Late Paris, Berlin News Rublee, Optimistic, Leaves for Berlin

Optimistic as to the outcome of their negotiations with German authorities on emigration, George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Refugee Bureau, and his American assistants, Robert T. Pell and Joseph Cotton, left for Berlin tonight after reporting to the steering committee of the Intergovernmental Committee on the results of the conversations to date.

There are several side questions of the general refugee problem requiring action by the Intergovernmental Committee which interested groups had expected Chairman Lord Winterton and American Vice-Chairman Myron C. Taylor to take up with Mr. Rublee before his departure, but these problems were not taken up because of the steering committee’s anxiety that Mr. Rublee complete his Berlin negotiations as soon as possible.

Recommendations prepared by various groups for the Intergovernmental Committee’s steering committee and which remained undiscussed are:

(1) That the Intergovernmental Committee, through the British and American embassies in Rome, approach Premier Benito Mussolini to seek postponement of the March 12 date for expulsion of foreign Jews from Italy, mainly because 5,000 German and Austrian Jews would not be accepted by the Reich and would have nowhere to go.

(2) That Mr. Rublee, during his resumed negotiations in Berlin ask the Reich authorities to influence Danzig to cancel the order forcing 1,000 Jews to leave on Jan. 27 and instead deal with the Jews of the Free City under the same arrangement reached regarding the Reich Jews.

(3) That the Intergovernmental Committee, together with the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, ask the Czech Government not to press emigration of German and Austrian refugees until they are enabled to emigrate within a general plan which the Intergovernmental Committee may devise after the Berlin negotiations are completed. There are more than 5,000 German refugees, 90 per cent of them Jews, in Czecho-Slovakia who are being threatened by the Government with deportation to the Reich if they do not leave by the end of January.

Meanwhile, news of the dropping of the Schacht proposal for sponsoring German exports by an external loan as part of a Jewish emigration scheme was received here with relief. It was taken to indicate that Jews might be permitted to leave the Reich with their capital under a transfer scheme similar to the Haavara agreement for transfer to Palestine, but not under a so-called “ransom loan,” which was criticized here on all sides.