ABSTRACT
In October 1944 Gerhart M. Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress (hereafter called WJC) in Switzerland, became obsessed with one fear: the survivors of the Third Reich’s concentration camps might be liquidated in a Nazi Götterdämmerung during the last phase of World War II. The man who had first alerted the skeptical Allied powers, in August 1942, to unconfirmed rumors that Adolf Hitler’s order for the annihilation of European Jewry would be implemented that autumn knew now that close to five million Jews were already victims of the Führer’s master plan. Earlier in April 1944, Riegner had cabled his superiors in New York the report that came to him from a Basel source with contacts in the German defense ministry that Germany had made special provision for the destruction of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews within six months. Eleven weeks later, the Geneva representative of the United States War Refugee Board confirmed that at least 335,000 members of the last major Jewish community in Europe had already been deported to concentration camps and sent to their deaths. 1 Efforts by the United States and Swedish governments, the Pope, the WJC and other sources had subsequently helped obtain Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy’s promise to stop further deportations. While the American and British governments procrastinated in rescue action, however, the gestapo regained the upper hand. Horthy was deposed in mid-October; Adolf Eichmann, fanatical architect of extermination, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross began forced labor marches of 27,000 Jews to Austria and the concentration of the remainder into a ghetto within range of Russian artillery not many miles from Budapest. 2
