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

by Steven Pressman

  Two weeks later, on Monday, February 20, Messersmith received a telegram from Geist. It simply said: “Voyage entirely feasible.”

  CHAPTER 7

  What is American citizenship worth if it allows American children to go hungry, unschooled and without proper medical attention while we import children from a foreign country? Let the sympathies of the American people be with American children first.

  —SENATOR ROBERT REYNOLDS OF NORTH CAROLINA

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FEBRUARY–MARCH 1939

  On the morning of Thursday, February 9, 1939, Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, rose to his feet next to his polished mahogany desk in the chamber of the United States Senate. After being recognized, Wagner announced the introduction of a bill he had authored that, if enacted, would dwarf the plan that Gil had been discussing with George Messersmith at the State Department.

  Wagner, who had been elected to the Senate in 1926 after spending several years as a New York state legislator and judge, knew firsthand what it meant to be an immigrant looking to America for safe haven. As a young boy, he and his parents had come to the United States from Prussia (which later became part of Germany) and settled in New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood. After attending the city’s public schools, Wagner enrolled in the College of the City of New York (which later became City College) and later earned a law degree from New York Law School. While serving in the New York State Senate, he led a committee that investigated the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the 1911 disaster that claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, most of whom were young Jewish or Italian immigrant women. Throughout his political career Wagner remained a steadfast supporter of immigrant rights. By early 1939 he had been working on his children’s rescue measure for weeks, aided by refugee relief groups and influential individuals. Wagner’s bill—formally known as Senate Joint Resolution 64—would allow twenty thousand children from Germany to enter the United States over the next two years, above and beyond the existing German immigration quota. “Millions of innocent and defenseless men, women and children in Germany today, of every race and creed, are suffering from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands,” Wagner said as he introduced his bill. “Our hearts go out especially to the children of tender years, who are the most pitiful and helpless sufferers.” Passage of his bill, he added, would provide them with much needed relief “from the prospect of a life without hope and without recourse, and [would] enable them to grow up in an environment where the human spirit may survive and prosper.”

  Five days later, Edith Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Lowell, Massachusetts, proposed identical legislation in the House of Representatives. “In Germany you have the situation where families … are willing to have their children come to a place where they feel they are safe,” said Rogers, who had been one of the first members of Congress to take up the cause of Jewish victims of Nazism. “I have also had the hope that many of the children would go back to their parents later. I do not feel that Hitler will always be in power in Germany.”

  The Wagner-Rogers bill at least in part was inspired by the British government’s decision in late 1938 to ease its immigration rules and allow thousands of Jewish children into England. Jewish leaders in Britain delivered an urgent personal appeal to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain five days after Kristallnacht, which resulted in Parliament’s swift approval of a bill that waived immigration requirements for children under the age of seventeen, who would be permitted to live, at least temporarily, with British foster families. The first group of nearly two hundred children left Berlin on December 1, 1938, and arrived in England the next day. Over the next nine months, some ten thousand children—most of them from Germany and Austria—were evacuated to safety in England, sent away on trains and crossing the English Channel in boats that, collectively, came to be known as the Kindertransport.

  Within weeks of the introduction of the Wagner-Rogers bill, scores of newspapers around the country published high-minded editorials in favor of allowing the twenty thousand children into the country. “It is difficult to see how anyone with humanitarian impulses can oppose” the bill, declared Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Those of us who have enjoyed a normal and happy childhood should try to place ourselves in the position of these unfortunate boys and girls in the Germany of today, where they are treated as outcasts, scoffed at in public, and in many cases thrown out of orphan asylums and left on the verge of starvation. How can we, who profess to believe in democracy and human rights, sit idly by and allow such atrocities to be committed without raising a finger?”

  But many of these same editorials, while lauding the humanitarian impulse to help Jewish children, also lobbied in defense of America’s existing immigration quotas. These editorials made it clear that a special gesture to aid the children should not be viewed as an endorsement of a broader effort to liberalize the nation’s overall immigration laws. “It is impossible to offer sanctuary in this country to all refugees, however urgent their need,” maintained the Galveston News in an editorial published on February 20. “It would dishonor our traditions of humanity and freedom, however, to refuse the small measure of help” offered by the legislation.

  These sentiments were broadly echoed in public opinion polls, which reflected overwhelming opposition to any relaxing of the immigration laws, even in light of the events unfolding in Europe. A 1938 survey conducted by the Roper polling company found that fewer than 5 percent of Americans favored more liberal immigration quotas. The same survey revealed that more than 67 percent of Americans were willing to stop all further immigration into the United States. The United States still bore the scars of the Great Depression, and restricting immigration was seen as a way to protect jobs for Americans, who for years had been plagued with staggering unemployment rates. But challenging economic considerations were not the only factors at play in the immigration debate. The American public simply was not moved by the dire situation in Europe.

  Even 20 percent of American Jews said they favored a strict immigration policy. Many feared that efforts to allow more than a small trickle of Jewish refugees into the country would only add further fuel to the rising flames of anti-Semitism in the United States. Jewish leaders worried that any effort to liberalize the immigration quotas would quickly be interpreted as un-American, resulting in even more negative attitudes toward the country’s Jewish population. These fears were not unfounded. A series of public opinion polls conducted in the late 1930s found that 60 percent of Americans held a low opinion of Jews, regarding them as “greedy,” “dishonest,” and “pushy.” More than 40 percent believed that Jews held too much power in the United States—a figure that would rise to 58 percent by 1945. A Roper poll conducted in 1939 revealed that only 39 percent of Americans felt that Jews should receive the same treatment as all other citizens, while 53 percent believed that “Jews are different and should be restricted.” One out of every ten Americans felt that all Jews should be deported outright.

  The anti-Semitic rants of national figures such as Father Charles Coughlin—the so-called radio priest of the 1930s—further inflamed public attitudes against Jews during this period. Throughout the Great Depression, Coughlin frequently railed against “international bankers”—a long-recognized code phrase for powerful Jewish interests in the United States and Europe. In a national radio broadcast ten days after Kristallnacht, Coughlin offered a twisted explanation of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany as a logical reaction to Soviet communism, which he and many others felt had been heavily influenced by Jewish leaders: “It is my opinion that Nazism … cannot be liquidated until the religious Jews in high places—in synagogues, in finance, in radio and in the press—attack the cause, attack forthright the errors and the spread of communism, together with their co-nationals who support it.” In the same speech, Coughlin insisted that any potential danger to 600,000 Jews in Nazi Germany “whom no government official has yet sentenced to death�
�� paled in comparison to millions of Christians “whose lives have been snuffed out, whose property has been confiscated and whose altars have been desecrated” since the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia.

  Even more virulent anti-Semitic rants poured out of Fritz Kuhn, the German-born leader of the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler group that at the height of its popularity in the 1930s published four newspapers, operated twenty-two summer camps for children, organized a businessmen’s league, and established nearly one hundred branches around the country. “All Jews are enemies of the United States,” Kuhn declared in June 1938. “It wasn’t the Jews who built up this country. They came later when there was something to grab.” On the night of February 20, 1939, more than twenty thousand Bund supporters filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where speaker after speaker riled up the crowd with taunts that included attacks on “Jewish leeches of class warfare” and snide references to President Roosevelt as “Franklin Rosenfeld.”*

  In defiance of these anti-Jewish sentiments, two congressmen from New York—Emanuel Celler and Samuel Dickstein—considered introducing a bill in the wake of Kristallnacht to allow unrestricted immigration for victims of religious or political persecution. Such a measure, which would have had no chance of success on Capitol Hill, also attracted widespread opposition from Jewish leaders and organizations, hardly the kind of attention that its sponsors had imagined. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the popular and charismatic leader of the American Jewish Congress, who had President Roosevelt’s ear on such matters, dismissed the Celler-Dickstein proposal as being “so bad that it seems the work of an agent provocateur.” Another national organization, the American Jewish Committee, warned that the legislation would create “bad feelings” by allowing Jewish refugees to take jobs away from Americans who were still looking for work during the lingering Depression. “As heartless as it may seem, future efforts should be directed toward sending Jewish refugees to other countries instead of bringing them here,” declared the group. Celler and Dickstein quickly abandoned their proposal.

  Within the Roosevelt administration, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins provided a lone sympathetic voice in support of allowing greater numbers of Jewish refugees into the United States. During a cabinet meeting held six weeks after FDR’s 1933 inauguration, Perkins urged the new president to rescind a 1930 executive order by President Herbert Hoover that had required strict adherence to the public charge requirement in the immigration law. The change would have immediately made it much easier for thousands of Jews to come to America without requiring any changes to the quota system. But Secretary of State Cordell Hull, along with Under Secretary of State William Phillips, opposed such a move and convinced Roosevelt there was no connection between Hoover’s earlier order and the low percentage of refugees who were being admitted from Germany. The public charge requirement would remain in the law. Perkins also lobbied for other revisions to the law, such as legal authority for the issuance of a financial bond in advance of an immigrant’s arrival in the country, which would help to guarantee that the immigrant would not wind up on public assistance.

  Perkins, of course, convinced Roosevelt in November 1938 to extend temporary visas for thousands of German-Jewish visitors already in the United States. Her actions, however, prompted a candid warning from C. Paul Fletcher, an official in the State Department’s visa division, who told a colleague that the department would quickly incur the wrath of the American public if “ships begin to arrive in New York City laden with Jewish immigrants.”

  By early 1939, efforts to allow more Jewish children into the country had gained the support of a few influential national figures, notably Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady had even provided, sotto voce, strategic advice to a coalition of refugee relief groups that had been trying to generate support for the children’s rescue bill even before it was formally introduced by Senator Wagner and Congresswoman Rogers. “My husband says that you had better go to work at once and get two people from opposite parties in the House and Senate and have them jointly get agreement on the legislation you want for bringing in the children,” Mrs. Roosevelt advised her friend Justine Polier, a New York judge and social welfare activist who also happened to be Rabbi Wise’s daughter.

  But the Wagner-Rogers bill almost certainly was doomed to fail from the moment it was introduced. Although the State Department never officially opposed the measure, neither did it offer any support. Instead, Secretary of State Hull sent a detailed letter to members of Congress that focused on how difficult it would be to carry out the children’s rescue bill. Without saying so explicitly, Hull’s message left little doubt that the State Department had no interest in seeing the legislation enacted.

  Once public hearings began in the spring of 1939, a steady stream of individuals and organizations paraded before the House and Senate immigration committees to testify against the bill. Agnes Waters, representing a group of World War I widows, urged Congress not to let in “thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners” who would grow up to become “potential leaders of a revolt” against the American government. “Why should we give preference … to these potential Communists?” railed Mrs. Waters. “Already we have too many of their kind in our country trying to overthrow our government.” To be sure, the hearings also featured a variety of witnesses who offered impassioned testimony in favor of the Wagner-Rogers legislation. “I know it must be difficult to visualize the anguish those mothers [in Germany] must feel to make them willing and eager to give up their children and send them to a strange land, send them to strange people,” actress Helen Hayes told members of Congress. “That is the most potent and the most moving evidence of the immediate need of those little children. I beg of you to let them in.”

  But the strong anti-immigration attitudes that already prevailed on Capitol Hill continued to align with the overall mood of the country—even when it came to saving children. While the Wagner-Rogers measure was being debated in Congress, Senator Robert Reynolds, a conservative North Carolina Democrat, introduced his own series of bills that, among other things, would reduce the immigration quotas for all countries by up to 90 percent. Other parts of his legislation would prohibit immigration altogether until America’s unemployment levels dropped further, along with requiring the deportation of all foreign aliens found to be receiving any form of public assistance. Reynolds staked out a leading role in marshaling public and political opposition to the Wagner-Rogers bill. “Shall we first take care of our own children, our citizens, our country, or shall we bestow our charity on children imported from abroad,” he asked in a national radio broadcast in March 1939. Reynolds summarily dismissed the claim, put forward by supporters of the Wagner-Rogers bill, that thousands of Americans were ready to open up their homes to Jewish children if the measure were to pass. “If that statement be true, then this is my answer, your answer, and America’s answer,” said Reynolds. “If homes are available for the adoption of alien children, Americanism demands that needy American children also be adopted into these American homes. My heart beats in sympathy for those unfortunate children across the seas. But my love and duty belongs firstly to our children here at home.”

  Throughout the spring, Washington was filled with talk, both public and private, about immigration and hardened attitudes toward allowing Jewish refugees into the country. During a Washington dinner party, someone asked Laura Delano Houghteling for her thoughts about the pending Wagner-Rogers bill. As the wife of U.S. Immigration Commissioner James Houghteling and also President Roosevelt’s first cousin, she might have been a little more circumspect before offering her opinion. Instead, she casually remarked: “Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow up into twenty thousand ugly adults.”

  It is doubtful that FDR himself ever gave serious consideration to throwing his political weight behind the Wagner-Rogers bill. Although he was immensely popular among Jews in America, Roosevelt was also acutely aware of the cost he might h
ave to pay by defying the broad public sentiments against increased foreign immigration. Roosevelt was a consummate politician with an ambitious agenda for the nation that, by 1939, included the challenge of preparing a reluctant American public for the seeming inevitability of a war in Europe. FDR and his closest advisers knew that highly visible efforts to help bring larger numbers of Jewish refugees into the United States would do little to help accomplish his broader agenda. Indeed such efforts would almost certainly result in a backlash among American isolationists and anti-immigration forces, which would make it even more difficult for the president to forge ahead with his priorities for the country. Saving Jewish lives—particularly those of innocent children—may well have appealed to FDR’s humanitarian instincts. But it did not square up with his broader political agenda.

  Eleanor Roosevelt tried on a few occasions to sway her husband in favor of the Wagner-Rogers bill. She also talked with Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in an effort to win more support for the legislation. “He says that personally he is in favor of the bill and feels as I do about it,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Justine Polier, “but that it would not be advisable for the president to come out because if the president did and [the bill] was defeated, it would be very bad.”

  As the hearings on the Wagner-Rogers bill concluded in late spring, a New York congresswoman attempted one last time to find out where the president stood. “Caroline O’Day asked me last night at dinner if you would give her an expression of your views on the bill providing for 20,000 refugee children being allowed into America regardless of the quota status,” wrote Edwin “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt’s senior aide, in a memo typed on cream-colored White House stationery. In the upper right-hand corner of the June 2 memo, Roosevelt, in clear handwriting, noted his succinct response: “File no action FDR.”