50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany

by Steven Pressman

  Once he had completed yet another review of the latest figures from Germany, Gil was now absolutely certain that the total number of visas issued exceeded the number of people who had actually entered the United States. Why would that be? he kept asking himself. He simply could not understand why any of those visas—those golden tickets to freedom—would go unused.

  Prior to Hitler’s takeover of Austria, the United States had maintained separate annual immigration quotas for Germany (25,957) and Austria (1,413). Once Austria lost its status as an independent nation, the quotas for the two countries were combined into an overall annual quota of 27,370. Based on the formula under which visas were distributed among several American consulates in Germany and Austria, combining the quotas actually resulted in better odds for Austrian Jews to obtain visas for the United States.

  Gil was surprised, meanwhile, to discover that the annual quota for Germany had never been filled throughout the 1930s. This was largely due to a combination of procedural roadblocks and an initial reluctance on the part of German Jews to fully grasp the severity of Nazi policies. In 1933, during Hitler’s first year in power, only 1,445 German immigrants—slightly more than 5 percent of the quota—came to the United States. Three years later, as Hitler’s policies began to weigh more heavily on Germany’s Jewish population, the quota had still only been 27 percent filled, with 6,642 refugees entering the country. Even as late as 1938, at which point there was no longer any doubt about the gravity of the Jews’ plight, the quota remained less than two-thirds filled. During Hitler’s first six years as Germany’s Nazi dictator, more than 106,000 quota spaces for would-be refugees from that country went unused.

  The Anschluss, reinforced by the shocking violence of Kristallnacht, dramatically altered the algorithm of the combined German and Austrian quota. Suddenly Jews seeking visas inundated the American consulates in Germany and Austria. Unfortunately, those seeking safe haven in the United States were stymied both by America’s immigration laws and the burdensome bureaucratic responses on the part of American government officials responsible for interpreting and carrying out those laws. “The Department of State was not set up for rapid action or for humanitarianism,” Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, wrote in his diary at the time. “The typical foreign service officer lived off paper. His instinct was always toward postponement, on the hallowed theory of all foreign offices that problems postponed long enough will solve themselves. Moreover, many State Department officials had small personal sympathy for the humble and the downtrodden… . The horrors of Dachau or Buchenwald were beyond their conception. They dealt with human lives at the same bureaucratic tempo and with the same lofty manner that they might deal with a not very urgent trade negotiation.”

  It hardly helped matters during this period that the State Department was filled with senior officials who were openly anti-Semitic or did little to conceal anti-Jewish attitudes. As early as 1934, James Wilkinson, a senior official in the State Department’s visa division, warned that a more sympathetic view of the inflexible 1924 immigration law would create “a grave risk that Jews would flood the United States.” In a memo to A. Dana Hodgdon, chief of the visa division, Wilkinson also wrote: “Experience has taught us that Jews are persistent in their endeavors to obtain immigration visas, that Jews have a strong tendency, no matter where they are, to allege that they are the subjects of either religious or political persecution [and] that Jews have constantly endeavored to find means of entering the United States despite the barriers set up by our immigration laws.”

  Sitting in his law office with the dizzying array of immigration figures and quota numbers spread out in front of him, Gil almost certainly had to question his own ability to overcome the monumental challenge of bringing Jewish children into the United States. He quickly realized that he would need to find someone at the State Department in Washington who could better explain the intricacies of the quota system and perhaps offer at least a sense of whether there might be even a remote chance of getting children out of Germany and into America. Gil himself did not know anyone at the State Department, but he knew someone else in Washington who might be able to help.

  Leon Sacks was a few years younger than Gil, but the two men had come to know each other through various Philadelphia connections. Sacks was born and raised in Philadelphia’s South Side—rough-and-tumble neighborhoods filled with Jewish and Italian immigrants that paralleled New York City’s immigrant-dense Lower East Side—which stood in sharp contrast to the far more genteel surroundings of Gil’s Philadelphia childhood. But Sacks and Gil had attended Penn both as undergraduates and as law students, and Sacks, like Gil, had quickly begun making a name for himself within the city’s business and Jewish communities after starting out as a lawyer in 1926. Unlike Gil, Sacks was intent on a political career. Following a brief stint as a deputy attorney general for the state of Pennsylvania, Sacks won election to the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the Democratic landslide that accompanied Franklin Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign in 1936.

  Sacks quickly assured Gil that he would gladly help with Brith Sholom’s noble, though vaguely defined, rescue project. To move matters along, he arranged for Gil and Louis Levine to meet with George Messersmith, a career Foreign Service officer who had been serving in Washington, D.C., as assistant secretary of state ever since he had returned in 1937 after several years of overseas postings. Although in his current position Messersmith had no formal role in refugee matters, his previous Foreign Service postings in Berlin and Vienna had heightened his awareness of the mounting urgency for Jews to get out as quickly as possible. Fortunately, for both Gil and everyone else at Brith Sholom, Messersmith did not share the brazenly anti-Semitic attitudes that were common among so many of his State Department colleagues. George Kennan, the veteran diplomat and historian, later described Messersmith as “a dry, drawling peppery man, his eyes always glinting with the readiness to accept combat.” He was, Kennan added, “incorruptible in his fight for what he considered right and decent.” Many of Messersmith’s colleagues incorrectly assumed that he himself was Jewish, which presumably explained his sympathetic views toward them. Instead, those views were shaped wholly by his personal contempt for Nazi ideology and policy.

  Messersmith had served as consul general at the American embassy in Berlin from 1930 to 1934, where he witnessed firsthand Hitler’s rise to power and, with his ascendancy, the increasing menace posed by the Nazi Party. By the time that Hitler became chancellor, Messersmith had been dispatching a series of cables to the State Department in Washington that spelled out the Nazis’ escalating anti-Jewish policies. “The extreme brutality with which the anti-Semitic movement has been carried through will, I believe, never be appreciated by the outside world,” Messersmith wrote in a lengthy confidential letter to Under Secretary of State William Phillips in September 1933. “While physical attacks may have stopped almost entirely … the measures against the Jews are being carried out daily in a more implacable and a more effective manner… . It is definitely the aim of the [German] government … to eliminate the Jews from German life.” In an earlier nine-page memo to Secretary of State Cordell Hull—written only a few weeks after the Nazi Party scored big gains in German federal elections in March 1933—Messersmith described the impact of the Nazi threat to something as ordinary as the F. W. Woolworth department stores, which were popular throughout Germany: in the wake of the recent election, “uniformed members of the National-Socialist party throughout Germany made difficulties for department stores, one-price stores and chain stores. The uniformed men in many cities picketed stores, posted themselves in front of them with placards warning the public not to enter or buy and, in some cases, compelled the closing of the stores. The Woolworth stores in various cities were among those which were affected.”

  Messersmith also made it abundantly clear to his superiors in Washington what was behind the Nazis’ new campaign. “The movement against these stores,” h
e concluded, “is largely influenced by the fact that the large department stores are owned by Jews and this general interference with stores of this type is therefore one of the manifestations of the anti-Jewish sentiment so actively displayed in these days throughout the country.” During his tenure in Berlin, Messersmith earned a well-deserved reputation for speaking frankly with high-ranking Nazi officials, and Hitler himself reportedly “frothed at the mouth” whenever Messersmith’s name was mentioned.

  After four years in Berlin, Messersmith was appointed U.S. minister to Austria, a role that he filled during the years that led up to the Anschluss. Once again, his diplomatic posting offered a front-row view of the dangers that the Nazis had brought with them from Germany. In a cable sent to Acting Secretary of State R. Walton Moore in November 1936, Messersmith mentioned that National Socialists in Austria had been organizing Nazi military units and “openly address[ing] each other with ‘Heil Hitler’ and the Nazi salute.”

  Messersmith returned to Washington the following April, where he was placed in charge of a project to reorganize the entire State Department. Along with his official duties, however, Messersmith continued to keep a close eye on the situation in Nazi Germany. In particular, Messersmith maintained a steady personal correspondence with Raymond Geist, another veteran Foreign Service officer who was stationed at the American embassy in Berlin and who, for the most part, shared Messersmith’s disgust with the miserable conditions of Jews trapped inside Germany. “The Jews in Germany are being condemned to death. Their sentence will be slowly carried out, but probably too fast for the world to save them,” Geist wrote in a private letter to Messersmith in December 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht. “This is a struggle to save the lives of innocent people and not only to save their lives, but spare them years [of] indescribable torture and privations.”

  Despite Messersmith’s personal sympathies, he was also an unyielding defender of America’s immigration laws. Only a few days after Kristallnacht, Messersmith warned Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that the State Department strongly opposed her “illegal” proposal to allow German Jews already in the United States on temporary visas to remain in the country rather than force them to return home.* In a “personal and confidential” memo written to Geist in early December, Messersmith sharply criticized Perkins for advocating “extraordinary measures” aimed against existing immigration policies. “All of us who are decent and human are appalled by what is happening in the world,” wrote Messersmith, “but we cannot permit the problem to be accentuated at home or abroad by hysterical action.”

  Although Messersmith readily agreed to meet with Gil and Louis Levine, he made it clear during their discussion that he was in no position to offer official support or encouragement for the Brith Sholom attempt to rescue Jewish children. He also pointed out that America’s immigration laws made it extremely difficult to bring children into the country, while adding that those laws were not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. As far as the State Department was concerned, Messersmith told Gil, the Nazis’ growing appetite for control of Europe was not going to result in easing the quotas that applied to those trying to find asylum in America. Messersmith, perhaps with a hint of resignation in his voice, added that the number of people from Germany and Austria who had already applied for visas would fill the annual quota for those combined countries for at least the next five years.

  Toward the end of the meeting, Gil finally raised the discrepancy that had been bothering him for the past several days. Messersmith offered several reasons that might explain why the quota and visa numbers did not match up. In some cases, Jews who had been waiting for visas to America wound up escaping instead to places like Shanghai or Cuba—two destinations that had proven relatively open to Jewish families desperate to leave Europe. (In Shanghai, Jewish refugees had already created a “Little Vienna” neighborhood, with streets that were lined with Viennese bakeries, cafés, and delicatessens.) In other cases, visas had been issued to Jews who could no longer afford to make the journey to the United States.

  This was the result of one of the cruelest paradoxes of the Nazis’ policy of Judenrein. The Nazis wanted Jews to leave and readily allowed Jews to leave. But it took money to go someplace, and Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws and policies had stripped virtually all Jewish adults of their wealth and means of earning a living.

  As he listened to Messersmith’s coldly realistic assessment of America’s immigration policies, Gil had a flickering thought about how he might be able to bring in some children. It was only a tiny glimmer of hope, but it was certainly worth mentioning. Might it be possible, he asked, to set aside some of the unused visas that would otherwise simply expire if they could not be used in time? Rather than letting these so-called dead visas vanish into thin air, Gil suggested that they be reserved for children from families who were already waiting for their own visas to the United States. As Gil and Louis Levine had already explained to Messersmith, Brith Sholom was willing to pay for boat tickets and all other expenses that would be required to transport a group of children out of Nazi Germany and into the United States. Equally important, Gil also promised that the plan would fully comply with all of the requirements of America’s immigration laws. In particular, each child would have a financial sponsor who would guarantee that the child, once in America, would not become a “public charge”—someone dependent upon any type of public support.

  Messersmith listened politely to Gil’s proposal. It was an intriguing idea, he admitted—and certainly one that had never been suggested by anyone else. He was willing to run it by Geist and others at the American embassy in Berlin, where the visas would have to be issued. Beyond that, however, he could make no promises.

  On Friday, February 3, shortly after their meeting in Washington, Gil typed out a two-page letter to Messersmith that described the general outline of the Brith Sholom plan to bring fifty Jewish children from Germany to the United States. Gil again assured Messersmith that there would be no attempt to circumvent the immigration laws or the existing German quota. “We will supply satisfactory affidavits and guarantees from individuals of good standing and character to fulfill the public charge requirements. Each child shall have his own affidavit,” wrote Gil. He also reminded Messersmith that there were “ample private funds to provide transportation of the children from Germany to Philadelphia and for their support, maintenance and education.” Gil’s letter further explained his own role—and that of Eleanor’s—in the unfolding rescue plan. “To accomplish our purposes as promptly as possible, Mrs. Kraus and I are prepared to go to Germany to arrange with the proper governmental authorities for the selection of eligible children, the filing of the affidavits, and the transportation of the children.” He closed the letter with a request that Messersmith offer some word in reply “concerning the feasibility of our plan and news from Germany.”

  On the same day that Gil wrote his letter to Messersmith, the State Department official sent a two-page cable to Geist in Berlin. The cable began with a reminder that “all sorts of steps are being proposed to bring children into this country in various ways.” Messersmith mentioned that several bills were expected to be introduced in Congress that would allow for children living in Nazi Germany—Jewish and otherwise—to be admitted into the United States above and beyond the quota limits. “My own view is that all these bills will probably die if they are introduced,” Messersmith candidly told Geist. “Although I am generally sympathetic to the idea of the admission of children under 15 years of age in a certain number … I believe the administrative difficulties in carrying through such a mission are tremendous and perhaps insuperable.” Besides, he added, debating any kind of immigration legislation “is going to raise discussion which we want to avoid.” Messersmith, above all else, was a political pragmatist who was well aware that anti-immigrant members of Congress would seize on any excuse to restrict immigration even further.

  Without mentioning Brith Sholom by name, Messersmith’s cabl
e referred to “a responsible group” that was hoping to bring in children “under the quota whose parents for some reason or other may not be able to emigrate.” In order to determine whether the plan might work, “a man and a woman of this organization intend to go to Germany and talk over certain matters with you and to go into certain aspects of the problem.” Gil and Eleanor were both Jewish, he explained to Geist, but “I told them that I did not see any reason why an American Jew or Jewess should not go to Germany on such legitimate business and I did not believe that they were running any special risk in so doing. As to whether a Jew or Jewess could find a proper hotel to stay in, I was uncertain and that I would write you.” Messersmith ended his cable with a request that Geist reply with either a “voyage feasible” or “voyage not feasible” response.

  Three days later, on February 6, Messersmith sent a letter to Gil saying that he thought Brith Sholom “thoroughly understands our immigration laws and practice” and that Gil’s proposed plan “is, I believe, the only sound and feasible way to approach this problem.” But, as he had emphasized during the meeting, Messersmith stressed that “there is nothing which this Government or this Department can do which involves sponsoring any such procedure.”

  Messersmith was willing, however, to take quieter steps aimed at giving at least an unofficial nod of approval to the rescue effort. Not long after his meeting with Gil, Messersmith sent a memo to A. M. Warren and Eliot Coulter, the senior State Department officials in charge of the visa division. “I believe that this group is a responsible one and they do seem to be a sensible one,” Messersmith wrote. “They have made a very favorable impression on me and their one thought is to carry through this project, which involves the initial bringing in of some 50 children, completely within the framework of our present immigration laws and practice.” He sent a similar message to Geist in a second cable to Berlin that described the Brith Sholom plan in more detail. “They have approached this whole problem in a much more sensible and understanding way than most people. I think you may give any representatives of this organization, whose names I would eventually send you, full cooperation within the framework of our existing immigrations laws and procedure.”