On This Day — August 11, 1942
America received the first clear warning of a Nazi industrial mass murder of Jews by gas, and then buried it.
By this point, the Allies already knew about the “Holocaust by Bullets”: the mass shootings that had already killed nearly two million Jews in the East.
What arrived on August 11 was different.
Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress walked into the U.S. Consulate in Geneva and delivered this cable (photo: the actual British Foreign Office copy, registered 11 August 1942):
“Received alarming report that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed … all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany number 3½–4 millions should … be at one blow exterminated … ways of execution are still being discussed including the use of prussic acid.”
His German industrialist source had already proven deadly accurate after correctly predicting the invasion of the Soviet Union five weeks early.
The American vice-consul strongly endorsed Riegner’s reliability and forwarded the message.
The State Department suppressed it.
The British copy only reached Rabbi Stephen Wise on August 28.
This was the first detailed warning of a centralized, industrial plan to murder millions of Jews by gas. The free world received it, and then locked it in a drawer.
They knew what was coming.
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