the physics conferences in Ann Arbor under an immigrant visa, and went back to Italy in the fall. He and his family immigrated to the US in 1938-1939, after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944.]

  The scientists may have had some success because they could show that they had been successful in their previous country. The State Department might have been swayed that they could also be successful in the U.S., even if they didn’t necessarily have a job lined up. If you had a prominent sponsor or you had letters of recommendation, even if you didn’t have a position, that could hold some sway.

  Peter Lax, who is coming from Hungary, and is one of only several hundred immigrants who came that year. He was a teenager at the time, and Hungary had also a very small quota. I can’t remember what it is off the top of my head, but it’s less than 1,000. His quota number is 102. He was the 102nd person getting a quota visa. He arrives in the U.S. right after Pearl Harbor on the Excalibur. That is a very difficult ship to get a ship ticket for.

  From 1939 to 1940, it becomes increasingly difficult to leave Europe. For all the paperwork reasons that I mentioned, but also because Europe is now at war. As soon as the War begins, ports begin to shut down. You can’t leave suddenly out of Danzig. You can’t leave out of Bremen or Hamburg or Amsterdam or Rotterdam, or any of the other Western European cities. By 1941, you can really only leave out of Lisbon.

  His [Peter’s] family made it through a war zone from Hungary to Lisbon to get their ship ticket on the Excalibur. They had to show that they had a ticket before they left. They’re making an enormous risk. Purchasing ship tickets for a ship that is leaving across the continent, and then assuming that they can make it there in time, and that they have all of their exit and entry paperwork for each country that they’re going to go through to actually make it on the ship.

  The Excalibur, there’s only a handful of ships that are going across the Atlantic at the time, about one a week. They were incredibly lucky to make it. He didn’t come with any special scientist visa or non-quota visa. He’s coming under all of the very difficult paperwork restrictions that I mentioned earlier.

  Levy: Can you just provide a very brief overview of the Holocaust, to describe the fate of those that the U.S. and other countries were not able to take in, or turned away?

  Erbelding: The Holocaust is the state-sponsored massacre of Jews in Europe. It started really in the summer of 1941. Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in June 1941. Behind the military troops, there are killing squads that come behind and really start rounding up towns, taking the Jews of the town out to fields or forests, and shooting them en masse. The beginning of the Holocaust is really what we call the “holocaust by bullets.”

  Now, there had been ghettos before. There had been internment camps and concentration camps. There were concentration camps starting in 1933. But Nazi Germany doesn’t turn to a systematic mass murder really until 1941.

  In January 1942, they codify it in the Wannsee Conference. They talk about how they’re going to implement the Final Solution, and the bureaucratic details involved in getting the trains to the right places and sending them to the killing centers. They set up killing centers throughout Europe. The first killing center opens around [the time of] Pearl Harbor.

  Throughout 1942, 1943, 1944, systematically Nazi Germany has taken over, but targets a population in one of the countries that they’re occupying, or an area. The way that it usually goes is, they will sequester the Jews in some sort of ghetto or camp, and then at some point deport them, usually to Nazi-occupied Poland, where all of the killing centers were set up.

  Between 1941 and 1944, when the Allies land on D-Day, five million Jews have already been killed. And then by the time the camps are liberated in early 1945, we’re up to nearly six million.

  The Americans never encounter the killing centers. The Americans and the Western Allies, Britain and the U.S., encounter concentration camps where there is massive death, largely from disease. But the Soviet Union liberates the extant killing centers. There are some that the Nazis had shut down due to prisoner revolts and fear that the Soviets would discover the camps, so they would raze them and replant over them.

  There’s a public understanding that Americans either knew everything and didn’t do anything about the Holocaust, or they knew nothing and didn’t do anything about the Holocaust. A few years ago, the Holocaust Museum decided to test that. We started a History Unfolded project asking Americans to go into their local newspapers. We gave them a range of dates. “Go into your local newspaper, photograph any articles that you find related to Kristallnacht, or book burning, or the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and send those articles to us.” Thus far, we have over 12,000 submissions from every state.

  Most towns and colleges reported on this. This was an age in which people read the newspaper, and people read magazines. By and large, Americans had access to this information. By the time the Holocaust begins, the U.S. is involved in the war or about to be involved in the war. War news tends to dominate Americans’ thinking. Women are going back to work. Husbands and fathers are going off to war. There’s rationing. It’s a war economy. That tends to suck up a lot of the noise for Americans, that’s what they’re paying attention to.

  But from 1942 on, Americans could read very accurate information that said, The Nazis are taking Jews. They’re deporting them to the East, and killing them in large numbers there.” Americans may or may not have believed this. There is some polling data that in 1943 only about 50% of Americans believed that the Nazis were killing Jews in large numbers. That’s really a holdover from atrocity rumors from World War I that Americans believed were false, or had been false. That that had all been propaganda, and it might be propaganda now, is what they’re thinking.

  Americans have a lot of information. They’re not necessarily paying attention to it. They’re not necessarily believing it. By 1944, it’s kind of a fact that this is happening, and many more Americans start to believe. But they also don’t think that there’s anything Americans can do about it, in terms of mass rescue, that the quickest way to end the Holocaust is to end the war as soon as possible. It was called “Rescue Through Victory.”

  That’s largely true. There wasn’t a lot Americans could do to rescue people more broadly. A lot of what could have been done to bring in more people and save more people is to open immigration earlier and in larger numbers. We’ve talked about why that wasn’t possible.

  So Americans have a lot of information. It doesn’t necessarily change behavior, and after a certain point, can’t change behavior, unfortunately.

  Levy: Can you talk a little bit about how the Holocaust affected individual Manhattan Project scientists? For example, several scientists lost family members in the Holocaust.

  Erbelding: They certainly had to leave Europe, and that is an incredibly disruptive experience. To have a community, to have intellectual acquaintances and colleagues that you’re working closely with and you are the one who has to flee. And sometimes flee with nothing, leaving behind loved ones, leaving behind family members.

  Then coming to a new country, learning the language, meeting new colleagues, worrying about family that are still abroad, and then after a certain point, not hearing from them again. Trying to focus on very important war work, when you have loved ones that you haven’t heard from in two years and you start hearing rumors that there’s mass atrocities going on. It had to certainly weigh on them as they were trying to win the war. And no doubt for some of them, they’re working even harder to win the war as soon as possible in the hopes of trying to save their loved ones.

  Levy: If you could talk a little bit about the situation of Jews in France before and after the war began, and how it changed?

  Erbelding: France gets a massive population surge in 1933 as German Jews escape over the border. German Jews who are worried about the situation in Germany right after the Nazis take power but don’t want to go too far, they don’t apply for American visas. They go to France, they go to the Netherlands, they go to Belgium.

  The French Jewish population grows rapidly in the 1930s. Most of those people, though, people who escape into France, don’t take out French citizenship. By 1939, there’s about 350,000 Jews in France. Fewer than half of them are citizens.

  In May 1941, Nazi Germany invades France and quickly defeats it. France is defeated in about six weeks. It is split into two zones. There is the occupied zone in the north, which includes Paris, and there’s the unoccupied Vichy France zone in the south. Vichy France is centered in Vichy. It is allied with Nazi Germany. The Vichy government agrees that they will turn over anyone the Germans want, at any time, who are living in that area.

  For German Jews who escaped to France to escape the Nazis, they’re suddenly under occupation again. And frankly, whether they’re in the north or the south, they’re under threat. Jews are rounded up in the north. They’re rounded up in the south, too, especially if they are not French citizens.

  Starting in 1939 and 1940, foreign Jews are interned in southern France. They’re sent to Gurs and Rivesaltes and Les Milles internment camps under fairly horrific circumstances that are run by the French collaborators in southern France. If you were a foreign Jew who was still trying to get to the United States, you are now trying to put your paperwork together from inside the internment camp, which is very, very difficult.

  Levy: How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust—how many French Jews, I should say.

  Erbelding: French Jews is difficult, because do we mean Jews in France, or do we mean French Jews? Overwhelmingly, French Jews, French-born Jews, survive. The Nazis and the French deport foreign Jews living in France, some of whom had been there since the early 1930s. [let me check my notes] 350,000 Jews are in France in 1939. 77,000 of them are deported and killed. More than that are deported who survive, but since most of the deportations from France are in 1942, they would have had to survive three years in a concentration camp in Poland, which was very, very difficult to do.

  If you are a French-born Jew, you are likely to survive. If you are a foreign Jew living in France, if you are deported, you are likely not to survive.

  Levy: Were Jews—either French-born or non-citizens—able to flee France after their country’s fall?

  Erbelding: Yes. Until November 1942, the U.S. has relations with southern France, with Vichy France. Even for almost a year after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. still has diplomatic relations with Vichy France and a diplomatic corps there.

  That means that if your number comes up on the waiting list, you still have a diplomatic staff that you can go to for your interview who can give you a visa. The thing that makes it difficult is actually leaving. There are many stories of people who get their visa, but still can’t leave.

  You have to cross Spain. You have to get into Portugal. You have to have a ship ticket. Arranging all of that from inside an internment camp is really difficult, especially if you’ve been interned for three years, you don’t have money anymore. You’re relying entirely on family members in the U.S. to figure out how to purchase the ship ticket for you, and get that news to you, and put together all of your paperwork.

  The deportations in France are in the summer of 1942. By the time the U.S. is about to cut off relations in November 1942, there are hundreds of people who obtained their visa. But the letter saying, “You’ve obtained your visa, please show up at the embassy and we’ll stamp your passport,” is returned to the embassy as undeliverable, because the people are no longer there. They’ve been deported already. So it is possible. It is very difficult to do.

  But after the summer of 1940, most people are getting out of Europe through southern France. That was one of the only places where people had fled to, and they could still make it to Lisbon. You couldn’t get out of the Netherlands anymore. You couldn’t get out of Germany, really.

  Levy: Can you explain why Portugal was really the one place people could leave from?

  Erbelding: Lisbon was the largest port city on the Atlantic in Europe that was still open. After the war breaks out in September 1939, all of the German ports close. After May 1940, when Nazi Germany invades Belgium and the Netherlands, all of those ports close. Ports in France close, except for Marseille, but really at Marseille you could only get to Casablanca.

  You could sail out of Casablanca. It’s difficult. It was possible. There were some ships that were leaving out of Casablanca, so if you could get to North Africa and get across. The movie Casablanca actually shows this really well. There’s a map component at the beginning, where it shows Nazi Germany taking over various areas and how difficult it was for people to get to Casablanca. It’s an accurate map.

  The only ships that are sailing are Portuguese ships, because it’s a neutral. It stood some chance of not being attacked on the Atlantic by German submarines. So lots of complicated bureaucratic reasons, but Lisbon becomes “it” for people.

  Levy: Can you provide a brief overview of French resistance efforts during the war?

  Erbelding: There is a very robust French resistance that really encompasses all areas of society. It ranged from hiding Jews in homes, in convents, in churches, helping Jewish children to survive to underground newspapers to acts of sabotage. There are large groups who are doing acts of sabotage: bombing train lines, and bombing munitions factories and depots that the Germans are trying to seize. It goes on throughout the war.

  They murder “traitors,” what they call people who are turning in Jews or helping the Germans. The resistance movement starts going after people and their families if they’re considered collaborators. It’s a large and fairly robust resistance movement, and participates in the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

  Levy: Now we’re going to switch to the French nuclear scientists.

  Erbelding: There was a company in Norway that was manufacturing heavy water, but not really in large quantities. In 1939, the company alerted the French government, which was not under Nazi occupation yet, that German companies were trying to buy out their entire supply of heavy water. This sent out alarm bells.

  The French Department of Munitions sent an emissary to Norway to take all of Norwegian heavy water. Norway willingly gave it up, to keep it out of the hands of the Germans. They seized the heavy water. They get it to France. This is something like 26 small metal containers of this water. Take it to France. Two months later, Nazi Germany invades France.

  The French scientists escape south. They escape to Clermont-Ferrand and then the British Earl of Suffolk realizes that this is a problem. He personally goes to France, and commandeers basically a Scottish freighter, and brings the French scientists and the heavy water to the Scottish freighter. They arrive in England the day that the French-German surrender is signed.

  Nate Weisenberg: What was the most unusual or surprising thing that you found in your research for the book?

  Erbelding: For my book?

  Weisenberg: Yeah.

  Erbelding: Unusual and surprising? One of the projects that the War Refugee Board does towards—well, they start a project in March 1944, almost as soon as they are founded. They’re founded in January. By March, they’re starting to think about how they could get food packages into concentration camps.

  This was something that was not allowed. Red Cross packages were meant for POWs [Prisoners of War]. They could not go into Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis wouldn’t let them. Jewish prisoners are being starved.

  The U.S. negotiates with the British to allow them to do a trial of 300,000 food packages. They were something like five pounds each. They had Kraft cheese in them, crackers, tinned meat, cigarettes, soap, and Vitamin C tablets. All sorts of things in these five-pound packages.

  Through this very elaborate bureaucratic structure of ration—you need to get your ration points together, you need to get this train to this station on time, and to this boat, and they need to be marked in a certain way with a certain tag. It took almost a year.

  Finally, by March and April 1945, they get the Red Cross to start delivering food packages to concentration camps. If you ever read about a Holocaust survivor who at the end of the war gets a Red Cross food package, that was actually sponsored and packed outside of New York, and sponsored by the U.S. government, disguised as a Red Cross food package, and snuck into concentration camps at the end of the war for about 300,000 prisoners.

  Levy: From reading memoirs, it sounds like those Red Cross packages really made a difference.

  Erbelding: Yes. It was either the first food that people had in a very long time, or it ended up being a symbol that the Allies are only a few weeks away, and if they just could hold on, liberation was coming very soon. It gave a lot of people at the end, I think, hope.

  Levy: Maybe you could also talk about the impact of the War on France generally, and how much of the country was destroyed during the war?

  Erbelding: France is utterly changed by the war. It’s changed by World War I, of course. They have twenty-five years to recover, and then it’s utterly changed again. It’s interesting to see the difference between northern France and southern France that had different occupying experiences until 1942.

  I think France has had a difficult memorial experience, because there are certain segments of the French government that were certainly collaborationist. Vichy France was collaborating. They were turning over foreign Jews. They always met the quota that the Germans asked. The Germans would say, “We need this may thousand Jews to be on a transport to Poland,” and the French government always provided those Jews. The French railroads transported them.

  At the same time, there are entire villages that took in Jewish refugees and hid them for the entirety of the war, with intricate systems to alert the entire town when officials were coming in so that people could be hidden properly.

  France has, I think, struggled with what their memory of the war is and should be. They were a haven for so many people, but for so many who had found haven there, they became the betrayer. Or, the country writ large became a betrayer. It’s a difficult history in terms of the Holocaust. There are heroes, and there are people who collaborated openly.

  Levy: That’s very eloquently put.

  Erbelding: Thanks.

  Levy: Maybe you could also talk about the Vichy government and how it was formed, and the leadership?

  Erbelding: Marshal [Henri Philippe] Petain was the nominal head of the government. He had been a World War I hero, which is why he was chosen. But he was also very elderly. It’s Petain and [Pierre] Laval.

  They’re both awful towards the end. They both had been somewhat of French heroes, but they’re not. They’re the ones who are turning people over. They get kind of overwhelmed by the Germans. They think they can control them, and they can’t. They think they can control the Nazis and keep France safe, and they absolutely can’t.

  Weisenberg: Are any particular things that you people should know?

  Erbelding: I think we look back and we think that choices were really easy back then, because we know what happened. We know that Nazi Germany will start mass murder. For a long time, people didn’t know that. They didn’t know that in France. They didn’t know it in the U.S.

  Even people who were living at the time, some of them had lived through pogroms, and they thought, “This is a phase.” And really until Kristallnacht, a lot of German Jews thought that too, that this was a phase that the country was going through and they would clearly snap out of it. That this is all insane, and at some point, everyone is going to come to their senses. We didn’t have the word “genocide” until 1944. We didn’t have the word “Holocaust.” There was this sense that, “This can’t happen. This is so unbelievable that it can’t possibly happen.”

  When we look at the choices that people made in 1939 and 1940 and 1941, to escape, to go into hiding, to go to a new country and start over, those are all really difficult decisions. We look back and think, “The U.S. should have taken everybody in 1938.” Maybe that’s true. The U.S. had 19% unemployment. Nineteen percent of the workforce was unemployed in 1938. The hesitancy that Americans had to admit more refugees was yes, based on anti-Semitism. It was also based in their belief that immigrants come and take jobs.

  Economists certainly debate that today, with many pointing out that immigrants create more jobs than they take. If you bring in six million immigrants, is that true? I mean, six million immigrants is never a possibility, because people weren’t escaping from Poland until it was too late to escape from Poland.

  But I think all of the decisions that people made at the time, they were making the decisions that were best for them. We can look back and say, “Oh, it should have been this way. We should have done things this way.” The context of the period just complicates all of that so much. It is yes, people should have been able to get out. How many boats can cross the Atlantic? Those are kind of the factors that people don’t think about. They don’t think about the reality of physically leaving, both for the country accepting them, and for the refugees trying to leave. Even if you're given the opportunity, if your parents are still in that country and that country is being destroyed and people are being deported, are you going to leave them? Those are really hard questions.

  I think we do survivors and victims a disservice by not recognizing how difficult their choices were all were. By looking back and judging whatever decision they made, instead of recognizing what an impossible, unbelievable situation that they were in. Looking back and thinking that things were easy back then but they’re hard now has given us the opportunity to say: “Oh we should have taken more people during the Holocaust but today, we can’t take refugees.” No, no, no. Decisions were hard then, too. We had a difficult bureaucratic system, but we didn’t shut our doors to people who were trying to get out. The U.S. doesn’t do that. Like I said, over 111,000 self-identified Jewish refugees escape in a three-year period between 1938 and 1941.

  When we look today and say: “Oh we can’t possibly take refugees, but it was so simple back then.” No, no. It was hard back then too, and we managed to take some. We think back and say, “We should have taken more.” We need to take those judgements and put them on ourselves now and try to figure out what to do, because the world hasn’t gotten easier.

  Levy: Refugee and immigration issues continue to arouse debate today. Do you see any parallels between the refugee issues in the 1930s and 1940s, and refugee issues today?

  Erbelding: To some extent, I gave you some of the parallels. Some of the differences are, we didn’t have a refugee policy back then. Everyone who wanted to come, who was fleeing persecution, had to stay in the same line and go through the same paperwork as everyone else. There was no political asylum. There was nothing put in place to help people trying to escape violence in their home country.

  There was also no worldwide mechanism for this. There was no United Nations. The League of Nations by the war is defunct. There is no one trying to help really, except for NGOs. The NGOs who were trying to help refugees back then are the same NGOs who are involved in refugee affairs now: the American Friends Service Committee of the Quakers, the Unitarians, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, HIAS, and the Emergency Refugee Committee became the International Rescue Committee.

  All of these organizations that were doing really great work and were the loudest voices in support of Jewish refugees in the 1930s are still the loudest voices in support of refugees today. Whenever anybody asks what people can do, I always point to that and say if you feel very strongly about this, these organizations are out there and doing fantastic work, and you should try to support them. Again, this is all me speaking, not the museum.

  Our population has grown threefold since World War II. Numerically, we took about the same number of refugees as we did in 1939 this past year. That was in the 1930s, that was into a U.S. that had 19% unemployment. Right now, we are at 4% unemployment, and we are numerically taking the same numbers.

  Levy: As you said, some economic studies have shown that immigrants really contribute to the workforce.

  Erbelding: Yes, and in the 1930s, that was a talking point then too. The Joint secretly published a brochure called “Refugee Facts.” They published it under the name of the Quakers so that it wouldn’t be seen as a “Jewish thing.” It’s a great brochure. It’s online right now. It’s laying out in cartoon form, “These are the number of refugees who are coming. This is the work that they’re doing.” It talks about the very important work that Jewish professors, refugee professors, are contributing to our country, and contributing to training young people, and would contribute to the war. They make something like a quarter million brochures and distribute them all throughout the country, to try to change the conversation about refugees. It doesn’t really work.

  It’s frustrating to see a lot of the same talking points then and now, and a lot of the same rhetoric about refugees then and now.

  Levy: I saw yesterday that the MacArthur Foundation awarded $100 million to Sesame Street and the International Rescue Committee for work with Syrian refugees.

  Erbelding: Yes. They’re doing really amazing stuff.

  The museum is trying to do its part in at least calling attention to the crises that are still going on, to the Rohingya in Myanmar and to the ongoing Syria crisis. We just opened a new exhibit on Syria, about two weeks ago, about the disappeared of Syria. It features cloth in which a Syrian journalist wrote the names of people that he was imprisoned with in blood and rust. Then he managed to smuggle the cloth out of prison. You can see the cloth on display at the museum now.

  Again, trying to call attention to the fact that this is again a government killing its own people, and that it goes on and on. We can’t figure out a way to stop it. I can’t figure out a way to stop it. My colleagues who do this work can’t figure out how to stop it.

  One of the lessons I think of this history—and historian Peter Hayes quotes this in his recent book, Why? [Explaining the Holocaust]—one of the lessons is “beware of the beginnings,” because a lot of times the place where you can do so much more is at the beginning, before the atrocities start. Once the atrocities start, it’s really difficult to make them stop, say, for winning a war. But the place to do it is to get as many people out before they do.

  Levy: Well said. Maybe a good way to close is if you want to just talk briefly about the work of the Holocaust Museum, both in educating the public about the Holocaust, and then talking about present refugee and genocide issues.

  Erbelding: The Holocaust Museum is partially federally funded. We’re non-partisan. We have about two million visitors every year. What we really want to do is encourage debates. We don’t always pose answers to questions, but we pose a lot of questions and we hope that people have informed debates about them. We try to give people the information to make their debates informed.

  In my field on American response to the Holocaust, there’s a lot of comparison between then and now. Stories like the St. Louis, Anne Frank’s father’s immigration attempts—I can go on and on about both of these—but they are taken out of context and put in editorials, and put in opinion pieces just as kind of throwaway sentences, without the context.

  What we want to do is explain the context of the United States at the time, and really point out some of the things that we talked about earlier—that it is very difficult contextually because of the Depression, because of the approach of war, for refugees to escape. Yet, there are these non-governmental agencies who are doing this amazing work. The government is making these decisions.

  We want people to be more informed about the editorials and op-eds that they’re writing when they’re doing comparisons, because this is a problem that’s not going away. It didn’t start with the Holocaust. It certainly has not ended with the Holocaust. “Never again” has not become a reality. There are still genocides ongoing now, and we haven’t figured out how to stop it. The more we learn, the more conversations we have that are informed, maybe we’re going to get somewhere at some point. We need to have it both to honor the victims and the survivors, who don’t want to see other families be destroyed like theirs might have been.

  I encourage everybody to come to the museum. Our exhibit on American Response to the Holocaust opens in April, the same time my book comes out. We always have new exhibits on contemporary issues as well. We just closed one on the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. We have our new one on Syria that just opened. We want people to be better informed so that they can have these conversations and try to come up with an answer that so far as eluded me, anyway.

  Levy: Now you’ve got me intrigued about the reference about Otto Frank’s attempts to immigrate.

  Erbelding: [Laughter] No, it’s okay. So there’s a story, there’s a meme. It’s actually on Snopes that the U.S. turned Otto Frank away. And that’s not true. What happened is, Otto Frank says in letters that he applied in 1938. They were living in Amsterdam, but they were under the German quota. So they applied in Rotterdam, which was the only immigrant visa issuing consulate in the Netherlands, the only U.S. consulate that could do it. They’re on the waiting list for the U.S.

  Germany invades the Netherlands in May 1940, bombs Rotterdam, and destroys the consulate. When they destroyed the consulate, they destroyed the waiting list, and any paperwork that anyone had already gathered. Because you had to keep your paperwork at the consulate so they could prove that you didn’t alter it, that you weren’t messing with your own paperwork.

  The consulate asked people to come back with their receipts. They were given a receipt when you signed up for the waiting list showing where your place was. For whatever reason, Otto Frank doesn’t do this. In April 1941 he approaches Nathan Straus, his old college buddy, who happened to be the son of the co-founder of Macy’s. Worked for the Roosevelt administration, was very wealthy, had no problem financially sponsoring the Frank family. It’s April 1941.

  In June, the U.S. orders German consulates in the U.S. to close. They are hotbeds of spying, and they fear sabotage. All German consulates have to close in the U.S. In retaliation, Nazi Germany orders the closure of all U.S. consulates in occupied territory. Even though we’re not at war, there’s no longer American consulates in northern France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands. The only way the Frank family could have gotten out is to make it down to Marseille or to Lisbon or Madrid, places where there were still American diplomats.

  They’re not denied, because they never show up. They’re never called for an interview. There is no diplomatic corps there. The meme should be, “Otto Frank thought about coming to the United States and could not do so because of the war,” basically.

  After that, he tries to go to Cuba. He gets a visa to Cuba but just for him. That visa is almost immediately cancelled, because his visa is issued December 1, 1941. On December 7, 1941 Cuba cancelled visas, because they were afraid of German spies reaching Cuba and then hopping over to the U.S. After that, he can’t get out. The Frank family really gets stuck, and then goes into hiding in 1942.

  I wrote a research paper with the Anne Frank House on this that should come out sometime in the next month or so. My goal is to get Snopes to change their rating because Snopes says: “Yes, the Frank family was turned away from the U.S.” One, that implies that they were on a ship and came here and then were physically turned away.

  But it’s really that Otto Frank ran out of time, and that’s no fault of his. He doesn’t know the future. It’s also no fault of the U.S., frankly, at that point. A lot of these, you can’t figure out. There’s no blame. There’s only tragedy.

QUOTED: "intriguing history."
"a fine work of scholarly detection, turning up a story that deserves to be much better known."

Erbelding, Rebecca: RESCUE BOARD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Erbelding, Rebecca RESCUE BOARD Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-385-54251-7
Intriguing history of the only U.S. government agency ever founded with the express purpose "to save the lives of civilians being murdered by a wartime enemy."
America's closed-door immigration policy, the product of an intractably isolationist Congress, did not budge during much of World War II, even after Hitler's program of annihilation became a known reality. As U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist and curator Erbelding writes, it was largely thanks to a German American lawyer named John Pehle that formerly private efforts at rescue became official ones. Firmly committed to an activist sense of justice, Pehle worked at the Treasury Department, leading efforts to freeze the assets and accounts of the nation's enemies--and thus "economically fighting the war long before Pearl Harbor." His office also monitored relief funds to Jewish refugees, and it was from that starting point that Pehle eventually organized the War Refugee Board, which, beginning formally in January 1944, provided such funding. Moreover, the WRB was its own clandestine operation on a par with the OSS, funding Resistance fighters in France, paying smugglers, bribing officials, and even floating efforts to negotiate with the Nazis directly to ransom European Jews. The last proved controversial and fell apart thanks to institutional resistance. As the author writes, "Great Britain refused any bargain designed to stave off Germany's defeat, nor could it care for a million released prisoners, which would undoubtedly force the Allies to call a temporary halt to the war." Even WRB efforts to make the Holocaust known to American soldiers and those on the home front were quashed. But many of the WRB's efforts were more successful overall, including opening diplomatic pathways to allow Jews to enter and settle in British Palestine, saving thousands of lives in the bargain. The denouement of the story is satisfying, too, for Pehle helped prosecute Nazi war criminals, while one of his colleagues became mayor of New York.
1 of 4 6/3/18, 9:53 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
A fine work of scholarly detection, turning up a story that deserves to be much better known.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Erbelding, Rebecca: RESCUE BOARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959729/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2be3ad5d. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959729

QUOTED: "Erbelding's history is an important and timely contribution to understanding America's humanitarian efforts during and after WWII."

2 of 4 6/3/18, 9:53 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Rescue Board: The Untold Story of
America's Efforts to Save the Jews of
Europe
Dan Kaplan
Booklist.
114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p49. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe. By Rebecca Erbelding. Apr. 2018. 384p. Doubleday, $30 (9780385542517). 940.53.
Erbelding, archivist and curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conveys the mostly forgotten story of dedicated U.S. Treasury agents who ran covert operations to save European Jews from mass murder at the end of WWII. Under increasing domestic pressure to save Jewish victims of the Nazis and with countries reluctant to accept sufficient numbers as refugees, President Roosevelt funded the War Refugee Board in 1944. Erbelding writes vividly of intrigue and espionage, secret negotiations, money laundering, ransoming of victims, and rescue ships. She describes WRB director John Pehle's international network and how one agent, Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, became a martyr to the cause. After the Allied liberation, the board helped coordinate relief efforts before dissolving. Criticism of the U.S. responses as "too little, too late" may be valid, but 100,000-plus lives were saved through the WRB's efforts, and Erbelding's history is an important and timely contribution to understanding America's humanitarian efforts during and after WWII, given questions about today's world crises.--Dan Kaplan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kaplan, Dan. "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of
Europe." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 49. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A534956852/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=007a3a71. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956852

QUOTED: "This first book-length history of the board marks an important contribution to the history of the Holocaust."

3 of 4 6/3/18, 9:53 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Rescue Board: The Untold Story of
America's Efforts to Save the Jews of
Europe
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p67. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe Rebecca Erbelding. Doubleday, $30 (384p)
ISBN 978-0-385-54251-7
Erbelding, an archivist, curator, and historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, sifted through almost 19,000 archival documents to tell the story of the War Refugee Board, created by F.D.R. in January 1944 to help save European Jews. She describes how Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. pushed for the WRB's creation after a long battle against the State Department's anti-refugee policies. Led by Treasury official John Pehle, the WRB placed officials in neutral countries, including Switzerland and Turkey. The board's activities included working to save Jewish Hungarians (who formed by far the largest remaining European Jewish community), paying for thousands of fake French identity cards, and supporting the Czech underground, thus contributing to the partisan liberation of camps in that country. Erbelding 's book would benefit from a final summary of the WRB's strengths and weaknesses. Still, this first book-length history of the board marks an important contribution to the history of the Holocaust, particularly as it relates to America's belated but vital efforts to stop it. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Ross Yoon Agency. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe." Publishers
Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 67. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A529357562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4e4feaf8. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357562
4 of 4 6/3/18, 9:53 PM

"Erbelding, Rebecca: RESCUE BOARD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959729/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2be3ad5d. Accessed 3 June 2018. Kaplan, Dan. "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 49. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956852/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=007a3a71. Accessed 3 June 2018. "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 67. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4e4feaf8. Accessed 3 June 2018.

• History News Network
  https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168822
  Word count: 2300

  QUOTED: "Erbelding’s study doesn’t whitewash the obstacles faced by the WRB, both from the State Department, which had suppressed information about the murder of Jews from becoming public, and the military, which wanted no distractions from the war effort. Most uncompromising were the British, who regularly refused to even consider aiding Jewish refugees. Nor does it recast Roosevelt in the light in which he was held by Jewish Americans during the war years."
  "Rather, like the best of the new scholarship on this period, Rescue Board demonstrates that the response of the United States government to the Holocaust was a mixed one, and the country should neither be viewed as the heroic defender of European Jews or as complicit in their destruction."
  "Rather, the response was defined by the intersection of contingencies of the war, pressure from refugee advocacy organizations, and by tensions within the Roosevelt administration between those who thought only in terms of military strategy and immigration restrictions and those who, like Pehle and the WRB, were motivated by humanitarian concerns to save as many civilian lives as possible."

  Review of Rebecca Erbelding’s “Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts To Save The Jews of Europe”
  Books
  tags: book review, Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board

  by Barry Trachtenberg

  Barry Trachtenberg is the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University and the author of The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance.

  Over the course of his presidency, Jewish Americans overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt, voting for him with wide majorities of over 80% in each of his four elections. They turned to him, as did most Americans, to pull the country out of the Great Depression, to keep America safe, and after December 1941, to fight the war against Germany and Japan. They also supported Roosevelt, in part, because he was the only major Presidential candidate who was friendly with prominent American Jews and who (at least occasionally) responded to the concerns of those worried about the rising threat of Nazism in Germany. After the start of the war and with the rise of atrocity stories, many looked to him to stop the murder of Europe’s Jews. Support for Roosevelt stayed strong as most Jews believed that stopping Hitler was the key to ending the slaughter. In spite of regular entreaties to the administration to do somethingto save Jewish lives or to declare publicly that that mass murderers would face severe consequences after the war, Jewish American support for the President never wavered while he was alive.

  Admiration for Roosevelt began to shift only in the late 1960s and 1970s, as new historical works appeared that challenged the view of the President—and by extension, the United States—as defenders of Jews during the war. Books by historians such as David Wyman, (who passed away in March of this year), Monty Noam Penkower, and Arthur Morse pressed the case that as much as American Jews may have loved their President, his administration not only left European Jews to their fate, but went even so far in its disregard for Jewish suffering as to have been in part responsible for the Nazi genocide. Some of these early works, most notably Wyman’s Paper Walls, correctly pointed to the US immigration laws that Congress passed in the early 1920s in order to maintain white racial supremacy as the primary obstacles that prevented German Jews in the 1930s from finding shelter in the United States. Following the Depression, the new quotas that were put in place were heavily policed by employees of the State Department who, acting out of isolationist motivations, kept immigration quotas unfilled and cut the number of new migrants to levels far below (often to just 10%) even what the new restrictive legislation would allow. These practices began under President Hoover and were maintained by Roosevelt for much of his presidency.

  This narrative, of an indifferent or complicit America, found receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum. Some on the political left were attracted to this history on account of its implied attack on the Democratic party, whose stance as a defender of freedom and liberty was severely compromised by Johnson’s war in Vietnam and the failures of the Great Society program, which had been modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal. Others found in this narrative a way to bolster US support for the state of Israel, which wasn’t as unwavering as it would become in subsequent decades. These histories produced a boogey man in the figure of Breckinridge Long, the State Department official in the late 1930s who was primarily responsible for keeping the number of refugees entering the United States at a minimum. They also gave us a new symbol of Jewish suffering in the doomed voyage of the M.S. St. Louis. (In fact, between 1938 and the US entry into the war, more than 100,000 European Jews found sanctuary in the US, despite the fate of the passengers aboard the St. Louis.) By the mid-1980s, this version of history held sway, largely in part because of Wyman’s 1984 book, The Abandonment of the Jews: American and the Holocaust 1941-1945, which ruled as the standard work in the field for decades. It told a tale of America’s refusal to come to the aid of European Jews, even in light of overwhelming evidence of wholesale mass murder and many opportunities to intervene, including the ransoming of Hungarian Jewry and the bombing of Auschwitz. Wyman’s view became the new orthodoxy and helped to build support for and to shape the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Decades later, this view of the American response still holds sway in popular Jewish American opinion. Critics of President Trump’s 2017 attempt to establish a “Muslim Ban,” for example, evoked the story of the St. Louisas a reminder of “Never Again.”

  Scholars who suggest that the United States’ response was not so one sided have faced attacks on their integrity and professionalism from steadfast defenders. In 2015, for example, Rafael Medoff, head of “The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies” along with Bar-Ilan historian Bat-Ami Zucker published a 34-page pamphlet attacking the scholars Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, who had in 2013 published FDR and the Jews, an award-winning study that offers a nuanced view of Roosevelt and the US response to Nazism. More recently, Medoff has publicly criticizedState Department historian Melissa Jane Taylor for demonstrating that the State Department’s role in the refugee crisis was more complicated than Wyman suggested, and that some US consulate officials sought to help Jews seeking to escape Nazi Europe.

  A new book by Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts To Save The Jews of Europe(Doubleday, 2018), poses the most significant challenge to this orthodoxy yet. A historian, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Erbelding spent ten years scouring through more than 43,000 sources to write a history of the War Refugee Board(WRB), an executive agency authorized by President Roosevelt in January 1944 to save European Jews from destruction. Typically, discussions of the WRB are dismissed as “too little, and too late” as if the WRB activities were a half-hearted attempt by Roosevelt to save face in light of ever-increasing atrocity reports stemming from Europe. As Erbelding convincingly demonstrates, however, the WRB is more accurately understood as a highly admirable and often successful effort by a small coterie of (mostly) Treasury Department officials who were willing to go to extremes in order to save as many lives as they possibly could.

  The WRB was established by Presidential Executive Order in January 1944. Such an agency could likely have not been created much sooner. Despite of a regular stream of classified reports from Europe—as early as the summer 1942—that Germany was engaged in the mass murder of Jews, the ability of the United States to actively intervene was nearly non-existent. The US only landed troops on the continent in September 1943. That was in Italy, and Allied forces were only halfway up the peninsula by the time of the WRB’s founding four months later. By that time, reports of the murder of European Jews were widespread and advocates on their behalf—both from within the Jewish community and from aid groups such as the American Friends Service Committee—clamored for a governmental response. Increasingly, officials in the Treasury Department came to realize that there were ways in which they would be able to intervene, not militarily, of course, but by issuing licenses to allow the transfer of funds by refugee organizations, such as the Jewish Joint Distribution committee, to refugees within Axis-controlled territories. Such transfers were being blocked by the State Department, primarily out of concern that the money would fall into enemy hands and behind that, a fear of not wanting to be responsible for any refugees who the US did manage to assist. With the creation of a new agency to oversee such transfers, however, the likelihood was greater that the monies could get to their intended recipients.

  Convincing the President of the need for the WRB wasn’t easy and took several months of back and forth dealings with the State Department and the White House with Treasury officials in between. Pressure from Jewish groups convinced some members of Congress to begin agitating for such a body and hearings were held in November 1943. Eventually, it was the office of the Foreign Funds Control who convinced Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau of the need for a special agency to oversee refugee assistance. Frustrated, Pehle and his colleagues wrote a report entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews,” which gave Morgenthau the arguments he needed to bring his report to Roosevelt, who eventually approved the plan in late January 1944.

  The hero of Rescue Board is unquestionably Treasury official John Pehle. Pehle serves as a useful foil to Breckinridge Long, who by the time of the WRB’s creation, had been reassigned (demoted really) away from overseeing immigration matters on account of false testimony that he gave to Congress during the November hearings in which he wildly inflated the number of immigrants who had entered the country in the past decade. At the time of the Board’s creation, Pehle was 35 years old. An attorney from South Dakota and born of a German immigrant father, Pehle had been the director of Foreign Funds Control, responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of frozen assets. His position allowed him to realize that by facilitating the transfer of funds from the United States to refugee groups working within neutral and Axis countries, the US government might make a significant impact and save Jewish lives.

  Upon agreeing to establish the WRB, Roosevelt funded it with an initial allocation from his executive funds of one million dollars. Pehle cobbled together a team, primarily made up of Treasury officials, and for the next year and a half, until the end of the war, the WRB dedicated itself to finding and exploiting every opportunity to rescue European Jews. When describing their activities, Erbelding’s book reads like a spy thriller, replete with crash landings, nighttime rescues, and espionage. WRB representatives sought to purchase ships to ferry refugees from Europe to safe harbors. While this was unsuccessful, they were able to break the “Bulgarian bottleneck” and allow refugees from Romania to reach Palestine through Turkey. It funded much of Raoul Wallenberg’s efforts to issue certificates of protection to thousands of Jews. It was instrumental in establishing the refugee camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego, NY that housed nearly 1,000 Jews (most of whom became US citizens after the war). It strung along Nazi officials who sought to trade goods, including military vehicles, for Jewish lives. Without ever engaging in such trades, they managed to keep Jewish prisoners alive for months, many until they could be liberated or could receive aid. It even convinced the Goodyear Tire corporation to launder $50,000 so that the WRB could transfer the equivalent amount in Swedish kronor to a WRB agent to help facilitate the rescue of refugees from the Baltic states just ahead of the Soviet invasion (leading Swedish Communists to accuse American diplomats of aiding the flight of Nazi collaborators). Its last major project involved organizing the purchase and delivery of hundreds of thousands of care packages to prisoners in German concentration camps in the last months of the war.

  Erbelding’s study doesn’t whitewash the obstacles faced by the WRB, both from the State Department, which had suppressed information about the murder of Jews from becoming public, and the military, which wanted no distractions from the war effort. Most uncompromising were the British, who regularly refused to even consider aiding Jewish refugees. Nor does it recast Roosevelt in the light in which he was held by Jewish Americans during the war years. Rather, like the best of the new scholarship on this period, Rescue Board demonstrates that the response of the United States government to the Holocaust was a mixed one, and the country should neither be viewed as the heroic defender of European Jews or as complicit in their destruction. Rather, the response was defined by the intersection of contingencies of the war, pressure from refugee advocacy organizations, and by tensions within the Roosevelt administration between those who thought only in terms of military strategy and immigration restrictions and those who, like Pehle and the WRB, were motivated by humanitarian concerns to save as many civilian lives as possible.

• Signature Reads
  http://www.signature-reads.com/2018/04/untold-story-americas-efforts-save-jews-europe/
  Word count: 2542

  Books
  The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
  By Rebecca Erbelding
  April 11, 2018
  SHARE

  Cover detail from Rescue Board by Rebecca Erbelding
  Editor's Note:

  Rebecca is an archivist, curator, and historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She and her work have been profiled in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and featured on the History Channel, NPR, and other media outlets. The following is excerpted from her book, Rescue Board.

  Over one million hungarian jews are crying for help! Let them, please not suffer the fate of the polish jews! Please, do not delay! Help!
  Buy The Book
  Rescue Board

  by Rebecca Erbelding
  Barnes & Noble
  Indiebound
  Amazon
  iBooks

  I am an American citizen, but my parents and sister are in Hungary. Until now their lot has been bad, but now it seems there is no hope whatever for them … I fully realize that people are dying by the thousands and a few lives do not mean much, but to me these lives mean everything.

  I am turning to you in behalf of my mother and sister, both Hungarian citizens and living in Budapest, Hungary. Long before this I have tried at every possible agency and committee to help my people but was turned down, that nothing could be done. At least I had a little consolation that, even if life must be hard, it might be still endurable … But now I am terror stricken. What will become of them? Dear Sir, please tell me what can be done. Please, don’t turn me away.

  The letters were heartbreaking and arrived by the dozens. Americans, reading about the president’s statement next to frightening articles about the sudden invasion of Hungary, homed in on John Pehle’s name, and within days those with loved ones still in enemy territory began to write to the man they were sure could help.

  The War Refugee Board staff kept all the letters and responded to each one. Most people received a personalized form letter, which always went out with John Pehle’s signature: “I am sure you will understand that the task of the Board is so great that, of necessity, it cannot deal with problems limited to seeking out and rescuing any specific individuals … I assure you that everything in its power will be done to rescue and save the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death.”

  John Pehle couldn’t have agonized long over this difficult but necessary approach. He had no choice: the War Refugee Board couldn’t locate and rescue specific individuals. The resources involved would have been enormous, and the undertaking very dangerous: sending relief workers into enemy territory to search for years-old addresses, hoping the owners still lived there, then spiriting those they found to safety, past thousands who also needed help. As one staff member later put it, the board decided to be in the wholesale rather than the retail business. The board would rescue the most people possible, rather than a selected few.

  Physical rescue, for Hungarian Jews and those trapped in the interior of Nazi territory, was largely impossible. The people needing the most help were too far from the Allied armies and from the borders of neutral countries to escape in any great numbers. They clearly required protection where they were, so “rescue” became something more fluid and intangible.

  At first, broadcast warnings seemed the most promising way to deter Nazi collaborators, who might be wavering about their commitment to a regime that seemed likely to lose the war. Roosevelt’s statement had received worldwide attention. It played every hour for forty-eight hours straight on shortwave broadcasts in English and on fifty-one shows in the same span of time in German, including eleven recitations of the entire text. But Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary somehow only heard it three times each, barely enough to penetrate and certainly not the mass reach the WRB staff had hoped. They had to have been satisfied, however, by the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, which responded with “An Emotional Explosion in the White House,” a derisive newspaper article long and antisemitic enough to prove the WRB had gotten under the skin of some Nazis.

  But the WRB’s psychological warfare campaign quickly began to ebb. Within a week of Roosevelt’s statement, the Office of War Information had virtually ceased reporting it, because its broadcasts were meant for current news, though listeners were still reminded of the threat of postwar punishment. And after the president, there was nowhere to go but down. The WRB wrangled a host of prominent Hungarian American figures, sending their voices crackling across the wire, better angels pleading from afar to their former countrymen. None of the messages garnered much attention.

  In Geneva, Switzerland, a lanky young man with dark hair and thoughtful eyes cut a March 23 article out of the Hungarian newspaper Új Magyarság and pasted it onto a blank sheet of paper. The article, which translated to “The Failure of the Office for European Refugees,” announced that Roosevelt’s new agency had made little progress and lacked money. Roswell McClelland noticed this particular article because it related to his new employer.

  Ross was, in many ways, the perfect War Refugee Board attaché. After his mother died when he was a toddler, Ross was shuttled from his native California to various boarding schools in Europe, picking up German and French along the way. While in graduate school at Columbia, he met Marjorie Miles, a sunny blonde with a wicked sense of humor, who ran a nursery school in Harlem. Marjorie was a Quaker, while Ross later described himself as a “backsliding Presbyterian with Quaker sympathies.” They married in November 1938, and soon after one of Marjorie’s friends in the American Friends Service Commit- tee learned of Ross’s language skills. She recruited the couple to run the AFSC’s Rome office, sweetening the pot by offering Ross a fellowship for his planned PhD in comparative literature. Ross, eager to delve into European archives, jumped at the chance, though the out- break of war put an end to any scholarly ambitions. Instead, the couple proved themselves quite adept at relief work: both were meticulous, good-natured, and hardworking.

  By early 1944, the McClellands had been in Switzerland for nearly a year and a half but in Europe since August 1940. After the American consulates closed in Rome in July 1941, rendering the country too dangerous and the opportunities to assist refugees too remote, they moved to southern France to join a larger AFSC delegation. Ross coordinated relief work in the internment camps, where he witnessed with horror the first deportations by train that took many of his refugee friends to their deaths at Auschwitz. Marjorie selected children for the United States Committee for the Care of European Children transports to America, forever separating them from imprisoned parents but saving their lives. In the fall of 1942, with Marjorie’s pregnancy beginning to show, the AFSC asked the couple to take over its Geneva office, and the McClellands crossed the border. Their son, Barre, was born in January 1943, only a few months after Nazi Germany invaded Vichy France, capturing the remaining AFSC workers and interning them as prisoners of war. Geneva, in comparison, was a quiet post where the McClellands ran a distribution center out of their apartment, just steps from Geneva’s oldest square, Place du Bourg-de-Four, providing clothing and small amounts of money to refugees already in the country. It was a perfectly nice place to do some good while waiting for the end of the war.

  Pehle had just taken the “acting” helm of the board when he decided Ross would be his man in Switzerland. The head of the AFSC, Clarence Pickett, lamented the Quakers’ loss, but Pehle didn’t hesitate; the board had very few options for representatives in Switzerland, a country completely surrounded by enemy territory and without Treasury staff. The Americans living there had been confined for more than a year, no one getting in or out. Because the Quakers were known for honesty and industriousness—the WRB simultaneously and unsuccessfully tried to get Pickett, too, and David Blickenstaff for Spain—McClelland’s job offer went by cable on February 13. Florence Hodel asked the AFSC for a picture of McClelland so the WRB staff could “meet” their new colleague.

  After some soul-searching, Ross accepted in early March, writing to a friend, “This appointment had more the tone of a designation than an offer . . . One only wishes that such a board had existed in 1940, when the opportunities for saving people were far greater. Perhaps the frightful deportations of Jews from France during the summer of 1942 could have been, if not entirely avoided, at least considerably mitigated . . . I feel strongly, therefore, that even if the WRB has come at the eleventh hour one should go to work in an unstinting effort to make the most of the little time that remains.” This was his chance to save the lives he couldn’t save in France.

  Due to some missing paperwork, the WRB didn’t actually appoint McClelland until April 22, in the midst of a whirlwind week that included meet and greets with the IGC’s director; Ira Hirschmann’s triumphant return to Washington; and the miraculous news that Henry Morgenthau’s son Robert had survived an enemy attack that had cleaved his naval destroyer in two. Having waited in limbo in Switzerland for two months, McClelland was eager to get started. Because the American legation was located in Bern, he commuted for most of the week, saying good-bye to little Barre and to Marjorie, who was pregnant with their second child, and boarding the train for the three-hour ride to the capital on Tuesday mornings, returning to Geneva on Friday evenings.

  Switzerland served as a base for Jewish relief agency workers, some with close ties to resistance movements in enemy territory, including in Hungary, and McClelland’s relationship with them—and the intelligence he gathered from them—would be pivotal for the War Refugee Board’s plans.

  In the first four months of 1944, the War Refugee Board had issued licenses worth almost $4 million, most for generic “relief and rescue,” which gave the relief agencies flexibility. Nearly $3 million of that went to Switzerland, on behalf of eight different relief agencies. Pehle asked McClelland to meet with the agency workers for audits, because he had to ensure the representatives were following all the license rules. It was also an opportunity to gather ideas and see how the WRB could better assist people who had secret channels into occupied lands. Three of the workers, whose personalities reflected their organizations, stood out and would become McClelland’s closest associates and the sources of his greatest frustrations.

  Isaac Sternbuch, bearded with a lazy right eye, represented multiple agencies of the Orthodox community—the Vaad Hatzalah, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, Agudas Israel, and HIJEFS (Schweizerischer Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Ausland)—and had to deal with their many demands, none of which were straightforward. These groups understood the Nazi murder campaign differently than other refugee organizations: they saw a Nazi war against Judaism, rather than against Jews.

  The Orthodox organizations emphasized aid and rescue for yeshivas, rabbis, and religious leaders, targeting their efforts toward specific individuals and small groups rather than toward a needy population as a whole. Their leadership in New York never fully understood the impossibility of targeted rescue and would send Sternbuch—and McClelland—desperate pleas to find and rescue certain rabbis, deep in enemy territory. They had little regard for the WRB’s license rules; when McClelland asked how he was spending his money, Sternbuch confessed his colleagues wanted to open a children’s home in Switzerland. Sternbuch knew this broke the terms of his license and apologetically drafted his own angry “response,” which McClelland could use when formally rejecting the request. The multiple sources of Sternbuch’s projects and finances made close accounting impossible.

  Saly Mayer, the JDC’s representative, had fallen into his job the same way McClelland had: his organization needed someone responsible, and he had been the head of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. A middle-aged lace manufacturer in St. Gallen, Mayer was a formal man, very precise and ponderous. The WRB trusted the JDC more than any other Jewish organization, and eventually—though not at first—McClelland’s relationship with Mayer reflected that, too.

  Like the WRB, the JDC operated on a “wholesale” basis, providing funds to assist the largest number of people possible. Through Saly Mayer, the JDC funded most of the Jewish organizations still operating in enemy territory and some of the work of the International Red Cross. Even though it sometimes paid a massive amount of money for a relatively small number of people—like financing rescue boats from Romania to Istanbul—these were exceptions. Mayer had the largest budget of any relief worker by far but resisted an audit at first, considering McClelland’s request “an affront to his integrity.” Within a few weeks, he came around, providing a breakdown of the $1,829,400 the JDC had sent him between September 1943 and May 1944.

  Gerhart Riegner was much more willing to share the details of his operations—too willing, as it turned out. On April 28, Riegner sent a written account of the World Jewish Congress’s work in France to the Bern legation’s offices. After finally receiving his license, he had used the money to evacuate children and young adults across the Spanish border, to procure false identity papers, and to publish an underground newspaper, though after the publisher was arrested, the paper went on hiatus. Riegner also supported a Jewish resistance group’s training and purchased their firearms, used for the “punishment of traitors.” He added proudly, “Several traitors have already been destroyed for having denounced and sold Jews to the Germans.” The Office of Censorship chastised the War Refugee Board for forwarding Riegner’s audit to his bosses in New York, which “endangers national security” by sharing “information of possible military value” with the World Jewish Congress.

  Gerhart Riegner also sent the War Refugee Board some of the first intelligence about Hungarian Jews, relaying the Nazi plan to quickly concentrate them together in makeshift ghettos. From him, the Bern legation would learn about economic deprivations, the new political personalities who had been installed in the Hungarian government, and where and in what numbers Jews were being collected together.

  Excerpted with permission from Rescue Board by Rebecca Erbelding, published by Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Erbelding. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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• Medium
  https://medium.com/@StarrSayles/this-post-is-for-all-those-history-buffs-like-me-6cca4174ec43
  Word count: 2630

  This post is for all those “History Buffs” like me.

  I wouldn’t talk up a book, but, this is a time when America needs to remember the past.
  Books
  The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
  By Rebecca Erbelding

  April 11, 2018

  SHARE

  Cover detail from Rescue Board by Rebecca Erbelding
  Editor’s Note:

  Rebecca is an archivist, curator, and historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She and her work have been profiled in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and featured on the History Channel, NPR, and other media outlets. The following is excerpted from her book, Rescue Board.

  Over one million hungarian jews are crying for help! Let them, please not suffer the fate of the polish jews! Please, do not delay! Help!
  Buy The Book
  Rescue Board

  by Rebecca Erbelding

  Barnes & NobleIndieboundAmazoniBooks

  I am an American citizen, but my parents and sister are in Hungary. Until now their lot has been bad, but now it seems there is no hope whatever for them … I fully realize that people are dying by the thousands and a few lives do not mean much, but to me these lives mean everything.

  I am turning to you in behalf of my mother and sister, both Hungarian citizens and living in Budapest, Hungary. Long before this I have tried at every possible agency and committee to help my people but was turned down, that nothing could be done. At least I had a little consolation that, even if life must be hard, it might be still endurable … But now I am terror stricken. What will become of them? Dear Sir, please tell me what can be done. Please, don’t turn me away.

  The letters were heartbreaking and arrived by the dozens. Americans, reading about the president’s statement next to frightening articles about the sudden invasion of Hungary, homed in on John Pehle’s name, and within days those with loved ones still in enemy territory began to write to the man they were sure could help.

  The War Refugee Board staff kept all the letters and responded to each one. Most people received a personalized form letter, which always went out with John Pehle’s signature: “I am sure you will understand that the task of the Board is so great that, of necessity, it cannot deal with problems limited to seeking out and rescuing any specific individuals … I assure you that everything in its power will be done to rescue and save the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death.”

  John Pehle couldn’t have agonized long over this difficult but necessary approach. He had no choice: the War Refugee Board couldn’t locate and rescue specific individuals. The resources involved would have been enormous, and the undertaking very dangerous: sending relief workers into enemy territory to search for years-old addresses, hoping the owners still lived there, then spiriting those they found to safety, past thousands who also needed help. As one staff member later put it, the board decided to be in the wholesale rather than the retail business. The board would rescue the most people possible, rather than a selected few.

  Physical rescue, for Hungarian Jews and those trapped in the interior of Nazi territory, was largely impossible. The people needing the most help were too far from the Allied armies and from the borders of neutral countries to escape in any great numbers. They clearly required protection where they were, so “rescue” became something more fluid and intangible.

  At first, broadcast warnings seemed the most promising way to deter Nazi collaborators, who might be wavering about their commitment to a regime that seemed likely to lose the war. Roosevelt’s statement had received worldwide attention. It played every hour for forty-eight hours straight on shortwave broadcasts in English and on fifty-one shows in the same span of time in German, including eleven recitations of the entire text. But Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary somehow only heard it three times each, barely enough to penetrate and certainly not the mass reach the WRB staff had hoped. They had to have been satisfied, however, by the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, which responded with “An Emotional Explosion in the White House,” a derisive newspaper article long and antisemitic enough to prove the WRB had gotten under the skin of some Nazis.

  But the WRB’s psychological warfare campaign quickly began to ebb. Within a week of Roosevelt’s statement, the Office of War Information had virtually ceased reporting it, because its broadcasts were meant for current news, though listeners were still reminded of the threat of postwar punishment. And after the president, there was nowhere to go but down. The WRB wrangled a host of prominent Hungarian American figures, sending their voices crackling across the wire, better angels pleading from afar to their former countrymen. None of the messages garnered much attention.

  In Geneva, Switzerland, a lanky young man with dark hair and thoughtful eyes cut a March 23 article out of the Hungarian newspaper Új Magyarság and pasted it onto a blank sheet of paper. The article, which translated to “The Failure of the Office for European Refugees,” announced that Roosevelt’s new agency had made little progress and lacked money. Roswell McClelland noticed this particular article because it related to his new employer.

  Ross was, in many ways, the perfect War Refugee Board attaché. After his mother died when he was a toddler, Ross was shuttled from his native California to various boarding schools in Europe, picking up German and French along the way. While in graduate school at Columbia, he met Marjorie Miles, a sunny blonde with a wicked sense of humor, who ran a nursery school in Harlem. Marjorie was a Quaker, while Ross later described himself as a “backsliding Presbyterian with Quaker sympathies.” They married in November 1938, and soon after one of Marjorie’s friends in the American Friends Service Commit- tee learned of Ross’s language skills. She recruited the couple to run the AFSC’s Rome office, sweetening the pot by offering Ross a fellowship for his planned PhD in comparative literature. Ross, eager to delve into European archives, jumped at the chance, though the out- break of war put an end to any scholarly ambitions. Instead, the couple proved themselves quite adept at relief work: both were meticulous, good-natured, and hardworking.

  By early 1944, the McClellands had been in Switzerland for nearly a year and a half but in Europe since August 1940. After the American consulates closed in Rome in July 1941, rendering the country too dangerous and the opportunities to assist refugees too remote, they moved to southern France to join a larger AFSC delegation. Ross coordinated relief work in the internment camps, where he witnessed with horror the first deportations by train that took many of his refugee friends to their deaths at Auschwitz. Marjorie selected children for the United States Committee for the Care of European Children transports to America, forever separating them from imprisoned parents but saving their lives. In the fall of 1942, with Marjorie’s pregnancy beginning to show, the AFSC asked the couple to take over its Geneva office, and the McClellands crossed the border. Their son, Barre, was born in January 1943, only a few months after Nazi Germany invaded Vichy France, capturing the remaining AFSC workers and interning them as prisoners of war. Geneva, in comparison, was a quiet post where the McClellands ran a distribution center out of their apartment, just steps from Geneva’s oldest square, Place du Bourg-de-Four, providing clothing and small amounts of money to refugees already in the country. It was a perfectly nice place to do some good while waiting for the end of the war.

  Pehle had just taken the “acting” helm of the board when he decided Ross would be his man in Switzerland. The head of the AFSC, Clarence Pickett, lamented the Quakers’ loss, but Pehle didn’t hesitate; the board had very few options for representatives in Switzerland, a country completely surrounded by enemy territory and without Treasury staff. The Americans living there had been confined for more than a year, no one getting in or out. Because the Quakers were known for honesty and industriousness — the WRB simultaneously and unsuccessfully tried to get Pickett, too, and David Blickenstaff for Spain — McClelland’s job offer went by cable on February 13. Florence Hodel asked the AFSC for a picture of McClelland so the WRB staff could “meet” their new colleague.

  After some soul-searching, Ross accepted in early March, writing to a friend, “This appointment had more the tone of a designation than an offer . . . One only wishes that such a board had existed in 1940, when the opportunities for saving people were far greater. Perhaps the frightful deportations of Jews from France during the summer of 1942 could have been, if not entirely avoided, at least considerably mitigated . . . I feel strongly, therefore, that even if the WRB has come at the eleventh hour one should go to work in an unstinting effort to make the most of the little time that remains.” This was his chance to save the lives he couldn’t save in France.

  Due to some missing paperwork, the WRB didn’t actually appoint McClelland until April 22, in the midst of a whirlwind week that included meet and greets with the IGC’s director; Ira Hirschmann’s triumphant return to Washington; and the miraculous news that Henry Morgenthau’s son Robert had survived an enemy attack that had cleaved his naval destroyer in two. Having waited in limbo in Switzerland for two months, McClelland was eager to get started. Because the American legation was located in Bern, he commuted for most of the week, saying good-bye to little Barre and to Marjorie, who was pregnant with their second child, and boarding the train for the three-hour ride to the capital on Tuesday mornings, returning to Geneva on Friday evenings.

  Switzerland served as a base for Jewish relief agency workers, some with close ties to resistance movements in enemy territory, including in Hungary, and McClelland’s relationship with them — and the intelligence he gathered from them — would be pivotal for the War Refugee Board’s plans.

  In the first four months of 1944, the War Refugee Board had issued licenses worth almost $4 million, most for generic “relief and rescue,” which gave the relief agencies flexibility. Nearly $3 million of that went to Switzerland, on behalf of eight different relief agencies. Pehle asked McClelland to meet with the agency workers for audits, because he had to ensure the representatives were following all the license rules. It was also an opportunity to gather ideas and see how the WRB could better assist people who had secret channels into occupied lands. Three of the workers, whose personalities reflected their organizations, stood out and would become McClelland’s closest associates and the sources of his greatest frustrations.

  Isaac Sternbuch, bearded with a lazy right eye, represented multiple agencies of the Orthodox community — the Vaad Hatzalah, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, Agudas Israel, and HIJEFS (Schweizerischer Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Ausland) — and had to deal with their many demands, none of which were straightforward. These groups understood the Nazi murder campaign differently than other refugee organizations: they saw a Nazi war against Judaism, rather than against Jews.

  The Orthodox organizations emphasized aid and rescue for yeshivas, rabbis, and religious leaders, targeting their efforts toward specific individuals and small groups rather than toward a needy population as a whole. Their leadership in New York never fully understood the impossibility of targeted rescue and would send Sternbuch — and McClelland — desperate pleas to find and rescue certain rabbis, deep in enemy territory. They had little regard for the WRB’s license rules; when McClelland asked how he was spending his money, Sternbuch confessed his colleagues wanted to open a children’s home in Switzerland. Sternbuch knew this broke the terms of his license and apologetically drafted his own angry “response,” which McClelland could use when formally rejecting the request. The multiple sources of Sternbuch’s projects and finances made close accounting impossible.

  Saly Mayer, the JDC’s representative, had fallen into his job the same way McClelland had: his organization needed someone responsible, and he had been the head of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. A middle-aged lace manufacturer in St. Gallen, Mayer was a formal man, very precise and ponderous. The WRB trusted the JDC more than any other Jewish organization, and eventually — though not at first — McClelland’s relationship with Mayer reflected that, too.

  Like the WRB, the JDC operated on a “wholesale” basis, providing funds to assist the largest number of people possible. Through Saly Mayer, the JDC funded most of the Jewish organizations still operating in enemy territory and some of the work of the International Red Cross. Even though it sometimes paid a massive amount of money for a relatively small number of people — like financing rescue boats from Romania to Istanbul — these were exceptions. Mayer had the largest budget of any relief worker by far but resisted an audit at first, considering McClelland’s request “an affront to his integrity.” Within a few weeks, he came around, providing a breakdown of the $1,829,400 the JDC had sent him between September 1943 and May 1944.

  Gerhart Riegner was much more willing to share the details of his operations — too willing, as it turned out. On April 28, Riegner sent a written account of the World Jewish Congress’s work in France to the Bern legation’s offices. After finally receiving his license, he had used the money to evacuate children and young adults across the Spanish border, to procure false identity papers, and to publish an underground newspaper, though after the publisher was arrested, the paper went on hiatus. Riegner also supported a Jewish resistance group’s training and purchased their firearms, used for the “punishment of traitors.” He added proudly, “Several traitors have already been destroyed for having denounced and sold Jews to the Germans.” The Office of Censorship chastised the War Refugee Board for forwarding Riegner’s audit to his bosses in New York, which “endangers national security” by sharing “information of possible military value” with the World Jewish Congress.

  Gerhart Riegner also sent the War Refugee Board some of the first intelligence about Hungarian Jews, relaying the Nazi plan to quickly concentrate them together in makeshift ghettos. From him, the Bern legation would learn about economic deprivations, the new political personalities who had been installed in the Hungarian government, and where and in what numbers Jews were being collected together.

  Excerpted with permission from Rescue Board by Rebecca Erbelding, published by Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Erbelding. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher
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