This is Ira Hirschmann’s diary entry and in it, he talks about a piece of the story I’m still working out. The WRB representatives overseas were granted the ability to meet and negotiate with the enemy–something pretty much unheard of, since the State Department has to send messages through their protecting powers if they wanted to talk to enemy countries. (“The United States presents its regards to the Swiss Foreign Office and asks them respectfully to transmit a message to the government of Hungary requesting they …”)
Hirschmann has been meeting with Alexandre Cretzianu, the minister of Romania in Turkey and Ivan Balabanoff, the minister of Bulgaria in Turkey. With Cretzianu, Hirschmann discussed people interned in Transnistria, an area near the Dneister river in present-day Ukraine. The Romanian government had deported large groups of Jews there, and basically just left them.
At their first meeting, Hirschmann urged Cretzianu to order the release of the Jews in Transnistria to protect them from the retreating German army, which looked to be moving through Transnistra in the near future. At their next meeting, on March 18th, Cretzianu told Hirschmann the Jews were being released, a fact the Red Cross confirmed two days later.
So here’s why I’m still working out the story. Hirschmann and the WRB see this as an enormous victory, and the number of Jews released from Transnistria is a large piece of the Board’s statistic of how many people they “saved.” Romanian sources indicate that the movement of refugees was in the works beginning in 1943, long before the WRB was created. When Hirschmann asked, it was a conveniently timed way to win American goodwill.
Later in life, Hirschmann claimed that he offered Cretzianu visas for the United States after the war if he convinced Romania to bring the refugees out. A few problems with this: Hirschmann didn’t have or control US visas; this is never mentioned in his diary, correspondence, reports, or memos, nothing from the period; Cretzianu denied it (but his papers are restricted until 2020 from researchers); and it doesn’t make any sort of sense at all. Cretzianu does end up in the United States, but he defects there in the late 1940s–which he wouldn’t have to do if he had visas. Also, there’s nothing in this for Romania, so there’s no reason they would agree to Transnistria on the basis of Cretzianu’s planned future defection.
But Hirschmann said it later on, and other historians have repeated Hirschmann. I’m really dubious. Hirschmann is not a reliable narrator. A lot of his memoir is wrong.
