N AUGUST 1, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the representative in Switzerland of the World Jewish Congress, learned from a leading German industrialist that Adolf Hitler had ordered the extermination of all the Jews of Europe.

Riegner's informant, a high-ranking official of a firm employing more than 30,000 war workers, had access to Hitler's headquarters. It was there, he claimed, that he had heard the order discussed. He even identified the precise instrument of murder — prussic acid, the lethal ingredient of Zyklon B gas.

Riegner took the German's revelation seriously because of earlier authenticated reports. On July 1, the Polish government-in-exile stated that 700,000 Jews had been massacred since the German invasion in September, 1939. On July 16, the Nazis had rounded up more than 18,000 Jews in Paris for deportation to the East.. Six days later, they began their "resettlement" of the remaining 380,000 Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. "Resettlement" involved the shipment of some 6,000 Jews daily by freight car to the concentration camp of Treblinka, where they were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.

Riegner realized that if his new information could be authenticated and transmitted to the United States and Britain, as well as to his colleagues of the World Jewish Congress, it might set in motion programs of rescue. He had gained the friendship and trust of Paul Chapin Squire, the American consul in Geneva, and Squire permitted him to use State Department cable facilities to send messages to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress. This assured security of communication and also kept State informed of Riegner's findings.

Riegner now checked his German informant's reputation through the extraordinary channels open in neutral Geneva. He learned that the industrialist had twice before transmitted secret information whose accuracy had been borne out by later events. Once he had revealed significant changes in the Nazi high command long before the Allies were aware of dissension. More remarkably, he had reported the precise date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union five weeks in advance. Riegner now decided that he had sufficient justification to report his news to the United States Government and to key officials of his own organization. When he contacted the U.S. Consulate, he learned that Squire was on vacation, so on August 11, he met with the vice-consul, Howard Elting, Jr. Riegner described the German informant's background and his past help to the Allies and handed Elting the text of a cable to he sent to Rabbi Wise:

RECEIVED ALARMING REPORT THAT IN FUHRER'S HEADQUARTERS PLAN DESCUSSED AND UNDER CONSIDERATION ACCORDING TO WHICH ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED GERMANY NUMBERING 3½ FOUR MILLION SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATEON IN EAST BE EXTERMINATED AT ONE BLOW TO RESOLVE ONCE FOR ALL THE JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE STOP ACTION REPORTED PLANNED FOR AUTUMN METHODS UNDER DISCUSSION INCLUDING PRUSSIC ACID STOP WE TRANSMIT INFORMATION WITH ALL NECESSARY RESERVATION AS EXACTITUDE CANNOT BE CONFIRMED STOP INFORMANT STATED TO HAVE CLOSE CONNECTIONS WITH HIGHEST GERMAN AUTHORITIES AND HIS REPORTS GENERALLY SPEAKING RELIABLE.

In a covering memorandum to the State Department, Elting wrote: "When I mentioned that this report seemed fantastic to me, Riegner said that it had struck him in the same way but that from the fact that mass deportation had been taking place since July 16 as confirmed by reports received by him from Paris, Holland, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague it was always conceivable that such a diabolical plan was actually being considered by Hitler."

Elting requested that the American and Allied governments attempt to seek confirmation through their intelligence sources and closed with a strong endorsement of Riegner: "For what it is worth, my personal opinion is that Riegner is a serious and balanced individual and that he would never have come to the Consulate with the above report if he had not had confidence in his informant's reliability and if he did not seriously consider that the report might well contain an element of truth."

Riegner gave the same draft cable to the British Consulate, adding as a precaution: "Inform and consult New York." He addressed it to Sydney Silverman, a Liverpool attorney, member of Parliament and chairman of the British section of the World Jewish Congress. This telegram also was sent through diplomatic channels because of wartime censorship regulations and to ensure privacy.

When Riegner's cable and Elting's memorandum were received by the State Department's Division of European Affairs, they were circulated for comments and action. The reaction was one of universal disbelief. Paul Culbertson, assistant chief of the Division, wrote: "I don't like the idea of sending this on to Wise but if the Rabbi hears later that we had the message and didn't let him in on it he might put up a kick."

In his comment, Elbridge Durbrow recommended: "... it does not appear advisable in view of the ... fantastic nature of the allegation, and the impossibility of our being of any assistance if such action were taken, to transmit the information to Dr. Stephen Wise as suggested."

The cable was suppressed. This was the first of many similar decisions. On August 17, a telegram was sent to the senior U.S. diplomat in Switzerland, Leland Harrison, minister of the legation in Bern, informing him that Riegner's message had not been delivered to Rabbi Wise "in view of the apparently unsubstantiated nature of the information."

That same day, the London branch of the World Jewish Congress received a copy of Riegner's cable from the British Foreign Office, which had not seen fit to suppress it. Acting on Riegner's instruction to "inform New York," the message was forwarded to Rabbi Wise, but did nor reach him until August 28.

Wise immediately got in touch with Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. Welles, although usually sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, had initialed the decision to suppress Riegner's cable, and he persuaded Wise to refrain from any public announcement of the extermination order until official confirmation could be obtained. Welles then informed Myron C. Taylor, president Roosevelt's special representative at the Vatican, of the Riegner message and asked him to check its allegations with Vatican Sources.

Meanwhile, in Geneva, Riegner was undergoing what he was to call "my great agony." After 16 days of silence, he was notified by the Geneva Consulate that his telegram to Rabbi Wise had not been delivered because his information had not been substantiated.

On August 26, the U.S. ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., forwarded to Washington an eight page, single-spaced memorandum prepared by Ernest Frischer, a member of the Czechoslovak State Council. Biddle, a personal friend of President Roosevelt, considered this document so significant that he sent a copy directly to the White House. Describing the fate of the Jews of Central Europe, Frischer wrote:

"There is no precedent for such organized wholesale dying in all Jewish history, nor indeed in the whole history of mankind." He added: "This war is not being waged with bombs and guns alone, nor will the nature of the coming world be determined only by the outcome of battles. The victory of morality is the issue in this war, Should we succeed in no more than mitigating the enemy's foul design against his most hated victim it would amount to partial victory..."

As these reports filtered through the Washington bureaucracy, which was still awaiting the Vatican's reply to Welles, another voice was heard — this time from France.

Dr. Donald A. Lowrie an American representing the World Alliance of Young Men's Christian Associations, returned to Geneva from his assignment in unoccupied southern France, where he had observed the treatment of Jews in the concentration camps established by the Vichy government. He described the selection of Jews for deportation, "about the object of which no one had any illusions: falling into German hands meant either forced labor or slow extermination in the Jewish 'reservation' in Poland." Lowrie added that parents being deported were given the option of taking their children to an unknown fate or leaving than behind. Most parents chose to leave them. Before the deportation began, parents and children were separated. "Eyewitnesses," wrote Lowrie, "will never forget the moment when these truckloads of children left the camps with parents crying in one last gaze to fix an image to last an eternity.

After eleven weeks of U.S, inaction, Gerhart Riegner reports: "Four million Jews are on the verge of annihilation...."

N OCTOBER 10, at the Vatican, Luigi Cardinal Maglione, Papal Secretary of State, handed Myron Taylor's deputy, Harold H. Tittmann, Jr., an informal, unsigned response to Taylor's inquiries. The note said that reports of severe measures against the Jews had also reached the Vatican, but that it had not been possible to check their accuracy.

"I regret that Holy See could not have been more helpful," Tittmann reported, "but it was evident from the attitude of the Cardinal that it has no practical suggestions to make."

But other reports mounted higher and higher on Washington desks. One of the most dramatic was that of two non-Jewish escapees, who arrived in Geneva with details of the German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the death of 50,000 Jews of Lvov and the German use of Jewish corpses for the manufacture of fertilizer. Sumner Welles, troubled by the mounting volume of evidence tending to substantiate the Riegner revelations of August 8 and beleaguered by prominent Jews requesting clarification of similar reports in the American press, cabled Minister Leland Harrison in Bern to submit any further material supporting the existence of an extermination order. Welles said that Riegner and Richard Lichtheim, the representative in Geneva of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, would call upon Harrison and that he was to telegraph any factual evidence they might submit.

The American Minister met with Riegner and Lichtheim on October 22. Riegner, frantic after 11 weeks of U.S. inaction following his momentous message, handed the Minister a three-page summary of the Nazi persecutions.

"Four million Jews," it began, "are on the verge of complete annihilation by a deliberate policy consisting of starvation, the ghetto system, slave labor, deportation under inhuman conditions and organized mass murder by shooting, poisoning and other methods. This policy of total destruction has been repeatedly proclaimed by Hitler and is now being carried out."

The Riegner statement urged public denunciations of the Nazi acts and warnings to the German satellites of future Allied retribution.

Riegner had hoped to conceal the identity of his German informant, but the State Department's skepticism convinced him that he could no longer keep this secret, so he banded Harrison a sealed envelope containing the German's name and official title. Lichtheim was never told his identity, and Riegner and Harrison guarded their secret from everyone but the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to protect the German.

At this meeting, Riegner also said that Professor Paul Guggenheim, a distinguished Swiss lawyer, had been told by a high official of the International Red Cross that the latter also had heard of a German order dooming the Jews.

On October 24, Harrison, possibly suspecting an unsympathetic audience in the State Department's Division of European Affairs, incorporated the details of this meeting in a personal letter to Welles. (This correspondence, together with a follow-up letter of October 31, was never deposited in the official State Department archives. Both were discovered in the unpublished private papers of Sumner Welles.)

Harrison's first letter informed Welles that the German industrialist, whose name he now knew, was indeed a member of the inner circle of advisers of the Nazi war economy. Furthermore, he verified Riegner's report that Professor Guggenheim had learned of the German order from a high Red Cross official, Carl J. Burckhardt.

Harrison, determined to follow up these leads, assigned Consul Squire to take a sworn affidavit from Professor Guggenheim. This the Consul did on October 29.

The major points of Professor Guggenheim's affidavit were:

"There exists an order of Hitler demanding the extermination (Ausrottung) of all Jews in Germany and in the occupied countries up to December 31, 1942....

"The existence of Hitler's order ... has reached Professor Guggenheim's informant through two sources each independent of the other, as follows.

"(a) An official of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Berlin;

"(b) An official of the German Ministry of War at Berlin."

In November, 1942, Welles summoned Rabbi Wise to Washington and showed him the evidence from Switzerland, which supported the revelations of Gerhart Riegner. Welles then released Wise from his agreement to refrain from publicizing the German extermination order.

In spite of the stepped-up pace of Nazi killings, most of Europe's Jews were still alive. A powerful demonstration of the Allies' outrage and of their determination to punish those who had committed crimes against innocent civilians might have forced the Germans and their satellites to moderate their policies. The tide of war was beginning to turn. The Allies had landed in North Africa, and in the East, the Soviet Union, far from crumbling before Hitler's armored legions, had launched a massive counterattack.

Rabbi Wise wrote to his friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, oil December 2, 1942:

"I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing with magic and, as I believe, heaven-inspired strength at this time. But you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass massacres ... and it is indisputable that as many as two million civilian Jews have been slain."

As Rabbi Wise asked Roosevelt to meet with Jewish leaders to plan a way to combat the newest Nazi threat, one million who would die at Auschwitz from the effects of prussic acid were still alive. The massive new crematoria installations were not yet ready, the combination of hydrogen and cyanide in the amethyst-blue crystals had not yet been tossed into the "shower room" where naked men, women and children would fight for breath before the clawing, convulsive moment of suffocation.

The Nazi mask had now been lifted. The euphemisms that had been used for extermination, words like "resettlement" and reassuring descriptions of Jewish reservations," were no longer believed in Europe. The Jews were bound for destruction. Everyone knew it, anti the press reported it freely. Oil December 7, 1942, the London Tinges said, "In all parts of Europe the Germans are calling meetings, or issuing orders, to bring about what they call 'the final solution of the Jewish problem.' "

Members of a delegation that Stephen Wise led to the White House on December 8 handed the President a 20-page document titled Blue Print For extermination, a country-by-country analysis of annihilation. The President assured his visitors that the United States and its allies would take every step to end the crimes "and save those who may yet be saved."

Wise emphasized that the tide of war had turned and that Jews everywhere recognized that an Allied victory would end the Nazi terror. The question, he said, was whether any of them would be alive to see that great day.

In the months of apathy that lay ahead, Stephen Wise's question would be asked again and again. Those who opposed specific action for the rescue of the Jews would argue that an Allied victory offered the only remedy for their plight, that any overt moves to save them would somehow diminish the war effort. This placed those American Jews who wished to take direct action in an awkward position. If they fought for more vigorous U.S. policies toward their coreligionists, their own patriotism might be impugned.

The line of reasoning that led to the abandonment of the Jews had at its core the belief that rescue was incompatible with the Allies' principal war aims. The politicians, diplomats and military leaders who shared this view brushed aside the question that Wise and his colleagues raised gently with the President — what would victory mean to the dead?

But beyond the issue of human survival lay other fundamental questions. What was the effect of Allied disinterest on the captive peoples of Europe who might shelter the oppressed at the risk of their own lives ... or on Axis troops weighing the commission of atrocities ... or on churchmen in German-occupied lands wrestling with their consciences ... or on German commanders contemplating their own futures?

The United States uniquely represented the aspirations of the beleaguered peoples of the earth. They clutched at news from America, listened at peril of death to Allied broadcasts, waited for the material power of the United States to free them from enslavement. Many would risk their lives to shelter countrymen who happened to be Jewish, but they knew that if the United States and its allies did not exploit rescue opportunities, the Jews would be doomed. In a moral and ethical sense, the expectations of a continent in captivity would also be doomed.

But before December, 1942, the United States and its allies, far from engaging in rescue efforts, had not even used words as weapons in the battle to save the Jews.

It was not until December 17 that Britain, the United States, the U.S.S.R. and the governments-in-exile issued their first joint statement directly condemning the Nazi extermination of the Jews. This was triggered by the indignation of the British and speeded by a committee of prominent Jews who enlisted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's support. On the day that Rabbi Wise and his delegation visited the President, a first draft of this declaration, written by the British, arrived at the State Department. Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave the draft declaration his personal attention.

Hull was over 70, a handsome, stooped Tennessean whom Roosevelt had selected for his political rather than diplomatic prowess. Although ardently opposed to Nazi policies in the prewar period, the Secretary had mirrored his President's caution in dealing with Hitler, restricting himself largely to informal protests to German diplomats in Washington. He had neither the time nor conviction to go deeply into the refugee problem and, in fact, became short-tempered and rigid when faced with opportunities for rescue.

Such was the case in 1940, when a refugee ship carrying Jews who had escaped from France before the German Occupation was turned away from Mexico. Mexican authorities stated that the visas carried by the passengers had been sold illegally, and the ship was ordered to return to Europe, and the Jews to certain doom.

When the vessel made a brief stop for coal at Norfolk, Va., a delegation of American Jews, encouraged by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited Hull. Among them was Dr. Nahum Goldmann, a persuasive and tough-minded Zionist leader. Goldmann urged the Secretary to grant the refugees asylum although they lacked U.S. immigration papers. Hull swung around in his chair and pointed to an American flag. "Dr. Goldmann," he said, "I took an oath to protect that flag and obey the laws of my country, and you are asking me to break those laws."

Goldmann reminded Hull that several weeks earlier a number of anti-Nazi German sailors had leaped overboard as their ship departed from New York. The United States was not yet at war with Germany, and the Coast Guard had picked up the sailors and given them sanctuary at Ellis Island. Goldmann suggested that he might telegraph the passengers in Norfolk and ask them to jump overboard. "Surely they will not be allowed to drown," he said. "The Coast Guard will pick them up and they will be safe for the rest of the war."

"Dr. Goldmann," said Hull sharply, "you are the most cynical man I have ever met."

Unabashed, Goldmann replied, "I ask you; Mr. Secretary, who is the cynical one, I who wish to save these innocent people or you who are prepared to send there back to their death?"

Hull dismissed the delegation, refusing to shake Goldmann's hand. But in the end, he yielded to Mrs. Roosevelt's intervention, and the refugees were admitted.

To obtain U.S. visas, Jewish refugees from Hitler are asked to produce reports from the German police

OOSEVELT USUALLY ignored Hull in the shaping of foreign policy, but even those who considered Hull an intellectual liability found him a kindly man. Anyone who raised the possibility that anti-Semitism might be at the root of his seeming indifference to the plight of the Jews was told quietly that Mrs. Hull was a Jewess.

This, then, was the Secretary of State who examined the British draft of the proposed Allied declaration on war crimes. The statement began:

"The attention of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, of the Soviet Government and of the United States Government has been drawn to reports from Europe which leave no room for doubt that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish origin in all the territories in Europe over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe."

Hull made one change in the first paragraph. He deleted the phrase which leave no room for doubt and inserted the word numerous so the sentence read, "The attention of His Majesty's Government ... has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities...."

This lessened the impact of the unqualified statement about Nazi Germany's extermination of the Jews, but the remainder of the declaration left no doubt that the Allies were talking about wholesale murder.

When the draft was circulated in the State Department's Division of European Affairs, it underwent a more hostile scrutiny.

The sharpest critic was a 38-year-old Foreign Service officer named Robert Borden Reams, who was destined to play a minor but persistent role in the evolution of American policy. Reams, a Pennsylvania farm boy, had worked as a salesman and hotel manager before passing the Foreign Service examination.

After experience in American consulates in France, South Africa, Denmark and Switzerland, he had joined the Division of European Affairs in 1942. His primary duties were as desk officer for South Africa and Greenland, but at some point during the year, he added a new chore. He was put in charge of "Jewish questions" for the Division. All communications dealing with such problems were channeled through him, and he was frequently consulted on refugee matters, although he has described specialists in refugee affairs as "people who live off the misery of others." (In recent years, the man once in charge of "Jewish questions" has referred to his wartime role as that of a "master sergeant," simply taking orders from higher authority.)

Secretary Hull delegated refugee and visa questions to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, whose orders, as Reams knew, were to curb any special efforts on behalf of Jews, as these would create a diversion from the war effort. This restrictive approach, Reams believed, was not only Long's wish but also that of Long's good friend, the President of the United States.

When Reams was handed the British draft declaration of December, 1942, he reacted much more negatively than Secretary Hull. He objected to its release, giving his reasons in a memorandum to his superior in the Division:

"While the statement does not mention the soap, glue, oil and fertilizer factories, it will be taken as additional confirmation of these stories and will support Rabbi Wise's contention of official confirmation from State Department sources. The way will then be open for further pressure from interested groups for action which might affect the war effort."

Although Under Secretary Welles himself had acknowledged the accuracy of information about the planned Nazi massacre of the Jews, Reams blamed the spread of "atrocity stories" on Gerhart Riegner. In fact, Reams had initialed similar reports circulating within the State Department, submitted by the Polish government in-exile, by Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., the U.S. ambassador to seven exiled governments, by representatives of the YMCA and by numerous escapees of various religious faiths.

Reams also revealed a curious reservation about the suggested declaration. Another memo of his warned that the statement proposed by the British Government "would be accepted by the Jewish communities of the world as complete proof of the stories which are now being spread about. These people would undoubtedly be pleased that the Governments of the United Nations were taking an active interest in the fare of their fellows in Europe but in fact their fears would be increased by such a statement. In addition the various Governments of the United Nations would expose themselves to increased pressure from all sides to do something more specific in order to aid these people.

A few days later, Ream's expertise on Nazi-Jewish matters was again used. The American minister to Costa Rica cabled that President Rafael Calderón wished to protest the Nazi order to exterminate the Jews if reports of that order were correct. Reams replied that the order had not been confirmed, and he added: "For your confidential information the source of the reported order ... was a Jewish leader in Geneva."

Reams suggested that Calderón might associate himself with the war-crimes declaration that he himself had opposed. The joint declaration was released on December 17, 1942, by the Belgian, Czechoslovak, Greek, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norwegian, Polish, Soviet, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslav governments and by the French National Committee.

In the wake of the first Allied condemnation of war crimes, suggestions for the rescue of the Jews poured into Washington and London. The proposals included:

1. A direct appeal to the Axis powers via the neutrals for the release of the Jews, with an Allied guarantee to find them temporary havens until the end of the war.
2. The temporary suspension of American immigration quotas to expedite the flow of refugees, which had slowed to a trickle.
3. Relaxation of time Anglo-American blockade to permit the shipment of food, clothing, medical supplies and funds to Jews imprisoned in concentration camps.
4. A concerted effort to persuade the neutrals to open their frontiers to all escaping Jews.
5. Pressure upon the International Red Cross to provide the same safeguards for imprisoned Jews as for prisoners of war or interned civilians. These had been denied because time Germans had declared the Jews to be "stateless" — common criminals. The International Red Cross had in effect accepted these German designations.
6. Demands for the British to revoke their

White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to a total of 75,000 within a five-year period ending in March, 1941.

The man most concerned with this deluge of ideas was Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Long, a 61-year-old Missourian, was a descendant of the politically active Breckinridges of Kentucky and Longs of Virginia. In the first of what would prove to be an unending' series of misjudgments, "Breck" Long had entitled his master's thesis The Impossibility of India's Revolt from England. He began a conventional law practice in St. Louis, but enhanced both his career and his family tree by marrying the wealthy granddaughter of Francis Preston Blair, the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1808.

Mrs. Long's wealth enabled "Breck" to contribute substantial funds to the 1916 Presidential campaign of his former professor, Woodrow Wilson. In 1917, Wilson repaid this debt by appointing Long his Third Assistant Secretary of State. Intensely conservative in most matters, Long nevertheless supported Wilson's internationalism and the League of Nations. His new State Department duties included supervision of Far Eastern affairs, and, as he expressed it in his diary, "I am surprised how much can he done without any knowledge of it on my part."

His frequent financial contributions to the Democratic National Committee–loans and gifts of $130,000 one year–included a generous offering to Franklin Roosevelt's campaign in 1932. As a floor manager at the Democratic National Convention, he further ingratiated himself with the nominee. On April 20, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Italy. The new ambassador was impressed by Mussolini. "The head of the Government is one of the most remarkable persons," he wrote. "And he is surrounded by interesting men. And they are doing a unique work in an original manner, so I am enjoying it all."

In a letter to Roosevelt in June, 1933, he described improvements in Italian efficiency, cleanliness and morale: "Many men are in uniform. The Fascisti in their black shirts are apparent in every community. They are dapper and well dressed and stand up straight and lend an atmosphere of individuality and importance to their surroundings.... The trains are punctual, well equipped, and fast. The running times have been decreased 20 percent to 30 percent and efficiency increased 100 percent."

Two years later, Long's laudatory views were modified and he began to recognize the threat of fascism. Nevertheless, as ambassador to Italy, he cautioned against American economic measures to halt Mussolini's assault on Ethiopia, and he was quoted as calling victory in Ethiopia the "fruitful harvest of Mussolini's enterprise. "

In January, 1940, Long was appointed Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for no fewer than 23 of the State Department's 42 divisions, including the Visa Division, which served as overseer of foreigners entering the United States, and the Special Division, which acted as watchdog over transmission of American funds overseas. Long's jurisdiction also extended to prisoners of war and civilian internees.

Breckinridge Long, of course, had not originated United States immigration policy. He had inherited a law passed in 1924 that restricted immigration quotas to some 150,000 aliens a year. The law had been buttressed with an incredible mosaic of regulations. Though directed originally at 19th-century abuses, they now kept out 20th-century Jews.

With Long supervising the Visa Division, there would he no reform in the cumbersome procedures under which a Jew who escaped the Gestapo had to produce an official police record from his hometown in Germany attesting to his good character. On this matter, Roosevelt was ambivalent. Afraid that the Jewish issue was a political liability, he helped to doom European Jewry by inaction, even as he proclaimed that America was the asylum for the oppressed. Roosevelt had repeatedly turned down suggestions for liberalization of the immigration laws and had refused to issue Executive Orders that would make their implementation less harsh.

But if Roosevelt personally was sympathetic to the victims of Nazism, Long seemed untroubled by such considerations. In suppressing ant influx of Jews, Breckinridge Long believed he was protecting the nation against all invasion by radicals and foreign agents. Through the years, he persisted in his theories about enemy agents entering as refugees, although the record indicates that only one enemy agent entered the United States in the guise of a refugee. As it happened, the man was not Jewish.

Long's principal aides in handling refugee matters were George L. Brandt, his executive assistant; Howard K. Travers, chief of the Visa Division; and Robert Borden Reams, specialist in the Division of European Affairs. In carrying out refugee policies, they were supported fully by the White House. Thus, at the beginning of 1943, as hopeful suggestions for the relief of the Jews poured into Washington, Breckinridge Long sat firmly in command under Cordell Hull, determined to protect the Republic from the foreigner seeking sanctuary from murder.

It was not easy. The wrath of Britain had been aroused by documentation of the Nazi crimes, and on January 20, the British proposed a new approach. They called for international cooperation in settling the dispossessed and said that if such an international effort were undertaken, Britain and her colonies would examine the possibility of accepting more refugees in spite of the shortage of ships.

A month passed without an American response. On February 20, Richard Kidston Law, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, urged the American embassy in London to hasten a State Department reply. Law pointed out that "the temper of the House of Commons was such that the Government would be unable to postpone beyond the following week some reply to the persistent demands to know what it is going to do to help the Jews."

Law's implied warning was effective. On February 25, Secretary Hull replied to the British suggestion of January 20, stating that intergovernmental action was obviously necessary. His note pointed out proudly that the United States had initiated the Evian Conference of 1939, which had in fact established an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.

Hull failed to add that the Evian Conference had simply confirmed the unwillingness of the world to accept Jews fleeing from the Nazis; nor did he point our that the Intergovernmental Committee was, for all practical purposes, defunct. Instead, Hull suggested an Anglo-American meeting for a "preliminary exploration" of ways and means to help the refugees. Its recommendations would be implemented by the aforementioned Intergovernmental Committee. But no matter what the recommendations might he, Hull wrote, the United States would be bound by its immigration laws. As if to stress that the problem was not uniquely Jewish, he added another proviso: "'Idle refugee problem should not be considered as being confined to persons of any particular race or faith."

On March 3, before the British had fully digested the U.S. reply, the State Department issued a press release quoting the contents of the American note. This brought Sir Ronald Campbell, of the British Embassy, to the State Department in a hurry. He told Acting Secretary Welles that the premature publication of the American reply embarrassed Foreign Secretary Eden, since it made it appear "that the United States Government had taken the initiative in the matter, whereas it had been the British Government...."

Sir Ronald's explanation of Mr. Eden's distress irritated Mr. Welles. 'The Acting Secretary replied icily that he regretted reaching the conclusion that the British Government wanted to create the impression that it "was the great outstanding champion of the Jewish people and the sole defender of the rights of freedom of religion and of individual liberty, that it was being held back in its desire to undertake practical steps to protect the Jews in Europe and elsewhere and to safeguard individual rights and liberties by the reluctance of the United States Government and by the unwillingness of the United States itself to take any action for the relief of these unfortunate people other than words or gestures."

Sir Ronald, somewhat taken aback by Welles's vehemence, asked for documentation of this charge, but the Acting Secretary ignored his request. He remarked that "it was a matter notorious to us that such a campaign of undermining United States foreign policy had been pursued by certain elements within the British Government for a long time past."

In this atmosphere of competitive humanitarianism, preparations began for the ill-fated Bermuda Conference. But during the two months before it opened, there was scarcely any indication that the Allies had become more interested in aiding the Jews. On the contrary, there was an intensification of the American effort to stem the flow of information.

On January 21, 1943, little more than a month after the Allied statement warning the Germans about mistreatment of the Jews, Rieglier provided the American Legation in Bern with a new and detailed description of Nazi atrocities. Minister Harrison forwarded it in the usual manner, that is, to Rabbi Wise via the State Department. His cable number 482, comprising four pages of horror, reported that the Germans were killing 6,000 Jews each day in Poland. It was read by Sumner Welles, who passed it on to Rabbi Wise. His American Jewish Congress immediately began planning a mass meeting at New York's Madison Square Garden. But on February 10, before the rally took place, Harrison received a strange communication from the State Department. Its file number was 354, and it began by referring to his most recent cable:

YOUR 482, JANUARY 21, 3 P.M. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT IN THE FUTURE REPORTS SUBMITTED TO YOU FOR TRANSMISSION TO PRIVATE PERSONS IN THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT BE ACCEPTED UNLESS EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE SUCH ACTION ADVISABLE. IT IS FELT THAT BY SENDING SUCH PRIVATE MESSAGES WHICH CIRCUMVENT NEUTRAL COUNTRIES' CENSORSHIP WE RISK THE POSSIBILITY THAT NEUTRAL COUNTRIES MIGHT FIND IT NECESSARY TO TAKE STEPS TO CURTAIL OR ABOLISH OUR OFFICIAL SECRET MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

Harrison was astounded.

The United States and Britain had publicly pledged to come to the aid of the Jews and to punish war criminals. To do that, both countries required continuing information about Nazi activities. Yet the United States was now instructing him to reject one of his most fertile sources of news from occupied Europe at a time when the war had distinctly turned to the Allies' advantage. With the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, a wave of optimism had swept across the Allied world.

Harrison would have been puzzled further had he known that the cable had been initialed by Welles. Later, it would become clear that Welles had done so without realizing the implications. (Neither Breckinridge Long nor Robert Borden Reams was involved in its drafting.)

Before the selection of the American delegation for the Bermuda Conference, Sir Ronald Campbell had visited Breckinridge Long with another British suggestion: since North Africa was now controlled by the Allies, the 20,000 refugees in Spain could be evacuated immediately to that area. This would make it possible for the Spanish to receive other refugees of various nationalities, and thus a cycle of sanctuary could be established.

Long disagreed with this notion. North Africa, he pointed out, was a political entity controlled by the French, and therefore the United States had no jurisdiction over such matters. At this point, Long did not express his fear that the arrival of Jews might annoy North Africa's Muslim population, but later Roosevelt, Hull and Long would make it clear that this was their dominant consideration.

Dr. Harold Willis Dodds, president of Princeton University, was selected to head the American delegation to Bermuda. The other American delegates were Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Scott Lucas of Illinois. Robert Borden Reams was appointed secretary of the delegation.

The selection of Congressman Bloom created consternation in the American Jewish community. His intellectual resources in general and courage on the refugee issue in particular were notably deficient. Bloom's appointment, nevertheless, provided the Roosevelt Administration with a useful facade.

During the period before the Bermuda meeting, the State Department received many dispatches dealing with the step-by-step destruction of European Jewry.

They were ignored when the State Department drew up a memorandum for the guidance of the delegates to the Bermuda Conference. The Americans were instructed not to limit the discussion to Jewish refugees; not to raise questions of religious faith or race in appealing for public support or promising U.S. funds; not to make commitments regarding shipping space for refugees; not to expect naval escorts or safe conducts for refugees; not to delay the wartime shipping program by suggesting that homeward-bound, empty transports pick up refugees en route; not to bring refugees across the ocean if any space for their settlement was available in Europe; not to pledge funds, since this was the prerogative of Congress and the President; not to expect any changes in the U.S. immigration laws; not to ignore the needs either of the war effort or of the American civilian population for food and money; and not to establish new agencies for refugees, since the Intergovernmental Committee already existed for that purpose.

On the positive side, funds could be guaranteed to neutral nations for the support and evacuation of refugees. With this mandate for inaction, the American delegation left for the sunny sands of Bermuda. The conference opened on Monday, April 19, 1943.

Only the texts of the opening speeches by Mr. Law and Dr. Dodds were released to the press. The remainder of the conference was shrouded in secrecy, but the Law-Dodds statements were enough to cause dismay.

According to Law, victory in the war provided the only real solution to the refugee problem, and the persecuted people "should not be betrayed ... into a belief that aid is coming to them, when, in fact, we are unable to give them immediate succor."

Dodds reiterated this point and added: "The problem is too great for solution by the two governments here represented."

While the Allies hold a conference in Bermuda, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto wage a doomed battle against the Nazis

HE LONDON Observer commented: "Here are the leisurely beach hotels of the Atlantic luxury island, where well-dressed gentlemen assemble to assure each other in the best Geneva fashion that really nothing much can be done.... The opening speeches of the conference have been widely noted in this country, and noted with dismay and anger. We have been told that this problem is beyond the resources of Britain and America combined ... If Britain and America cannot help, who can? ... What is so terrible about these speeches is not only their utter insensitiveness to human suffering. It is the implied readiness of the two greatest powers on earth to humiliate themselves, to declare themselves bankrupt and impotent, in order to evade the slight discomfort of charity."

Opening day in Bermuda was also upsetting to Breckinridge Long, though for another reason. His diary entry for April 20 reads:

"The 'Bermuda Conference' on Refugees has been born. It has taken a lot of nursing but is now in existence. One Jewish faction under the leadership of Rabbi Stephen Wise has been so assiduous in pushing their particular cause in letters and telegrams to the President, the Secretary and Welles in public meetings to arouse emotions — in full-page newspaper advertisements–in resolutions to be presented to the conference–that they are apt to produce a reaction against their interest. Many public men have signed their broadsides and Senator Edwin C.J Johnson of Colorado introduced their resolution into the Senate. One danger ... is that their activities may lend color to the charges of Hitler that we are fighting this war on account of and at the instigation and direction of our Jewish citizens, for it is only necessary for Nazi propaganda to republish in the press of neutral countries the resolution introduced in the United States Senate and broadsides bearing the names of high Government officials in order to substantiate their charges in the eyes of doubting neutrals ... It might easily be a definite detriment to our war effort."

With the exception of a brief press release, no report of the Bermuda Conference was ever published. The unpublished papers, however, shed light on its "deliberations."

According to these records, the British chief delegate, Richard Kidston Law, added some "Don'ts" to the long list brought by his American friends. Britain would not consider a direct appeal to the Germans, would not exchange prisoners for refugees or lift the blockade of Europe for the shipment of relief supplies. Law cited the danger of dumping on the Allies large numbers of refugees, some of whom might be Axis sympathizers masquerading as oppressed persons.

Sol Bloom, flattered to have been invited to a historical meeting, but sensing suddenly that history was being delayed rather than made, spoke up. He suggested rather forcefully that the United States and Britain make an effort to admit refugees in large numbers. Finally, President Dodds silenced him with the reminder that the delegates were bound by U.S. policy.

Robert Borden Reams contributed the observation that the State Department, like the Foreign Office, was opposed to any negotiations with the German Government.

The potential exchange of refugees for war prisoners was dismissed without discussion, and it was agreed that questions relating to the Allied blockade of Europe were beyond the scope of the conference. Shipping specialists attached to each delegation ruled out the use of Allied ships to carry refugees, but a British expert made a positive suggestion. It occurred to him that there were Portuguese ships that might bring as many as 15,000 refugees to the Portuguese colony of Angola. Reams observed that the Portuguese Government might not wish to have any refugees in Angola. Someone proposed that the State Department might negotiate this question with the Portuguese, but President Dodds disagreed, recommending that this issue be handled by the Intergovernmental Committee. That took care of that matter — forever.

Far from the diplomatic niceties of Bermuda, a harsh drama was being enacted. On the same day that the conference opened, the Germans launched their final assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. Reinforced troops and police moved against the 60,000 Jews remaining of the original half-million inhabitants (more than 300,000 had already been deported and tens of thousands had perished from typhus, starvation and murder in the street).

While the United States and Great Britain were ruling out inconvenient methods of rescue at Bermuda, the ghetto fighters were simplifying the refugee problem by their heroic death. They fought against German armor with homemade bombs, a few light machine guns and a handful of revolvers and rifles. With the exception of one British airdrop of Joint Distribution Committee funds from American Jewry, the outside world contributed nothing to the resistance.

On the ninth day of battle, the abandoned Jews of the ghetto sent a message to London: "Our closest allies must at last understand the degree of responsibility which arises from such apathy in face of an unparalleled crime committed by the Nazis against a whole nation.... The heroic rising, without precedent in history, of the doomed sons of the ghetto should at last awaken the world to deeds commensurate with the gravity of the hour."

It did not.

Thus April 19, 1943, marked not merely the opening day of the Bermuda Conference but the beginning of the end of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was also the eve of Passover, the holiday celebrating the exodus of the Jews from bondage in Egypt. In 1943, the events in Bermuda and Warsaw would not lead to a promised land. The Red Sea would not part.

The brief statement issued by the United States and Britain after the Bermuda Conference revealed no details of future action, but the delegates' principal "confidential" recommendations proposed that the moribund Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees be expanded, that paid administrators be hired and that the committee's responsibilities be enlarged.

The Bermuda Conference has faded from memory, along with other exercises in diplomatic futility. Even those who participated in it deplore its memory. Richard Kidston Law, who headed the British delegation, is now Lord Coleraine. Recently, he was asked about the events of Bermuda. He said:

"It was a conflict of self-justification, a facade for inaction. We said the results of the conference were confidential, but in fact there were no results that I can recall."

The State Department stalls for eight months on a plan to rescue 70,000 people — at a cost of $8.50 each

he Bermuda Conference was only one of many failures to take advantage of rescue opportunities in 1943. The most startling episode led to a written accusation and a near scandal that forced Franklin Roosevelt to take drastic action. This incident was triggered by the United States obstruction of the proposed rescue of 70,000 Rumanian Jews. Rumania, led by the dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, was allied to Germany. In 1941-42, Antonescu had deported 185,000 Jews from their native land. 'They had been brutally removed to primitive camps in Transnistria, a Ukrainian area north of Odessa. As the Soviet armies drove the Nazis back toward Transnistria, Antoncscu, envisioning an ultimate Allied victory and the later punishment of war criminals, underwent a change of heart. The Marshal let it be known to the Allies in early 1943 that he would bring the 70,000 survivors back to Rumania if their food, clothing and medicines were provided.

Once again, it was Gerhart Riegner who confirmed the information and proposed a rescue plan to Minister Harrison in Switzerland. About $600,000 ($8.50 per human being) would be needed. Certain Rumanians were willing to lend the money for repayment after the war. Riegner wanted the World Jewish Congress to transmit $25,000 as a first installment, to be deposited in a Swiss bank. It would not be released until after the German defeat, so the money could not aid the Nazi cause.

In accordance with U.S. wartime regulations, the State and Treasury Departments would have to agree to the issuance of a license to Riegner before the money could be sent. Harrison relayed Riegner's information on April 120. On May 17, Robert Borden Reams sent Breckinridge Long a memorandum about the message. "I have certain definite doubts about the subject matter referred to in the telegram. In the first place questions of this sort will properly fall within the competency of tile Intergovernmental Committee." Reams, having just returned from Bermuda, must have known that the committee had not yet been reorganized and was incapable of action,

Thanks to the intercession of Dr. Herbert Feis, the State Department's adviser on economic affairs (and, more recently, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian), the Riegner initiative was kept alive, but by July 15, State had still not acted. Fortunately, the Treasury's Division of Foreign Funds Control had become interested in the proposal. Under the energetic leadership of 34-year-old John Pehle, the Division approved the arrangements. But two more months passed before State consented to the rescue proposal. By that time, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare's representative in Bern objected in the absence of instructions from London. After six months of delay, Minister Harrison now cabled State: "Legation is uncertain to exercise authority granted by the Treasury to issue licenses to implement Riegner plan in the absence of the Department's specific instructions."

State and Treasury then prepared a joint message for Harrison, but before it was sent, Reams voiced his opposition in another memo to Long: "I feel that this proposal is objectionable from the Department's point of view. We are granting to a special group of enemy aliens relief measures which we have in the past denied to Allied peoples." He added chat the proposed rescue action would "incense the British," since we had not consulted them.

Long replied, explaining his approval of the license. As for the Jews, characterized as "enemy aliens" by Reams, "There is no available presently known method for the people for whom the funds are intended to leave the jurisdiction of the enemy."

State finally sent an equivocating message to Harrison that further convinced the Minister that the Department did not really wish him to issue the license. This added delay enraged Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. On November 24, his "My dear Cordell" letter informed the Secretary of State that months had elapsed since Hull himself had authorized the issuance of the license:

"Since programs of this character can be just as effectively vitiated by delay as they can by denial of the necessary licenses, your assistance is badly needed in order to expedite this matter."

Before Hull could act, the British Government introduced the most callous argument that had yet been raised on the subject of rescue.

On December 15, 1943, the Ministry of Economic Warfare addressed a letter to Ambassador John G. Winant in London, who immediately cabled its contents to Washington. The text, read in the light of what was then known of the Nazi extermination program, represented nothing less than a death sentence:

"The Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued ... They foresee that it is likely to prove almost if not quite impossible to deal with anything like the number of 70,000 refugees whose rescue is envisaged by the Riegner plan." During 1943, when the Foreign Office was concerned "with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews," Britain's 1939 White Paper on Palestine was choking off immigration to that haven. And in 1943, the United States, with an annual quota permitting the immigration of more than 150,000 persons, admitted a grand total of 23,725. Of these, only 4,705 were Jews fleeing from persecution.

On December 20, Henry Morgenthau and John Pehle visited Cordell Hull and Breckinridge Long. Hull had drafted a strong reply to the British, expressing "astonishment" at the attitude of His Majesty's Government, and Long announced proudly that Harrison had been ordered finally to issue the license to Riegner.

On December 23, 1943, eight months after Riegner's first description of relief possibilities in Rumania, he was personally handed his license, and a few days later, the first installment of $25,000 arrived. Eventually, some 48,000 Jews returned from Transnistria. Sickness, starvation and brutality had not been halted during the eight-month delay.

Three Federal employees — all Protestants — prepare a bitter report "on the acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews."

HE EPISODE convinced Henry Morgenthau and his colleagues at the Treasury Department that rescue activity must be removed from direct State Department control. To prove their case, they began to prepare a documented resume of State's ineptitude. They planned to take this directly to the President. As they studied the past record of the Department, they began to realize the magnitude of the duplicity involving cable number 354.

Before his recent death, Morgenthau said that this message from Washington Instructing Minister Harrison in Switzerland to cut off the flow of information about the desperate situation of the Jews shocked him more profoundly than anything else in the long chain of apathy.

Morgenthau was sure, however, that Sumner Welles had initialed cable number 354 without realizing its significance. Each day, Welles reviewed a mass of routine outgoing messages prepared by subordinates. Cable number 354, drafted as though it were a conventional administrative instruction, might easily have slipped by his scrutiny. On the surface, the State Department's refusal to let persons send private messages via its communication net seemed reasonable and justified. Nothing in the text indicated that it concerned the persecution of the Jews.

But the hidden meaning of cable number 354 was contained in its innocent introductory phrase, "Your 482, January 21." This referred Minister Harrison to his earlier message, which had detailed in the most precise manner the massacres in Poland and the ghettoization of survivors, the deportation of Rumanian Jews to Transnistria and the deliberate starvation of the remaining Jews of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Unless Welles had checked the text of 482 before initialing 354, he could not have realized the nature of the earlier message.

Morgenthau himself never saw the cable of suppression, but a minor State Department official had leaked word of its contents and its cross reference to a friend in Treasury, who had informed the Secretary. At his meeting with Hull and Breckinridge Long on December 20, 1913, Morgenthau had casually requested the complete text of 354. When Long sent a copy to his office, Morgenthau was not surprised to find that the cross-reference had been deleted.

The areas of deception were growing, and so was Morgenthau's indignation. He assigned the Treasury Department's general counsel, Randolph Paul, to check the original text of 354. Paul managed to get hold of an exact copy of the original, complete with its introductory cross-reference. Now Morgenthau, convinced of State Department perfidy, instructed Paul to prepare a paper documenting the eight months' delay. At the same time, he scheduled a meeting with the President for January 16.

Paul turned the project over to the chief counsel of the Foreign Funds Control Division, an intense young man named Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. DuBois became the principal architect of the paper, although he was given a major assist by John Pehle.

This 18-page narrative, prepared by three Protestants, was entitled REPORT TO THE SECRETARY ON THE ACQUIESCENE OF THIS GOVERNMENT IN THE MURDER OF THE JEWS. It was signed by Randolph Paul and has never before been published:

1. [State Department officials] have not only failed to use the Governmental machines at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.
2. They have not only failed to cooperate with private organizations in the efforts of these organizations to work out individual programs of their own, but have taken steps designed to prevent these programs from being put into effect.
3. They not only have failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe but in their official capacity have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.
4. They have tried to cover up their guilt by:
   1. concealment and misrepresentation;
   2. the giving of false and misleading explanations for their failures to act and their attempts to prevent action; and
   3. the issuance of false and misleading statements concerning the 'action' which they have taken to date."

The report also said: "While the State Department has been thus 'exploring' the whole refugee problem, without distinguishing between those who are in imminent danger of death and those who are not, hundreds of thousands of Jews have been allowed to perish."

The draft submitted to Morgenthau included a point-by-point chronology of State's listless response to rescue opportunities.

Morgenthau retitled the document PERSONAL REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT, condensed it by half and changed some of the language, but it remained tough and uncompromising.

When Morgenthau, Paul and Pehle visited the White House on Sunday, January 16, 1914, the Secretary handed the President his PERSONAL REPORT. Roosevelt read it quickly in their presence. The new version began with a direct attack, its emotion compensating for its syntax:

"You are probably not as familiar as I with the utter failure of certain officials in our State Department, who are charged with actually carrying out this policy, to take any effective action to prevent the extermination of the Jews in German-controlled Europe.... Although they have used devices such as setting up intergovernmental organizations to survey the whole refugee problem, ... making it appear that positive action could be expected, in fact nothing has been accomplished.... Whether one views this failure as being deliberate on the part of those officials handling the matter, or merely due to their incompetence, is not too important from my point of view. However, there is a growing number of responsible people and organizations today who have ceased to view our failure as the product of simple incompetence on the part of those officials ... handling this problem. They see plain Anti?Semitism motivating the actions of these State Department officials and, rightly or wrongly, it will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into a nasty scandal."

The document ended on a fervent note:

"The facts I have detailed in this report, Mr. President, came to the Treasury's attention as a part of our routine investigation of the licensing of the financial phases of the proposal of the World Jewish Congress for the evacuation of Jews from ... Rumania. The facts may thus be said to have come to light through accident. How many others of the same character are buried in State Department files is a matter I would have no way of knowing.... This much is certain, however. The matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile. The task is filled with difficulties. Only a fervent will to accomplish, backed by persistent and untiring effort can succeed where time is so precious."

Roosevelt reacted sympathetically to the report and to the comments of his visitors, as they amplified their criticism of the State Department. John Pehle, as head of Foreign Funds Control, argued forcefully that the rescue of the Jews would in no way impede economic warfare against the Axis. The lean young man who stood before the President of the United States backed his arguments with an arsenal of facts.

As Roosevelt listened to his exposition of the facts and fallacies of economic warfare, he must have noted Pehle's obvious talents and filed them for future reference. Later, this most political of Presidents would select the nonpolitical Pehle to direct a last-minute rescue operation.

As the Treasury representatives dissected the obstructive tactics of the State Department, Roosevelt must have realized that his own failure to liberalize refugee policies bore much of the responsibility. Furthermore, Morgenthau's PERSONAL REPORT contained political dynamite, and Roosevelt knew it. If it were made public, the damage to the prestige and good faith of his Administration would be incalculable.

Morgenthau's report aggravated an already serious situation. Only a few weeks earlier, the secret testimony of Breckinridge Long before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on November 26 had been released, arousing wide public protest. The committee had been considering a resolution urging "the creation by the President of a commission of diplomatic, economic and military experts to formulate and effectuate a plan of immediate action designed to save the surviving Jewish people of Europe from extinction at the hands of Nazi Germany."

In his testimony, Long denied the need for such a commission on the ground that State was already aiding rescue work in the most effective manner. "I have been in supervisory control and direction of its movements," he exclaimed, describing the teamwork between himself, George Brandt, Robert Borden Reams and Howard Travers, the chief of the Visa Division.

According to Long, the appointment of a Presidential rescue commission would signify a repudiation of the State Department's efforts and would reflect unfavorably upon the work of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.

This latter comment awakened the interest of Rep. Will Rogers, Jr. (D., Calif.), a cosponsor of the resolution. Rogers pointed out that the Intergovernmental Committee seemed to have no American office. "We have never known in the past exactly where to go," he told Long. "Is there any office of the Intergovernmental Committee anyplace other than in London?"

LONG: "No...."

ROGERS: "They have no branch office?"

LONG: "They have not up to now. But we have made that proposal to them."

The statement by Long that evoked the most bitter criticism was his claim that "We have taken into this country since the beginning of the Hitler regime and the persecution of the Jews, until today, approximately 580,000 refugees."

This was an utter misrepresentation of the facts. The official annual reports of the Immigration and Naturalization Service revealed that of the total of 176,930 aliens of all religions from all countries who entered the United States between July 1, 1933, and June 30, 1943, 165,756 were Jews. Of these, about 138,000 had escaped persecution. During this ten-year period, United States immigration quotas could have permitted the entry of over 1,500,000 aliens. Thus the number of Jews entering the United States (luring this period approximated 10 percent of the total number of immigrants permissible under law.

Long and Rep. Karl E. Mundt agreed with each other that it was not the American way to single out one group for special consideration:

Mundt said: "As a general policy for this country it is not good practice for us to establish a precedent, or if the precedent is already established, to emphasize it, whereby we pass legislation which singles out groups of people by their religion, or by their color or their faith, or their political affiliations, either for special consideration or for special penalty."

Long's view was that "the State Department has maintained that attitude all through, but the situation has come to a state of publicity today where I think the Jewish interests have emphasized the fate of the Jews as such...."

According to Long, there was one insurmountable obstacle — the shortage of ships. This, he said, presented the principal barrier to greater efforts by the United States.

This argument conflicted with the report by a study group on shipping and transportation that had met some months earlier and had reported its findings to the Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe. According to the representative of the Norwegian Journal of Commerce and Shipping, there were sufficient vessels available to transfer at least 50,000 Jews a month from the Balkans to Palestine or the Mediterranean ports. Furthermore, United States troop transports to Europe and Allied ships bearing food to Greece often returned empty.

Long closed his testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee by urging Congress to suspend any bills to set up a special Presidential rescue commission for the Jews. "The point is," he said, "that the historic attitude of the United States as a haven for the oppressed has not changed. The Department of State has kept the door open. It has been carefully screened, but the door is open and the demands for a wider opening cannot be justified for the time being because there just is not any transportation."

The repercussions of Breckinridge Long's testimony must have been on Franklin Roosevelt's mind as he listened to the Treasury Department's documented case against the State Department on January 16, 1944.

The criticism that had followed Long's appearance lent substance to the arguments for a Presidential rescue commission. It was very late, but not too late for a determined new effort. As the Secretary of the Treasury and his associates singled out opportunities offered and rejected, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that he would have to take action — and quickly. The Treasury men had been farsighted enough to bring along the suggested draft of an executive order establishing a War Refugee Board. Roosevelt reacted enthusiastically and proposed that Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson join Morgenthau and Hull as its nominal heads. He urged Morgenthau to discuss the proposal with the new Under Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.

That afternoon at 5:30, Morgenthau, Paul and Pehle met with the handsome, silver-haired Stettinius and with Roosevelt's assistant and confidant, Samuel I. Rosenman. Morgenthau and Pehle told Stettinius bluntly that some State Department officials, particularly Long, had obstructed rescue. Stettinius said that he was not surprised by Long's performance, since the Assistant Secretary had also bungled a proposed exchange of prisoners. Stettinius, who was planning an administrative reorganization of the State Department, said that Long would be assigned to congressional relations and removed from matters affecting refugees.

On January 22, 1914, only six days after the confrontation with the Treasury Department, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the establishment of the War Refugee Board. John Pehle was named acting executive director.

Executive Order 9417, creating the board, began by stating that "it is the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war."

For the first time since Hitler's accession to power in 1933, United States policy called for the rescue of the innocent. Seventeen months had passed since Gerhart Riegner's revelation that Hitler was carrying out his threat to eliminate every Jew in Europe. At least four million had perished during the period of Allied apathy. It was late, very late in the war. The German machinery of destruction was in full operation. Thousands of men, women and children were walking to their death each day. Adolf Eichmann was efficient and implacable, and he always managed to find cattle cars for his victims in spite of wartime shortages of transport.

In attempting to combat this slaughter, the War Refugee Board would work with a small staff, meager funds and in close contact with a State Department that had permitted the American tradition of sanctuary for the oppressed to be despoiled. Between 1933 and 1914, this tradition had been displaced by a combination of political expediency, diplomatic evasion, isolationism and indifference that played directly into the hands of Adolf Hitler even as he set in motion the plans for the greatest mass murder in history.