War Refugee Board, Day by Day

Prior to my book on the War Refugee Board, there was not a lot of good primary source research on the War Refugee Board, the agency established in January 1944 as the official American response to the murder of the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution.  Books cited only other books, or published source series of highly selected documents, and a “game of telephone” emerged–where each version of the story got further away from the primary source documents and incrementally less correct.  When I started working on this story, I noticed how much detail and context had gotten lost, and decided I would write based on primary sources almost exclusively.  I digitized hundreds of thousands of pages of original documents and put them in a chronological database. (You can see more about my methodology here.)

In 2014 I started to keep a blog, posting one document from each day the WRB operated. I ran out of steam after about nine months–since I needed to focus on writing the manuscript–but want to share the pages for anyone interested.