FIRST PERSON | I found hope in the founding of the War Refugee Board

The holidays are long over. I’ve scraped the menorah of its drippy wax. I’ve washed and ironed the hand-embroidered tablecloth. Only the extra weight and the credit card bills remain as evidence of the festivities. 

I was yearning for inspiration to keep me moving forward in the new year — amid the unsettling political landscape, the troubled state of the world and especially as we marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I needed a hero and, happily, I found one. His name: John Pehle.

A son of German immigrants, Pehle was born in Minnesota in 1909. Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School, he started working at the U.S. Treasury Department.  

At Treasury, he co-authored “The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” a 1944 report on the U.S. government’s failure to rescue Europe’s Jewry. Perhaps even worse, the report detailed the government’s efforts to prevent and obstruct such rescue attempts and to block information about Jews from reaching the American public. 

The report title alone was so damning that it was softened to “A Personal Report to the President.”

On Jan. 13, 1944, Pehle and Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau presented that report to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They also handed him a draft executive order to create a new government agency tasked with the “immediate rescue and relief of the Jews of Europe and other victims of enemy persecution.”

One week later that order was signed and created the War Refugee Board. Pehle was its first director. He was 34 years old. 

He was interviewed shortly after his appointment. 

“I am aware that we face perhaps the greatest humanitarian task of all time. I am aware of the urgency of that task. We must thwart the Nazi program swiftly and decisively,”  Pehle said. “We have no blueprints to guide us. We have no precedents to show us the way. There are no panaceas, no pat formulas to meet these problems.” 

To do the job, Pehle and his self-described staff of “red-tape cutters” negotiated interagency conflicts, streamlined humanitarian aid to Europe, released detailed reports of the horrors in the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, financed evacuation efforts, established refugee camps, issued visas, created false ID papers and reportedly even laundered money and paid bribes to Nazi sympathizers via covert agents. In short, he and his staff did everything they could to save lives.

And save lives they did. By the War Refugee Board’s own estimates, the organization saved tens of thousands of European Jews who otherwise would have died at the hands of the Nazis in the last two years of the Second World War. According to some historians, the number of lives saved exceeded 200,000.

Yet, Pehle — a man whose whistleblowing and leadership played a central role in every life saved — was modest in the extreme. 

“What we did was little enough. It was late. Late and little, I would say. Looking back at the board, the resources available were too small to deal effectively with the problem,” he later said. “But we were able to change the policy of the United States, and we were able to help the private agencies, and we were able to change the moral position of the United States in this area.”

After the war, Pehle entered private practice as a tax attorney. He died of cancer in 1999.

In 2006, Pehle was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal “in recognition of his contributions to the nation in helping rescue Jews and other minorities from the Holocaust during World War II.”

You can read more about Pehle in Rebecca Erbelding’s “Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe.” Her book, published in 2018, won several accolades, including a National Jewish Book Award. Her research also played a major role in Ken Burns’ 2022 docuseries “The U.S. and the Holocaust.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Pehle these days as the new administration restricts immigration and begins mass deportations. I wonder where someone of Pehle’s courage and conviction might fit in. 

His example gives me the courage to face the challenges ahead, large and small. As always, Jews must strive to create “a shenere un besere velt,” Yiddish for “a more beautiful and better world.”