Benjamin Akzin (1904-1985) was a staff member of the War Refugee Board and advocate of U.S. air strikes on the Auschwitz death camp. After completing doctorates in political science and law at the universities of Vienna and Paris, the Latvian-born Akzin traveled to the United States in the 1930s...
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"The Bergson Group" was the name often used to refer to a series of political action committees in the United States during the 1940s that were headed by Hillel Kook, using the name Peter Bergson. The nucleus of the group came out of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Palestine Jewish underground militia associated...
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Beginning in the late spring of 1944, representatives of Jewish organizations in the United States, Europe, and British Mandatory Palestine began urging Allied officials to take military action to interrupt the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz. About thirty different Jewish officials were involved,...
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U.S. Congressman Emanuel Celler (1888-1981) was one of the most outspoken voices on Capitol Hill for rescue of Jews from the Nazis. First elected to the House of Representatives from a heavily-Jewish district of Brooklyn in 1922, Celler served in Congress for the next fifty years. During the 1930s,...
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Treasury Department official Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. (1912-1983) was instrumental in exposing the State Department's suppression of news about the Holocaust and obstruction of opportunities for rescue. A graduate of Penn Law School, DuBois began working at the Treasury Department's Foreign Funds Control...
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Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (1891-1967), the only Jewish member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet and FDR's closest Jewish friend, enjoyed regular access to the president and belatedly used it to advance the cause of rescue. Morgenthau was the son of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who had served as America's...
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