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

behind the Nazis’ new campaign. “The movement against these stores,” he concluded, “is largely influenced by the fact that the large department stores are owned by Jews and this general interference with stores of this type is therefore one of the manifestations of the anti-Jewish sentiment so actively displayed in these days throughout the country.” During his tenure in Berlin, Messersmith earned a well-deserved reputation for speaking frankly with high-ranking Nazi officials, and Hitler himself reportedly “frothed at the mouth” whenever Messersmith’s name was mentioned.
    After four years in Berlin, Messersmith was appointed U.S. minister to Austria, a role that he filled during the years that led up to the Anschluss. Once again, his diplomatic posting offered a front-row view of the dangers that the Nazis had brought with them from Germany. In a cable sent to Acting Secretary of State R. Walton Moore in November 1936, Messersmith mentioned that National Socialists in Austria had been organizing Nazi military units and “openly address[ing] each other with ‘ Heil Hitler ’ and the Nazi salute.”
    Messersmith returned to Washington the following April, where he was placed in charge of a project to reorganize the entire State Department. Along with his official duties, however, Messersmith continued to keep a close eye on the situation in Nazi Germany. In particular, Messersmith maintained a steady personal correspondence with Raymond Geist, another veteran Foreign Service officer who was stationed at the American embassy in Berlin and who, for the most part, shared Messersmith’s disgust with the miserable conditions of Jews trapped inside Germany. “The Jews in Germany are being condemned to death. Their sentence will be slowly carried out, but probably too fast for the world to save them,” Geist wrote in a private letter to Messersmith in December 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht. “This is a struggle to save the lives of innocent people and not only to save their lives, but spare them years [of] indescribable torture and privations.”
    Despite Messersmith’s personal sympathies, he was also an unyielding defender of America’s immigration laws. Only a few days after Kristallnacht, Messersmith warned Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that the State Department strongly opposed her “illegal” proposal to allow German Jews already in the United States on temporary visas to remain in the country rather than force them to return home. * In a “personal and confidential” memo written to Geist in early December, Messersmith sharply criticized Perkins for advocating “extraordinary measures” aimed against existing immigration policies. “All of us who are decent and human are appalled by what is happening in the world,” wrote Messersmith, “but we cannot permit the problem to be accentuated at home or abroad by hysterical action.”
    Although Messersmith readily agreed to meet with Gil and Louis Levine, he made it clear during their discussion that he was in no position to offer official support or encouragement for the Brith Sholom attempt to rescue Jewish children. He also pointed out that America’s immigration laws made it extremely difficult to bring children into the country, while adding that those laws were not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. As far as the State Department was concerned, Messersmith told Gil, the Nazis’ growing appetite for control of Europe was not going to result in easing the quotas that applied to those trying to find asylum in America. Messersmith, perhaps with a hint of resignation in his voice, added that the number of people from Germany and Austria who had already applied for visas would fill the annual quota for those combined countries for at least the next five years.
    Toward the end of the meeting, Gil finally raised the discrepancy that had been bothering him for the past several days. Messersmith offered several reasons that might