Thread by @Vanguard_WW2

🇺🇸 🇫🇷 Marseille, France, 14 August 1940

American citizen, Varian Fry, opens the Centre Americain de Secours (American Center for Relief) in the port city of Marseille in the Vichy-government controlled unoccupied zone.
It will establish an escape network that goes on to save an estimated 2,000 Jewish and ant-Nazi refugees, many of whom were artists and intellectuals.
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Fry was born in New York City on 15 October 1907 and by the age of nine, already showed a humanitarian streak when he held a fund raiser for the American Red Cross during World War One.
He went on to study at Harvard and whilst there, was introduced to Eileen Avery Hughes, his senior by seven years and editor of the Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic) who he married in 1931.
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Fry's work as a journalist took him to Berlin in 1935 and it was there that he saw first-hand how German Jews were being increasingly persecuted. He would later state that "I could not remain idle as long as I had any chances at all of saving even a few of its intended victims."
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In New York on 25 June 1940 (the day on which France ceased hostilities with Italy and the official capitulation to Axis forces), a meeting was held at the Hotel Commodore and resulted in the founding of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) supported by hundreds of prominent people such as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Fry later volunteered to travel to Marseille to establish what conditions were like for refugees, how people at risk from the Nazis could be helped to escape to Portugal or Morocco, and find people there who could help with the ERC.
He was due to go for three weeks, he would stay for thirteen months.
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Arriving in Marseille with 3,000 dollars strapped to his leg and a list of people to help, he rented an office and set to work, soon joined by fellow Americans like Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, whose wealth helped fund Fry's work.
With Vichy France preparing to deport German refugees back to their home country, there was no time to lose.
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Fry soon had dozens of people queuing outside his office and he was able to secure US visas with the help of Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice Consul in Marseille, despite the opposition to the ERC's work from Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Mexican diplomat Gilberto Bosques Saldívar also helped secure visas, securing passage on ships still sailing from the port.
An escape line was run from a rented villa, helping people cross into Spain and then to Portugal.
On 24 March 1941, 222 people escaped on a passenger ship bound for Martinique.
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Fry was expelled by the Vichy France authorities after thirteen months flowting the law in front of their noses. The ERC would continue for a few more months, saving a few hundred more people before it closed down.
He returned to New York and the role he played in saving so many was largely forgotten.
He died in 1967.
In 1994, Yad Vashem attributed Fry with the honour of Righteous Among the Nations.
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To mention only a handful of the refugees that Fry and his American and French colleagues saved.
German born Hannah Arendt, historian and philospher.
French surrealist and poet, André Breton.
German novelist and playright, Lion Feuchtwanger.
Austrian writer and actor Hertha Ernestine Pauli.
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