Archive-Name: gov/us/fed/congress/record/1998/feb/11/1998CRS670B

[United States Congressional Record: February 11, 1998 (Senate)]
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r105:1:./temp/~r105DkpxTf:e1535:

[Page S670-S672]

From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

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[From New London Day, newspaper of Oct. 5, 1997]

A Man From Salem Emerges as a Hero of the Holocaust: Hiram Bingham IV

 

By William S. Bingham

 

When we lose a loved one, we struggle desperately to

recollect bits and pieces of a life lived and finished. We

hang tightly onto the slightest memories that have meaning

for us. Gradually, the memories fade and the vividness of

those who were once alive grows dim. But parchment and

celluloid, letters and photographs allow us to recapture our

loved ones' lives. These images and words left behind in

journals, books and correspondence allow us to revisit the

life and times of our loved ones and the history they

embrace.

Such was the journey I started when I began investigating

my father's secret history as a covert operative in a mission

to rescue Jews, artists and other political figures from the

Nazis during World War II.

I cannot say I know everything about my father. Most of him

is still a mystery to me. But almost 10 years after the death

of my father, Hiram Bingham IV, I discovered a cache of

diaries and documents tightly bound in manila folders by hay

bale rope and masking tape, buried deep in the dust and

cobwebs of an ancient linen closet tucked by colonial design

into the wall behind the fireplace in my family's 230-year-

old pre-Revolutionary homestead in Salem. In these bound

folders and files marked simply ``H.B.--Personal Notes--

Marseilles--1940,'' which had lain untouched for more than a

half-century, I discovered chilling evidence of my father's

secret role in thwarting the spread of Nazism and in rescuing

thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

After my father died in 1987, I discovered he was a silent

hero of the Holocaust. As with almost all intelligence

operatives, he maintained secrecy about most of his actions

from everyone except those who had a need to know up to the

time of his death. He kept his silence because he himself

became a victim of pro-Nazi elements and Nazi sympathizers in

the U.S. government and, in his role as a rescuer, he took

actions which were condemned by his superiors and contravened

U.S. laws and policy. My father's story contained in these

hidden papers sheds a small ray of light on one of the

darkest periods in human history.

Among his papers were secret memos, photographs and reports

on the concentration camps, maps and notes on escape routes

and meetings of the anti-Nazi conspirators. There were

reports on Nazi propaganda, hidden Nazi gold and war

criminals and the ``Fifth Column'' (Nazi civilian

infiltrators worldwide). There were accounts and descriptions

of Nazi agents and suspected agents within and without the

U.S. consulate in Marseilles and embassies in Europe and

Latin America and their methodology for world conquest. There

were letters from Marc Chagall and Thomas Mann, which the top

opponents of Adolf Hitler had written to my father pertaining

to the rescues, the rescue operations and my father's

participation. There were copies of passport photos and

``official'' documents and papers used by the escapees to

gain freedom from the concentration camps and to escape the

Holocaust.

As a vice consul in the U.S. Consulate in Marseilles,

France, when the Nazis invaded and took Paris in the summer

of 1940, my dad became a government expert on Nazis and

Fascists, and a key agent in the secret rescue operation of

thousands of Jewish and other political refugees from war-

torn Europe. The whole rescue operation, encouraged and

supported by Eleanor Roosevelt, was kept in large part secret

even from his State Department superiors, because many of

them at first supported Hitler. Some in the U.S. government

believed Hitler would win the war and felt that the U.S.

should maintain favorable political, social and economic

relations with the Nazis.

In the face of strident and vocal opposition from his own

bosses in France and Washington, my father helped establish a

clandestine operation of international operatives smuggling

Hitler's ``most wanted'' enemies--predominantly Jewish

intellectuals, political activists and artists who opposed

Nazism--through an underground railroad system across Europe

to gain safe passage through Africa, the Caribbean and Latin

America to the United States and other safe harbors. Some of

my father's collaborators formed Maquis, guerrilla-resistance

cadres, to fight the Nazis in the countryside.

But my father's role in the operation had to remain secret

from his superiors, his family and all but his closest

friends, because he followed a moral imperative to aid Jews

and other political refugees in violation of official U.S.

policy, regulations and laws. My father's superiors in the

State Department and other branches of government who favored

accommodation and cooperation with Hitler had forbidden

official and unofficial support for the operation.

It was only because of Eleanor Roosevelt's quiet support,

pressuring Franklin D. Roosevelt to permit the operation, and

my father's Washington contacts through his own father

(former Connecticut Gov. and U.S. Sen. Hiram Bingham III),

that my father himself was not arrested and prosecuted for

violating ``official'' U.S. law and policy. But my father

suffered retaliatory treatment at the hands of his superiors

and feared government prosecution if the extent of his role

in the planning and execution of rescue missions was known.

Why were the Nazis chasing Chagall? In the pictures and

letters it became clear that my father was instrumental in

saving Chagall, but why did he need to? Why did the Nazis

want to exterminate the surrealist artists like Max Ernst,

Marcel Duchamp and Andre Masson, or the surrealist poet Andre

Breton, or the novelists?

Because surrealism was a threat to Nazism--it was

nonconformist and often contained political messages that

were the antithesis of Nazism, totalitarianism and

nationalism.

My father was an artist and philosopher till the end of his

life. He would sit on an old beat-up chair by the bathtub,

where he would place his large-framed canvases flat on the

porcelain rim of the tub and paint his surreal visions while

listening to Beethoven and Brahms. He liked the subdued light

from the west through a small window there, and he could

rotate his paintings to adapt to the swirls of his ``music on

canvas,'' as he called it. You could turn the panting upside

down or sideways, he told me, any way, and new visions would

be revealed.

My father had painted portraits of some of the rescued, and

he had painted copies of several of Chagall's paintings

because he admired Chagall and had become his friend during

the crisis. My father's journal entries revealed that Chagall

had gracefully admired my father's rather traditional

portraits and landscapes during meetings at my father's

villa in Marseilles while they were planning his escape,

and Chagall told him always to paint large canvases and

never conform to what others wanted him to paint.

I remembered the tale of Lion Feuchtwanger, who was

smuggled out of a concentration camp at Nimes dressed up as

woman at the direction of my father and hidden at my father's

villa for two months, passed off as his mother-in-law from

Waycross, Ga., to fool the neighbors and the Gestapo and

spies at the U.S. Consulate. Feuchtwanger, I learned, was

Hitler's Public Enemy Number One, because of his historical

novel, ``The Oppermans,'' which exposed Hitler and the evils

of Nazism in 1933.

Hitler stripped Feuchtwanger of his German citizenship, and

the Nazis issued a death warrant for him before he fled to

France, where the pro-Nazi Vichy government held him until he

was rescued. When it was leaked to members of the U.S.

Consulate that my father was hiding Feuchtwanger and his wife

at my father's villa, my father soon realized that his own

life was in danger--so he put a pseudonym ``Lion Wetcheek''

on Feuchtwanger's passport and arranged that the

Feuchtwangers be smuggled on a footpath over the Pyrenees

Mountains into Spain and on to Lisbon, Portugal, where they

caught a steamship to New York City. The code words for them

in this operation were ``Harry's friends.''

I vaguely remembered the names of Rudolf Breitscheid and

Rudolf Hilferding, whom my parents would discuss in hushed

and saddened voices. Although their names rang a bell in my

recollections from youth, I never knew who they were or what

happened to them. The two Rudolfs were Hitler's greatest

political enemies in the Reichstag. Old political activists

in Germany, they too were stripped of German citizenship by

Hitler and fled to France.

Met in Brothels

 

Some of the rescue team would meet in Marseilles brothels

with their prospective escapees, because it was one of the

few places where discretion and hushed conversation in

English and other foreign languages could take place without

arousing the suspicion of the proprietors. On occasion, some

of the women in the team (Americans among them) would entice

pro-Nazi guards and policemen in order to distract them, or

get them drunk so that rescue operations could proceed with

little or no interruption. Other meetings took place in jazz

clubs, until the Nazis forbade jazz, or at my father's villa

in the evening after his work in the visa section of the

consulate was finished for the day.

Until I discovered these papers, only a few individuals

knew my father's role: those who worked closely with him and

a handful of those he helped rescue. Some, like the artists

Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Andre Masson--and writers Victor

Serge, Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel and the family of

Thomas Mann--were close to my father during their own

escapes. But because my father had to keep his actions secret

from his own government superiors and fellow employees, some

of whom were supporters of and informants for the Nazis, he

could not reveal his role in planning and executing the

escapes of the refugees to any but a select few of the

escapees who were staunch anti-Nazi activits and conspirators

in the underground network.

At any moment, Nazi agents posing as refugees or enemies of

Hitler and Mussolini might infiltrate and blow the whole

operation.

 

[[Page S672]]

 

Indeed, when the true nature of my father's role became

more fully known by his superiors in the U.S. State

Department, he was removed from his position in the visa

section. Given meaningless bureaucratic paperwork, he was

passed over time and again for promotions, and he was

ultimately dispatched to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with my

mother and their five children. Despite the threat from Nazi

sympathizers and agents acting with the U.S. State

Department, my father continued to investigate and report on

the Nazi menace in Latin America and in the U.S. Embassy

in Buenos Aires.

In an ultimatum to the State Department in 1945, he vowed

to resign from the diplomatic corps if there were no efforts

to put a stop to the spread of Nazism and fascism in Latin

America. For this ultimatum, he was again passed over for

promotion and his pleas for investigations of Nazi gold and

war criminals being smuggled into Chile and Argentina on

German U-boats (submarines) were ignored.

He then made good on his vow, resigned from his post, and

returned to the family homestead in Salem to farm, paint,

pursue various business ventures and study Buddhism and

Eastern philosophy, which he embraced as a believer in

mystical Christianity.

Only now, after 50 years of obscurity, is my father's story

coming to light worldwide. After discovering the cache of

documents, I began an effort to investigate all of his

correspondence and official files, including those in the

U.S. archives, which are now declassified, and to find those

he rescued who may never have known his role in their

escapes. All of these incredible stories of spies, refugees,

counterspies, American heroes, surrealist artists and writers

fighting and fleeing the conflagration which engulfed Europe,

I am assembling into a personal and historical account of the

events for publication based on my father's papers and

supporting documents.

Prompted by contacts from a man whom he rescued and from

the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which knew of

his involvement in the effort, the key documents and

photographs I discovered in that ancient linen closet behind

the fireplace have been duplicated and are being preserved by

the museum. More than 50 documents and photographs from my

father's files were exhibited, along with several of my

father's surrealist paintings and landscapes, at the Simon

Weisenthal Center--House of Tolerance Museum, in Los Angeles,

during July and August this past summer.

 

Petition Seeks Medal

 

A petition prepared by survivors my father helped rescue

asks that Hiram Bingham IV be honored with a medal from the

State of Israel and a tree planted in his honor at Yad

Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

If he is awarded the Yad Vashem medal as one of the

rescuers, he will be only the second U.S. Citizen and the

only U.S. diplomat ever so honored for putting his life and

career on the line to rescue Jewish refugees.

Perhaps most important, the documents related to Nazi gold

and war criminals being spirited away to Latin America on

submarines with the knowledge of the U.S. State Department

now are being investigated by the Simon Weisenthal Center.

 

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