If there was a single American diplomat in Nazi Germany viewed as a potential savior by German Jews desperate to flee the country, it was acting consul-general Raymond Geist. During his nearly ten years in Berlin, Geist turned himself into an indispensable intermediary between Jewish groups, refugee advocates, and the people he called “my devils”—the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

“It has been necessary for me to keep on good relations with this crowd,” Geist informed his superiors in Washington in October 1938, referring to the Gestapo. “Otherwise, I would have little influence on the gates of the concentration camps, which now and then I manage to pry open.”

A stocky man of medium height with brushed-back hair, Geist frequently strode past the forbidding entrance to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin while escorting American delegations seeking to alleviate the lot of Germany’s half million Jews. He instructed his Jewish companions to ignore the sign that read “No Entry for Jews,” and served as their negotiator-translator with top security officials such as Heinrich Himmler or Reinhard Heydrich.

As a descendent of German refugees who fled to the United States in the nineteenth century, Geist had a deep understanding of German history and culture, in addition to being fluent in German. He attributed his success in dealing with Nazi officials to an intuitive sense of knowing “where and when to be aggressive and where and when to use more gentle methods.” A Shakespearean stage actor in his youth, he learned how to conceal his emotions beneath a mask of amiable politeness.

The most sensitive of Geist’s responsibilities involved administration of the annual German immigration quota established by Congress. By juggling the number of visas available to various consulates, he was able to make full use of the 27,370 slots in the quota for the first time during the Nazi era in the fiscal year 1938–39. (More than 83,000 German quota spots had gone untapped during the previous five years.)

“I go every day to the office with a heavy step because I know the tragedies which await me there,” Geist wrote in December 1938. “Yet I am glad that I am able to help and find ways to save the existence of decent people . . . I am forced to go ahead a great deal on my own responsibility.”

Controversy and Conflict

Geist’s first major brush with political controversy occurred in December 1932, three years after his arrival in Berlin. The Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein had applied for an American visitor visa, and Geist was assigned to interview him, in the absence of the then-consul general, George Messersmith. In accordance with US immigration law, he was obliged to ask Einstein a long list of questions, such as whether he had ever been a member of the Communist party.

Einstein took offense at the questions, and walked out of the interview, triggering outrage in progressive circles in the United States over the “humiliating” treatment of the world’s most celebrated scientist. The controversy was defused when Einstein was granted a visa after all. Messersmith defended his deputy, insisting that the questioning had been entirely routine, in order to observe “the formalities of the law.”

After Messersmith was later promoted to assistant secretary of state, he praised Geist for his ability “to foresee developments [in Germany] surely and clearly.” The two career diplomats had similar views about the evils of Nazism, but disagreed sharply on the desirability of a massive rescue effort for German Jews.

Surrounded by human misery in Berlin, Geist came to believe that America had a duty to assist the persecuted. In private letters to Messersmith, he spoke of the need to act swiftly before the plight of German Jews “becomes so desperate that salvation will be beyond recall.” He favored working with “moderates” inside the Nazi regime to facilitate Jewish emigration in return for financial concessions to Germany. Messersmith, by contrast, wanted to maintain maximum economic pressure on Berlin, even at the expense of rescuing refugees.

Together with the British visa officer in Berlin, Frank Foley, Geist devised a plan that enabled German Jews to find a temporary refuge in Britain while they waited for their US immigration papers to be processed. The British government understood the deal: they would temporarily accept the refugees, but they would eventually be admitted to the United States. Messersmith objected to any arrangement that implied the promise of an American visa at a future date. He argued that this was a violation of US immigration law and likely to cause a furor in Congress.

Confronted with Messersmith’s objections, Geist was obliged to disown his own plan. Nevertheless, the British escape route remained at least partially open for another few months, saving tens of thousands of lives. Many of the German Jews admitted to Britain later immigrated to the United States.

Raising the Alarm

Geist’s high-level contacts in Berlin gave him unrivaled insight into the Nazi mindset and plans for persecution of the Jews. The Nazis “have embarked on a program of annihilation of the Jews,” he warned Messersmith in a private letter in December 1938. “We shall be allowed to save the remnants if we choose.”

Geist’s network of informants included the Gestapo official in charge of the “Jewish problem,” Karl Hasselbacher. In late 1938, Hasselbacher told Geist that Germany would be made judenrein—“clean of Jews”—and that “all the Jews who failed to leave Germany would be exterminated.” It was partly as a result of this conversation that Geist informed his superiors that German Jews had been “condemned to death.” He predicted that “their sentences will be slowly carried out, but probably too fast for the world to save them.”

Geist continued to raise the alarm after his promotion to acting chief of mission in February 1939 following the unexpected death of his predecessor. In a May 1939 cable, he again urged the Roosevelt administration to negotiate an orderly exit of German Jews. The alternative, Geist warned, was for Nazi radicals to resolve the problem “in their own fashion.”

The cable caught the attention of President Roosevelt, who described Geist’s warnings as “sound and not exaggerated.” By this time, however, hopes of negotiating a large-scale international resettlement plan for German Jews were already fading. The outbreak of war in September 1939 put an end to them completely. Geist was recalled to Washington at the end of 1939.

Learn more about Raymond Geist and the US State Department in The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between, published in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.