State Department official is credited with saving thousands from Nazis
By Michael Jay Friedman
Washington – Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. diplomat whose unselfish actions in saving Jews from the Nazi Holocaust cost him his diplomatic career, was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in a commemorative stamp unveiled May 24.
Bingham’s actions and bravery linked the lives of such disparate talents as painter Marc Chagall, political theorist Hannah Arendt, novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger and the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Otto Meyerhof with each other and with those of nearly 2,000 other individuals.
That link became clear in 1994 when Bingham’s son discovered a cache of documents, bound together with bailing wire and tape, in the back of a closet in his parents' Salem, Connecticut, home, six years after Hiram Bingham’s death. That find revealed to his 11 children how he had secretly, and against official policy, processed thousands of visas that enabled refugees from Hitler's Nazi regime to start new lives in America.
In June 2002, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented Bingham's children with a "Courageous Diplomat" award and praised Bingham's "constructive dissent."
Members of Congress, Bingham's children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of men and women he had saved attended the Washington ceremony unveiling the stamp.
A LIFE WELL-LIVED
Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV was born in Connecticut in 1903. His father, Hiram Bingham III, was the archeologist and explorer who rediscovered the largely forgotten Incan city of Machu Picchu before turning to politics and serving as both governor of Connecticut and U.S. senator.
iram Bingham, after graduating from Yale University and Harvard Law School,  joined the U.S. Foreign Service.
In 1936, Bingham was posted to the U.S. consulate in Marseilles, France. With that nation's conquest by Nazi Germany in 1940, and the establishment of the collaborationist regime in southern France, the Marseilles consulate assumed singular importance as European Jews and others facing Nazi persecution desperately sought means of escape.
As one Austrian refugee later wrote, "Visas! We began to live visas day and night. When we were awake, we were obsessed by visas. We talked about them all the time. Exit visas. Transit visas. Entrance visas. Where could we go? During the day we tried to get the proper documents, approvals, stamps. At night in bed, we tossed about and dreamed about long lines, officials, visas, visas."
Bingham decided that he would provide those visas, more than 2,000 in all, before he was transferred out of France. This required personal bravery: Czech, Brazilian and Mexican diplomats in France who followed a similar path were arrested by the Nazis or collaborationist French authorities.
His activism went beyond processing papers. On one occasion, he arranged to have Lion Feuchtwanger smuggled out of an internment camp, dressed in women’s clothes. Bingham, after bluffing their way past German checkpoints by claiming the novelist was his mother-in-law, hid Feuchtwanger in his home. He also hid the historian Golo Mann, son of the Nobel laureate in literature, Thomas Mann.
Bingham supplied crucial support to journalist Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group established with the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to bring to the United States 200 refugee artists, intellectuals and their families. When Fry was arrested, Bingham forced his release.
The U.S. diplomat did not limit his efforts to the intellectual and artistic elite. Most of those he saved were "just ordinary people seeking freedom," said Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut), who spoke at the May 24 ceremony.
Many of the rescued, out of bureaucratic necessity, were identified as "Mrs. Fawcett," an associate of Fry's. "Your father broke every rule in the book," the real Mrs. Fawcett later told Harry Bingham's son Bill.
A "DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN DIPLOMAT"
Bingham kept his secret his entire life, but after discovering his papers, Bingham's children led a campaign for public recognition of his bravery and moral integrity.
The postage stamp honoring Bingham is one of six in the "Distinguished American Diplomats" series, to be dedicated May 30 at the Washington 2006 World Philatelic Exposition.
It is "uplifting to see an American hero of the Holocaust," said Representative Tom Lantos (Democrat of California). "Hiram Bingham was a person of unbelievable moral authority."
Lantos is the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to the U.S. Congress. He was among the many thousands of Hungarian Jews rescued from Nazi-controlled Hungary by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Like Harry Bingham, Wallenberg issued visas to individuals fleeing the Nazis. Wallenberg was arrested by the Red Army in 1945 and last seen alive in a Soviet prison.
Representative Rob Simmons (Republican of Connecticut) personally obtained the signature of each member of the Connecticut General Assembly on a petition urging the U.S. Postal Service to create the Bingham stamp. Bingham understood that career is less important than "the moral integrity you see in the mirror," Simmons said.
Robert K. Bingham told the gathering that his father "put humanity ahead of career …. He and his wife Rose taught his children there's a spark of divinity in every human being."
Others who spoke during the ceremony at the Rayburn House Office Building included Chagall’s granddaughter, Bella Meyer, and two recipients of Bingham-procured visas: retired New York State Senator Franz Leichter and Marianne Pennekamp, a lecturer at Humbolt State University in California.
"There were never enough visas," Pennekamp recalled, but somehow, when a Martinique-bound boat became available, Bingham produced 800 of them in 48 hours.
"It was about simple people and their lives," she said. " It wasn’t about the famous."
More information on the 2006 U.S. commemorative stamps is available on the U.S. Postal Service Web site.
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