Free 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman

Philadelphia’s South Side—rough-and-tumble neighborhoods filled with Jewish and Italian immigrants that paralleled New York City’s immigrant-dense Lower East Side—which stood in sharp contrast to the far more genteel surroundings of Gil’s Philadelphia childhood. But Sacks and Gil had attended Penn both as undergraduates and as law students, and Sacks, like Gil, had quickly begun making a name for himself within the city’s business and Jewish communities after starting out as a lawyer in 1926. Unlike Gil, Sacks was intent on a political career. Following a brief stint as a deputy attorney general for the state of Pennsylvania, Sacks won election to the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the Democratic landslide that accompanied Franklin Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign in 1936.
    Sacks quickly assured Gil that he would gladly help with Brith Sholom’s noble, though vaguely defined, rescue project. To move matters along, he arranged for Gil and Louis Levine to meet with George Messersmith, a career Foreign Service officer who had been serving in Washington, D.C., as assistant secretary of state ever since he had returned in 1937 after several years of overseas postings. Although in his current position Messersmith had no formal role in refugee matters, his previous Foreign Service postings in Berlin and Vienna had heightened his awareness of the mounting urgency for Jews to get out as quickly as possible. Fortunately, for both Gil and everyone else at Brith Sholom, Messersmith did not share the brazenly anti-Semitic attitudes that were common among so many of his State Department colleagues. George Kennan, the veteran diplomat and historian, later described Messersmith as “a dry, drawling peppery man, his eyes always glinting with the readiness to accept combat.” He was, Kennan added, “incorruptible in his fight for what he considered right and decent.” Many of Messersmith’s colleagues incorrectly assumed that he himself was Jewish, which presumably explained his sympathetic views toward them. Instead, those views were shaped wholly by his personal contempt for Nazi ideology and policy.
    Messersmith had served as consul general at the American embassy in Berlin from 1930 to 1934, where he witnessed firsthand Hitler’s rise to power and, with his ascendancy, the increasing menace posed by the Nazi Party. By the time that Hitler became chancellor, Messersmith had been dispatching a series of cables to the State Department in Washington that spelled out the Nazis’ escalating anti-Jewish policies. “The extreme brutality with which the anti-Semitic movement has been carried through will, I believe, never be appreciated by the outside world,” Messersmith wrote in a lengthy confidential letter to Under Secretary of State William Phillips in September 1933. “While physical attacks may have stopped almost entirely . . . the measures against the Jews are being carried out daily in a more implacable and a more effective manner. . . . It is definitely the aim of the [German] government . . . to eliminate the Jews from German life.” In an earlier nine-page memo to Secretary of State Cordell Hull—written only a few weeks after the Nazi Party scored big gains in German federal elections in March 1933—Messersmith described the impact of the Nazi threat to something as ordinary as the F. W. Woolworth department stores, which were popular throughout Germany: in the wake of the recent election, “uniformed members of the National-Socialist party throughout Germany made difficulties for department stores, one-price stores and chain stores. The uniformed men in many cities picketed stores, posted themselves in front of them with placards warning the public not to enter or buy and, in some cases, compelled the closing of the stores. The Woolworth stores in various cities were among those which were affected.”
    Messersmith also made it abundantly clear to his superiors in Washington what was