One of the difficult things about studying something that’s been studied so much (the Holocaust) is that it’s almost impossible to prevent presentism from getting in the way. If you’re not familiar, “presentism” is when we take what we know now or our present-day sentiments, politics, culture, and try to impose it on the past. It’s when you ignore the context of the period you’re talking about. Politicians do this all the time. So do historians. Every time you see a book that re-examines someone’s “last hours” and tries to search for meaning in that—that’s presentism. It’s also when we, as historians, assume that historical figures never changed their minds, and never forgot anything they ever said or anyone they ever met.
I explained the thing about presentism to explain that when we look at the Holocaust, especially when what we’re doing is looking at “what people knew,” context is so important. So often, historians criticize historical actors for acting one way or another while quoting some piece of information that the actor could never have known. Since there’s so much written about the Holocaust, we’re especially vulnerable to this.
Anyway, in 1943, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (the IGC) was reconstituted. It was a committee created at the Evian Conference in 1938 and had a multi-country membership that was supposed to be working for pretty much the same purposes as the WRB. They were based in London.
The WRB had no idea what the IGC was and whether they overlapped with that committee. So they had to find out. There was a lot they had to research in the first few weeks of the Board, just like this.
