At the end of November 1940, Hiram Bingham IV arrived at the gates of a grim internment camp in the shadow of the Pyrenees Mountains in southwest France. He was traveling on his own initiative, and at his own expense, to investigate the situation of thousands of Jews recently expelled from Germany. A member of a prominent Connecticut family that included renowned explorers and missionaries, Bingham—who professionally used “Hiram Bingham Jr.” rather than his actual place in the family lineage—was anxious to focus attention on the plight of the refugees.

It was a cold, rain-drenched day, typical for the time of year. As he toured the Camp de Gurs, the 37-year-old Bingham noted the appalling sanitary conditions, lack of food, and inadequate housing. He reported that “the wind whistled through the cracks” of the unheated barracks, which had been slapped together from cheap plywood. Latrines “consisted of outhouses raised over an open row of exposed garbage cans,” reachable only by wading through knee-deep mud.

As a vice-consul in the visa section of the American consulate in Marseille, Bingham had shown he was willing to risk censure from his superiors to assist refugees. In the opinion of the American rescue worker Varian Fry, Bingham was “the one man at the Consulate” who understood that his job was “not to apply the rules rigidly but to save lives wherever he could.”

“He has a heart of gold,” Fry wrote later, in his book Surrender on Demand. “He does everything he can to help us, within American law.”

Like his colleagues, Bingham had to work within the constraints of an immigration system that imposed strict quotas on the number of people who could be admitted to the United States. In fall 1940, President Roosevelt had turned down a French request for assistance in facilitating the onward travel of 6,504 Jews deported from Germany to France. The State Department argued that the Germans were using “blackmail” tactics to get rid of their unwanted Jewish population.

The ostensible purpose of Bingham’s visit to Gurs and other French internment camps was to avoid much “useless correspondence” with inmates about their immigration to the United States. The consulate in Marseille lacked the support staff to deal with more than 20 visa cases a day. Bingham convinced his boss that a visit to the camps would help weed out the “hopeless cases” before they overwhelmed the consulate.

In reality, Bingham wanted to compile an official report on the desperate living conditions of the refugees that would be read by policymakers back in Washington. His visit to Gurs enabled him to establish contacts with the Jewish relief agency HIAS-HICEM and set up a system for the preliminary screening of refugees. He estimated that there were approximately 3,000 “prospective immigrants” to the United States in Gurs alone. While the United States had no asylum or refugee laws or exceptions, immigrants fleeing persecution could still be assisted on an individual basis.

Aiming to Help People

Known as “Harry” to his friends, Bingham seemed an excellent fit for the Foreign Service. He attended an elite prep school and received degrees from both Yale and Harvard. His stern, rather distant father was an explorer who had rediscovered the forgotten Inca city at Machu Picchu and had represented Connecticut in the US Senate. His grandfather had devoted his life to spreading Christianity on various Pacific islands.

Despite this glittering pedigree, Bingham felt his diplomatic career had stalled by the time he arrived in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille in 1937. He had been repeatedly passed over for promotions. Superiors detected an overly sensitive disposition and lack of the social graces expected from American diplomats. Bingham’s humanitarian streak—he told a supervisor that his main aim in life was to “help people”—made them suspicious.

“He is inclined to permit idealistic considerations to transcend the letter of his instructions,” noted the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh Fullerton, in his 1941 annual efficiency report. “[He] supports his convictions with a stubbornness which, I understand, has at times estranged former chiefs.”

Relegated to visa work, Bingham found himself at the center of events when the German army invaded France in May 1940. Following the fall of Paris, hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees, including Jews and anti-Nazi intellectuals, fled southwards into the unoccupied zone. Many ended up in Marseille, where they besieged the American consulate for visas.

The experiences of the refugees made a deep impression on Bingham, who recorded their stories in his diary. “Noise of sirens and diving planes terrorized them,” he wrote on June 7.

Among the refugees helped by Bingham was the German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who was wanted by the Nazis for his anti-Hitler writings. Then at the height of his international fame, Feuchtwanger was interned by the French in a former tile factory at Les Milles, a 40-minute drive from Marseille. Bingham organized Feuchtwanger’s escape from Les Milles in a diplomatic vehicle. After sheltering the writer in his own home, he provided him with documents that permitted him to escape illegally across the border with Spain, one step ahead of the Gestapo.

Feuchtwanger described Bingham in his diary as “an awkward, friendly, puritanical, dutiful, somewhat sad New Englander” who was “always tired and exhausted.” At the same time, he acknowledged a huge debt to the vice-consul. As he crossed the Atlantic to safety, he wrote a letter to Bingham to thank him for arranging his escape, despite “the great stress.” Bingham assisted other prominent refugees as well, including the painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst and the writers Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Franz Werfel.

At Odds

As the refugee crisis continued, Bingham found himself at odds with his colleagues in the consulate, who favored a more restrictive immigration policy. Assigned to a new post as head of the British interests section of the consulate, his visa-issuing responsibilities were sharply limited. In April 1941, he was transferred to Lisbon.

In a subsequent conversation with State Department personnel officers, Bingham complained that his efforts on behalf of the refugees were thwarted by the “dilatory tactics” of his superiors. He blamed Consul General Fullerton for an “anti-semitic” atmosphere at the consulate and an unwillingness to do anything that might antagonize the Germans. Fullerton angrily denied the charge of “defeatism,” and defended himself by arguing that he had to “watch his step pretty carefully,” as he was working “in enemy territory” under constant surveillance.

Frustrated by being repeatedly passed over for promotion, Bingham resigned from the Foreign Service in 1946. After retiring to a family farm in Connecticut, he died in 1988 at the age of 84. It would take another decade for his efforts on behalf of the refugees who flooded into Marseille to receive official recognition.

In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell honored Bingham with a posthumous “constructive dissent” award on behalf of the American Foreign Service Association. Four years later, he became one of only six former American diplomats to be commemorated by special US postage stamps. In Powell’s words, Bingham “risked his life and his career . . . to help over 2,500 Jews and others who were on Nazi death lists to leave France for America in 1940 and 1941. Harry was prepared to take that risk to his career to do that which he knew was right.”

Learn more about Hiram Bingham in The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between, co-published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.