The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within Richard Breitman

Abstract

Richard Breitman is well established as one of the leading authorities on American response to the plight of European Jewry in the 1930s and the Second World War. In conducting research for FDR and the Jews, a book he co-authored with Allan Lichtman in 2013, Breitman came across Raymond Geist, an obscure consular official in the American embassy in Berlin who was directly responsible for the rescue of literally hundreds of German and Austrian Jews, among them Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, arguably the most famous Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Despite this, Geist had remained virtually unknown to Holocaust scholarship. Raymond Geist was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1885 and died at the age of sixty-nine in Los Angeles, California. He entered the foreign service after receiving degrees at Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) and Harvard. During his career Geist held positions in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and...