[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 10 (Wednesday, February 11, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S670-S672]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HERO OF THE HOLOCAUST

 Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to pay tribute to Mr. 
Hiram Bingham IV, a Connecticut native, who risked his life and 
sacrificed his career to rescue thousands of Jews from the Nazis while 
serving as a U.S. diplomat in Vichy France. Mr. Bingham performed these 
services despite the opposition of his superiors in France and in 
Washington, displaying a courage of conviction which demands both our 
recognition and greatest respect.
  Hiram Bingham IV died in 1987 and it was only last year that his son, 
William S. Bingham, discovered the records which brought his father's 
exploits to light. Survivors whom Hiram Bingham helped rescue have now 
petitioned Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, that he be honored 
as a ``righteous gentile'' for having put his life and career on the 
line to save Jewish refugees.

[[Page S671]]

  Hiram Bingham IV never sought glory for himself but as a man who put 
service to others before all other considerations he has earned our 
appreciation as a true American hero. In doing so he has extended the 
remarkable public service and honorable reputation of the Bingham 
family, one of Connecticut's great families.
  Mr. President, I ask that an article by William Bingham in the New 
London Day be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the New London Day, Oct. 5, 1997]

 A Man From Salem Emerges as a Hero of the Holocaust: Hiram Bingham IV

                        (By William S. Bingham)

       When we lose a loved one, we struggle desperately to 
     recollect bits and pieces of a life lived and finished. We 
     hang tightly onto the slightest memories that have meaning 
     for us. Gradually, the memories fade and the vividness of 
     those who were once alive grows dim. But parchment and 
     celluloid, letters and photographs allow us to recapture our 
     loved ones' lives. These images and words left behind in 
     journals, books and correspondence allow us to revisit the 
     life and times of our loved ones and the history they 
     embrace.
       Such was the journey I started when I began investigating 
     my father's secret history as a covert operative in a mission 
     to rescue Jews, artists and other political figures from the 
     Nazis during World War II.
       I cannot say I know everything about my father. Most of him 
     is still a mystery to me. But almost 10 years after the death 
     of my father, Hiram Bingham IV, I discovered a cache of 
     diaries and documents tightly bound in manila folders by hay 
     bale rope and masking tape, buried deep in the dust and 
     cobwebs of an ancient linen closet tucked by colonial design 
     into the wall behind the fireplace in my family's 230-year-
     old pre-Revolutionary homestead in Salem. In these bound 
     folders and files marked simply ``H.B.--Personal Notes--
     Marseilles--1940,'' which had lain untouched for more than a 
     half-century, I discovered chilling evidence of my father's 
     secret role in thwarting the spread of Nazism and in rescuing 
     thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
       After my father died in 1987, I discovered he was a silent 
     hero of the Holocaust. As with almost all intelligence 
     operatives, he maintained secrecy about most of his actions 
     from everyone except those who had a need to know up to the 
     time of his death. He kept his silence because he himself 
     became a victim of pro-Nazi elements and Nazi sympathizers in 
     the U.S. government and, in his role as a rescuer, he took 
     actions which were condemned by his superiors and contravened 
     U.S. laws and policy. My father's story contained in these 
     hidden papers sheds a small ray of light on one of the 
     darkest periods in human history.
       Among his papers were secret memos, photographs and reports 
     on the concentration camps, maps and notes on escape routes 
     and meetings of the anti-Nazi conspirators. There were 
     reports on Nazi propaganda, hidden Nazi gold and war 
     criminals and the ``Fifth Column'' (Nazi civilian 
     infiltrators worldwide). There were accounts and descriptions 
     of Nazi agents and suspected agents within and without the 
     U.S. consulate in Marseilles and embassies in Europe and 
     Latin America and their methodology for world conquest. There 
     were letters from Marc Chagall and Thomas Mann, which the top 
     opponents of Adolf Hitler had written to my father pertaining 
     to the rescues, the rescue operations and my father's 
     participation. There were copies of passport photos and 
     ``official'' documents and papers used by the escapees to 
     gain freedom from the concentration camps and to escape the 
     Holocaust.
       As a vice consul in the U.S. Consulate in Marseilles, 
     France, when the Nazis invaded and took Paris in the summer 
     of 1940, my dad became a government expert on Nazis and 
     Fascists, and a key agent in the secret rescue operation of 
     thousands of Jewish and other political refugees from war-
     torn Europe. The whole rescue operation, encouraged and 
     supported by Eleanor Roosevelt, was kept in large part secret 
     even from his State Department superiors, because many of 
     them at first supported Hitler. Some in the U.S. government 
     believed Hitler would win the war and felt that the U.S. 
     should maintain favorable political, social and economic 
     relations with the Nazis.
       In the face of strident and vocal opposition from his own 
     bosses in France and Washington, my father helped establish a 
     clandestine operation of international operatives smuggling 
     Hitler's ``most wanted'' enemies--predominantly Jewish 
     intellectuals, political activists and artists who opposed 
     Nazism--through an underground railroad system across Europe 
     to gain safe passage through Africa, the Caribbean and Latin 
     America to the United States and other safe harbors. Some of 
     my father's collaborators formed Maquis, guerrilla-resistance 
     cadres, to fight the Nazis in the countryside.
       But my father's role in the operation had to remain secret 
     from his superiors, his family and all but his closest 
     friends, because he followed a moral imperative to aid Jews 
     and other political refugees in violation of official U.S. 
     policy, regulations and laws. My father's superiors in the 
     State Department and other branches of government who favored 
     accommodation and cooperation with Hitler had forbidden 
     official and unofficial support for the operation.
       It was only because of Eleanor Roosevelt's quiet support, 
     pressuring Franklin D. Roosevelt to permit the operation, and 
     my father's Washington contacts through his own father 
     (former Connecticut Gov. and U.S. Sen. Hiram Bingham III), 
     that my father himself was not arrested and prosecuted for 
     violating ``official'' U.S. law and policy. But my father 
     suffered retaliatory treatment at the hands of his superiors 
     and feared government prosecution if the extent of his role 
     in the planning and execution of rescue missions was known.
       Why were the Nazis chasing Chagall? In the pictures and 
     letters it became clear that my father was instrumental in 
     saving Chagall, but why did he need to? Why did the Nazis 
     want to exterminate the surrealist artists like Max Ernst, 
     Marcel Duchamp and Andre Masson, or the surrealist poet Andre 
     Breton, or the novelists?
       Because surrealism was a threat to Nazism--it was 
     nonconformist and often contained political messages that 
     were the antithesis of Nazism, totalitarianism and 
     nationalism.
       My father was an artist and philosopher till the end of his 
     life. He would sit on an old beat-up chair by the bathtub, 
     where he would place his large-framed canvases flat on the 
     porcelain rim of the tub and paint his surreal visions while 
     listening to Beethoven and Brahms. He liked the subdued light 
     from the west through a small window there, and he could 
     rotate his paintings to adapt to the swirls of his ``music on 
     canvas,'' as he called it. You could turn the panting upside 
     down or sideways, he told me, any way, and new visions would 
     be revealed.
       My father had painted portraits of some of the rescued, and 
     he had painted copies of several of Chagall's paintings 
     because he admired Chagall and had become his friend during 
     the crisis. My father's journal entries revealed that Chagall 
     had gracefully admired my father's rather traditional 
     portraits and landscapes during meetings at my father's 
     villa in Marseilles while they were planning his escape, 
     and Chagall told him always to paint large canvases and 
     never conform to what others wanted him to paint.
       I remembered the tale of Lion Feuchtwanger, who was 
     smuggled out of a concentration camp at Nimes dressed up as 
     woman at the direction of my father and hidden at my father's 
     villa for two months, passed off as his mother-in-law from 
     Waycross, Ga., to fool the neighbors and the Gestapo and 
     spies at the U.S. Consulate. Feuchtwanger, I learned, was 
     Hitler's Public Enemy Number One, because of his historical 
     novel, ``The Oppermans,'' which exposed Hitler and the evils 
     of Nazism in 1933.
       Hitler stripped Feuchtwanger of his German citizenship, and 
     the Nazis issued a death warrant for him before he fled to 
     France, where the pro-Nazi Vichy government held him until he 
     was rescued. When it was leaked to members of the U.S. 
     Consulate that my father was hiding Feuchtwanger and his wife 
     at my father's villa, my father soon realized that his own 
     life was in danger--so he put a pseudonym ``Lion Wetcheek'' 
     on Feuchtwanger's passport and arranged that the 
     Feuchtwangers be smuggled on a footpath over the Pyrenees 
     Mountains into Spain and on to Lisbon, Portugal, where they 
     caught a steamship to New York City. The code words for them 
     in this operation were ``Harry's friends.''
       I vaguely remembered the names of Rudolf Breitscheid and 
     Rudolf Hilferding, whom my parents would discuss in hushed 
     and saddened voices. Although their names rang a bell in my 
     recollections from youth, I never knew who they were or what 
     happened to them. The two Rudolfs were Hitler's greatest 
     political enemies in the Reichstag. Old political activists 
     in Germany, they too were stripped of German citizenship by 
     Hitler and fled to France.


                            Met in brothels

       Some of the rescue team would meet in Marseilles brothels 
     with their prospective escapees, because it was one of the 
     few places where discretion and hushed conversation in 
     English and other foreign languages could take place without 
     arousing the suspicion of the proprietors. On occasion, some 
     of the women in the team (Americans among them) would entice 
     pro-Nazi guards and policemen in order to distract them, or 
     get them drunk so that rescue operations could proceed with 
     little or no interruption. Other meetings took place in jazz 
     clubs, until the Nazis forbade jazz, or at my father's villa 
     in the evening after his work in the visa section of the 
     consulate was finished for the day.
       Until I discovered these papers, only a few individuals 
     knew my father's role: those who worked closely with him and 
     a handful of those he helped rescue. Some, like the artists 
     Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Andre Masson--and writers Victor 
     Serge, Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel and the family of 
     Thomas Mann--were close to my father during their own 
     escapes. But because my father had to keep his actions secret 
     from his own government superiors and fellow employees, some 
     of whom were supporters of and informants for the Nazis, he 
     could not reveal his role in planning and executing the 
     escapes of the refugees to any but a select few of the 
     escapees who were staunch anti-Nazi activits and conspirators 
     in the underground network.
       At any moment, Nazi agents posing as refugees or enemies of 
     Hitler and Mussolini might infiltrate and blow the whole 
     operation.

[[Page S672]]

       Indeed, when the true nature of my father's role became 
     more fully known by his superiors in the U.S. State 
     Department, he was removed from his position in the visa 
     section. Given meaningless bureaucratic paperwork, he was 
     passed over time and again for promotions, and he was 
     ultimately dispatched to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with my 
     mother and their five children. Despite the threat from Nazi 
     sympathizers and agents acting with the U.S. State 
     Department, my father continued to investigate and report on 
     the Nazi menace in Latin America and in the U.S. Embassy 
     in Buenos Aires.
       In an ultimatum to the State Department in 1945, he vowed 
     to resign from the diplomatic corps if there were no efforts 
     to put a stop to the spread of Nazism and fascism in Latin 
     America. For this ultimatum, he was again passed over for 
     promotion and his pleas for investigations of Nazi gold and 
     war criminals being smuggled into Chile and Argentina on 
     German U-boats (submarines) were ignored.
       He then made good on his vow, resigned from his post, and 
     returned to the family homestead in Salem to farm, paint, 
     pursue various business ventures and study Buddhism and 
     Eastern philosophy, which he embraced as a believer in 
     mystical Christianity.
       Only now, after 50 years of obscurity, is my father's story 
     coming to light worldwide. After discovering the cache of 
     documents, I began an effort to investigate all of his 
     correspondence and official files, including those in the 
     U.S. archives, which are now declassified, and to find those 
     he rescued who may never have known his role in their 
     escapes. All of these incredible stories of spies, refugees, 
     counterspies, American heroes, surrealist artists and writers 
     fighting and fleeing the conflagration which engulfed Europe, 
     I am assembling into a personal and historical account of the 
     events for publication based on my father's papers and 
     supporting documents.
       Prompted by contacts from a man whom he rescued and from 
     the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which knew of 
     his involvement in the effort, the key documents and 
     photographs I discovered in that ancient linen closet behind 
     the fireplace have been duplicated and are being preserved by 
     the museum. More than 50 documents and photographs from my 
     father's files were exhibited, along with several of my 
     father's surrealist paintings and landscapes, at the Simon 
     Weisenthal Center--House of Tolerance Museum, in Los Angeles, 
     during July and August this past summer.


                          petition seeks medal

       A petition prepared by survivors my father helped rescue 
     asks that Hiram Bingham IV be honored with a medal from the 
     State of Israel and a tree planted in his honor at Yad 
     Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.
       If he is awarded the Yad Vashem medal as one of the 
     rescuers, he will be only the second U.S. Citizen and the 
     only U.S. diplomat ever so honored for putting his life and 
     career on the line to rescue Jewish refugees.
       Perhaps most important, the documents related to Nazi gold 
     and war criminals being spirited away to Latin America on 
     submarines with the knowledge of the U.S. State Department 
     now are being investigated by the Simon Weisenthal 
     Center.

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