In the 1930s, central and east-European Jews were desperately attempting to flee Nazi persecution. In July of 1938, Roosevelt called a conference at Evian to explore possible resettlement options. Delegates from thirty-one countries assembled at Evian. Only one, San Domingo, suggested it might be willing to accept Jewish refugees–with money. One Nazi newspaper concluded, “The Evian Conference serves to justify Germany’s policy against Jewry.” In November of that same year, Goebbels orchestrated a nationwide pogrom which became known as “Kristalnacht.”

On May 17,1939, Britain published a new White Paper which repudiated all its former commitments to establishing a national Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ten days earlier, a shipload of 937 Jewish refugees had set sail from Hamburg to Havana. The Cuban government, under pressure from Britain, rescinded the visas it had issued, and the ship was refused landing. Many of the passengers threatened suicide. Cuba was not moved.

Trailed by the American Coast Guard, the “St. Louis” drifted in Florida waters. It was only when J.O.I.N.T. guaranteed to sponsor the refugees did France, Britain, Belgium and Holland each agree to temporarily admit a limited number. The refuge they offered was, indeed, temporarily, for within 13 months, the refugees (excluding those lucky enough to have been accepted by Britain) were back in the same “boat.”…Hitler struck the match, and the western democracies locked the exits.

In the spring of 1945, the Allies penetrated into the ruins of what had been the Third Reich and “liberated” those still stumbling among its rubble…Towards the end of the war, Roosevelt had convened another conference. Representatives of forty-four countries laid the groundwork for U.N.R.R.A. (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency) By the end of the war U.N.R.R.A. was established and within little more than a year helped to repatriate and to resettle most of the displaced people who had homes to which they wanted to return. However, there were D.P.s who did not want to go home.

Most of them were Nazi collaborators who dared not return. The rest were Jews. An Allied military directive was issued assigning the D.P.s to camps according to country of origin. This policy threw Jewish survivors together with, among others, unrepentant Ukrainians and anti-Semitic Poles. Initially, the survivors were too ill and exhausted to challenge the new authorities.

When they gained the strength to do so, the military stood on principle. Would not segregation (the segregation practiced in their own country) be an endorsement of Nazi racial policy? So the survivors of death camps were confined behind barbed-wire fences under the surveillance of armed guards. (Ostensibly, to prevent them from “looting.” The Germans were being protected from the Jews.) Just beyond the fences German and Austrian burghers continued to live in their homes, to tend their gardens, to travel without harassment, and to despise the victims they had failed to destroy.

Teams of delegates from Jewish relief agencies raised a ruckus that was heard in the White House. Truman appointed Earl Harrison to conduct an investigation. An excerpt from the Harrison Report read: “…As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentrations camps in large numbers under our own military guards instead of the S. S. troops.

One is led to wonder whether or the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following, or at least condoning Nazi policy.” First and foremost, Harrison urged, the Jews must have their own camps. Truman responded by instructing Eisenhower to give priority to those who had suffered most. He cabled: “We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.”

Another member of the high command reacted to the Harrison Report. In a diary entry dated September 1945 he wrote: One of the chief complaints of (Earl Harrison) is that the D.P.s are kept in camp under guard. Of course, Harrison is ignorant of the fact that if they were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camp, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged…Harrison and his ilk believe that the D.P. is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” This comes from the journal of General George Patton.

Though Patton’s reaction was extreme, it was not unique. American officers, bringing their prejudices from home, simply filed and ignored directives that called for humane treatment of the disoriented D.P.s. It was in this atmosphere and under these conditions, that a thirty-four-year-old Jewish lieutenant from Chicago named Albert Hutler was appointed displaced persons’ officer for the three-hundred mile region of southwest Germany. Educated as a lawyer and trained as a social worker, Hutler balanced military demands with the exigencies of traumatized people.

Though Jewish survivors were not the only D.P.s in his charge, they were his main concern. In his efforts to restore their health and dignity he and his staff requisitioned, on their behalf, office buildings, apartment complexes, private homes, and at least one castle. Then they confiscated every useful article to be found on the requisitioned premises. They organized medical facilities, soup kitchens, nurseries, and sponsored religious services.

They even supplied a keg of wine as a gift on every railway car transporting French returnees. (When Hutler learn that repatriated Frenchmen were demonstrating in the streets of Paris because the government subsidies being given to help them rebuild their lives were also being granted to their fellow French Jews, the wine stopped flowing.)

Jewish survivors were given work as translators on Hutler’s staff. When he discovered that 249 Polish Jewish survivors of a death camp, “liberated” in the French sector, were scheduled to be placed in a Polish D.P. camp, Hutler risked court martial by arranging to have them transferred to his sector in the American zone. He signed passes and identifying papers on American Military Government stationary, enabling survivors to move freely as they searched for relatives and loved ones.

One of the D.P.s equipped with documents from Hutler was an eighteen-year-old girl who, on her motorcycle, roared across three international boundaries, to Poland, and back. Ten years later, that daredevil would become my mother. My mother had survived the second half of the war in southwest Germany on forged documents, as a Polish Catholic slave laborer. The documents restoring her true identity, signed by Hutler, exist, yellowed and frayed, to this day.

As word of the guardian angel-of-a-Jewish-officer-with- the-name-that-sounded-like-“Hitler” spread among the survivors, they descended on his office. On Tuesday nights my mother would sleep on the floor, somewhere in the apartment that had been requisitioned for her and her friends by Hutler’s staff, having, yet again, given up her bed to another D.P. who had an audience with him the next day, because Wednesdays, at Hutler’s office, was “Jewish Day.” On Wednesdays, displaced Jews gathered at American Military Government headquarters to tell their stories to Lieutenant Hutler and the Jewish chaplain.

Whatever could be done to assist them, was. In his memoir, “Agony of Survival,” Hutler relates his anguish in the face of their tragedy, and his awe at their resilience. In a letter to his wife he writes; …At yesterday’s meeting, a man with a record of six years at Buchenwald, with its “standing room,” its “incinerator,” the “small camp,” a man broken in body and yet with hope-hope because he has a sister in England and a cousin in America-came to the office.

He talked of his own daughters who he heard are in a camp in the Russian area. His eyes glow as he speaks, and yet he does not know whether they are alive or dead. He speaks gently of his wife, whom the Nazis murdered. What can we do for him? A pair of shoes, a suit, a few suits of underwear, a shirt-we can give him these. But can the Germans be made to give him back his wife, his girls, or even his healthy body? America just won’t believe…

There are still elements in America which don’t believe, or pretend not to. The testimony of veterans, whether they be Jewish or not, is vital not only because it augments the documentation of the period, but also because it unmasks the outrage of revisionism.

Albert Hutler was awarded the Bronze Star for his work with French refugees and with D.P.s in Germany, and was decorated by the Dutch government with the Order of Orange-Nassau with Swords-their highest honor – For his help to refugees from Holland. He formed lifelong friendships with several of the survivors who settled in the United States, and last year, when an article about the lieutenant and his memoir appeared in “The Canadian Jewish News” he received a phone call-from my mother. In return, she received a copy of his book.