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Earl G. Harrison (1899-1955) was a lawyer who served in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration as Director of Alien Registration within the Justice Department, United States Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, and US representative on the Intergovernmental Commission on Refugees. At President Harry Truman’s request, he toured and inspected displaced persons camps in the American zone of Europe in the summer of 1945. His report, which became known as the Harrison Report, publicized the poor conditions of the camps, recommended that 100,000 Jewish displaced persons be permitted to resettle in Palestine, and led to the separation of Jewish displaced persons from anti-Semitic populations, an improvement in their housing and rations, and the appointment of an adviser on Jewish affairs to the U.S. Army.


Harrison Report: Post-World War II Bombshell
BY LARRY TEITELBAUM
Penn Law Journal Spring 2006

July 1945. Germany lay in ruins, defeated, occupied and partitioned by the allies. Traveling through the bombed out landscape, a determined man with a commanding presence and indisputable integrity toured 30 Displaced Persons camps filled with thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors. He wanted to see conditions for himself.
This envoy, on special assignment from President Truman, recoiled at what he found : serious overcrowding, with some people stuffed into small rooms which lacked enough beds; widespread malnutrition worsened by the absence of fresh foods; inadequate clothing and unsanitary quarters. Many Jews languished behind barbed wire, just as they had in concentration camps; in at least one instance, they lived in horse stalls. What's more, these refugees had to endure the sight of Germans, some of whom had been their tormentors, living in relative comfort, much like they had before World War II.

More than 60 years later, Harry Reicher ruminates on the report's effect. Reicher, a Penn Law adjunct professor and board member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, says the report brought home the atrocities committed against Jews and galvanized public interest in their plight. Reicher argues that you can draw a straight line from the report to changes in immigration laws that allowed several hundred thousand European Jews to enter the United States. The Harrison Report, he adds, also led Truman to pressure the British government to lift restrictions on emigration of Jews to Palestine, then under British control. Although that effort failed, it helped create a climate, Reicher contends, in which the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel in 1948.

'He (Harrison) put his heart and soul into this,' says Reicher, who wove his research on the report into a talk at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library in 2002. 'He was motivated by genuinely humane instincts. He didn't rest with the report. He followed it through.'

Harrison was well-qualified for the job. He had a reputation as an outstanding administrator and tireless worker. President Roosevelt's attorney general, Robert Jackson, who went on to fame as chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trial, appointed Harrison Commissioner of Alien Registration. During the war Harrison also served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and as the U.S. delegate to the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees. In each instance, he applied himself to the task with vigor. As Reicher notes, Harrison visited all INS district offices and every one of the internment camps. No government official had ever done that.

He also had a well-honed sense of justice and compassion. According to eyewitness accounts, Harrison, a big man with a fine sense of humor, broke down in tears as he visited the camps. 'He was always for the underdog, for those who were less fortunate,' said his son, J. Barton Harrison, 56, who created the Earl G. Harrison International Human Rights Fund at Penn Law in his father's memory. 'He didn't think that human beings should be treated that way.'

That concern continued to fuel his work on behalf of the refugees, whom he felt should have the opportunity to leave Europe, where they had suffered such unspeakable losses. As a result, he lobbied hard to change American immigration laws. And in large measure, he succeeded. By 1952, a total of 395,000 displaced persons had entered the United States.

But the Harrison Report, which unleashed a domino of policy changes, remains his signature achievement - a fact recognized by officials at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who deem it 'the single most important document of the DP era.'

Larry Teitelbaum
Director of Development Communications
Editor, Penn Law Journal
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Harrison was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1899, the son of grocer Joseph Layland Harrison and stock-company actress Anna MacMullen, both foreign-born. He earned his A.B from University of Pennsylvania as a valedictorian in 1920, and his LLB from the same university's law school in 1923.[1] He practiced law at the firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick, and Saul from 1923 to 1945, becoming a partner in 1932.[1]
Harrison served in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, first as Director of Alien Registration in the United States Department of Justice for six months from July 1940 to January 1941.[2] He was the United States Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization from 1942 to 1944. During his tenure, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service experienced significant reform and restructuring following its transfer from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.
- wikipedia