The Unitarians and other humanitarian organizations helped thousands of intellectuals and artists, many of them Jews, fleeing the Nazis to emigrate to safety in the United States and other countries.
Dexter also worked with the clandestine Office of Strategic Services (OSS), providing information about Nazi Germany to the U.S. from his network of refugee workers in France, Spain, and Portugal.
Over the next years he served as a social worker for a number of small organizations and with the entry of the United States into World War I he worked for the American Red Cross, supervising camps for soldiers in the South East.
They both taught at Skidmore College from 1923 to 1927, and moved to Cambridge Massachusetts in 1927 when Robert Dexter accepted a position as head of the Departments of Social and International Relations for the American Unitarian Association, a job that entailed many visits to liberal religious congregations in Europe.
The success of the Sharps’ activities increased momentum for the founding of the Unitarian Service Committee, which was officially launched in the spring of 1940, for the purpose of helping endangered refugees.
[4][5] World War II was underway, but the United States was still a neutral when the Sharps returned to Europe to focus on helping refugees in France after the country fell to Nazi Germany in June 1940.
Dexter in the Unitarian office in Boston believed that relief aid to people in Vichy France, a near-puppet state of the Germans, helped the Nazis.
In June 1941, he agreed with the statement by another Unitarian that "A few men and women of ability and prominence saved are more worthwhile than a hundred to whom we simply give a bit of food and whose agony we help to prolong.
[11] In July 1942, while still working for the Unitarians, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter accepted an assignment with the Office of Strategic Services and were given the code names “Corn” and "Cornette" They returned to Portugal and agreed to deliver money to French resistance leaders.