Gerhart Riegner, 90; Warned of Holocaust

Gerhart Riegner, who tried to alert the world about the planned Nazi Holocaust and later led the World Jewish Congress, died Monday. He was 90.

Riegner died of pneumonia in a Geneva hospital, according to his spokeswoman, Edda Bournot.

Riegner was a World Jewish Congress official in Geneva when he cabled the U.S. vice consul and the British counterpart in the Swiss city on Aug. 8, 1942, describing Adolf Hitler’s plan to deport an estimated 4 million Jews to Eastern Europe to annihilate them.

But it took four months from the time Riegner sounded the alarm for the governments of Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union to issue a warning to Germany to stop the Holocaust or face retribution, and 18 months before President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board to try to save the Jews.

On July 29, 1942, Riegner received a telephone call from a friend at the Federation of Jewish Communities in Switzerland with news that a German industrialist--apparently with a guilty conscience--had told him of a plan being discussed by Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

“We made inquiries about this man,” Riegner told The Times during a Los Angeles speaking tour in 1985, relating his initial skepticism of the claims, “and found he had previously predicted the Nazi invasion of Russia and German military and political moves.”

He said he had known as early as the fall of 1941 that “terrible things were going on” against Jews all over Europe and that he had written to World Jewish Congress co-founder Nahum Goldmann, saying that if the events continued, he feared few Jews would survive the war.

On Aug. 8, 1942, Riegner asked the U.S. vice consul in Geneva to inform the U.S. government of the plan and to transmit the contents of his telegram to Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress and a friend of Roosevelt.

“Received alarming report,” Riegner telegraphed, “that in Fuehrer’s headquarters plan discussed and under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany, numbering 3 1/2 to 4 million, should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe.”

The telegram added: “Action reported planned for autumn. Methods under discussion including prussic acid [the poison in the gas Zyklon B]. We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable.”

Riegner’s telegram was the first authoritative word that the Nazis had a coordinated extermination plan.

The State Department tried to verify Riegner’s telegram with the Vatican and the Red Cross. Both said they knew of mistreatment and deportations of Jews but not of a mass extermination plan.

The equally skeptical British Foreign Office did pass on the telegram to a Jewish member of Parliament, Sidney Silverman, who was head of the British chapter of the World Jewish Congress. He contacted Wise, who asked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to intervene with Roosevelt.

For the rest of his life, Riegner was haunted by the belief that many of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis might have been saved if the United States and Britain had acted promptly on his warning.

“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,” Riegner recalled in his memoirs.

During his 1985 Los Angeles visit, he was philosophical about the Allies’ inability to accept his warning about the Holocaust, telling The Times: “A great part was that people couldn’t, didn’t want to, believe it. It’s a cognitive problem. It doesn’t mean when you know something that you accept it. . . . Ironically, I sometimes think it might be the most positive aspect to come out of the whole tragedy. People cannot believe in absolute evil. This gives me hope for the character of man.”

Riegner was secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress from 1965 to 1983 and then became its honorary vice president. He also worked on improving relations between Israel and the Roman Catholic Church and was present at the signing of the basic accord normalizing relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1993.

At the United Nations, he campaigned to rescind the 1975 General Assembly vote that Zionism equals racism. The resolution was annulled in 1991.

Born into an intellectual Jewish family in Germany, Riegner’s first experience with anti-Semitism came when a boy yelled at him, “You dirty little Jew.” “Filthy little Christian,” Riegner shouted back--a response that later caused him great shame.

In 1933, Nazi thugs stood outside his parents’ Berlin house yelling “Jews out! Jews out!” while Riegner sat in the bath, frozen in terror. The family fled to France and then moved on to Switzerland.

A trained lawyer, Riegner was appointed to staff the office of the newly founded World Jewish Congress in Geneva and remained in Switzerland throughout the war.

Riegner never married.

The funeral will be Wednesday or Thursday, the spokeswoman Bournot said.