In early 1939, in response to the Kristallnacht pogrom, U.S. Senator Robert Wagner (D-New York) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Massachusetts) introduced legislation to admit 20,000 German--presumably Jewish--children to the United States, outside America's strict immigration quotas. The Wagner-Rogers bill...
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As vice president from 1941 to 1945, Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965) showed little interest in the plight of Europe's Jews. Palestine Zionist leader Rabbi Meyer Berlin, visiting Washington in February 1943, later reported that his "most disappointing" meeting was with Vice President Wallace. The vice...
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Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg (1912 - ?), with financial backing from the U.S. War Refugee Board, rescued many thousands of Jews in German-occupied Budapest in 1944-1945. Wallenberg was recruited to go to Hungary by War Refugee Board emissary Iver C. Olsen, who also persuaded the Swedish Foreign...
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The work of the War Refugee Board in 1944-1945 represented the only official effort by the United States government to help rescue Jews from the Holocaust. The Board was handicapped from the outset because President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration never wanted it to come into existence...
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To alert the American public about of European Jewry, screenwriter and Bergson Group activist Ben Hecht in 1943 authored a dramatic pageant called "We Will Never Die." On a stage featuring forty foot-high tablets of the Ten Commandments, it would survey Jewish contributions to civilization throughout...
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Internationally renowned composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950), exiled from Nazi Germany, used his talents to promote rescue of refugees and Jewish statehood. Weill, who is best remembered for such classics as his collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht on "The Threepenny Opera," was denounced as a "degenerate"...
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Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl (1903-1957) was the first European Jewish leader to urge Allied leaders to bomb Auschwitz and the railway lines leading to it. Weissmandl (1903-1957) grew up in Slovakia and became a prominent figure in the famous Nitra Yeshiva. When the Germans began deporting Slovakia's...
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As undersecretary of state from 1937 to 1943, Sumner Welles (1892-1961) played a significant role in the shaping and implementation of the Roosevelt administration's policy toward European Jewry. The wave of antisemitism accompanying the German absorption (Anschluss) of Austria in March 1938 resulted...
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While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, by Arthur D. Morse, was the first book written about America's response to the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed near-iconic status in the public mind. It was virtually unthinkable to criticize the president...
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Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, spoke out on behalf of rescuing Jewish refugees and creating a Jewish state. Willkie (1892-1944) was an early endorser of the Bergson Group's campaign for a Jewish army. In 1943, he made speeches strongly supporting Jewish statehood in Palestine,...
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British stockbroker Nicholas Winton rescued more than 600 Czech children, most of them Jews, and brought them to England in 1939 after the Roosevelt administration refused to admit them to the United States. Winton was the son of turn-of-the century German Jewish immigrants to London who had changed...
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Rabbi Dr. Stephen S. Wise (1874-1949) was the most prominent and influential Jewish leader of his time. He headed an array of communal institutions, including two major defense groups, the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, as well as the American Zionist movement; the Free Synagogue,...
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David S. Wyman, the grandson of two Protestant ministers, was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1929, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in history, and from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in history. From 1966 until his retirement...
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