It sounds harsh, my title. The fact of the matter was, as usual, politics came first. In March 1938, when Austria fell to the Nazis, FDR was president of the United States. Anti-Semitism was rampant not only in the Third Reich, but worldwide. It was bad politics to take a side, and strict immigration quotas were one way to prevent “stirring the pot of dissent”. FDR had a reputation of being both a “Jew-lover” and a “Jew-hater”, depending on which side of the spectrum the accuser stood.

In writing The American Wife, the first book in The Diplomat’s Wife series, I stumbled on an article on Jstor about the management styles of two Charges d’Affaires in Vienna: John Cooper Wiley and Leland Morris.

Vienna’s response to the Anschluss and the Nazi takeover was an immediate and brutal pogrom against the Jews. Nazis struck at lightning speed, having long ago taken the cues from their northern neighbor. By that time, Germany had already put into place the Nürenberger Laws, limiting Jewish rights, preventing “mixed” marriages, and stripping Jews of basic human dignities. Many of the Jews in Austria had fled Germany in the 1930s because of the debilitating pogrom against them.

The day after the Anschluss, chaos reigned at every consulate and embassy in Vienna. Jews lined up for hours upon hours, often never reaching their goal of actually speaking to someone about their personal plight. Meanwhile, Nazi stormtroopers descended on those waiting on the streets and beat, harrassed, and humiliated them.

American John Cooper Wiley was a rather progressive leader. He pleaded with his staff to bring in all of their friends to help process the Jewish refugees pouring in with visa requests. And when the Department of State refused to pay salaries, he paid out of pocket. The embassy in Berlin also “transferred” their quota numbers to Vienna to help get more people out.

By the time the Nazis set up their own emigration office in Austria, they had put into place a very debilitating and official process for the Jews. Restrictions and policies (such as requiring name changes and which meant reapplying with a new passport at the consulate of choice) interfered with the consulates’ own schedules and policies. In other words, between the foreign bureaucracy and that of the sadistic and demeaning measures placed on the Jews by the Nazis, many Jews found themselves stateless and displaced.

In the midst of all this, Cooper Wiley was reassigned to another station and Leland Morris, one of his Foreign Service Officers, took charge. A numbers-man and administrator to the core, Morris immediately reorganized the entire application process in an attempt to simplify the chaotic paperwork. In the process, he removed the human-side of the process by making all applicants send in their documents by mail. He removed the “face” of the problem entirely, and fired all of the “extra” staff.

Under Cooper Wiley, many documents were lost. Affidavits – which took forever to receive from sponsors in America – were mislaid or lost completely, and Jewish applicants forced to file for a new one.