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13 CHAPTER TWO The Struggle for U.S. Rescue Action When Josiah DuBois began working in the Treasury Department in 1935, the last thing he expected was that it would involve him in the affairs of Europe’s Jews. Even after he returned, in 1940, to the Treasury after a hiatus, and was assigned to combat Nazi economic penetration of the Western Hemisphere, he had little inkling as to what lay ahead. It seemed to be an ordinary government job. It would soon turn out to be anything but. I. The Early Years Q:1 Perhaps you could tell us to begin, something about how you happened to achieve [your] career in the civil government? DuBois: Well, I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania law school in ’34 and was granted a fellowship and worked under Dean Goodrich of the law school for one year. . . . Thereafter, the Dean, actually unbeknownst to me, recommended me to the Treasury Department. . . . They were looking for young lawyers. I was interviewed and granted the job, and I worked in the Treasury for two and a half years, actually, on, initially, the problems relating to gold. As you may recall, they had withdrawn gold coins, which created a lot of problems . . . [In] the summer of ’38 . . . I resigned and came back here to work with my brother, Herbert, who is one of the partners now in this firm. . . . [In] 1940, I got a call from one of the lawyers that I had worked with in the Treasury asking if I could come down there to Washington to assist them in work known later as the Foreign Funds Control. It involved, actually, what you might call the beginning of preparation of economic warfare directed against Germany. [In 1941], they sent me with one other person from the State Department on a two-man mission to Central America. We went to every country in Central America and the idea of our mission, basically, was to try to get the Central American countries to do what we had done, namely (to oversimplify it), freeze all accounts in which the Germans had any kind of an interest, direct or indirect, so that they couldn’t use the moneys in those accounts for espionage, sabotage, and spying activities in this country. . . . CHAPTER TWO 14 [Once] they sent me to North Africa. That was about a five or six months’ mission. . . . [T]he main function was the Treasury had issued, or were issuing, this gold seal currency, which you’ve probably heard about, which they used in North Africa. And the main idea of that, of course, was to dry up the currency which we felt the Germans had more or less secreted in North Africa, and rather than to permit that to be used in connection with our operations we wanted our own currency; and a lot of my legal work had to do with that. [W]e arrived [in Algiers] within less than a month after the [November 1942] invasion [by the Allies]. I’ll never forget, the very first day I was there they put me in a temporary hotel, and the German planes were still coming over and one of them hit a hotel right across the street from me. It scared the s— out of me! A night or two later, I was attending some kind of a cocktail party or something, with Bernie Bernstein and a few others, and there was a porch out there. I heard these planes roaring and I wanted to see what was going on. I just walked out on the porch and looked up. Bernie came out and grabbed me by the collar, “What are you doing, are you crazy, standing out there?” I wasn’t thinking. ✳ ✳ ✳ It was during DuBois’s stay in Algiers that he first encountered the Roosevelt administration ’s unsympathetic response to the plight of Jewish refugees. Under the pro-Vichy regime that ruled North Africa from mid-1940 until the Allied conquest, more than four thousand Jews were interned in dozens of forced labor camps along the Morocco–Algeria border. The prisoners included Jews who had fled Nazi Europe but were unable to secure visas to reach the West, Algerian Jews involved in the local anti-Vichy underground, and various political prisoners. Following the Allied capture of the region, President Roosevelt allowed the pro-Vichy regime of Francois Giraud to remain in power, and even its Office of Jewish Affairs, which had been in charge...

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