The effectiveness of Jewish organizations in making available “thousands of affidavits of support” for displaced persons in the American zones of Germany and Austria who have applied for visas to the United States, was disclosed by George J. Haering, chief of the Visa Division of the State Department, in a letter to Senator Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia.
Revercomb recently submitted to the Republican Steering Committee a report unfavorable to admission of displaced persons as immigrants to this country.
In response to a request from Revercomb to the State Department for information on visa issuances to displaced persons, Haering wrote the Senator Dec. 18, 1946 that “for obvious reasons, the majority of the persons qualifying under the German and Austrian quotas would be Jewish persecutees.” Haering’s letter is printed in the Revercomb report.
Pointing out that all DP’s must be qualified for admission into the United States under the immigration laws, including the so called public charge provisions, Haering said that “the slowness of most non-Jewish welfare agencies in providing any considerable number of affidavits and of establishing adequate staffs of their representatives in the field to deal with cases requiring evidence to meet the provisions of the law naturally affected the number of non-Jewish cases which could qualify in early months of the distribution of visas to DP’s.
“In contrast,” Haering continued, “Jewish organizations had large staffs and thousands of affidavits of support available at the very beginning of the program and they were, therefore, in a position to take up any balance of monthly quotas for which non-Jewish applicants were not available by virtue of a lack of adequate documentation concerning support.” A large number of certain non-Jewish groups, according to Haering, had a “volksdeutsch” status under the Nazis, which affected their Army security screening.
The combination of these circumstances created a majority of Jewish immigrants among the DP’s thus far, Haering reported, adding, however, that an increased volume of affidavits of support for non-Jewish immigrants is resulting in a “continually rising percentage of visa issuances to DP’s of non-Jewish faiths.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
