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On January 22, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the "Executive Order 9417 Establishing a War Refugee Board." Like other pieces of legislation then and now, the establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) was not the result of a self-starting, heartfelt desire of the American government to aid Jews during the Second World War but rather the result of personal investment in a cause, professional organization, media pressure, political horse-trading, and Congressional jockeying. Two and a half months earlier, on November 9, 1943, the fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, three congressmen, Senator Guy Gillette and Representatives Will Rogers, Jr. and Joseph B. Baldwin, introduced a resolution with bipartisan support to Congress, calling on the president to create an agency that would act immediately to save the remaining European Jews.
At the time, there were significant forces within the United States and Britain that opposed such a measure, with claims ranging from duplication of effort to the fear of flooding countries with Jewish refugees. Both the House and Senate were to vote on the resolution on January 24, 1944, but two days earlier the American president pre-empted the vote by establishing the WRB, which was charged with rescuing the "victims of enemy oppression" and offering them "all possible relief and assistance consistent with successful prosecution of the war (ix). Various groups and individuals have been credited by historians for helping to force Roosevelt's hand in this matter. These range from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. who, on January...