50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (10 page)

Even more virulent anti-Semitic rants poured out of Fritz Kuhn, the German-born leader of the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler group that at the height of its popularity in the 1930s published four newspapers, operated twenty-two summer camps for children, organized a businessmen’s league, and established nearly one hundred branches around the country. “All Jews are enemies of the United States,” Kuhn declared in June 1938. “It wasn’t the Jews who built up this country. They came later when there was something to grab.” On the night of February 20, 1939, more than twenty thousand Bund supporters filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where speaker after speaker riled up the crowd with taunts that included attacks on “Jewish leeches of class warfare” and snide references to President Roosevelt as “Franklin Rosenfeld.”
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In defiance of these anti-Jewish sentiments, two congressmen from New York—Emanuel Celler and Samuel Dickstein—considered introducing a bill in the wake of Kristallnacht to allow unrestricted immigration for victims of religious or political persecution. Such a measure, which would have had no chance of success on Capitol Hill, also attracted widespread opposition from Jewish leaders and organizations, hardly the kind of attention that its sponsors had imagined. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the popular and charismatic leader of the American Jewish Congress, who had President Roosevelt’s ear on such matters, dismissed the Celler-Dickstein proposal as being “so bad that it seems the work of an
agent provocateur
.” Another national organization, the American Jewish Committee, warned that the legislation would create “bad feelings” by allowing Jewish refugees to take jobs away from Americans who were still looking for work during the lingering Depression. “As heartless as it may seem, future efforts should be directed toward sending Jewish refugees to other countries instead of bringing them here,” declared the group. Celler and Dickstein quickly abandoned their proposal.

Within the Roosevelt administration, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins provided a lone sympathetic voice in support of allowing greater numbers of Jewish refugees into the United States. During a cabinet meeting held six weeks after FDR’s 1933 inauguration, Perkins urged the new president to rescind a 1930 executive order by President Herbert Hoover that had required strict adherence to the public charge requirement in the immigration law. The change would have immediately made it much easier for thousands of Jews to come to America without requiring any changes to the quota system. But Secretary of State Cordell Hull, along with Under Secretary of State William Phillips, opposed such a move and convinced Roosevelt there was no connection between Hoover’s earlier order and the low percentage of refugees who were being admitted from Germany. The public charge requirement would remain in the law. Perkins also lobbied for other revisions to the law, such as legal authority for the issuance of a financial bond in advance of an immigrant’s arrival in the country, which would help to guarantee that the immigrant would not wind up on public assistance.

Perkins, of course, convinced Roosevelt in November 1938 to extend temporary visas for thousands of German-Jewish visitors already in the United States. Her actions, however, prompted a candid warning from C. Paul Fletcher, an official in the State Department’s visa division, who told a colleague that the department would quickly incur the wrath of the American public if “ships begin to arrive in New York City laden with Jewish immigrants.”

By early 1939, efforts to allow more Jewish children into the country had gained the support of a few influential national figures, notably Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady had even provided, sotto voce, strategic advice to a coalition of refugee relief groups that had been trying to generate support for the children’s rescue bill even before it was formally introduced by Senator Wagner and Congresswoman Rogers. “My husband says that you had better go to work at once and get two people from opposite parties in the House and Senate and have them jointly get agreement on the legislation you want for bringing in the children,” Mrs. Roosevelt advised her friend Justine Polier, a New York judge and social welfare activist who also happened to be Rabbi Wise’s daughter.

But the Wagner-Rogers bill almost certainly was doomed to fail from the moment it was introduced. Although the State Department never officially opposed the measure, neither did it offer any support. Instead, Secretary of State Hull sent a detailed letter to members of Congress that focused on how difficult it would be to carry out the children’s rescue bill. Without saying so explicitly, Hull’s message left little doubt that the State Department had no interest in seeing the legislation enacted.

Once public hearings began in the spring of 1939, a steady stream of individuals and organizations paraded before the House and Senate immigration committees to testify against the bill. Agnes Waters, representing a group of World War I widows, urged Congress not to let in “thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners” who would grow up to become “potential leaders of a revolt” against the American government. “Why should we give preference . . . to these potential Communists?” railed Mrs. Waters. “Already we have too many of their kind in our country trying to overthrow our government.” To be sure, the hearings also featured a variety of witnesses who offered impassioned testimony in favor of the Wagner-Rogers legislation. “I know it must be difficult to visualize the anguish those mothers [in Germany] must feel to make them willing and eager to give up their children and send them to a strange land, send them to strange people,” actress Helen Hayes told members of Congress. “That is the most potent and the most moving evidence of the immediate need of those little children. I beg of you to let them in.”

But the strong anti-immigration attitudes that already prevailed on Capitol Hill continued to align with the overall mood of the country—even when it came to saving children. While the Wagner-Rogers measure was being debated in Congress, Senator Robert Reynolds, a conservative North Carolina Democrat, introduced his own series of bills that, among other things, would reduce the immigration quotas for all countries by up to 90 percent. Other parts of his legislation would prohibit immigration altogether until America’s unemployment levels dropped further, along with requiring the deportation of all foreign aliens found to be receiving any form of public assistance. Reynolds staked out a leading role in marshaling public and political opposition to the Wagner-Rogers bill. “Shall we first take care of our own children, our citizens, our country, or shall we bestow our charity on children imported from abroad,” he asked in a national radio broadcast in March 1939. Reynolds summarily dismissed the claim, put forward by supporters of the Wagner-Rogers bill, that thousands of Americans were ready to open up their homes to Jewish children if the measure were to pass. “If that statement be true, then this is my answer, your answer, and America’s answer,” said Reynolds. “If homes are available for the adoption of alien children, Americanism demands that needy American children also be adopted into these American homes. My heart beats in sympathy for those unfortunate children across the seas. But my love and duty belongs firstly to our children here at home.”

Throughout the spring, Washington was filled with talk, both public and private, about immigration and hardened attitudes toward allowing Jewish refugees into the country. During a Washington dinner party, someone asked Laura Delano Houghteling for her thoughts about the pending Wagner-Rogers bill. As the wife of U.S. Immigration Commissioner James Houghteling and also President Roosevelt’s first cousin, she might have been a little more circumspect before offering her opinion. Instead, she casually remarked: “Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow up into twenty thousand ugly adults.”

It is doubtful that FDR himself ever gave serious consideration to throwing his political weight behind the Wagner-Rogers bill. Although he was immensely popular among Jews in America, Roosevelt was also acutely aware of the cost he might have to pay by defying the broad public sentiments against increased foreign immigration. Roosevelt was a consummate politician with an ambitious agenda for the nation that, by 1939, included the challenge of preparing a reluctant American public for the seeming inevitability of a war in Europe. FDR and his closest advisers knew that highly visible efforts to help bring larger numbers of Jewish refugees into the United States would do little to help accomplish his broader agenda. Indeed such efforts would almost certainly result in a backlash among American isolationists and anti-immigration forces, which would make it even more difficult for the president to forge ahead with his priorities for the country. Saving Jewish lives—particularly those of innocent children—may well have appealed to FDR’s humanitarian instincts. But it did not square up with his broader political agenda.

Eleanor Roosevelt tried on a few occasions to sway her husband in favor of the Wagner-Rogers bill. She also talked with Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in an effort to win more support for the legislation. “He says that personally he is in favor of the bill and feels as I do about it,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Justine Polier, “but that it would not be advisable for the president to come out because if the president did and [the bill] was defeated, it would be very bad.”

As the hearings on the Wagner-Rogers bill concluded in late spring, a New York congresswoman attempted one last time to find out where the president stood. “Caroline O’Day asked me last night at dinner if you would give her an expression of your views on the bill providing for 20,000 refugee children being allowed into America regardless of the quota status,” wrote Edwin “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt’s senior aide, in a memo typed on cream-colored White House stationery. In the upper right-hand corner of the June 2 memo, Roosevelt, in clear handwriting, noted his succinct response: “File no action FDR.”

CHAPTER 8

Since the quota waiting list is so long, I am afraid the children whom we register now won’t come in for at least another year
.

—C
ECILIA
R
AZOVSKY

P
HILADELPHIA

F
EBRUARY
–M
ARCH
1939

W
ith a bang of his gavel, Louis Levine called to order the emergency meeting of Brith Sholom leaders that he had hastily convened on the evening of Monday, February 27. Acting in his capacity as the organization’s grand master, Levine had summoned the officers from dozens of the group’s Philadelphia area lodges to its national headquarters on Spruce Street, just a few blocks south of the city’s historic Independence Hall. With Gil sitting off to the side of the meeting room, Levine formally announced the plan to bring a group of German refugees into the United States. As everyone listened attentively, Levine explained that once the children were safely out of Nazi Germany and in the United States, they would be put up for adoption, placed with foster parents, or sent to live with relatives. Additional children would be brought over once the first group had been settled in good homes.

The Brith Sholom leader solemnly added that the organization had the power to “make or break” the rescue plan. He then introduced Gil, though everyone in the room already knew him. By the end of the evening, the men from Brith Sholom promised to raise $150,000 in support of the plan.

Two days later, the Philadelphia
Evening Public Ledger
published a two-paragraph item announcing that a project “to bring refugee children from Germany to Philadelphia is under consideration” by the Jewish fraternal organization. A slightly longer article appeared in that week’s Philadelphia
Jewish Times
. “Grand Master Levine was assured that the entire national membership is eager to cooperate,” reported the newspaper.

Word was spreading about the rescue project. But not everyone liked what they heard. Brith Sholom was not the only organization—Jewish or otherwise—interested in bringing Jewish children into the United States. Others, in fact, had been trying for some time to set into action similar missions, but with little or no success to show for their efforts. “We had a telephone message from Philadelphia stating that Brith Sholom is collecting funds and is making arrangements to set up a home for fifty children who are due to arrive here very shortly,” Blanche Goldman, the chairman of German-Jewish Children’s Aid, wrote on February 28 to A. M. Warren, the State Department’s visa official. “As you know, German-Jewish Children’s Aid has been carrying on a project of bringing children to the United States within the quota on an individual basis, and that recently very few children have been arriving because of the delay in the issuance of quota visas to them.” The Brith Sholom plan, she told Warren, “is naturally very embarrassing for our organization.”