Dr. Raymond Herman Geist, American Consul General and First Secretary, US Embassy in Berlin, 1929-39

Between 1929 and 1939, Dr. Raymond Herman Geist was the American Consul General in Berlin.  Geist sent a number of reports to the State Department about the increasing persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1939.  In December 1938, Geist warned Assistant Secretary of State Messersmith that the Jews of Germany were being condemned to death, and urged measures to rescue them.  In May 1939, Geist sent another warning to Washington stating that if resettlement opportunities did not open up soon, the Jews of Germany would be doomed.  In a letter to his former supervisor in Washington, Geist wrote:  "The Jews in Germany are being condemned to death and their sentence will be slowly carried out; but probably too fast for the world to save them."  During the period of 1938-39, he helped many Jews and anti-Nazis to emigrate from Germany.  He personally intervened on behalf of these refugees with the Nazi high officials.  Geist helped Jews and others who were under imminent threat of deportation to the concentration camps leave Germany.  Geist opposed the transfer of German quotas to US consulates outside of Nazi Germany.  He did this because he felt German Jews were in much more danger than Jews in other parts of Europe at the time.  Geist also issued letters to German refugees indicating that they appeared to be eligible for visas, and that their quota number would come up soon.  Often, these letters were sufficient to have people released from Nazi concentration camps.  The letters were also used to help refugees gain entry to neighboring countries.