Ira Hirschmann was an American businessman from New York who, in 1944, was appointed by the War Refugee Board to oversee refugee operations in Turkey. By the time he was done, he was credited with saving tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who had been trapped in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, unable to reach Palestine.
Hirschmann was not a bureaucrat or a diplomat. He was a cosmetics executive — the former president of Elizabeth Arden's cosmetics company. Roosevelt appointed him to the War Refugee Board because he had no bureaucratic attachments and was willing to bend rules. He arrived in Istanbul in January 1944, determined to get refugees out of the Balkans before the war made the routes impassable.
His most audacious operation involved negotiating directly with the Bulgarian government to allow the departure of thousands of Jews who had been turned away from Palestine. Hirschmann arranged a deal: the refugees would be transported through Turkey, across Syria, and into Palestine via British-mandated territory. The British, who severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine under the 1939 White Paper, were pressured by Washington to allow the transit.
By the end of the war, Hirschmann had facilitated the rescue of approximately 48,000 Jewish refugees through routes that he established and financed through the War Refugee Board. When asked after the war why he took the assignment, Hirschmann said simply: Somebody had to do it. He returned to the cosmetics industry after the war and was virtually forgotten by history.
The War Refugee Board itself is one of the least-known achievements of Roosevelt's final years. Created in January 1944, the agency saved the lives of over 200,000 Jews and other refugees in the final 18 months of the war. Yet the Board's records were not declassified until 2005, and Hirschmann's role was not highlighted until researchers began examining the Board's files.