War Refugee Board

The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency created to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers. Created largely at the behest of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Roosevelt "stressed that it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe".

The WRB was created when a group of young Treasury Department lawyers, including John Pehle, Ansel Luxford, and Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., grew frustrated by State Department delays surrounding a license for relief funds to help Jews escape Romania and France. While the Treasury Department had granted the World Jewish Congress permission to send the money to Switzerland in July 1943, the State Department used various excuses, delaying permission until December, a full eight months after the program was first proposed. Josiah DuBois also found evidence that the State Department had actively tried to suppress information about the murder of the Jews from reaching the United States.

When the Treasury staff learned about the State Department's obstructions, they wrote a report entitled Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government to the Murder of the Jews, first drafted by DuBois. The report was written to convince Morgenthau that it was time to go to the President with their complaints. Morgenthau, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul met with Roosevelt on January 16, 1944. He agreed to create the War Refugee Board, issuing Executive Order 9417. Credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied countries, through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg and others, the War Refugee Board is the only major effort undertaken by the United States government to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.

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