Much has been written about the origins of the War Refugee Board (WRB) and its official creation in January 1944. The present writer has first one important document to add to the published literature, found in the papers of Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., dated January 7, 1944, and already partially quoted earlier, which carried the heading “Summary of Recommendations for Specific Action”:

Release of Persons from Axis Europe (underlined in original)

Next to this first paragraph and underneath, a single handwritten word was added: “No.” We do not know whether the document was a summary of Jewish demands made possibly by Peter Bergson, alias Hillel Kook, of the IZL Mission in the United States and communicated to Stettinius by Assistant Secretary Long, to be rejected by both or by a higher authority, or by another State Department official, as it seemed to have given Hitler what he might have wanted to achieve among other things during the Final Solution: a sense of emergency among the Western Allies, as influenced by the Jews as they supposedly were to do it, to make concessions to him if they wanted Jews to be saved from his mills of death, or to supply him with official evidence that the war was about Jews.