International efforts to rescue Europe's Jews improved with the January 1944 creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board (WRB). After hedging for more than a year, President Franklin Roosevelt finally responded to public pressure and ordered the establishment of the board. He told the WRB to take "all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death."

Neither the president nor the State Department, however, was committed to the WRB, and they provided inadequate financial support for its activities. Most funding was solicited from private Jewish organizations.

Led by John Pehle (pictured), the War Refugee Board coordinated rescue efforts through a small number of operatives stationed overseas. Their rescue strategies included planning evacuations of Jews from Nazi-occupied areas; finding suitable relocation sites; preventing anticipated deportations; and mailing emergency supplies to prisoners in Nazi camps. In August 1944 the WRB succeeded in bringing 982 refugees from Italy, 874 Jewish, to safety in the United States. The WRB focused much of its work during 1944 on rescuing Hungarian Jews threatened by Nazi deportation as well as brutalization at the hands of Hungary's Arrow Cross. Despite valiant efforts, and saving probably more than 200,000 lives, the work of the WRB, in the estimation of its director, was still "too little, too late."
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive