The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers.
[citation needed] When the Treasury staff learned of the State Department obstructions, they submitted a Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government to the Murder of the Jews, first drafted by DuBois, aiming to convince Morgenthau to meet with the President.
Morgenthau, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul met with Roosevelt on January 16, 1944, where he agreed to create the War Refugee Board, issuing Executive Order 9417.
The immediate cause for Roosevelt's action was pressure from the staff of the Treasury Department's office of Foreign Funds Control and its chief, John W. Pehle.
Pehle's office had authorized a number of charitable groups to use funds in the U.S. regulated under the Trading with the Enemy Act to pay for food, medicine, and other aid to refugees and other civilian victims of the war in Europe.
Specifically, in July 1943, the Treasury Department issued a license to the World Jewish Congress to use funds in the United States to pay some of the costs of evacuating Jews from Romania and France.
By the end of 1943, Roosevelt was also getting intense pressure to act on the issue from some members of Congress and Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) and the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe, which he founded and led.
Notably Jewish Congressman Sol Bloom, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, opposed the initiative and especially Hillel Kook and his rescue activist group.
Two Congressional resolutions had been introduced in November 1943, calling on Roosevelt to create a commission to formulate and effectuate plans for the relief and rescue of Jews.
Establishment of the Board was thanks to the team at the Treasury Deportment and relentless long-term information campaign and pressure by Hillel Kook's high-level rescue activist group.
Well before establishment of the WRB some Papal representatives helped and tried to protect Jews, for example Angelo Rotta in Budapest and Phillippe Bernadini in Switzerland, both deans of the diplomatic community.
The board obtained the cooperation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and the International Committee of the Red Cross in rehabilitating and resettling refugees, finding temporary shelters for rescued victims, transporting these victims to the shelters and providing for their maintenance in transit, and making relief deliveries inside enemy territory.
A Treasury Department licensing policy that permitted established private agencies to transfer funds from the United States to their representatives in neutral countries aided in financing the rescue of persecuted peoples living under Nazi control.
These refugees were admitted outside the immigration quota laws, but given no status, and it was intended that they would be repatriated to their home countries at a (successful) war's end.