Do not bother trying to read today’s document.  It is ridiculously bureaucratic, and I’m going to tell you what it says anyway.

First, pink means outgoing cable, yellow means incoming cable.

This is a cable sent from the State Department to the US legation in Bern. (Fun fact: in 1944, we did not have an embassy in Bern. Because the minister in Bern covered both Switzerland and Luxembourg, it was a “legation” and a “minister” instead of an “embassy” and an “ambassador. This changes soon, and even State Department staff complain that they can’t remember which countries have which.)

Anyway, this cable is the text of a license granted to the World Jewish Congress to send money to their representative, Gerhard Riegner, for relief and rescue programs in France and Romania.  The background of the license is a big deal in the creation of the Board, since it’s the source of a lot of State Dept and Treasury Dept tension.  But basically, the take-away of for this license is how utterly complicated it is. It grants Riegner permission to borrow money against blocked funds in Switzerland or to trade currencies in Switzerland as long as the bearer of the currency Riegner wants had that amount of money prior to October 1940.  That is literally the simplest way I can explain it. To prevent money from falling into the hands of the enemy, the US government, prior to 1944, placed very stringent rules on anyone sending money overseas. One of the things the WRB does is to streamline this process.  The licenses won’t look like this much longer.