He spent a period with the legal department of the Library of Congress and was then appointed to a position on the staff of the War Refugee Board (WRB), which had been established by president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, under pressure from the United States Congress, Jewish activists and the Treasury Department.[2] In 1944, when the WRB began receiving reports of mass deportation of Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau, Akzin presented a memorandum to the WRB calling for the US to bomb the death camps themselves,[4] which went beyond earlier proposals of bombing the railroad lines leading to the camps.