Harry Bingham: profile in courage: U.S. Foreign Service officer ignored his bosses at Foggy Bottom and saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis, at the cost of his career. Now State is honoring him

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2002 | by Martin Edwin Andersen

To some he is the "American Wallenberg" to others "Salem's Schindler." Like Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg or German businessman Oskar Schindler, U.S. diplomat Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV, the son of a Republican former senator from Salem, Conn., was one of a righteous few who aided Jews and others fleeing Nazi

oppression in Europe. Now, six decades later, Bingham's heroism and acts of conscience are being recognized by a State Department whose rules he violated--at great personal risk and cost to his career--in order to save hundreds, and maybe thousands, of lives as well as a significant piece of European culture. "My father," recalls Robert "Kim" Bingham, a Justice Department lawyer, "placed humanity ahead of his career. He always told us, "Give the best you have to the best that you know.'"

Harry Bingham, whose explorer father also rediscovered the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes in 1915, arrived in 1937 to take up the position of vice consul at Marseille, France, after diplomatic postings in Poland, China and Great Britain. Despite the gathering clouds of war in Europe, the new posting--so close to the Riviera and the bucolic life in southern France--might have seemed an excellent conventional opportunity to the Harvard-educated scion of the Tiffany & Co. jewelry dynasty. "Here he was, an idealistic, wealthy young man, coming to what was normally a kind of social posting where you could have a good time," says Severin Hochberg, an historian with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

By mid-1940, however, the Germans had invaded and successfully occupied northern France. In the south the puppet Vichy government had agreed to surrender on demand certain kinds of people--in the beginning mostly German anti-Nazi activists--who were targeted by the Berlin regime. As the Nazi war machine advanced, many thousands of Germans, Central Europeans and other refugees found themselves stranded in southern France with no place to go. In Marseille, between 15,000 and 17,000 people, mostly Jews, woke with trepidation each new day. "Nineteen forty," notes Hochberg, "was also a bad year for American attitudes toward refugees."

Hochberg, who has studied Bingham's work as vice consul, says that the new decade coincided with a hardening of attitudes at the State Department toward immigration. During the Great Depression, anti-immigrant feeling had been fueled in part by concern for providing scarce jobs for native-born Americans, but also by varying degrees of prejudice against foreigners in general and German Jews in particular. As hostilities increased in Europe, Hochberg says, American worries grew to include fears that immigrants and refugees could in fact be German spies. "At the time," notes a release provided by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the diplomats' professional organization which is honoring Bingham's memory by recognizing his "constructive dissent" posthumously, "the official U.S. policy was that Jews were not to be granted American entry visas, as it would not be wise to upset any government that might become legitimate and important in Europe, and therefore a possibly valuable ally of the U.S."

Other historians have noted a thinly disguised anti-Semitism in some U.S. diplomatic circles as also being a problem. It was during this period, says Hochberg, that "every possible kind of obstacle to immigrants" was being thrown up by U.S. consular officials. These included requiring refugees to get certificates of good citizenship from the Nazi regime's police and making them prove they had sufficient material assets to keep them from becoming a "public charge."

Robert Bingham tells INSIGHT: "I remember my father becoming ashen-faced when he began to recall looking out his window and seeing lines of people who needed to be saved. He then frowned and quickly changed the subject." Other Bingham children recall feeling their father's sadness at not being able to do even more.

But Harry Bingham's central role in the Marseilles rescue drama was only vaguely understood by his 11 children as they were growing up. True, there were a few grateful references in inscriptions in books written by famous German authors for the help provided by the one-time consul, and artist Marc Chagall sent cards at Christmas. But rather than regaling his children with tales of saving between 500 and 2,500 lives between 1939 and 1941 by defying his State Department superiors and signing hundreds of visas for European Jews and enemies of Adolf Hitler, Bingham kept his own counsel.

Even disparaging remarks from Bingham's extended family about how his foreign service came to an inglorious end were met with silence from the man his children remember as having the family's "missionary zeal as well as a tremendous moral fiber."

According to diplomatic historian Ellen Rafshoon, it wasn't until Harry Bingham died in 1988 (to be followed by his wife Rose in 1996) that the family read Bingham's personal papers that included his wartime journal, photos and other correspondence documenting his mostly unheralded crusade. Among the papers was evidence of how Bingham brandished before the Vichy police Chagall's American Carnegie Prize diploma in order to get the painter released from prison. (According to Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, earlier efforts by Bingham and others to convince the Russian-born maestro to leave the village of Gordes, in Provence, received an unenthusiastic reception. "Are there trees and cows in America, too?" Chagall is quoted as asking.) Later Bingham and his close coworker in the refugee effort, writer Varian Fry of the underground Emergency Rescue Committee, were able to help Chagall and his wife to escape, together with numerous art works, to the United States.