Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., (1913–1983) was a Treasury Department official who played a major role in exposing State Department obstruction of efforts to provide American visa to Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe.[1]
DuBois, a 1934 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was Special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, 1944–45; general counsel of the War Refugee Board, 1944; member of Allied Reparations Commission, Moscow, 1945; member U.S. delegation, Berlin Conference (Potsdam), 1945; and deputy chief of counsel for War Crimes in charge of I.G. Farben case, Nuremberg, Germany, 1947-48 [2]
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DuBois wrote the famous "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," which Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., used to convince President Franklin Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in 1944.[1][3][4] Randolph Paul was also a principal sponsor of this report, the first contemporaneous Government paper attacking America’s dormant complicity in The Holocaust.
Entitled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews", the document was an indictment of the U.S. State Department’s diplomatic, military, and immigration policies. Among other things, the Report narrated the State Department’s inaction and in some instances active opposition to the release of funds for the rescue of Jews in Romania and occupied France, and condemned immigration policies that closed American doors to Jewish refugees from countries then engaged in their systematic slaughter.
The catalyst for the Report was an incident involving 70,000 Jews whose evacuation from Romania could have been procured with a $170,000 bribe. The Foreign Funds Control unit of the Treasury, which was within Paul’s jurisdiction, authorized the payment of the funds, the release of which both the President and Secretary of State Cordell Hull supported. From mid-July 1943, when the proposal was made and Treasury approved, through December 1943, a combination of the State Department’s bureaucracy and the British Ministry of Economic Warfare interposed various obstacles. The Report was the product of frustration over that event.
On January 16, 1944, Morgenthau and Paul personally delivered the paper to President Roosevelt, warning him that Congress would act if he did not. The result was Executive Order 9417[5] creating the War Refugee Board composed of the Secretaries of State, Treasury and War. Issued on January 22, 1944, the Executive Order declared that “it is the policy of this Government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”[6]
Historian Rafael Medoff will soon publish a book about DuBois, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and the Struggle for an American Response to the Holocaust.[7]