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FDR’s receptiveness to such an idea. 107 He viewed Under Secretary of State George S.
Messersmith (considered the State Department’s authority on the Reich with influence
over the Visa Division) as a possible impediment to any refugee rescue plan. Feis
believed Messersmith was “slow to recognize the inadequacy” of American immigration
practices and was hampered by the “fear [of] any new though wholly reasonable and
justified flexibility in our laws.” 108
Foreign correspondent and Berlin bureau chief for the New York Post, Dorothy
Thompson, observed that the Anschluss was an international incident of the “first order”
that threatened to generate an uncontrollable cascade of events that would result in
American entrapment in foreign affairs, war or the “utter capitulation” of the world’s
democracies. The drama being played out on the streets of Austria—the beatings,
terrorization, imprisonment and economic disenfranchisement—had been predicted by
the earlier events within Germany itself. The world had already been provided with a
“blueprint” of fascist plans and the ultimate question was whether or not “western liberal
culture can indefinitely tolerate the aggrandizement upon it, step by step, of a barbarian
revolution!” Democracies were not threatened by nation-states but by “international
revolutionary movements” of which fascism posed the greatest danger. The democracies,
although endowed with “enormous wealth and power”, were “totally paralyzed” and
unable to see the ideological peril. Isolationists were “blind and worse than blind” for
107 Breitman, American Refugee Policy, 56.
108 Herbert Feis to Felix Frankfurter, March 22, 1938, Herbert Feis Papers, Box 33, Library of Congress
cited in Breitman, American Refugee Policy, 57.
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