War Refugee Board

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The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers. The Board was, in the words of historian Rebecca Erbelding, "the only time in American history that the US government founded a non-military government agency to save the lives of civilians being murdered by a wartime enemy."^[1]

There was increasing and persistent significant publicity and pressure on the Roosevelt administration to help the abandoned Jews of Europe. The campaign was led by the Bergson Group led by Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson). The activist group had significant support by many leading senators and congressmen mostly from states without significant Jewish voters, from Eleanor Roosevelt, famous Hollywood and Broadway personalities and other prominent citizens. President Roosevelt acted after considerable additional pressure from his friend, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his team at the Treasury. Roosevelt "stressed that it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe".

The WRB was created when a group of young Treasury Department lawyers, including John Pehle, Ansel Luxford, and Josiah E. DuBois Jr., grew frustrated by State Department delays surrounding a license for relief funds to help Jews escape Romania and France. While the Treasury Department had granted the World Jewish Congress permission to send the money to Switzerland in July 1943, the State Department used various excuses, delaying permission until December, a full eight months after the program was first proposed. Josiah DuBois also found evidence that the State Department had actively tried to suppress information about the murder of the Jews from reaching the United States.

When the Treasury staff learned of the State Department obstructions, they submitted a Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government to the Murder of the Jews, first drafted by DuBois, aiming to convince Morgenthau to meet with the President. Morgenthau, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul met with Roosevelt on January 16, 1944, where he agreed to create the War Refugee Board, issuing Executive Order 9417.^[2] Credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied countries, through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg and others, the War Refugee Board is the only major civilian effort undertaken by the United States government to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.