Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, 1940-1941

Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV (1903-1988) was the U.S. Vice Consul in charge of visas, stationed in Marseilles, France, in 1937-1941.  Even before the fall of France in June 1940, Bingham began issuing visas, safe passes, and letters of transit to Jews and other refugees.  He did this against the orders and policy of his superiors and US State Department regulations.  Bingham helped set up the contacts and issued visas to individuals identified by the Emergency Rescue Committee, headed by U.S. citizen Varian Fry.  Bingham also worked with other diplomats and rescue operations in Marseilles, including the American Friends' Service Committee (Quakers), the American Red Cross, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC), the Mennonite Committee, Czech Aid, the Nîmes Committee, and Jewish relief organizations.  He was, in part, responsible for saving several hundred Jews and other victims of the Nazis.  Among them were many anti-Nazi activists, labor leaders, and Communists.  He rescued Jewish artists, intellectuals, writers and scientists, such as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, Heinrich Mann, and Jewish Nobel Prize winners. 

Bingham visited local French concentration camps and filed reports on the conditions in them to his superiors.  He also issued visas to Jews imprisoned in the Les Milles concentration camp near Marseilles. 

In May 1941, Bingham helped to rescue Jewish children by issuing US visas in coordination with the Unitarian Service Committee (USC), the Quakers, the Nîmes Committee and the Children's Aid Rescue Society (OSE).  These children left France in June 1941.

In October 1941, Bingham was transferred to the US embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  At the end of the war, he reported on the entry of Nazi war criminals to Buenos Aires.  He wrote numerous reports and encouraged his supervisors to report these activities to the State Department.  His superiors did nothing and in 1945 he resigned from the Foreign Service in protest.

Hiram Bingham IV died in Salem, Connecticut, in 1988.

In 2002, Bingham was posthumously awarded the American Foreign Service Association Constructive Dissent award by the US Secretary of State.  In 2005, he was given a letter of commendation from Israel's Holocaust Museum.  In 2006, a US commemorative postage stamp was issued in his honor.