Through his position as consular officer at the Polish legation in Bern, Switzerland, Julius Kühl played an important role as a conduit for news about the persecution and murder of Jews in Nazi- occupied Europe and assisted Jewish relief organisations in their efforts to effect the rescue of Europe's Jews. The papers in this collection document the activities of Jewish relief organisations during the war; shed light on foreign governments' policies with respect to the reception of Jewish refugees and provide evidence for the spread of Nazi persecution throughout many European countries both through reports and articles and by the testimony of individuals. Julius Kühl is described as having come from a very good Chassidic family in (Sanok?) Poland (615/1/5) from where he moved to Switzerland in early childhood (615/1/6). He completed his doctorate on Polish-Swiss trade relations in the summer of 1939 at the University of Bern. From 1938 until the end of the war he was employed by the Polish Consular service, Bern. Thanks to a sympathetic head of Consular service, Alexander Lados, a non-Jew, and with the use of the diplomatic pouch, Kühl was able to circumvent state censorship enabling news about the murder of Jews to reach America and to facilitate communication between Jewish relief organisations in their attempts to rescue Jews.

In 1949 he moved to America with his Swiss-born wife and 2 children where he eventually became a property developer

During the course of his war-time activities he formed close ties with a number of individuals and organisations intent on rescuing Europe's Jews. There follows a brief description of two of those organisations which feature most prominently in this collection

The Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Shanghai (HIJEFS) was founded by Recha Sternbuch and her husband, Isaac, in 1941, with the objective of assisting rabbinical students who had fled to the Far East. It soon expanded its activities to include the provision of passports to non-religious Jews from many European countries and changed its name to Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Ausland. Va'ad Hahatsala was established in 1939 and was based in the USA at the offices of its parent body, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States. It was an emergency committee formed initially to provide financial support to more than 20 Talmudic academies which had left Poland for Lithuania. It continued to provide relief throughout the war to Jews all over Europe. It had offices in Montreux, Switzerland. Both Julius Kühl and Isaac Sternbuch were on the committee.