Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe

by Rebecca Erbelding Narrated by Hillary Huber

Overview

Featured historian in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS ¿ WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD ¿*In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America's little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.

“An invaluable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” -Andrew Nagorski, author of The Nazi Hunters and Hitlerland

“Brilliantly brings to life the gripping, little-known story of [a] transformative moment in American history and the crusading young government lawyers who made it happen.” -Lynne Olson, New York Times bestselling author of Last Hope Island

For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge.*
*
Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine.
*
“A landmark achievement, Rescue Board is the first history of the War Refugee Board. Meticulously researched and poignantly narrated, Rescue Board analyzes policies and practices while never losing sight of the human beings involved: the officials who sought to help and the victims in desperate need. Top-notch history: original and riveting.” -Debórah Dwork, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, and coauthor of Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

02/19/2018
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.)

From the Publisher

An invaluable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” —Andrew Nagorski, author of The Nazi Hunters and Hitlerland

“Rebecca Erbelding brilliantly brings to life the gripping, little-known story of [a] transformative moment in American history and the crusading young government lawyers who made it happen.” —Lynne Olson, New York Times bestselling author of Last Hope Island

“A landmark achievement, Rescue Board is the first history of the War Refugee Board. Meticulously researched and poignantly narrated, Rescue Board analyzes policies and practices while never losing sight of the human beings involved: the officials who sought to help and the victims in desperate need. Top-notch history: original and riveting.” —Debórah Dwork, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, and coauthor of Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946
 
“Erbelding writes vividly of intrigue and espionage, secret negotiations, money laundering, ransoming of victims, and rescue ships . . . [Her] history is an important contribution to understanding America’s humanitarian efforts during and after WWII and a timely perspective.” —Booklist
 
“Engagingly written, Rescue Board homes in on the individuals who managed to save the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. A must-read for anyone concerned with the refugee crises of World War II and today.” —Marion Kaplan, author of Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
 
“A fine work of scholarly detection, turning up a story that deserves to be much better known.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“Erbelding’s account—both infuriating and inspiring—reveals an unnervingly timely history. This important book, taut as a thriller and historically authoritative, deepens our understanding of the American response to the Holocaust as well as the excruciating obstacles and crucial opportunities confronting citizens committed to saving victims of war and genocide.” —Atina Grossmann, author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
 
“If it were not based on real events, Rescue Board would rank as a first-rate thriller. This meticulously researched book tells the story of the race to save lives and cut through the cumbersome bureaucracy, hard-hearted officials, the fog of war, and the competing interests that impeded progress.” —The Beacon
 
“This first book-length history of the [War Refugee 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” —Publishers Weekly
 
“A brilliantly researched story, Rescue Board is also a disturbing reminder—especially relevant today—that anti-immigrant bigotry has vied continually with tolerance for control of our nation’s soul. In Erbelding’s retelling, the War Refugee Board is a historical lodestar for a future America trying, hopefully, to recover its role as a moral leader.” —Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Kirkus Reviews

2018-02-20
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.A fine work of scholarly detection, turning up a story that deserves to be much better known.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171850982
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/10/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Two Wars

Nazi Germany fought two simultaneous wars: the military war against the Allies and the genocidal war against the Jews. It launched the first on September 1, 1939, riding roughshod over Poland and daring the British and French to protest. Americans argued for more than two years over whether to join the conflict, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended the debate. The second war began in 1941 when a decade of racial and religious persecution morphed into a plan to annihilate the Nazis’ innocent enemies. The U.S. government confirmed the ongoing mass murder in 1942, and for more than a year Americans—­to the extent they were paying attention—­debated how and whether to respond. Finally, in 1944, the United States began fighting the second war.

On a drizzly Sunday in the middle of January, John Pehle, a young assistant to the secretary of the Treasury, walked from his office to the White House at lunchtime, and when he emerged, the United States had entered the war against the Nazi extermination of European Jews. When the war in Europe ended seventeen months later, tens of thousands of people—­Jewish and non-­Jewish—­were alive due to the outcome of Pehle’s meeting: a new government agency, the War Refugee Board (WRB), had been born. Pehle and his colleagues never became famous and spent the rest of their lives hearing—­and agreeing—­that the United States should have done more to help save the Jews of Europe. At the same time, few people ever knew what the War Refugee Board had actually done.

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The odds that day—­January 16, 1944—­were stacked against John Pehle.

President Franklin Roosevelt had the flu. Rumors flew around official Washington about his ill health, a topic of particular concern because the Democratic National Committee met that weekend to debate nominating him for an unprecedented fourth term. The president felt physically weak and postponed things he wasn’t up to doing.

Pehle, a tall midwesterner with a deep voice and light brown hair already starting to recede, had never had an official White House meeting, even though he had worked in Washington for a decade, rising through the ranks at the Treasury Department. Since 1940, when he was just thirty-­one, Pehle had overseen Foreign Funds Control, responsible for keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of America’s enemies. With a staff of nearly fifteen hundred, Foreign Funds Control also supervised the small amounts of relief money sent from the United States into Europe. This did not exactly qualify Pehle, or any of his colleagues, as humanitarian aid specialists.

Many people, including military officials, believed the United States could only truly help the victims of the Nazis and their collaborators by winning the war as soon as possible. Everything else was a distraction and a diversion of resources. Pehle thought they could do more than just fight militarily, but would Roosevelt?

Most worryingly, Pehle’s news would undoubtedly upset the president. His friends had been lying to him, and Pehle—­a man Roosevelt couldn’t have picked out of a lineup—­had the proof. Pehle’s plan—­an incredibly risky one—­was to argue that if the president did not act immediately and follow the Treasury Department’s advice, his legacy as a defender of the downtrodden would be forever marred. Millions had already died, but millions of lives were still at stake. Pehle felt convinced that some could still be saved, but only if Roosevelt acted quickly.

Pehle entered the White House, stomped his shoes clean, hung up his hat and coat, still damp with wintry drizzle, and climbed the stairs to the president’s private study. He readied himself for the most important meeting of his life.

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In the summer of 1942, a year and a half before Pehle’s meeting, news of the ongoing massacre of the Jews began to reach the United States. Most Americans had known that Nazi Germany made life impossible for Jews, but the idea of a systematic mass murder plan seemed absurd. And even if it was true, what could Americans do about it? Helping refugees escape Europe had never been a priority for the American government or the American people. Bigger problems—­the Great Depression, war in Europe, war in Asia—­stole most Americans’ focus. Restrictive immigration laws instituted in the 1920s hadn’t been written to target German Jews—­and were in place long before the refugee crisis began in the late 1930s—­but as a result of these laws many thousands of people who might have been able to escape couldn’t do so. They were still in Europe waiting for immigration visas when they were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis.

The doors to the United States began to close in the 1920s. The Johnson-­Reed Act of 1924, which passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, was born from intense postwar isolationism and eugenic theories. The law capped the number of immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere at about 154,000 people per year, a far cry from the more than 10 million who had arrived in the United States in the decade prior to World War I. The act also applied “national origins” quotas and categorized applicants based on country of birth, not country of residence or citizenship. The quotas severely restricted persons from southern and eastern Europe, who had formed the majority of the immigrant population in recent decades, and kept most Asian and African people out entirely. Countries with large populations of Jews, Slavs, and people thought to be racially undesirable, poorer, and harder to assimilate were specifically targeted. Great Britain had the largest quota, and Germany was second, with a cap of 25,957.

The 1924 law also moved power over immigration to the State Department. Though the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) stayed in the Labor Department until June 1940, applicants for immigration visas had to present all their paperwork—­identification, financial records, medical exams—­to State Department officers at designated consulates around the world. Immigrants received their visas before leaving Europe, so Ellis Island became merely a holding area for illegal or sick passengers. As ships steamed past the Statue of Liberty, those on board could wave with ease; the hardest part of the process was already over.

Then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit the United States and the world.

As had happened before and has happened since, politicians blamed immigration for exacerbating American economic problems. President Herbert Hoover instructed the State Department to strictly interpret an obscure clause from a 1917 law about people “likely to become a public charge.” Visa applicants who did not have sufficient financial resources were no longer eligible, because one could not assume they would ever find employment in America. The year before Hoover’s restriction, 25,957 German immigrants entered, completely filling the quota allotment. By 1933, the number had fallen to 1,324.

On March 4, 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt recited the oath of office, the front pages of major newspapers reported on his laundry list of New Deal legislation but also on increasing antisemitism in Nazi Germany, where a new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had taken power five weeks earlier. Jews were being kicked out of their jobs, stores boycotted, books burned. In protest, tens of thousands of Americans marched in major cities around the country, held rallies, and began an anti-­German boycott movement.

Roosevelt’s State Department staff, still settling into the massive Department of State building just west of the White House, felt that diplomatic tensions were too fraught to make any formal protest. Germany owed American investors $2 billion in loans after World War I, and the new Nazi regime acted on whims. Germany was a sovereign nation, and anyway it was not a crime to persecute your own citizens.

From Berlin, the U.S. consul general George Messersmith sent a warning to his colleagues in Washington in June 1933: The persecution of the Jews “is one of the most serious and one of the saddest problems that has arisen in a civilized country in modern times . . . I personally can see no hope for the Jews in Germany for years to come and all those who can possibly get out of the country, will wish to do so.”

In the first full year of Nazi control, fewer than 4,400 Germans had been granted U.S. immigrant visas, while 83,013 persons, mostly Jews, sat on the waiting list. The State Department loosened the “likely to become a public charge” instruction and reminded consular officials to be sympathetic. Otherwise, the process stayed the same. The United States had an immigration policy, but no refugee policy. Those fleeing persecution had to qualify, with the same paperwork and under the same strict rules as everyone else. Soon, Nazi persecution stopped being front-­page news, and most Americans stopped paying attention.

Five years later, on March 12, 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in a territorial grab known as the Anschluss. Hitler rode triumphantly through Vienna, with swastika flags hanging from every building and people lining the streets to cheer. There were 1,413 immigration spots available under the Austrian quota each year, but the consulate had been a sleepy one, issuing only an average of 15 per month prior to the Nazis’ arrival. In the next four months, 40,000 Austrians applied, the vast majority of them Jews. Between 500 and 4,000 people waited in the gardens outside the consulate every day for an appointment with the small—­and now frantic—­State Department staff. Eight hundred letters arrived every day, all needing responses. The desperate Jews of Vienna were being evicted from their homes and constantly threatened with arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps. Suicide grew increasingly common.

Though the State Department controlled the issuance of visas, Congress determined immigration law and set the quotas. In the spring of 1938, three Democrats, all representing parts of Brooklyn, proposed bills to assist refugees. Samuel Dickstein wanted to carry over unused quota slots from year to year, reassigning them to countries according to need; Emanuel Celler wanted to remove the “public charge” consideration entirely for those escaping persecution; and Donald O’Toole thought that all physically and mentally healthy refugees should be granted visas. Hearings on their bills were scheduled for April 20–­­22, 1938.

Before they could take place, Messersmith, now assistant secretary of state, made the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol at Celler’s request. After the hearings had been scheduled, both Messersmith and Celler had heard from frantic refugee advocates, all warning that the bills were dangerous. They shouldn’t hold any debate regarding immigration, Messersmith warned the Jewish congressmen gathered in Celler’s office, not in committee and definitely not on the House floor. Immigration was simply too unpopular, and any proposal to increase the quotas would likely result in laws to cut or end immigration entirely. It was better to keep quiet and keep the quotas as they were.

The congressmen listened and argued among themselves for a long time. All were hearing from constituents, many with Jewish family members in Germany. But they made a unanimous decision: Celler would pull his bill, and Representative Adolph Sabath of Illinois would tell Dickstein and O’Toole to do the same. No hearings, no debate. The Jewish members of Congress would not propose any new legislation to change the immigration laws. It was just too risky.

At the end of April, President Roosevelt instructed the State Department to combine the Austrian and German quotas. Though Austria no longer existed—­the busy consulate found itself in Vienna, Germany—­Austrians were eligible for one of the now 27,370 quota slots available to the German-­born. To most Americans, that number seemed far too high. In a Roper poll, 67 percent of respondents felt that German, Austrian, and “political refugees” (non-­Jews being persecuted by the Nazis) should be kept out entirely—­never mind the quotas. The 1937 recession had reversed some of the New Deal economic gains, and unemployment in early 1938 shot back up to 19 percent. Many Americans were feeling sympathetic but not charitable.

To address the worsening crisis, President Roosevelt called for an international conference in Évian-­les-­Bains, France, in early July. Thirty-­two countries participated, discussing ways to assist Jews still in Germany who wanted to immigrate. But when individual countries were asked about accepting refugees, most—­including the United States—­demurred. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take German Jews, though the invitation wasn’t quite an altruistic one. General Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, had initiated a massacre of poor black Haitians less than a year earlier and specifically sought to bring white wealth into his country. Rich Jews would do just fine.

The Évian Conference did have one tangible result: the formation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGC). But its work streamlining emigration met with little success. At one point, George Rublee, the seventy-­year-­old American director of the IGC, wrote to the State Department, “With the exception of the United States, which has maintained its quota, and the British Isles, which are admitting immigrants at a current months rate equal to the rate immigrants are being admitted to the United States, doors have been systematically closed everywhere to involuntary emigrants since the meeting at Évian.” Though the Nazis officially encouraged emigration, they demanded refugees surrender the majority of their wealth and assets first, which meant many didn’t have the money to be desirable immigrants.

On the evening of November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis instigated a violent pogrom known as Kristallnacht. The attacks and the subsequent mass arrest of Jewish men and boys received widespread press coverage in the United States—upwards of a month of front-page newspaper stories. Roosevelt condemned the violence, adding that he “could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.” The president recalled American ambassador Hugh Wilson from Berlin and announced he would extend the expiration on tourist visas for Germans—including many Jews—visiting the United States who did not feel safe returning home. But while a Gallup poll in the wake of Kristallnacht showed that 94 percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, this still did not translate into a public appetite for increasing the quotas.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Rescue Board"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Rebecca Erbelding.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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