1944

by Jay Winik

  At Singen the train stopped and the conductor announced that everyone had to get off for border control.

  Was this trouble?

  One by one, the passengers climbed out of the train and were waved into a nondescript room in the station, where two police officers scrutinized their passports. The check took about twenty minutes; then the passengers reboarded the train. Overhead, the sky suddenly darkened and the day turned cloudy just as Schulte saw the Rhine and the Swiss border beyond. Even on a cloudy day, Switzerland, with its natural seclusion and the beauty of its valleys, had an aura of health and freedom completely incongruous with the rest of the war. Its rugged mountain peaks rose into the sky. The air itself was a swirl of colors and delicate odors.

  Soon, Schulte saw a little wooden house with a Swiss flag flapping in the wind. He was almost there.

  SCHULTE COULDN’T SHAKE OFF the thought that for what he was about to do, the Gestapo could hunt him down, abduct him, or kill him. Yet when the train came to a stop inside Zurich’s main railway station, the Hauptbahnhof, and a porter escorted him to his limousine, Schulte knew that he could not turn back. The car sped past Zurich’s elegant stores and the headquarters of its largest banks. Then it turned to the right and slowed on reaching his hotel. The manager greeted him warmly, and Schulte was escorted to his usual suite, which had splendid views of the shimmering lake. Tapestries adorned the walls, and the public spaces had Tudor paneling; in Schulte’s rooms a flower arrangement and a bottle of red wine awaited him.

  Schulte picked up the phone. It was mid-afternoon.

  EVEN IN NEUTRAL SWITZERLAND, there was little doubt that this was a continent at war. Though it was the height of the season, and the middle of the day, the streets were deserted—save for men striding about in uniform. Everything was rationed. Some of the smaller shops had been closed. A number of the larger businesses were struggling to survive—hotel owners, for instance, were facing the fact that only one tenth of their rooms were occupied during peak season. Gasoline was scarce. Meat was also in short supply. And of course, as in other nations across Europe, there was a blackout at night. But in what was perhaps a portent, there were indications of American culture around the city: not far from Schulte’s hotel a Mickey Rooney comedy was playing.

  Schulte had wrestled with the question of to whom to pass on his information. It had to be someone discreet—otherwise Schulte would be risking his life—but at the same time someone with the necessary connections and influence. It also had to be someone who would share Schulte’s sense of urgency. He mulled over names: Poles, Swiss, Americans. In the end, he felt it had to be someone with ties to a major Jewish institution in America, who could then send the information to the White House.

  He set up a meeting with a well-placed Jewish contact in the world of high finance.

  That night, Schulte had a late dinner with a Jewish woman named Doris, with whom he was having a passionate affair. While they were picking at their food, Doris noticed that he looked anguished. Schulte laconically told her that “there were problems.”

  The next morning Schulte rendezvoused with his contact, and wasted little time in detailing Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Not just thousands. Not just hundreds of thousands. But every man, woman, and child within the grasp of the Third Reich. He urged his contact in the strongest terms that this information had to be relayed immediately both to the leading Jewish organizations in America and to the U.S. government itself. He stressed that if immediate action wasn’t taken, the Jewish people would be wiped out. A great crematorium had been built, and the Nazis were planning to take 3 million to 4 million Jews to the east, where they would be gassed with prussic acid. He stressed that this information came from unimpeachable sources in the upper reaches of the Nazi regime, but that otherwise the plan was enshrouded in the greatest of secrecy.

  Schulte’s contact sat stunned. As fantastic as the scheme sounded, he knew the Jews of eastern Europe were being rounded up and murdered in pogroms. Yet this was death on a scale almost unimaginable. This was not the Russians massacring Polish officers, or Lithuanian mobs herding Jews toward freshly dug pits for mass shootings, or roving Nazi squads assassinating anyone in their path. This was death on a level never before devised. Had anyone other than Schulte told him this information—the war was rife with rumors—he might have been skeptical. Schulte, however, was an impeccable source.

  One problem—and it was a considerable problem—was that the contact was not close enough to the appropriate diplomats or to the Swiss Jewish leaders. He instead suggested another colleague, a Jewish journalist who was respected in all the right circles in Switzerland. Schulte agreed.

  Wasting no time, the contact called the journalist immediately. Told he was out of town, he quickly tracked him down, leaving a message that it was a matter of “life and death.”

  When he finally reached the journalist, Benno Sagalowitz, Sagalowitz agreed to take a train to Zurich the very next day. But for the time being, Schulte was unwilling to meet with Sagalowitz himself. It was too dangerous. And in any case, he had an important conference in Berlin, which he could ill afford to miss, if only to keep up appearances. He authorized his contact to use his name—but only with Sagalowitz.

  While Schulte was on a train heading home, his contact met with Benno. He explained to Benno that Schulte, a well-placed German industrialist, had a dire message to convey. With that, he pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pocket, and began to read its shattering contents. “I’ve received information from absolutely trustworthy sources,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion, “that Hitler’s headquarters is considering a plan to kill all remaining European Jews.”

  After relaying the whole sordid story, he underscored what Schulte had stressed: “action” must be taken at once. And by “action,” he didn’t mean diplomacy or the standard protest by the State Department or a warning from the Allies; he meant something more dramatic, such as rounding up German citizens in the United States.

  Benno paused, digesting what he had just heard. “May I quote him,” he said, “when I pass it on?”

  The contact shook his head. “Under no circumstances.”

  For Benno, there were many unresolved questions. Was this just propaganda, much like the apocryphal stories of atrocities in World War I: babies being bayoneted or eaten alive by Germans, and nuns being violated? Benno reflected on what he had been told and thought not. Just a week earlier, he had clipped an article from a leading Swiss newspaper about a message that Winston Churchill himself had delivered to American Jews in Madison Square Garden. Churchill had urgently warned that more than 1 million Jews had been killed, and that Hitler would not be satisfied “until the cities of Europe” where Jews lived had been turned into “giant cemeteries.” Wasn’t Schulte confirming this? Hadn’t Hitler been underestimated time and again? Moreover, the Führer was at the zenith of his power—most of western and eastern Europe lay in his grasp, and his forces seemed as unstoppable in North Africa as in northern Norway. In the Soviet Union, Nazi forces had reached the outskirts of Moscow. The Continent was close to despair, and even the remaining neutral nations were pervaded by a deadly tonic of fear and rumors.

  Benno believed only one man could make the difference between life and death for millions of Jews. Like Schulte, he resolved that President Roosevelt should be reached as quickly as possible.

  BUT HOW TO DO this, when it seemed that just about everyone in the free world was vying for the American president’s attention? It turned out that the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of a young émigré lawyer working in a musty office at the former Hotel Bellevue in Geneva. Sagalowitz’s contact was just thirty years old, and his name was Gerhart Riegner.

  Small, scrawny, with a wry smile and slicked-back hair, he had been born in Berlin to a comfortable middle-class Jewish family with deep roots in German culture. He practiced law like his father and had studied at the Sorbonne, passing the bar in Paris. Then
setback followed setback: Hitler came to power and, as in Germany, France lost its tolerance for Jews. French authorities passed an edict that forbade foreigners to practice law until a decade after they were naturalized. At his wit’s end—he had even considered moving to Palestine—Riegner sought the advice of an eminent legal philosopher, who suggested he go to Geneva and take up international law. Riegner followed this advice and moved to Geneva. There, in 1936, he found a position with the League of Nations. He had the grand sounding portfolio of “monitoring” the rights of minorities guaranteed by the treaties ratified at the close of World War I. But as Hitler’s power was on the rise, the League’s was on the wane, until the organization all but withered away. Nevertheless, Riegner’s determined efforts caught the eye of one founder of the World Jewish Congress, who asked him to take over the day-to-day work of that organization at Geneva.

  It was a daunting prospect. Suddenly, Riegner, polite, conscientious, reserved, and a refugee himself, was in a position to report on the escalating persecution of Jews, as well as to run one of the most significant “listening posts” in Nazi-dominated Europe, particularly as fragmentary information about massacres began to trickle in. Actually, the World Jewish Congress was more fiction than fact. Founded in 1936 to protect the rights of Jews in Europe, and to “mobilize the democratic world against Nazi atrocities,” it had virtually no budget, no authority, and no diplomatic reach. It had a meager office in New York, and an equally meager one in London. It had few emissaries abroad and had to confront an unsympathetic public and an overwhelmed western alliance. Its calls for protests and economic boycotts of the Nazi regime went nowhere, and its denunciations of mounting anti-Semitism were all but unheeded. More often than not, its only authority stemmed from its chief architect—its general secretary—and whatever persuasive powers he could muster.

  Initially, the World Jewish Congress had its headquarters in Paris, but after France was overrun by the Germans, it was forced to move to Geneva, where it already had a liaison office. In 1940 most of Europe had already fallen under Nazi occupation, and even in neutral Switzerland, Riegner never felt quite safe. Thus, he always carried a rucksack filled with basics, “ready to flee into the mountains” in case the Germans pursued him. It included a fake Bolivian passport, complete with ID, and an emergency visa for the United States. Moreover, he knew that Switzerland was a reluctant host nation and that as far as his own security was concerned, the clock was always ticking. Indeed, within a week of his meeting with Sagalowitz, the Swiss police began turning back Jewish refugees who had managed to cross the border. Riegner was also attuned to the other worrisome signs around him. His first brush with anti-Semitism had occurred when he was just five and a fellow pupil derided him as a “dirty little Jew.” He could vividly recall the Nazi hooligans who gathered outside his parents’ home in Germany in 1933, chanting over and over, “Jews out! Jews out!” while he huddled, terrified, in his bathroom. There were also the indelible images of the brownshirts smashing the windows of Jewish homes and stores, hauling out Jews, chasing them down, and beating and taunting and finally killing them.

  Riegner and Sagalowtiz had talked for five hours over lunch, dissecting every detail provided by Schulte. Riegner wanted to satisfy himself about Schulte’s reliability; Sagalowitz reassured him. After lunch they strolled along one of Lake Geneva’s beautiful beaches and paused to watch boats gliding in the water. It was a cloudless day, and the sights and smells were intoxicating. At first, hearing Schulte’s warnings secondhand, Riegner was incredulous. His initial reaction was that there had to be some mistake; it made no sense. To be sure, he knew about the initial hazy reports of pogroms, and then the more extensive and specific reports of Nazi persecutions. He knew about the arrests and deportations, the harsh use of ghettos and capricious imprisonments, the forced labor and the summary slayings, and insidious accounts of “mobile gas vans.” And he knew that three times Hitler had given speeches proclaiming openly that he would exterminate the Jews of Europe.

  Indeed, he recalled that in early 1942 one of his colleagues had written a letter with a terrifying conclusion: “The number of our dead after the war will have to be counted not in thousands or hundreds of thousands but in several millions.” Then in June 1942, Riegner himself became aware that more regions across Europe were being emptied of Jews: in France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany itself, and now Poland. That raised the question: where were the Jews going to be settled? No one, it seemed, knew.

  What was unique about Schulte’s report was that it came not from Jewish victims or Jewish authorities, but from a German industrialist with access to Hitler’s inner circle. And gas chambers? This was the first Riegner had heard about them. And for the first time, here was evidence that the Nazis had a coordinated extermination plan extending across all of Europe and beyond.

  The streets were half deserted. Now, for Riegner, the time for hesitating was over. He and Sagalowitz were terribly shaken. Both men were well aware that they might be accused of the worst kind of panic-mongering. But if this news was true, every day and indeed every hour now mattered. Like Schulte, Riegner believed this news had to get to President Roosevelt, and get to him fast.

  But first, he had to find a sympathetic ear. It was then that Riegner began to make his plan. He and Sagalowitz decided to meet again in Zurich, on Monday, August 3.

  Thus would begin the efforts to formulate what history would remember as the “Riegner Telegram.”

  OF COURSE, NEITHER RIEGNER nor Schulte knew that Hitler’s scheme had already begun, and that, in secret, the murderous Nazi machine was now operating at a grueling pace. Treblinka, Sobibór, and Belzec were already killing Jews en masse; and the Nazis had begun their assault on the Warsaw ghetto, where the Jews would heroically fight and fail. By now, 1.5 million Jews had already been killed.

  FOR HIS PART, AN agitated Schulte was now back in Breslau, leading a double life, playing his roles flawlessly. In one life, he continued to display his normal swagger, and kept up his work routine as always. There was the thorny question of delivering zinc for the production of ammunition, as the War Ministry was now demanding; there was his own schedule of appointments and conferences; and always there was the question of having enough supplies of raw materials. In his other life, he was working night and day, or as best he could, to obtain further information about the Nazis’ plans to murder each and every Jew in Europe—and he was fervently hoping that his contacts in Switzerland would heed his message.

  There was another message that he hoped they would heed as well. From his familiarity with the inner workings of the Third Reich, he knew that simple statements or diplomatic démarches would have little effect on Hitler and his regime. The Nazis held Roosevelt in contempt and respected only force. Thus only dramatic action or a crushing blow could sway the Nazis, such as a widely publicized arrest of hundreds of thousands of Germans living in America—not unlike the internment that FDR had imposed on the Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor—or an Allied bombing attack.

  As the enormity of the risk he had taken sank in, Schulte couldn’t help wondering if one day the SS might knock on his door, coming for him.

  FOR RIEGNER, THE STRAIN was almost unbearable. Nevertheless, as European Jewry was being taken apart piece by mangled piece, he was determined not to be defeated by the magnitude of his task. After careful thought—by his own account it took two days for him to make “sense of the whole thing”—he decided to approach both the American and the British consuls in Geneva and ask them to pass on the information to their respective governments, as well as to send a coded message to Stephen Wise, who was one of the United States’ most prominent Jews and a close personal ally of President Roosevelt. On the morning of August 8, he made his way to the British consulate, where he passed on Schulte’s information. By 4:48 p.m. on August 10, a coded cable was being relayed to the Foreign Office in London; it reached there at 6:25 that same evening.

  Later in the day, Riegner ar
rived at the American consulate, where he met with the vice consul, Howard Elting Jr.

  By now, the normally composed Riegner was in a state of “great agitation” as he blurted out the Nazis’ extraordinary plans. “There has been,” he said, “and is being considered in Hitler’s headquarters a plan to exterminate all Jews from Germany and German controlled areas in Europe after they’ve been concentrated in the East—presumably Poland.” He continued, “The number involved is said to be between 31/2 and 4 million and the object is to permanently settle the Jewish question in Europe.” The dapper Elting—he had black, wavy hair and wore three-piece suits—was at first taken aback; the report seemed “fantastic.” Riegner nodded in agreement: he had at first felt this way as well. Yet he stressed that it coincided with the recent mass deportations, and with everything else they knew about Germany’s actions toward the Jews.

  At that he handed Elting a summary of the message and urged that it be telegraphed as soon as possible to Washington and other Allied governments, as well as to Stephen Wise. Whatever doubts Elting may have had were overcome by Riegner’s earnestness. Wasting little time, Elting immediately passed on Riegner’s information to the American legation in Bern, adding that in his “personal opinion,” he thought Riegner was “a serious and balanced individual.” Moreover, he recommended that the report be “passed on” to the State Department.