Hiram Bingham IV

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Hiram Bingham, formally Hiram Bingham IV (July 17, 1903-January 12, 1988), was an American diplomat, artist and philosopher. He served as American Vice Consul in Marseilles, France during World War II who helped rescue over 2500 Jews from the Holocaust by granting visas to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.

Bingham was one of seven sons of former Connecticut Governor and US Senator Hiram Bingham III and Alfreda Mitchell, the heiress of the Tiffany and Co. fortune. His great grandfather Hiram Bingham and grandfather Hiram Bingham II, were the first missionaries to the Kingdom of Hawai'i. Bingham attended the prestigious Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1925.

Foreign Service

Bingham served in Kobe, Japan as a civilian secretary in the United States Embassy. He worked part-time as a schoolteacher. He traveled to India and Egypt before returning to the United States to attend Harvard University. After obtaining his law degree, he scored third in his class on the foreign service exam.

Bingham's first assignment in the United States Foreign Service was in Beijing, China. There, he witnessed the beginnings of the communist revolution. His travels through Asia peaked Bingham's interest in eastern religious philosophy. He spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile eastern religious philosophies with that of the Christian traditions his family had been historically known to preach.

Family Life

In 1934, Bingham served as third secretary to the United States Embassy in London. It was there that he met Rose Lawton Morrison, a college drama teacher from Waycross, Georgia. He had the honor of escorting Morrison to Buckingham Palace where the Queen had been expecting to meet her. They were eventually married and became proud parents of eleven children. The couple lived to see over forty of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Vice Consul to France

On June 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler's forces invaded France and the French government fell. The French signed an armistice with Germany. In Article 19 of the document, the French agreed to "surrender on demand all Germans named by the German government in France." Civil and military police began to roundup German and Jewish refugees who were marked for death by the Nazis. Several influential Europeans tried to lobby the American government to issue visas so that German and Jewish refugees could freely leave France and escape persecution. American officials refused. However, Bingham was Vice Consul in France, in charge of visas.

Bingham issued legal and illegal visas to save the lives of thousands of German and Jewish refugees. Among those he saved were famous authors and artists: Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Golo Mann, son and brother of Thomas Mann, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, Andre Masson, Nobel Laureate Otto Meyerhof, Konrad Heiden and Hannah Arendt.

Consequence

In 1941, the United States government abruptly pulled Bingham from his position as Vice Consul and transferred him to Portugal and then Argentina. In 1945, he was forced to retire from the United States Foreign Service and the American government willingly overlooked Bingham's actions in France.

After Bingham's death, his youngest son discovered a tightly wrapped bundle of letters, documents, and photographs in a cupboard behind a chimney in the family home. The bundle told of Bingham's struggle to save German and Jewish refugees from death, details long hidden by the United States government. The material was published and the United Nations and Israel declared Bingham a hero. On June 27, 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell praised Bingham’s "constructive dissent" and presented a posthumous “courageous diplomat” award to his children at an American Foreign Service Officers Association awards ceremony .