The man behind a covert WW2 operation

The man behind a covert WW2 operation Netflix The new Netflix series Transatlantic explores a covert WW2 operation to rescue artists, intellectuals and authors from Nazi-occupied Europe, writes Matthew Wilson. At the outbreak of World War Two, a US journalist named Varian Fry volunteered to travel to the French port city of Marseilles and help repatriate members of the continent's cultural elite, many of whom were being hounded by the Nazis as anti-authoritarian dissidents, or because they were Jewish. On 25 June, 1940, following the fall of France to the Nazis, Fry joined 200 museum curators, artists, journalists, and Jewish refugees at a meeting at the Hotel Commodore in New York City. A new cultural hub In December 1941, Fortune magazine described the influx of artists to New York City as "the greatest migration of intellectuals since the Byzantine".