Josiah DuBois and the War Refugee Board

Josiah DuBois, an attorney in the United States Treasury Department, entered Holocaust history with his heroic “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of Jews” (see 2022.1.52), a sweeping incendiary attack of the State Department’s policies that effectively closed doors to Jewish refugees attempting to obtain visas, refused the release of funds for rescuing Jews, and did little to diminish the persecution and murder of European Jews by the Nazis. Several critical events together form a throughline to the eventual creation of the War Refugee Board. They include the following:

Early Intelligence Reports to The Allies 1941

By mid-summer 1941, information about the mass execution of Jews by SS death squads - the Einsatzgruppen - reached Stalin and Churchill through intelligence agents. Western allies were apprised throughout that summer. Polish resistance fighter and courier to the Polish government in exile, Jan Karski, was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and became a remarkable eyewitness to the starving and disease-ridden Jews held captive here, dead bodies in the street, a pervasive stench everywhere. Karski was also able to penetrate the transit camp at Isbica where, disguised as a guard, he observed Jews exposed to the elements and worked to exhaustion - gathered to be deported to concentration camps. Karski was desperate to warn the world about these atrocities: he had taken some photographs with him when he met in the oval office with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Karski delivered his account of the atrocities he observed, but he could not elicit a reaction from FDR or a statement of a willingness to help the beleaguered Jews of Europe. Indeed, FDR rose from his chair and unceremoniously walked Karski to the door. It was difficult for Karski to square FDR’s response with his popularity with Jews in the United States. Karski was no less confused by Felix Frankfurter’s response to the same information: the eminent Supreme Court Justice simply stated that he had difficulty believing Karski’s account.

See 2012.1.98 The Mass Extermination of Jews in German- Occupied Poland

The Riegner Telegram 1942

In August 1942, a critical telegram sent by Dr. Gerhart Riegner - a German Jew working in the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress which would prove to foreshadow Hitler’s dream of “the final solution of the Jewish question.” Jews were to be gassed with prussic acid which, upon exposure to the air, caused oxygen deprivation and a painful death when inhaled. Riegner’s source was an anti-Nazi executive of a German company. Riegner contacted both the American legation in Switzerland and British consulate after the American legation in Switzerland dismissed the document as rumor. The message was ultimately conveyed to Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of both the World and the American Jewish Congresses. Rabbi Wise was informed by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles that the message was a rumor, required verification, and should not be discussed publicly. However, Rabbi Wise did announce the contents of Riegner’s message which resulted in widespread public outrage. After November 1942, citizens were aware that Nazi Germany had a plan to murder the Jews of Europe. Eleven Allied nations denounced Hitler for the Nazi’s “bestial” policy of extermination. Reports continued of Jews worked to death in labor camps, and dying of exposure and starvation in the ever-proliferating ghettos and concentration camps. Churchill’s response to this mass murder was telling: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” The concept of a “Holocaust” had not yet been born.

See 2012.1.98 The Mass Extermination of Jews in German- Occupied Poland

The Bermuda Conference 1943

Jews were alarmed by Wise’s news regarding the genocide of European Jews and Jewish organizations in both the United States and Great Britain demanded governmental action. A conference was held in Bermuda where press coverage would be limited. Its purpose was to create a plan to help the victims of atrocities committed by the Nazis, but Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long made certain that the process was hobbled from the outset. The delegates decided against negotiating with Hitler for release of hostages. Representatives from the State Department had no knowledge of refugee policy. Furthermore, there was no intention of expanding immigration quotas to accommodate Jews. As well food, clothing, money or shelter were prohibited topics for discussion. The Conference was widely seen as “staged political theatre” preordained to fail the Jews of Europe, its outcome cynically predetermined by a State Department that just wanted to appease Jewish organizations for the time being. Any relief effort, so it was argued, would only slow the war effort.

See 2015.2.181 Bermuda Conference Program; 2015.2.182 Bermuda Conference Letter from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise

Peter Bergson and the Emergency Committee to Save European Jews

Peter Bergson was a Zionist activist from Palestine and a Jewish resistance leader. Frustrated with the response of the United States government to the murder of the European Jews, he used pageantry and parades to draw public attention to their predicament. He organized the Memorial Service to the Jewish Dead in Madison Square Garden in 1943. Fourteen members of Congress were able to introduce a resolution to push FDR to rescue European Jews using Sweden’s example of rescuing the Jews of Denmark from deportation to concentration camps by creating temporary housing in countries not aligned with the Nazis. The Emergency Committee had more than 125,000 members and supporters working with political parties and organizations in an effort to save the Jews of Europe.

See 2014.1.302 Memorial Service for Jewish Dead in Madison Square Garden. Also see the subcollection AID AND RESCUE: THE EXAMPLE OF DENMARK

Antisemitism in the United States State Department: Breckenridge Long and Testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee 1943

Franklin Roosevelt essentially continued the quota system that had been operative since 1921 and 1924, allowing approximately 25,000 Germans to enter the United States every year. During the Great Depression Americans feared that immigrants would compete for scarce jobs. Polls taken at the time found that Americans held unfavorable opinions of Jews, for example that they wielded too much power or that they were attempting to provoke a war. These were themes taken up by the formidable America First Committee. Luminaries such as Henry Ford whose Dearborn Independent was a platform for his belief in an international Jewish conspiracy to control world finance; Father Coughlin whose radio broadcasts promoted antisemitic views and whose newspaper would quote Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels; Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK) who thought that the German Jews were getting what they deserved and that the United States should not be drawn into a war; and Charles Lindbergh who also spoke of Jews holding too much power, especially over media. These unpleasant men held a disproportionately large megaphone, their political and economic views extruded through their own antisemitic and pro-fascist bias.

Nor was this antisemitic animus toward Jews reserved only for adults. The Wagner-Roberts Bill - supported by Eleanor Roosevelt - was to be an American version of the heralded Kindertransport and would have brought 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14 to the United States over the course of two years. Moreover, they would have not been counted in the existing quota system. The bill never came to a vote and died in committee.

While antisemitism ran rife in the State Department during the 30s and 40s, few were more instrumental in crippling efforts to help the beleaguered Jews of Europe than Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, a friend of FDR. Along with willfully obstructing rescue efforts, Long dramatically restricted Jewish immigration, advising consuls to place unmanageable, arbitrary and constantly changing obstacles in the path of refugees hoping to become candidates for visas; for example, exhorting consuls in a departmental memo in June 1940 to keep revising the evidential standards of proof that applicants would not be a financial burden on the state and thus continue to “postpone, postpone, and postpone” the granting of the lifesaving visas. His claim in the Foreign Affairs Committee was that everything that could be done to save the Jews was being done and the United States had taken in 580,000 refugees since 1933. This figure was shown to be a dramatic overstatement of the true numbers reported by the New York Times and others. Long would be criticized by Congress, the media and Jewish organizations. The Senate was slated to vote on Gillette-Rogers and it was expected to pass. However, before the vote took place FDR, influenced by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., established the War Refugee Board.

Morgenthau had presented compelling evidence - based on the work of Josiah DuBois - that the State Department had willfully attempted to prevent action to rescue the Jews imperiled by Hitler. FDR declared “the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death . . . and to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” Sadly, Long ensured that saving Jews being relentlessly crushed under the Nazi boot would not be a priority. Many more were allowed to perish who might have been rescued.

See 2022.1.53 Acme Press Photo of Breckenridge Long; 2019.2.197 Press Photograph of Cordell Hull with Henry Morgenthau; 2022.1.52 Press Photograph of Josiah DuBois, Jr. and Copy of His Report to the State Department

The War Refugee Board 1944

Josiah DuBois was named General Counsel of the newly formed War Refugee Board and John Pehle its executive director. The authorization of humanitarian aid and rescue operations to protect Jews began immediately. The Board worked with the Swedish government helping subsidize Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian efforts in Hungary; they forged IDs and protective identity documents and found safehouses to protect Jews from deportation to death camps. Possibly 100,000 Jews were saved. Thousands more were evacuated from Axis territories such as Transnistria to safer areas. They prevailed upon FDR to shelter 982 European refugees - men, women and children - at Fort Ontario in Oswego, NY where they lived behind a barb wire fence: the only camp for refugees in the United States. They released details of the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz; its bombing, however, was not considered a military priority by the War Department.

After the War, DuBois continued as Deputy Chief Counsel for War Crimes in the case against I.G. Farben, the chemical conglomerate utilizing Jewish slave labor at Monowitz- Auschwitz III. I.G. Farben owned part of the company that manufactured Zyklon B, the gas pellets used to murder Jews in concentration camp gas chambers.

See 2014.1.46 One of 982 Jewish Refugees at Fort Ontario, Dorrit Blumenkranz Samples a Hot Dog; 2022.1.52 Press Photograph of Josiah DuBois, Jr. and Copy of His Report to the State Department.

--Michael D. Bulmash, K1966

Browse the Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection.