FOCUS ON AFSA DISSENT AWARDS

FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JUNE 2002

HARRY BINGHAM:

BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY

THIS MONTH, AFSA IS CONFERRING A SPECIAL POSTHUMOUS AWARD
FOR “CONSTRUCTIVE DISSENT” ON HIRAM “HARRY” BINGHAM IV. HERE IS HIS STORY

BY ELLEN RAFSHOON *

Une traduction française de ce très intéressant article est vivement souhaitée. Ecrire : traduction@reinfo-israel.com.]


Hiram Bingham helped rescue some of the 20th century’s greatest artists, writers and scientists, including painters Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp.


The son of a United States senator and a Tiffany fortune heiress, Hiram “Harry” Bingham IV (1903-1988) lived his last 40 years as a Connecticut country squire. He and his wife Rose raised their 11 children in the 200-year-old home he had inherited at the age of nine from his grandmother. He spent his days tinkering with inventions he failed to sell and playing tennis. He also explored alternative religions, painted landscapes and played the cello.

Yet from an early age, Bingham’s children had inklings that their father’s eccentricities concealed a more complicated interior. He would drop hints about his earlier days as an American diplomat during World War II. Once, during a home movie showing some of the children’s first steps, an image of Marc Chagall
appeared. Though their father explained he had rescued the French painter from the Nazis, the looks on Harry and Rose’s faces told the children it was not a topic to be pursued further. “It was a sore subject with our mother,” recalled William, the youngest son. Bingham himself “became ashen,” said his middle child, Robert “Kim” Bingham. “You could see deep frown lines when he discussed that period.” Not until their parents had passed away — Harry in 1988 and Rose in 1996 — did the children learn the full story, when William found some boxes stored in a hidden pantry behind the living-room fireplace. Labeled “H.B. — Personal Notes — Marseille — 1940,” they contained his father’s wartime journal, as well as letters and photos.

These papers, and other documents that have now been examined by historians, reveal that while stationed in Marseille as the vice consul in 1940 and 1941, Harry Bingham issued visas that saved the lives of at least 2,500 Jews and political enemies of Adolf Hitler. In addition to Chagall, Bingham helped rescue some of the 20th century’s greatest artists, writers and scientists: painters Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst; sculptor Jacques Lipchitz; poets Andre Breton and Walter Mehring; writers Victor Serge and Lion Feuchtwanger; and the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Otto Meyerhoff.

Nor did Bingham simply issue the prized entry permits to the United States. He undertook extraordinary measures to save his charges, including hiding people in his villa, providing disguises, passing some off as members of his own family, and purchasing fake documents. His principled defiance of State’s refugee policies, which severely restricted European immigration to the United States, destroyed his good standing with the department, along with his dreams of someday becoming an ambassador. In 1941, his tour in Marseille was curtailed
over his protest and he was reassigned to Buenos Aires. Five years later, his Foreign Service career was over. Saddened by his own treatment and by the fate he knew awaited the refugees he left behind, Bingham chose to keep his memories to himself for the rest of his life.

Saving Souls, Saving Lives

If Harry Bingham required role models for an exceptional life, he need not have looked further than his extended family. Although Bingham was born into wealth, money was the least of what made the Connecticut Binghams remarkable. A common trait, historian Char Miller has noted in his 1982 biography of the
Binghams, Fathers and Sons: The Bingham Family and the American Mission (American Civilization), “has been the familial devotion to a sense of mission in
American life.” Niece Lucretia Bingham, a writer, has described her kin’s sense of service more bluntly in a recent article about Harry: “We are a family of zealots.
We believe in causes. ”

The original Hiram Bingham, born in 1789, was the leader of the first band of Protestant missionaries to enter Hawaii during the 1820s. A controversial figure, he became enmeshed in island politics through his single-minded efforts to impose Christian reforms on Hawaiians. Following in his father’s footsteps, his son, Hiram Bingham, Jr., set up a mission in Micronesia. Harry Bingham’s father, Hiram Bingham III (1875-1956), was also groomed to be a missionary. But he found success in more worldly pursuits. After marrying a grand-daughter of the jewelry magnate, Charles Tiffany, he embarked on a career as an aviator and explorer in South America. In 1915, he achieved lasting fame for rediscovering
the ancient Mayan city of Machu Picchu. When he returned to the sprawling family compound in Salem, where he would father seven boys, he entered politics as a Republican. He was Connecticut’s lieutenant governor and governor and served in the U.S. Senate from 1924 to 1933.

When Harry Bingham graduated from Yale in 1925, he carried on the family tradition of overseas work. He found a position as a civilian secretary in the U.S.
embassy in Kobe, Japan and briefly taught school. After traveling throughout India and Egypt, he returned to the U.S. to attend Harvard Law School. But he had no intention of practicing law. During his first year in law school, he passed the Foreign Service exam and left to enter the State Department in 1929. He was posted to Peking, Warsaw and London before reporting to Marseille in 1937.
The Foreign Service also brought Bingham and his wife together. While serving in the London embassy, he had escorted Rose Lawton Morrison, the niece of Georgia Senator James Hamilton Lewis, to an audience with the Queen of England. The pair fell in love and married in 1934.


The Gateway to Escape

In June 1940, Marseille was teeming with foreigners who hoped it would be their gateway to escape the continent. Paris had fallen to the Germans and millions of
refugees were trapped in the “unoccupied” south of France, which was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. The refugees were in immediate
danger: under Article 19 of the armistice signed with Germany, France had agreed to “surrender on demand” anyone considered an enemy of the Germans.
For most refugees, the United States was their destination of choice. Overwhelmed with applicants, the U.S. consulate’s visa section had been relocated from the center of town to the suburb of Montredon. From his office window, Bingham could see long lines of men, women and children waiting to apply.

Officially, there was little Bingham could do to assist the vast majority of those seeking to enter the United States. Not only had Congress set low quotas for the
number of Central Europeans permitted to immigrate — 25,957 Germans and 1,414 Austrians — but the State Department had issued a series of internal directives further restricting immigration. For example, refugees had to prove they had the financial backing to prevent them from becoming a “public charge.”
A month before Bingham took up his post in Marseille, consuls were ordered to
demand that refugees produce certificates from their home country’s police about their criminal backgrounds. For the many who had been stripped of their citizenship for any number of “crimes,” this was an insurmountable barrier. By 1941, the ceiling on European immigration had been cut to about 25 percent of the yearly quota.

In their 1987 book, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, historians
Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut cite a variety of motivations for the mounting obstacles to immigration while war raged on the continent. They argue that American officials worried about émigrés being a financial drain or subverting the United States in the war against fascism. In addition, many officials also held prejudices against Jews and others they associated with radicalism. Whatever their motivations, says Severin Hochberg, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who is currently researching the actions of consuls during the war, most consuls complied with the regulations. In particular, he points to the dramatic decline in the numbers of visas issued to Central Europeans during what was the “most crucial time” — the beginning of the “Final Solution.” Figures compiled by Breitman and Kraut show that 27,370 U.S. visas were issued to Germans and Austrians in 1939, but just 4,883 were issued in 1942.

As for Bingham, from the moment he was confronted with the human misery outside the consulate walls, he sought to grant as many visas as he could. Eldest daughter Tiffany recalls one of the few things her father shared about his experiences was his shame over not having helped more of those people. “I remember him saying there were so many [more] he could have saved and didn’t.” Word of Bingham’s willingness to bend the rules to help people soon spread, and various groups and individuals involved in helping refugees escape Europe began to seek his assistance.

One such group was the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-affiliated organization. The AFSC had established a refugee assistance office in Marseille to provide food to orphans, and helped refugees find a safe place to live while assisting their escape from France. Ralph Hockley, now a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer living in Texas, worked for the Quakers in Marseille. He has recounted his experiences with Bingham in his memoir, Freedom Is Not Free, published in 2000. Back in 1940 when he met Bingham, Col. Hockley was
“Rudi Hockenheimer.” His father, a successful businessman, had relocated the family to southern France in 1935, convinced “that when we left Germany, Hitler was an evil that would go away.” For a time the family lived in peace, but when Germany invaded Poland, the French authorities sent his father to the notorious camps, Les Milles and Gurs. Rudi, expelled from the lycee he was attending,
supported his family by becoming an errand boy for the AFSC.

One of Hockley’s jobs was to check the status of documents on behalf of refugees seeking visas at the American consulate and try to fill the gaps. Bingham and his staff were entirely sympathetic to the Quakers’ efforts in
spite of the bureaucratic obstacles, according to Hockley. Indeed, Bingham was responsible for saving Hockley’s entire family. Despite the “holes” in the family’s own file, in 1941, Bingham gave Hockley a letter addressed to the Gurs Camp commandant announcing the American diplomat’s intention to issue a visa to Hockley’s father. The letter instructed the commandant to release him immediately. He complied, and the family received the promised visas.
They arrived in New York in the summer of 1941.


Mr. Wetcheek

That Bingham went beyond the call of duty to save lives is further demonstrated in the escape he arranged for Lion Feuchtwanger, the German novelist. Feuchtwanger recounted his escape in his 1941 memoir, The Devil in France, but Bingham’s name appears nowhere in the text since the writer feared its inclusion would jeopardize the future rescue of his peers. However, more recent accounts by other Marseille rescue workers and a post-script to Feuchtwanger’s memoir written by his wife, Marta, confirm that the pivotal figure in the escape was
Harry Bingham. A best-selling author of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Feuchtwanger was stripped of his German citizenship in 1933 for publishing books and articles openly challenging Hitler’s regime. He fled to his summer home on the French Riviera but was interned as an enemy alien after the fall of France in 1940. After a brief release, the author was arrested again and sent to a camp known as St. Nicola. Fortunately, security there was lax. Feuchtwanger and
other inmates were permitted to leave the camp on short outings to restaurants or to bathe in a nearby river. One day in the summer of 1940 when he was returning from a swim, a woman Feuchtwanger referred to in his memoirs
as “Madame L.” handed him a letter instructing him to “do exactly as you are told.” Consequently, Feuchtwanger silently obeyed when she pointed him to proceed up the road to a man exiting an imposing American-made car. To the astonishment of the raggedy-looking writer, the “smartly dressed” man in a white suit telling him to hurry was the U.S. vice consul, Harry Bingham. Bingham had a disguise waiting for Feuchtwanger — a lady’s coat, dark glasses and a head shawl — and told suspicious police along the route back to his home that
Feuchtwanger was his elderly mother-in-law from Georgia. For the next couple of months, Feuchtwanger and his wife lived in Bingham’s villa. During that time, Bingham was also hiding the brother, sister-in-law and son of writer Thomas Mann, who had already emigrated to the United States. Meanwhile, Bingham had made sure his own family would not be endangered by this risky business. Rose, then pregnant with their fifth child, took the other four children with her back to America on the USS Manhattan in June 1940. It was the last cruise ship to depart Genoa, Italy for a cross-Atlantic voyage before Mussolini declared war against England.

On Sept. 14, 1940, Bingham executed the escape of the Manns as well as that of the historical novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler, the widow of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. According to William Bingham, his father provided the group with papers permitting them to cross the border between France and Spain. They wired a message to Bingham that they had arrived safely
in Lisbon and told him that the Feuchtwangers should now join them. The next day, Bingham guided the Feuchtwangers’ exit from Europe. He had already given the writer a fake identity, “Mr. Wetcheek” — a literal English translation of
Feuchtwanger. Bingham then had issued an American entry visa under the pseudonym. That made it possible for the writer, who was on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, to obtain a French exit visa. Nevertheless, the couple’s escape was harrowing. The Feuchtwangers eventually took a train to the French-Spanish
border but were denied entry into Spain. So they climbed over the Pyrenees in search of another crossing. When they arrived at a Spanish customs house, only Lion could enter because his wife had no visa of her own. While he was allowed to pass into Spain, Marta waited behind in the hills. Before leaving Marseille, Bingham had stuffed her backpack and pockets with Camel cigarettes and instructed her to bribe the guards. His ploy worked like a charm. When the guards saw Marta’s stash of cigarettes, she has written, “one of them quickly stamped a paper I gave him without looking at the name. I have never gone down a mountain so fast.” The couple then managed to board a cargo ship from
Lisbon to New York. Although a 1941 New York Times article announcing
Feuchtwanger’s escape referred to “American friends” who provided miraculous assistance to the writer, it did not name Bingham.


Harry’s Friends

Those “American friends” were members of a group of intellectuals and journalists who had formed an underground network, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Its mission was to smuggle out of Europe hundreds of artists,
writers and scientists whose lives were endangered by the Nazis. Funded and assisted by prominent supporters, the ERC had already sent writer Varian Fry in 1940 to head their operation in Marseille, and Bingham soon became Fry’s accomplice. The people whose escapes they arranged — a “Who’s Who” of Europe’s greatest talents — were known as “Harry’s Friends.” Tiffany Bingham believes her father used his own inheritance to fund his rescue activities. His State Department salary did not even cover the cost of the villa they lived in. “I imagine a lot of his money was used to help pay off border guards or the fellow who was forging visas.”

One of Bingham and Fry’s most important missions involved traveling to the southern French town of Gordes to convince Marc Chagall to leave. Despite the worsening situation for Jews, the Russian-born painter had been reluctant to depart until late 1940 when the French revoked all Jews’ citizenships. He and his wife had then moved out of their home to Marseille, where the painter was arrested. By presenting Chagall’s American Carnegie Prize diploma to the Vichy police, Bingham was able to get him released from jail. In May 1941, Bingham and Fry orchestrated the Chagalls’ escape to the U.S. along with crates of the artist’s most recent works. Tiffany Bingham recalls having met Chagall in Marseille when she was about five years old. She guesses her father took her and her twin brother Tony along to hide the nature of his dealings with the painter. But even though Chagall sent Bingham Christmas cards every year, addressed to “Mon Ami,” only recently did she learn just how intimately their lives were linked.

Although Bingham’s work with Fry was not seen as heroic back in Washington, Jewish groups, who were quietly promoting greater efforts on behalf of refugees, were grateful. Hochberg, the Holocaust Museum historian, recently came across a document in the archives of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee that points to Bingham’s reputation for generosity among Jewish activists. The document, an Oct. 26, 1940, letter from JDC head Morris Troper to George Warren, a member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s advisory committee on refugees, praised Bingham’s work on behalf of refugees in Marseille.

The story of Lilian Stuart Smith underscores just how profoundly Bingham differed from his peers in the consular service. Smith was the daughter of Richard Winkler, a prominent French publisher whose press syndicate rep-resented the Hearst Corporation. The Gestapo was seeking Winkler’s arrest because he had published numerous anti-Nazi articles and a tell-all book by a Nazi defector. The family of five left Paris just before German tanks rolled into
the city in 1940. Arriving in Lyons, her father went to the American consulate to request a visa. They thought there would be no problem; Winkler had an office in New York, after all. “There was no way our family could have become a burden on the U.S. taxpayer,” Smith, who now lives in Maryland, wrote in a January
2000 letter to the Foreign Service Journal. However, the U.S. consul in Lyons placed an intolerable condition on his offer of a “visitor’s” visa: He would allow their younger sister to depart with the parents but Lilian, then 16, and her younger brother would have to stay behind in France. This was ostensibly to “ensure you will return to France and not stay in the U.S. beyond your
visitor status,” the consul told Smith’s father. After refusing the demand, Winkler proceeded to try the Marseille consulate. At once, Bingham granted the entire family visas, enabling them to travel to Portugal for a flight to New York.

Smith, who returned to France during the last year of the war to serve as an officer for Charles DeGaulle’s Free French Air Force, later married an American diplomat, who recently retired from the Foreign Service. She never heard anything about Bingham until 30 years later when it turned out her son was attending the same boarding school as one of Bingham’s sons. In a chance encounter at a school function, she was finally able to thank the man who had rescued her family. But Smith, like many others familiar with Bingham’s history, remains troubled by the retaliation he suffered so many years ago and the lack of recognition today. “His courage and generosity cost him much. The Germans
complained of his activities to the Vichy government, who then complained to Washington,” she laments.


Bingham’s Transfer

In fact, the State Department was receiving information about what Bingham was doing from several different sources. William Bingham said his father’s papers include a Sept. 15, 1940, letter from Secretary of State Cordell Hull ordering consular staff in France to refrain from involvement in efforts to smuggle out refugees: “However well-meaning their motives may be, they are carrying on acts evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintained friendly relations.”

In the spring of 1941, officials at State became alarmed that Harry was actively rescuing so many refugees. They unceremoniously ousted him from Marseille and transferred him first to Lisbon and then to Buenos Aires. The bad news came in an April 26, 1941, telegram from Secretary of State Cordell Hull that William found among the hidden documents after his parents’ death. “It said the transfer was ‘not made at his request,’ ” William reports. “My father’s activities had become embarrassing and contrary to the interests of the United States.” Even as the Allied victory approached in 1945, Bingham ran further afoul of the department when his dispatches from Buenos Aires on the transfer of Nazi assets to Argentina were greeted with dismay back in Foggy Bottom. The final blow to Bingham’s career came a year after the war ended, when Bingham requested an assignment in Washington. Notes in his diary indicate he had intended to request that the State Department involve the United Nations in a search for escaped Nazis in Latin America. His superiors turned him down and offered to send him to Havana. Bingham, who considered Cuba a demotion after nearly two decades of continuous overseas service, resigned instead and returned to Connecticut in
1946, where he lived for another 42 years.


Making Up for Lost Time

Bingham’s children, backed by a host of family friends and beneficiaries of his help like Lilian Stuart Smith, have been lobbying the United States government to posthumously honor their father. There are signs that their pleas have begun to resonate in the State Department. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, herself the child of Czech refugees, briefly reached out to family members in May, 2000 at an American Jewish Committee anniversary dinner they all attended. Albright shook hands with the diplomat’s children and asked how their father had been treated by the State Department. Although Albright’s public speech, which touched on remembrance of the Holocaust, made no mention of Bingham, Harry’s children were grateful for her private gesture. “It was like a 180-degree turnaround,” said Robert “Kim” Bingham.

State’s deputy historian, David Patterson, grew up with the Bingham children in Connecticut. As a child, he had no idea his friends’ outspoken father had such an extraordinary record, but he welcomes the chance to correct the record now. Patterson says the department will recognize Bingham’s humanitarian service by including the following biographic entry in the revised official department history:

Hiram (Harry) Bingham, Courageous Diplomat

Despite the Department of State’s bureaucratic caution during the European refugee crisis, a few Foreign Service officers proactively helped Jewish people who were trying to flee from Nazi-occupied Europe. One such example was Hiram (Harry) Bingham, U.S. vice consul in Marseille. Son of the historian-explorer who had earlier discovered the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu in Peru and went on to become a U.S. senator, Harry Bingham was also a scion of the Tiffany & Co. fortune and had independent means. Following his graduation from Yale University, he entered the Foreign Service in 1929 and served overseas in several countries.
Harry Bingham was, however, a singular personality. He was idealistic and naïve (a casual business acquaintance much later swindled $100,000 from him). Working alone or in collaboration with Varian Fry, the young American relief worker whose exploits in rescuing Jews are better known, Bingham responded sympathetically and courageously to European refugees trying desperately to flee German-occupied France in 1940-1941.
Visiting refugee camps in the Marseille area, Bingham provided disguises (men dressing as women, for example) and false passports and visas to refugees, hid them in his villa, and got them passage out of the country to safety. Among those he assisted were the French painter Marc Chagall and German writer Lion Feuchtwanger. He foiled official U.S. policy, the Gestapo and the Vichy police, but
the department did not appreciate his efforts. In late 1941, Bingham was transferred to Argentina, where he increasingly complained without much effect that German war criminals were fleeing to Argentina.
Having 11 children of his own increasingly complicated Bingham’s ability to accept overseas assignments, and he resigned from the service in 1946.


Yet while the planned entry praises Bingham’s courage, it still does not acknowledge that State transferred Bingham out of Marseille as punishment for it. And instead of conceding that he was effectively forced out of the Foreign Service for his continued efforts to fight fascism, the disingenuous wording suggests his resignation was linked to his substantial family responsibilities. William Bingham, who is writing a book about his father, comments: “The State Department has never said ‘Boo.’ We’ve had no formal acknowledgment, no apology for their actions or repudiation.”

However, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is sched-uled to attend the American Foreign Service Association award ceremony this coming June 27 which will include the presentation by AFSA of a special posthumous award for “constructive dissent” for Bingham, a long-time AFSA member. Several Bingham children are expected to be on hand to accept the award in the ornate Benjamin Franklin Diplomatic Reception Room at Main State.


Other Recognition

The papers that William discovered have been used in exhibits on “righteous” diplomats. In 1998, an exhibition titled “Visas for Life” opened in Israel about the Holocaust rescues carried out by 23 diplomats worldwide, including Bingham. According to the show’s curator, Eric Saul, the envoys saved as many as 250,000 people. The exhibit, which has been displayed at the United Nations, is now traveling the world to libraries, colleges, Jewish organizations and Holocaust memorials.

Meanwhile, Robert “Kim” Bingham is lobbying to have a postage stamp created in his father’s likeness. The Postal Service has informed Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman that the proposal is on this year’s selection committee agenda. A decision is expected by the fall. In addition, several Holocaust survivor organizations have nominated Bingham to be honored by Israel with a medal for being one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” Israel has stringent requirements for awarding this high state honor. (Fry was the first American to receive the award.) According to Eric Saul, Israeli officials feel they need further
documentation before doing so.

But the Bingham children feel ample proof is already available. Tiffany Bingham said that during her brothers’ 1998 visit to Israel for the Visas for Life opening, they had a chance meeting with a woman who claimed their father rescued her family in Marseille. A little girl then, she had been reprimanded by her mother for playing with the consul’s shoelaces under his desk. Her mother feared he would kick them out of his office. “But our father loved children. I’m sure she was part of the reason they got out,” Tiffany said.

When Char Miller published his history of the Binghams in 1982, the historian, along with most people familiar with the family, thought that Harry’s brother
Alfred was the most notable member of the Binghams’ next generation. A radical writer and political organizer, Alfred founded the left-wing journal Common Sense in 1932 and published it until 1946. However, the discoveries about Harry Bingham’s work as a guardian angel to victims of the Holocaust have profoundly changed his standing within the clan. Now he appears to be the one who has
come closest to fulfilling the family ethos of mission and service. “Harry stood shoulders above his peers. He had this missionary background and he had to do something great for humanity. Our ancestors saved souls, but my father saved lives,” says Robert “Kim” Bingham.

---------------------------------

* Ellen Rafshoon, Ph.D., is a writer and diplomatic historian in Atlanta. Her last story in the Journal was on the use of humor in diplomacy.



OTHER COURAGEOUS U.S. DIPLOMATS

Hiram Bingham’s work was exceptional, but not unique. The Web site of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (www.raoul-wallenberg.org.ar/english/visaslife.htm) cites five other U.S. diplomats who saved lives during World War II:

RIVES CHILDS, U.S. Consul General in Tangier, Morocco, 1944: Childs, the head of the U.S. legation in Tangier, Algeria, made connections with the Spanish authorities in Madrid and in Morocco and helped save more than 1,200 Jews. He persuaded Spanish authorities to issue the Jewish refugees visas and access to Spanish safe houses until they could emigrate from Algeria.

HOWARD ELTING, Consul, U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, 1944: Elting was one of the first diplomats in Europe to recognize the Auschwitz Report (also known as the Auschwitz Protocols) as a true document representing the murder of millions of Jews in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Elting received the Auschwitz Protocols and, with an important endorsement, passed it along to Jewish community leaders in Switzerland and the U.S. secretary of State.

DR. RAYMOND HERMAN GEIST, American Consul General and First Secretary, U.S. Embassy in Berlin, 1929-1939: From 1938 to 1939, Geist helped many Jews and anti-Nazis to emigrate from Germany by personally intervening on behalf of the refugees with high Nazi officials. In doing so, he went well beyond his official
duties as consul general. He also helped Jews and others who were under imminent threat of deportation to the concentration camps leave Germany.

MILES STANDISH, U.S. Vice Consul in Charge of Visas, Marseille, France, 1940: Standish, like Hiram Bingham, issued visas to Jewish and other refugees seeking to escape France to Portugal. He was active in the rescue of Lion Feuchtwanger from a French-German internment camp.

STEPHEN B. VAUGHAN, U.S. Vice Consul in Breslau, Germany, 1938-1939: Vaughan was responsible for issuing visas to more than 700 Jewish families who were from Breslau in the region of Silesia. Although they were not farmers, he issued them visas as agricultural experts for passage to the Philippines, where
they survived the war. Afterward, many of them emigrated to the East Coast of the United States.