Riegner telegram

The Riegner Telegram was a message sent in August 1942 by Gerhart M Riegner, then representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, informing the Allies about the so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish question", the German plan to exterminate the European Jews, for the first time.

Riegner was office manager of the WJC in Geneva. He was informed about the German plans for the "final solution" by German industrialist Eduard Schulte. Through his British and American diplomatic channels, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise of the American Jewish Congress in New York and Samuel Silverman, a Jewish member of Parliament, Riegner sent the following message to his contacts via the British Foreign Office and the State Department in Washington:

Received alarming report about plan being discussed and considered in Führer headquarters to exterminate at one fell swoop all Jews in German-controlled countries comprising three and a half to four million after deportation and concentration in the east thus solving Jewish question once and for all stop campaign planned for autumn methods being discussed including hydrocyanic acid stop

However, in England and the United States, Riegner's telegram was met with disbelief despite there already being evidence for mass executions. The US State Department considered the telegram "a wild rumor, fueled by Jewish anxieties" while the British Foreign Office didn't forward the telegram for the time being. Only months later it found its way to the president of the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who acted on it. Early in 1944, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. stated in front of President Roosevelt that "certain officials in our State Department" had failed while it would have been commanded by duty to "prevent the extermination of the Jews in German-controlled Europe".

Sources

• Günter Schubert: Der Fleck auf Uncle Sams weißer Weste. Amerika und die jüdischen Flüchtlinge 1938-1945., Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York
• Heiner Lichtenstein: "Warum Auschwitz nicht bombardiert wurde", Köln 1980
• Walter Laqueur: Was niemand wissen wollte. Die Unterdrückung der Nachricht über Hitlers Endlösung", Frankfurt a. M. 1981
• Gerhard M. Riegner: "Niemals verzweifeln. Sechzig Jahre für das jüdische Volk und die Menschenrechte" Gerlingen 2001
• Portraits Parlés: Interview and portraits of Gerhard M. Riegner by Ariane Laroux, éditions of L'Age d'Homme. (2006)
• Michael Berenaum: "A Promise to Remember" Bulfinch Press 2003