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118 CHAPTER SIX The War Refugee Board: A Summary of Its Achievements1 Executive Order 9417 establishing the War Refugee Board endowed it with great potential. It directed the State, Treasury, and War Departments to provide whatever help the board needed to implement its rescue programs, subject only to the stipulation that they be “consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” In addition, it required all other government agencies to comply with the board’s requests for assistance. This order, which carried the force of law, should have opened the way for a powerful rescue campaign. But the WRB did not receive the cooperation that was promised. As a result, its capacity for rescue was always substantially less than it should have been. Only the Treasury Department met its full responsibilities . Besides housing the WRB and providing most of its staff, Secretary Morgenthau himself kept in close touch with the board. Secretary of War Stimson believed in the WRB’s mission but could spare almost no time for it because of his many other duties. The job of War Department liaison with the board fell to Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy. Although on the surface he seemed concerned about the plight of Europe’s Jews, McCloy was privately skeptical that the military should take a role in their rescue. The War Department’s contribution to the work of the board was very small. Cordell Hull, who preferred that the State Department’s connection with the WRB be limited, designated Undersecretary Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., as his representative. Stettinius had welcomed the board’s formation, but he, too, made little time for rescue matters. As a result, George Warren of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees served as State’s primary liaison with the WRB. Despite his long service in the area of refugee aid, Warren did little to counteract the opposition to the board that prevailed among the department’s middle-level officials. The War Refugee Board: A Summary of Its Achievements 119 The WRB staff, which never numbered more than thirty, revolved around a dozen people, most of them non-Jewish and most of them veterans of Treasury’s battles with State over the rescue issue. They were, as one observer remarked, “young, dynamic, bold, clear and a bit brash.”2 John Pehle was executive director . Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., was general counsel and author of many of its project proposals. During February and March 1944, the WRB chose representatives to direct its overseas operations and assigned them to locations that bordered Axis Europe: Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden, North Africa, Italy, and Portugal. They were granted diplomatic status as special attachés to the American missions there. But the WRB’s efforts to place representatives in Russia, Spain, and Egypt failed. The Soviet government was unresponsive. The American ambassador to Spain, Carlton J.H. Hayes, opposed the move. And the State Department blocked the board’s attempt to send Charles R. Joy to Egypt; Joy (and his employer, the Unitarian Service Committee) had been too outspoken and too politically active to satisfy State’s standards. From the start, the WRB solicited advice from many private agencies involved in rescue and relief activities. Nearly a score of them submitted comprehensive suggestions. Once in action, the board regularly coordinated its projects with those of the private groups and arranged to use the State Department’s coded telegraphic communications system for transmission of messages between the American private agencies and their representatives overseas. Under pressure from Stettinius, the State Department sent to all American diplomatic missions abroad cablegrams drafted by the board and ordering full cooperation with it. Special instructions were dispatched to those in neutral nations close to Nazi territory directing them to urge the governments to permit entry of all refugees who reached their borders and to publicize their willingness to take them in. The board assured the neutral powers that it would provide maintenance for the newly arrived refugees and arrange their evacuation as soon as possible. The WRB also offered its assistance to the International Red Cross. But middle-level State officials, who had been thrust aside in the first rush of WRB action, soon moved to reestablish their grip on diplomatic affairs. By mid-March, six urgent WRB cablegrams were stuck in the State Department awaiting clearance. Delays hobbled such important measures as warnings to Axis satellites to refrain from collaborating in atrocities and efforts to persuade the British to set up a refugee camp in...

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