Following a White House visit today, during which he discussed measures to prevent the extermination of the remaining Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe with President Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise revealed that the revitalized intergovernmental committee on refugees proposed by the recent Bermuda Conference will shortly meet either here or in London.
Dr. Wise added that he understood that “some leading American will represent our country at that Intergovernmental Commission, which is to seek to find an asylum for Hitler refugee victims of all faiths and races.”
“The President,” Dr. Wise said, “maintains a profound and searching interest in these victims of Hitler who are unable to meet him on the battlefield as our soldiers are doing in Sicily, but must die unarmed and incapable of self-defense as Hitler and Goebbels decreed.”
Rabbi Wise also revealed that he had learned recently from “an anti-Fascist representative” that the total number of Jews massacred by the Nazis has already reached more than 3,000,000. Soviet estimates, he said, are even higher.
“I find it significant,” Dr. Wise commented, “that the President has just made former Ambassador Herbert Pell his American representative on a Commission of the United Nations which is to try and bring to justice those of the Nazi-Fascist countries who may be found guilty of responsibility for the foulest of all crimes in wartimes – namely, the slaughter of civilian masses. I feel that the Commission, including Ambassador Pell, is likely to organize itself in the near future.”
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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.
