# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## War Refugee Board

On January 22, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9417, establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB) as an independent agency, subordinated directly to the President. Roosevelt instructed the WRB to take all measures to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death.

The creation of the WRB was largely the work of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and his dedicated staff at the Department of the Treasury, including general counsel Randolph Paul, assistant general council Josiah DuBois, Jr. and Foreign Funds Control chief John Pehle. Pressure from the American Jewish community and the U.S. Congress on the Roosevelt administration to take concrete steps on behalf of endangered European Jews increased following confirmation of the mass murder of Europe's Jews in late 1942, the failure of the Bermuda Conference on rescue in April 1943, and the growing outrage of American Jewry at how little was being done to rescue their European brethren. In the House of Representatives, the growing sense of urgency sparked a debate over a resolution urging rescue in November 1943.

Meanwhile, Morgenthau , shaken by the news of the "Final Solution" and convinced that the U.S. State Department and the British were doing everything possible to obstruct rescue efforts, met several times during 1943 with Revisionist Zionist activist Peter Bergson (a pseudonym for Hillel Kook). Bergson advocated a high profile presidential initiative on behalf of refugees that would have the authority to circumvent the State Department. It is possible that the discussions at these meetings influenced the conception of the WRB.

Morgenthau's staff, including Dubois, Paul, and Pehle, drafted a report to the president. Dated January 13, 1944, and issued under Paul's signature, the final version assigned blame to the State Department for the failure to rescue Jews. It stated bluntly: “Unless remedial steps of a drastic nature are taken, and taken immediately, I [Paul] am certain that no effective action will be taken by the [U.S.] Government to prevent the complete extermination of the Jews in German controlled Europe, and that this Government will have to share for all time responsibility for this extermination.” On January 16, 1944 Morgenthau, Pehle, and Paul personally delivered the report to Roosevelt. One week later, the War Refugee Board came into being.

The WRB operated under difficult political circumstances. In addition to Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury, Roosevelt appointed Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr. (representing Secretary of State Cordell Hull) and Secretary of War Henry Stimson to the War Refugee Board. Each agency had equal powers on the Board, thus offering the State and War Departments, whose leaders had opposed the formation of the WRB, an opportunity to obstruct its work. While the State Department feared a flood of refugees entering the United States, the War Department opposed initiatives which might, in the perception of its leaders, hinder the war effort. Thus, bureaucratic resistance from within the U.S. government limited the effectiveness of the WRB.

The British government opposed the establishment of the WRB as well, fearing that the Jews whom it rescued would attempt to enter Palestine and spark further unrest among the Palestinian Arab population. Preoccupied with key military matters such as the preparation for the Anglo-American landings in Normandy, Roosevelt remained generally uninvolved in the rescue issue. As the President had allocated only one million dollars for its annual budget, the WRB was chronically short of funds. It financed actual rescue initiatives by raising funds from American Jews, who contributed $17 million, mostly through the U.S.-based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

Measured against the enormity of the Holocaust, the accomplishments of the WRB seem modest. Given the enormous difficulties that the agency faced, the results were impressive, however. The War Refugee Board conducted operations through its representatives in a number of neutral countries, where they operated openly. Other representatives operated in a clandestine fashion, or used their credentials as neutral diplomats as cover. WRB officials targeted neutral and Axis nations as sites for rescue operations, hoping to achieve maximum impact.

WRB representatives persuaded the neutral nations, especially Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey, to give transit rights and temporary accommodation to refugees and to serve as bases for the clandestine activities of WRB agents. Sometimes assisted by U.S. diplomats, WRB agents initiated negotiations with the representatives of Germany's Axis partners -- Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria -- on neutral sites. They reminded Axis government officials that they would likely lose the war and be called to account for their actions. In dealing with Hungarian officials during the weeks before the deportation of the Hungarian Jews began, WRB agents broadcast warnings by President Roosevelt, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and various prominent U.S. citizens. Based in Istanbul, Turkey, WRB agent Ira Hirschman exploited Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu's change of policy towards Romanian Jews to negotiate the return of 48,000 Jews in the spring of 1944 from Romanian-occupied Ukraine (also known as Transnistria), and to facilitate the emigration of 7,000 Jews to Palestine via Turkey.

The WRB financed courier services to Budapest, Bratislava, Bucharest, Vienna, and Prague. Cooperating closely with private organizations, these agents smuggled ration cards, travel permits, and so-called Aryan certificates to endangered Jews, and bribed Axis officials and border guards. WRB officials and their agents took steps to safeguard those who held Latin American passports, and sent thousands of life-saving food parcels to concentration camps and labor camps during the last year of the war. The WRB also sent money to occupied France, Italy, and Slovakia to support local resistance movements and to aid Jews in hiding. Such measures boosted the morale of countless thousands, who could ascertain that the United States government cared about their fate. That many of these activities were clandestine and implemented by private organizations makes it impossible to gauge their ultimate impact or to calculate the number of those impacted.

The WRB's original idea to establish “free ports” as safe havens for refugees in the United States and elsewhere yielded but one success: the establishment of a single refugee camp in Oswego, New York. In August 1944, the WRB brought 982 refugees, most of them Yugoslav citizens-both Jews and non-Jews -- from liberated areas of Italy to Oswego; the U.S. government subsequently admitted the Oswego refugees to the United States as immigrants.

The WRB achieved its best-known success in 1944 in German-occupied Hungary. Following the German occupation in March, Hungarian officials rounded up and deported approximately 440,000 Jews from Hungary. After taking custody of them at the borders of the so-called Greater German Reich, German authorities transported most of them to Auschwitz. The WRB had been active in Budapest well before the arrival of its best-known agent, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, in July 1944. At the request of the WRB, the U.S. government issued warnings to the Hungarian regime. WRB officials also lobbied the Red Cross, the Vatican, and officials in the neutral countries to increase their representation in Hungary and to add their voices to the protest against the persecution and deportation of Jews by Hungarian officials. Protests and official warnings from the U.S. government and the Vatican, accompanied by the bombing of Budapest by the U.S. air force in the first days of July 1944, influenced the Hungarian leader, Regent Miklos Horthy, to announce a halt to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews on July 6.

After Wallenberg began his service at the Swedish legation in Budapest in July, rescue efforts intensified. Wallenberg played a major role in galvanizing the representatives of his own and other neutral governments to issue thousands of “protective” documents to Jews residing in Budapest. As such papers either conferred citizenship upon or documented official diplomatic protection of the bearers, the Hungarian authorities generally recognized them and exempted their bearers from some forms of persecution, including deportation. The Swedish and other diplomatic missions also established “safe hostels” in the sections of Budapest designated as ghettos.

After the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power in a coup d'état with German support on October 15, 1944, the Jews of Budapest faced mortal danger both in renewed deportation operations and in unauthorized but officially tolerated rampages of robbery and murder in the ghettos by members of the Arrow Cross and other Hungarian civilians. Wallenberg and others continued to issue citizenship and diplomatic protection papers; they were even able to remove Jews from the foot marches to the Austrian border initiated in late October 1944.

Concurrent with these efforts in Budapest, WRB agents were active in opening escape routes for Hungarian Jews and offering the Germans inducements not to reinitiate the deportations. Working with the JDC, WRB agents opened negotiations with the Germans to halt deportations in exchange for payment. Though these negotiations had little influence on either German or Hungarian policy until Horthy halted the deportations in July 1944, they may have helped to stall the deportation of the Budapest Jews until after Soviet troops cut the rail lines to Auschwitz.

On occasion, such negotiations led to success. Based in Switzerland, WRB agent Roswell McClelland negotiated with the Germans and obtained the release of 1,700 Hungarian Jews from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the diversion of 18,000 Hungarian Jews to Vienna instead of Auschwitz in October 1944, when deportations resumed in Hungary. WRB agents also negotiated escape routes for Hungarian Jews with Marshal Josip Tito, the commander of the Communist-led Partisan resistance movement in Yugoslavia, after his cadres had succeeded in clearing northeastern Yugoslavia of German troops in October 1944. The efforts of WRB agent Raoul Wallenberg and many others played a major role in ensuring the survival of around 100,000 Jews in Budapest.

The War Refugee Board has been credited with direct and indirect participation in the rescue of approximately 200,000 European Jews. Allowing for the fact that WRB worked alongside and through many other institutions and individuals, such a figure is not an exaggeration. The WRB should be seen as a late but significant effort on the part of the United States government and American Jewry to help European Jews. Amidst the great events of 1944 (the Allied landings in France, the Soviet advance into central Europe, and the catastrophic destruction of the Hungarian Jews), it is easy to overlook an effort that saved many lives and helped to partially redeem the role of the United States government during the Holocaust.

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