Gerhart Moritz Riegner (September 12, 1911 in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

– December 3, 2001 in

Geneva , neighboring_municipalities= Carouge, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Grand-Saconnex, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier , website = https://www.geneve.ch/ Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevr ...

) was a German philosopher and the secretary-general of the

World Jewish Congress The World Jewish Congress (WJC) was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in August 1936 as an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations. According to its mission statement, the World Jewish Congress' main purpose is to act as ...

from 1965 to 1983.

Life

On August 8, 1942, he sent the famous

Riegner Telegram The Riegner Telegram was a telegraph message sent on 8 August 1942 from Gerhart Riegner, then Secretary of World Jewish Congress (Geneva), to its New York and London offices. The cable confirmed the alarming reports that had reached the West pre ...

through diplomatic channels to

Stephen Samuel Wise Stephen Samuel Wise (March 17, 1874 – April 19, 1949) was an early 20th-century American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader in the Progressive Era. Born in Budapest, he was an infant when his family immigrated to New York. He followed his fath ...

, president of the

. (However, Wise did not receive it until the end of the month. The source of the information was

Eduard Schulte Eduard Schulte ( 4 January 1891 in Düsseldorf – 6 January 1966 in Zürich) was a prominent German industrialist. He was one of the first to warn the Allies and tell the world of the Holocaust and systematic exterminations of Jews in Nazi German ...

, the anti-Nazi chief executive officer of the prominent German company Giesche (part of Silesian-American Corporation) that employed high-level Nazi officials. His telegram was the first official communication about the planned

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

. It read in part:

"Have received through foreign office following message from Riegner Geneva STOP Received alarming report that in Führers headquarters plan discussed and under consideration all Jews in countries occupied or controlled Germany number 3½ to 4 million should after deportation and concentration in East at one blow exterminated to resolve once and for all Jewish question in Europe. Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of disaster and horror to the free world and no one believed me."

Awards and honors

In 1994 he received the Four Freedom Award for the Freedom of Worship In 2001 Riegner received an Honorary Doctorate from the

University of Lucerne The University of Lucerne (UNILU; German: ''Universität Luzern'') is a public university with a campus in Lucerne, Switzerland. 1,460 undergraduates and 1,258 postgraduate students attend the university, which makes it Switzerland's smallest un ...

References

External links

Article on Eduard Schulte in the Holocaust Encyclopedia with an image of the cable originating from Gerhart RiegnerA Final Hitler Decision for the "Final Solution"? The Riegner Telegram Reconsidered by Christopher R. Browning
1911 births 2001 deaths People from Berlin Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies alumni 20th-century German Jews The Holocaust and the United States Recipients of the Four Freedoms Award {{Germany-activist-stub