Honorable Failures Against Nazi Germany: McDonald's Letter of Resignation and the Petition in its Support

I

During supper and a long talk on June 11, 1935, that lasted until almost midnight, James G. McDonald informed James N. Rosenberg that he would definitely resign the office of League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming from Germany. For the past year and a half since his appointment, the former chairman of the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) had sought aid from the international community to resettle Jews and others persecuted in Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Neither the League nor the world's nations gave him anything better than "empty lip service," however. McDonald's thatch of yellow hair, his host that Tuesday evening would later recall, had turned by then to silver. His most recent search for havens, a three-month trip to South America, had yielded nothing but more frustration. The only course open to him, McDonald concluded, was to resign in protest at the lack of support for his efforts.

Rosenberg, a lawyer who served on the executive boards of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), had suggested McDonald for the post in August 1933. He now argued at length that his "tried friend and true" should take the occasion to present the League with a dramatic letter. The statement, its form to be agreed upon, would address the rights of religious and racial minorities, a sort of "bill of rights." It would focus the reader's attention not only on the persecution of Jews, but on the Nazi threat of world war. While accepting in principle the desirability of making this final gesture, McDonald in turn doubted that a sufficient basis could be found for formally requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court. He was unwilling at this stage to commit himself; Rosenberg found these reservations commendable.

The pair next discussed Rosenberg's further program of making available to McDonald two individuals for this purpose, Oscar I. Janowsky and Melvin M. Fagen. Janowsky had written a fine book on the origin and meaning of the minority treaties that resulted from the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I, and was planning a year in Geneva to continue these studies. Rosenberg thought that Fagen, whose recent memorandum to Rosenberg on the subject had impressed McDonald most favorably, could be released from his work at the AJC. McDonald proposed that Fagen, Janowsky, and Morris R. Cohen, with whom Janowsky was associated, meet with him and Rosenberg for lunch in the near future. After that, he would give a definite answer as to the two men suggested.¹

Technically, the League Covenant made no express provision for international help to refugees. Sanction for League action rested on the broad objective of the Preamble to the Covenant—"to promote international cooperation by the maintenance of justice," as well as on Article XXIII(a) prescribing that members seek to "establish and maintain the necessary international institutions" which would "secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor" in all countries within their economic purview. In 1921, the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen was appointed High Commissioner for Refugees to deal with the problem of the million or more émigrés who had departed Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Soon were added the 1,500,000 Greeks who were forced to leave their homes in Anatolia and in the Turkish provinces, and the 350,000 Armenians who fled from Asia Minor because of Turkish persecution. "Nansen passports," their issue left to the discretion of the state sheltering the refugee and which were valid for only one year, offered little protection to these stateless persons. After Nansen's death in 1930, the League Assembly set up the Nansen International Office as successor to the High Commissioner, to be funded mainly from philanthropic sources and liquidated by 1939. Confronted by world-wide economic depression and the habitual disregard by governments of Assembly recommendations not to expel refugees, the new office languished.²

Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, with antisemitism immediately becoming official German...