Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Roosevelt administration began planning for the arrest and postwar prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Even at that early stage, the Allies knew enough about Nazi atrocities against Jews and others to know that if and when they won the war, they would...
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Frances C. Perkins (1880-1965), the first woman to serve in an American president's cabinet, was one of the few cabinet members who sought to promote the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany. Perkins, who had served as Commissioner of Labor in New York state when Franklin D. Roosevelt was governor, was appointed...
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More than one thousand Jews fleeing the Nazis on the eve of the Holocaust found refuge in the Philippines, a United States territory. The rescue plan grew out of an unusual personal friendship between Philippines president Manuel Quezon, the islands' American governor, Paul V. McNutt, and the Frieder...
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Former Roosevelt administration official Henry F. Pringle (1897-1958) was active in the Bergson Group's campaigns challenging U.S. policy on Jewish refugees. A newspaper reporter who later become a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Pringle won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931...
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Joseph Proskauer (1877-1971), who served as president of the American Jewish Committee during the 1940s, staunchly opposed any Jewish criticism of the Roosevelt administration's refugee policy. Raised in an assimilated German Jewish family in Alabama, Proskauer became a successful attorney and served...
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