of Jewish refugees, who were often neglected by other bodies. Strauss acted as a liaison between Hoover's organization and JDC workers in a number of Central and Eastern European countries. Getting news in April 1919 of the Pinsk massacre, where during the Polish–Soviet War thirty-five Jews meeting to discuss the distribution of American relief aid were summarily executed by the Polish Army on the grounds they were Bolshevik conspirators, Strauss pressed the case to Hoover that a forceful response must be made to the Polish government. Hoover spoke to Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski and demanded a fair investigation, but Strauss saw Paderewski as an anti-Semite who inherently believed that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews. After a while the situation for Jews in Poland did (temporarily) improve. Strauss had grown up in Virginia surrounded by the veneration of Southern military heroes from the "War Between the States", but a tour he took in summer 1918 to the devastated battlefields of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood removed from his worldview any such glamorous or romantic notions. Similarly, his exposure to Communism in 1919 in seeing the effects of the Polish–Soviet War led to a powerful and lifelong anti-Communist sentiment. Investment banker, marriage and family At the JDC, Strauss came to the attention of Felix M. Warburg, a JDC leader who was a partner in the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, and Harriet Loewentstein, a JDC European head who was an accountant at the bank. In addition Hoover had introduced Strauss to Mortimer Schiff, another partner at Kuhn Loeb, who interviewed Strauss in Paris and offered him a job. In so doing, Strauss turned down an offer to become comptroller for the newly forming League of Nations. Strauss returned to the United States and started at Kuhn Loeb in 1919. As a result, he never did attend college, a fact that may have led to the perfectionist and defensive personality traits that he exhibited later in life. Kuhn Loeb's major customers were railroads, and by the mid-1920s, Strauss was helping to arrange financing for new railroad terminal buildings in Cincinnati and Richmond and for the reorganizations of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. By 1926 his yearly compensation from the firm had reached $75,000 () and by the next year, $120,000 (). Subsequently,