Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV (1903-1988) played a crucial role in the underground network led by Varian Fry that rescued Jewish and other refugees from Vichy France. Bingham's father, Hiram Bingham III, was the archaeologist who in 1911 discovered the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, in Peru, and upon whom...
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During the months following the German conquest of France in June 1940, thousands of refugees, including both French Jews and exiled German Jews, fled to southern France to avoid capture by the Nazis. Many were prominent political dissidents, intellectuals, writers, and artists. On June 22, Marshal Petain’s...
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While most major American magazines and newspapers buried or ignored news about the Nazi genocide, a significant exception was the weekly political magazine New Republic, which challenged the Roosevelt administration's refugee policy even though it strongly supported his New Deal policies in general. One...
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The Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian couple from Massachusetts, traveled to Europe in the 1930s to rescue Jews and other refugees from the Nazis. Working in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Sharps helped Jewish refugees and anti-Nazi activists escape from the Gestapo. In on instance,...
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