Roswell McClelland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roswell Dunlop McClelland (born January 25, 1914 in Santa Clara , California , † May 6, 1995 in Springdale , Arkansas ) was an American refugee aid worker and diplomat .

McClelland held senior positions for the American Friends Service Committee and the War Refugee Board in Europe during the Nazi era . He helped numerous persecuted Jews . After the Second World War he worked in the diplomatic service. Most recently he was ambassador to Niger .

Life

Early years

Roswell McClelland's parents were Ross St. John McClelland and Alys M. Mitchell. His mother died when he was one and a half years old. He first grew up with various relatives and friends of the family and eventually went to boarding schools in England and Switzerland, among other places . In the early 1930s he visited Italy and Germany , where he witnessed a speech by Hitler . McClelland graduated from Duke University in 1936 with a bachelor's degree . In 1938 he married Marjorie Miles . He graduated from Columbia University in 1940 with a master's degree .

His wife was a Quaker . Roswell McClelland received a Quaker scholarship to do research in a Voltaire archive in Geneva for his planned dissertation . The beginning of the Second World War thwarted these plans.

Worked for the American Friends Service Committee

Roswell and Marjorie McClelland went to Europe in August 1940 for the Quaker aid organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). After a month in Lisbon , they set up an office for refugee aid in Rome . The facility they run had to close in August 1941.

Cattle truck for the evacuation of Jews in Les Milles (2013)

The McClellands moved to Marseille , where they worked for an existing AFSC office. Roswell McClelland organized, among other things, an aid project for the inmates of the Les Milles internment camp . He made friends with his compatriot Noel Field , who worked in Marseille for the Unitarian Service Committee , an aid organization with similar goals. Later he was to support Fields dangerous relief operations in France, among other things with the mediation of funds. In the late summer of 1942, the McClellands moved to Geneva, where they jointly took over the management of the local AFSC office. The couple's first of four children was born in February 1943.

Worked for the War Refugee Board

In April 1944, Roswell McClelland became the director of the US government agency War Refugee Board responsible for Switzerland , which was supposed to help victims of National Socialism , especially Jewish refugees. He was considered particularly qualified for this because he spoke several languages ​​and grew up in Europe. McClelland was initially reluctant to accept the position because he was based in Bern while his family continued to live in Geneva. Finally he decided to commute . His wife ran the Geneva AFSC office alone.

One of his first projects for the War Refugee Board was managing a ten-million dollars - funds for relief activities of the International Red Cross . The United Kingdom , along with the United States, contributed to the fund set up on the initiative of the World Jewish Congress . The problems here included the poor availability of goods that had to be bought in neutral countries for aid packages, as well as difficulties in importing them into Switzerland due to the war. In the summer of 1944, the War Refugee Board provided the financing, packaging and shipping of its own 300,000 food packages.

Coordination with the numerous aid organizations for refugees active in Switzerland turned out to be time-consuming for McClelland. For the activities of DELASEM , which helped Jews in Italy , he provided access to a $ 100,000 account held by the Joint Distribution Committee . Aid measures for Jews in Hungary , for which representatives of a corresponding organization were also forging plans together with McClelland, could not be implemented. In order to enable the War Refugee Board to support the various groups financially, it had to set up an accounting system appropriate to the chaotic circumstances.

Roswell McClelland was a point of contact for many Jewish refugees who sought his assistance in rescuing their vulnerable relatives. He was responsible for the project to issue 5,000 visas for emigration to the United States to refugee children who arrived in Switzerland after January 1, 1944. This was primarily intended to benefit Jewish children who had previously fled to France, but Vichy France refused to allow all Jewish children to leave Switzerland legally. McClelland's proposal to extend the visa project to children who had come to Switzerland before 1944 was rejected. The quota could by far not be exhausted, even if US visas were ultimately issued to several hundred Jewish children who had fled from France to Switzerland.

George Mandel-Mantello , First Secretary of the Consulate General of El Salvador in Geneva, issued thousands of Salvadoran nationality certificates for persecuted Jews in Hungary. El Salvador itself had no diplomatic representation in Hungary. McClelland tried to get El Salvador to ask Switzerland whether it represented the Salvadorans in Hungary, even if he himself questioned the benefits of Almond-Mantellos' activities. He also criticized the inadequacies of the organization Swiss Red Cross, Children's Aid, perceived as such .

On the other hand, he had a warm friendship with the Swiss entrepreneur Saly Mayer , who stood up for persecuted Jews on many fronts. Formally, McClelland was in charge of Mayer's US-related activities. In November 1944, Mayer and McClelland held a secret meeting with SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher at the Hotel Savoy in Zurich , who, on behalf of Heinrich Himmler, extorted consideration for the release of Jews. The reason for the unusual encounter was that Becher wanted an Allied representative at the meeting as evidence of Mayer's legitimacy . For McClelland, the meeting, which he only publicly confessed to after the war, was potentially dangerous as he was forbidden from negotiating with Germans.

Vrba-Wetzler report sketch.JPG
Vrba-Wetzler report sketch (crematoria) .jpg
Sketches of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from the English translation of the Auschwitz Protocols

McClelland played an important role in the dissemination of the Auschwitz Protocols , authentic reports from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , the authenticity of which he did not doubt, despite the fact that the authorship was unclear to him. He personally arranged for them to be translated from German into English, recalculated the calculations and improved their linguistic clarity and effectiveness. He sent the minutes to the headquarters of the War Refugee Board in Washington, DC , where, due to logistical difficulties, he only sent a summary before he could send the complete documents. As a result, a bombing of the railway lines to the concentration camps was considered, which was ultimately rejected by Secretary of State John McCloy as too dangerous.

In the spring of 1945, Roswell McClelland spent a lot of time planning the escape of refugees from the Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps . His last major project for the War Refugee Board was how surviving concentration camp inmates could be kept alive until liberation. On July 31, 1945, he finished his work for the War Refugee Board with a comprehensive final report.

In the diplomatic service

After a vacation in August 1945, Roswell McClelland began to work for the foreign aid service of the American legation in Bern. The McClellands left Switzerland in 1949 and went first to Washington, DC, where Roswell McClelland was employed by the United States Department of State . In the course of this he worked in Madrid from 1953 to 1957 .

McClelland served from 1960 to 1964 as Deputy Head of the United States Embassy in Dakar , Senegal . In 1960 he was interim chargé d'affaires at the embassy for around five weeks . In addition to Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania were part of his sphere of activity . His next stop was Rhodesia in 1965 , where he was the American Consul General in Salisbury at the time of the country's controversial declaration of independence . From 1967 McClelland worked as deputy head of the US embassy in Athens in Greece , most recently - from January 1969 to January 1970 - as chargé d'affaires. He took a cautiously conservative stance towards the ruling colonels' regime .

Kennedy Bridge over Niger (2010)

Roswell McClelland in 1970 as a successor of Samuel Clifford Adams Jr. , United States Ambassador in Niger . During his tenure, the Kennedy Bridge was opened, the first bridge over the Niger in the capital Niamey to be planned and funded by the United States. He remained ambassador until 1973 and was replaced by Douglas Heck . With that he ended his diplomatic career.

Documents

Roswell McClelland's office papers are held in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library . The Roswell and Marjorie McClelland papers , the couple's private records, are part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .

Claude Lanzmann interviewed Roswell McClelland as a contemporary witness for his documentary Shoah (1985). As part of the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection , the director left the recordings that were not included in the finished film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

literature

  • Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roswell McClelland holds his baby son Kirk. Photograph Number: 74826. Biography. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed January 16, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 749 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  3. ^ Roswell and Marjorie McClelland papers. Biography. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed January 16, 2018 .
  4. ^ Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 490 and 493 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  5. ^ A b c Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 294–296 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed January 16, 2018]).
  6. ^ The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project: Ellis O. Jones. (PDF) Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy. Initial interview date: March 18th, 2014. 2014, p. 15 , accessed on January 16, 2018 (English).
  7. ^ A b Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 279 and 299 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  8. ^ A b Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 649 and 688 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  9. ^ A b Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 302–303 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  10. ^ Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 305–306 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  11. ^ Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 415–417 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  12. ^ Hanna Zweig-Strauss: Saly Mayer (1882–1950). A savior of Jewish life during the Holocaust . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-20053-4 , pp. 188-189 .
  13. ^ Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 540-543 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  14. ^ Rebecca L. Erbelding: About Time: The History of the War Refugee Board . Dissertation. George Mason University, Fairfax 2015, pp. 544 and 546 ( digilib.gmu.edu [PDF; accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  15. ^ A b Robert V. Keeley: The Colonels' Coup and the American Embassy. A Diplomat's View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece . The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2010, ISBN 978-0-271-03758-5 , pp. 8-10 .
  16. ^ Roswell Dunlop McClelland (1914-1995). Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, United States Department of State, accessed January 16, 2018 .
  17. ^ Carl Peter Watts: The Rhodesian Crisis in British and international politics, 1964–1965 . Dissertation. University of Birmingham, Birmingham 2006, pp. 330 ( etheses.bham.ac.uk [PDF; accessed January 16, 2018]).
  18. ↑ a b Chiefs of Mission for Niger. Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, United States Department of State, accessed January 16, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens . Vol. 27. Paris 1971, p. 86 and 131 .
  20. ↑ Ronny Loewy: The Shoah Outtakes . In: Ronny Loewy, Katharina Rauschenberger (ed.): "The Last of the Unjust": The "Jewish Elder" Benjamin Murmelstein in films 1942–1975 . Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-593-39491-6 , pp. 13 .
personal data
SURNAME McClelland, Roswell
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McClelland, Roswell Dunlop (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American refugee worker and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Santa Clara , California
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 1995
Place of death Springdale , Arkansas