Journalist and civil rights activist Oswald Villard (1872-1949) added his name to several public protests on behalf of European Jewry.

Born in Germany but raised in the United States, Villard was one of fifty prominent German-Americans to sign a full-page newspaper advertisement in December 1942 condemning the mass murder of the Jews and urging the overthrow of the Hitler government. Villard added his name to the Bergson Group’s Proclamation on the Moral Rights of the Stateless and Palestinian Jews, which called for creation of a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies against the Nazis. Villard also joined the sponsoring committee of Bergson’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe.

Sources: Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, pp.63-64; Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust, p.138.