To the Editor:

For forty years, students of the Holocaust have sought the identity of the prominent German industrialist who, at the risk of his life, warned the West in mid-1942 of a plan discussed in Hitler’s headquarters to murder all the Jews of Europe. Recently, a flurry of press coverage has been generated by the claim of Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, who purported to discover the identity of Eduard Schulte as the “mysterious messenger” [“Who Was the ‘Mysterious Messenger’?” October 1983]. My book, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust, published in November by the University of Illinois Press, has a direct and necessary bearing on this matter. Therein, Schulte’s name and role are first disclosed.

As already featured in Jewish Week (August 19, 1983) and Maccabi and Júdische Rundschau (Basel, Switzerland—both September 7, 1983), I determined that Schulte left Berlin expressly to convey his horrific information to a Jew named Koppelman, the legal representative of a powerful Swiss industrialist. Schulte then told his story to Benjamin Sagalowitz, who passed on the word to Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). While exacting from Sagalowitz a promise of anonymity, Schulte suggested that immediate Allied reprisals might check the reported design.

In early October 1942, Schulte returned to Switzerland to report that Backe, the German Secretary of State for Economics, had proposed “to exterminate the Jews found in the German alimentary space” to help ease supply and provision scarcities. At the end of July, according to Schulte, Backe had obtained Hitler’s signature on an order to carry out the quick deportation and subsequent annihilation in Eastern Europe of some four million Jews.

My initial finding of Schulte’s name and that of his contact in this matter came during an inspection, in July 1979, of the archives of the World Jewish Congress in London. A memorandum there revealed that the WJC’s A. Leon Kubowitzki (later Kubovy) met Schulte and Koppelman through Sagalowitz on February 24, 1945, when visiting Riegner. On that occasion, Koppelman indicated that a nephew of one of his female acquaintances had seen the draft on Hitler’s table of the annihilation decree signed by Himmler and Bormann, and that it had later received the Fuehrer’s signature. Schulte confirmed that “an extermination order seems to have existed.”

The mention by Schulte and Koppelman of specific Third Reich chieftains is noteworthy. Almost all historians doubt the existence of a “Final Solution” directive signed by Hitler (see Martin Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’: An Assessment of David Irving’s Theses,” Yad Vashem Studies 13 [1979], pp. 73-125). Schulte did promise Kubowitzki to try to locate that alleged order, but the WJC archives show nothing further. Intriguingly, Schulte’s report about Backe’s rationale coincided with Bormann’s concurrent explanation to Nazi administrators that “the elimination of millions of Jews living in the European economic area is an imperative rule in the struggle to secure the existence of the German people. It is in the nature of things that these somewhat difficult problems can only be solved with ruthless severity. . . .”

Although my subsequent inquiries to German and Swiss archives, as well as to Albert Speer, bore no fruit, the Berlin Document Center forwarded vital information on the “mysterious messenger” from a Nazi reference work (1942) entitled Wer leitet? Die Männer der deutschen Wirtschaft und der einschlágigen Verwaltung [Who Leads? Executives of the German Economy and Administration]. (Schulte, appointed Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer [Director of Defense Economy] on September 1, 1941, and a board member of some major industrial concerns, obviously had access to the highest German councils.) My culminating research at Yad Vashem, in January 1982, uncovered Kubowitzki’s diary entry of his talk with Riegner on February 16, 1945, concerning Schulte and Koppelman, as well as a copy in Sagalowitz’s papers of a plan by Schulte for Germany’s postwar economic rehabilitation and Sagalowitz’s memoir indicating that he introduced Riegner to the mysterious German industrialist in February 1945.

Messrs. Breitman and Kraut have, indeed, made a significant contribution in describing Schulte’s efforts to pass on intelligence information to the Allies about German foreign policy and military strategy. The story had not been told heretofore; it may yet prove to be one of the most impressive in the annals of wartime espionage—if the relevant archives are freely opened to these and other persevering scholars.

Yet to focus principally on Allied records also has its limitations, particularly in studying the Holocaust. Lack of research in the broad spectrum of Jewish primary sources results in more than imprecise identification of Sagalowitz and the Jewish Agency’s Richard Lichtheim. The elusive German named “S” becomes linked by Messrs. Breitman and Kraut to an “E.S.,” the recipient of two coded messages from Poland that the Germans were deporting all Jews in Warsaw to their deaths “except for the iron workers.” This is a key piece of evidence for the two authors (first reported in the Washington Post on September 28, 1983, and carried by United Press International under the same date), who claim further in COMMENTARY that Schulte (E.S.) supplied Sagalowitz or Riegner with the letters in mid-September 1942, as his “best effort to provide confirmation of the Final Solution.” The authors’ joint conclusion presents but one difficulty: “E.S.” in fact was not Eduard Schulte.

The original letters, which I found in August 1977, among the voluminous files of the WJC in New York, unequivocally name the recipient in both cases to be E. Sternbuch of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Elie Sternbuch, attempting with his brother Isaac and sister-in-law Recha to rescue Orthdox Jewry from under the Nazi jackboot, had obtained the agreement of Paraguay consul Rodolfe Hügli some months earlier to issue 1,000 protective passports for Jews in Poland, Belgium, and Holland at a mere 100 Swiss francs apiece. On September 4 and 12, 1942, I. M. Domb, an Orthodox Jew of Swiss parentage, wrote Elie Sternbuch about the fatal mass deportation from Warsaw.

Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died, following the code which Riegner gave the U.S. consulate in Geneva, erred in translating Domb’s Eisenzweig, Orlean, and Gefen as “iron workers,” “non-Jews,” and “wine tree,” respectively. (Messrs. Breitman and Kraut do the same for Eisenzweig.) Actually, the despairing Domb also informed Elie Sternbuch that Guta Eisenzweig (Elie’s future wife), Yehuda Leib Orlean (head of Cracow’s Beth Jacob Seminary), and Guta’s mother (maiden name Gefen) were safe, but that not all of Hügli’s “citrus fruit” had arrived.

The Sternbuchs’ organization, HIJEFS, had some prior knowledge of the unparalleled Jewish tragedy. Julius Kühl of the Polish legation in Bern provided a lengthy memorandum in mid-August 1942, concerning European Jewry, based on the eyewitness testimony of two reliable non-Jews reaching Switzerland. By Kühl’s use of the Polish diplomatic pouch, in early September, Isaac Sternbuch informed the president of World Agudath Israel (centered in New York) that about 100,000 Jews had recently been killed in Warsaw. Hillel Seidman, who with Guta Eisenzweig and her mother would survive through a Paraguayan passport (Domb and Orlean did not), dispatched a coded message quoting Scripture to Chaim Eiss of Zurich that 10 percent of Warsaw’s original 450,000 Jews had survived; Eiss replied that he understood the hint from Amos 5:3. The Sternbuchs gave Domb’s letters to Riegner, who handed them to the U.S. consul and then sent off a summary to his WJC colleagues in London.

With Eduard Schulte having no part in this entire “E.S.” episode, do Messrs. Breitman and Kraut possess documentation of Schulte’s exact name associated with his transmission of facts about the Holocaust? Readers will eagerly await their publication of a detailed account, as well as other investigations which the authors’ COMMENTARY article may, it is hoped, stimulate.

As for the Schulte and Sternbuch information, Riegner lost little time in giving this, as well as related reports, to the American and British authorities. Particularly important was the subsequent corroboration of the Final Solution design by International Red Cross official Carl J. Burckhardt, whose name Riegner first mentioned to the American minister in a decisive interview on October 22, 1942. (At that same conference, Riegner and Lichtheim provided additional materials and Schulte’s name in a sealed envelope.) Paul Guggenheim, WJC senior colleague who advised Riegner in August to forward Schulte’s initial information without the suggestion of reprisals but “with all necessary reservation,” had heard from Burckhardt about a Final Solution order. Guggenheim insisted that the name of Burckhardt, his faculty associate at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies, be kept confidential. Yet Riegner decided that Burckhardt—unlike Schulte—had nothing to risk, while his international humanitarian committee had done pitifully little to aid Jewry in its hour of greatest need.

The Allies, by then, had ample and highly credible accounts from diverse sources. Negligible results followed, however. Those who might have checked the tempo of the Holocaust did not alter their position throughout World War II. Tragically, the West’s disbelief, indifference, anti-Semitism, and, above all, political expediency doomed a powerless European Jewry to the Nazi program of systematic annihilation. Against this prevailing decay of conscience, a few courageous Jews and Gentiles who sought to answer the summons of the hour could accomplish little.

Monty N. Penkower
Touro College
New York City

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To the Editor:

I would like to add a clarification and a footnote to the very interesting article by Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut. This involves the two key letters of confirmation of the Riegner cable and its disposition at the hands of American Jewry. While these are elaborated upon and fully documented in my forthcoming work, Thy Brother’s Blood: The Role of the Orthodox and the Holocaust, it is important to set the record straight.

Contrary to the authors’ assertion, the letters were not supplied to Gerhart Riegner by the German industrialist Eduard Schulte, but by Isaac (Yitzchok) Sternbuch, the representative of both Agudath Israel and Vaad Hatzalah (Rescue Committee) in Switzerland. In Arthur Morse’s book, While Six Million Died, Riegner is quoted as stating that he obtained these two letters “from a friend in St. Gallen.” He neglected, however, to identify this friend as Isaac Sternbuch. Sternbuch and his wife, Recha, resided in St. Gallen until 1940, when they moved to Montreux. Recha Sternbuch, especially, had been extremely active since 1938, in helping thousands of refugees cross illegally from Nazi-occupied Austria and France into Switzerland. For this “crime” she was even jailed by the Swiss authorities for two weeks, thanks to a Jewish informer, who feared that the sudden influx of 800 Jews would create anti-Semitism in Switzerland. The humane Swiss then hermetically sealed their borders with motorized patrols to insure that no more Jews would enter. . . .

The two letters were dated September 4 and 12, 1942. The terms in the first letter were not fully understood. For example, even in the small excerpt given in the article, there is an error; the noun Eisenzweig does not refer to “iron workers.” It was in fact the name of an individual, the fiancée of Elie Sternbuch, younger brother of Isaac. She was spared because he had sent her a Paraguayan passport which was actually recognized by the Nazis. After the war, Miss Eisenzweig did indeed marry her intended, Elie Sternbuch, and both still reside in Switzerland. The Sternbuchs were in fact the first to send such bogus Latin American papers to hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. After a while, others followed suit.

In this and in all their manifold rescue activities spanning a decade, the Sternbuchs had the help of a close collaborator, Julius Kühl. This Orthodox Jew was the assistant for Jewish affairs to Ambassador Alexander Lados at the Polish legation in Bern. Kühl not only obtained these Paraguayan papers—for a fee—from a member of that country’s consulate, he was also the chief conduit for all the news emanating from Poland and other countries, via couriers and other means. Kühl made it his practice to supply such reports about Jewish conditions to, among others, Riegner; Saly Mayer, head of the Swiss Jewish communities and representative of the Joint Distribution Committee; as well as to Richard Lichtheim, representative of the Jewish Agency. . . .

The Riegner cable reached Rabbi Stephen S. Wise on August 28, via Sidney Silverman of England, but Wise notified neither the President nor any of the Jewish organizations. Instead, he quietly routed it to the State Department for verification, as he did with numerous other such reports.

In contrast, on September 3, five days after receipt of the Riegner cable, Jacob Rosenheim, president of World Agudath Israel, was given a copy of an ominous cable sent by Sternbuch in which he stated that 100,000 Jews had been deported from Warsaw and that their bodies had been turned into fertilizer and soap. This cable evaded the unsympathetic censors of the State Department because Sternbuch had sent it via the Polish diplomatic code made available to all Jewish organizations by Ambassador Lados. (Only the Orthodox made use of this valuable, though illegal, channel of communication, which the Jewish establishment considered taboo; their Weltanschauung demanded of the Orthodox that the survival of the Jewish people required all-out efforts, legal or illegal.)

Unlike the “skeptical” Riegner cable, that sent by Sternbuch displayed no equivocation. Moreover, at the conclusion, he added: “Do whatever you can to arouse an American reaction to halt this persecution. Do whatever you can . . . stirring up statesmen, the press, and the community. Inform [Stephen S.] Wise, [Abba Hillel] Silver, Lubavitcher [Rebbe], [Albert] Einstein, [Jacob] Klatskin, [Nahum] Goldmann, Thomas Mann, and others.”

Taking the message at face value, Rosenheim immedately cabled President Roosevelt, and with the help of the Polish embassy, requested an urgent meeting. The President declined to respond. Instead, after three weeks, he quietly passed this cable on to the State Department. But when Thomas Mann was made aware of the tragic news, he broadcast it on the BBC the following week.

In order to assure the arrival of this important information, Sternbuch telephoned Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, one of the key figures of Vaad Hatzalah. Upon hearing the first few words of the horrible news, the venerable rabbi fainted, and his secretary had to take the message.

By the next day, Friday, September 4, Rosenheim and Kalmanowitz had convinced Wise, American Jewry’s most prominent spokesman, to meet them at the office of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, where they repeated the details of the cable to Wise and his two assistants. As a result of the pressure by the charismatic Rabbi Kalmanowitz, Wise, who had never even informed the Orthodox of the Riegner cable, now agreed to their demand for a meeting of all the Jewish leaders for that Sunday, September 6. There, at the meeting of leaders of thirty-four Jewish organizations, Wise, who feared disturbing the President, accused the rabbis of being bearers of Greuelmärchen (atrocity tales) and he cajoled them, along with the leaders of all the organizations, into silence until this news too was verified by the State Department.

As I have noted, the letters to Sternbuch of September 4 and 12 became major sources of this confirmation, which Wise publicized at a news conference on November 24, 1942 in which he informed the free world that over two million Jews had been murdered by the Nazis. It was the unheralded Sternbuch initiative on both counts that was thus really responsible for the first and sole united effort by all of American Jewry on behalf of their suffering fellow Jews in Europe.

David Kranzler
Queensborough Community College
Bayside, New York

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To the Editor:

In early August 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva, dispatched two identical messages concerning a plan for the mass killing of Jews in occupied Europe by the Nazis. One was sent to the United States and a second to Great Britain. The information dispatched in these two cables was clearly important, but not new. It revealed again, from a reliable German source, the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry.

There is, however, confusion among historians over the source of this information. The journalist turned historian, Arthur Morse, in While Six Million Died, states that the information came directly to Riegner from an unnamed German industrialist. But in the Hebrew edition of Morse’s book, editor Shlomo Derech states that Riegner did not receive the information directly or exclusively from that German industrialist. Walter Laqueur also discovered and confirmed the fact that Riegner did not meet the German until 1945.

After being pressured by the Swiss Jewish community, which had been stirred by the misinformation in Morse’s book, Riegner confirmed, in Das Neue Israel (November 5, 1969), that the report of mass killing had not come to him directly or exclusively through the German industrialist, as Morse had claimed, but that it had been conveyed to him by Benjamin Sagalowitz, a Swiss Jewish leader who had originally helped substantiate the information. Finally, after the story had been verified by Sagalowitz, Riegner sent the information to the United States via the United States State Department. . . .

The main purpose of Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut’s article is to identify the informer who transferred the news of the German plan to massacre European Jews to the Allies for the first time. Yet nowhere in the article is there documented evidence that would lead us to believe that the German informer was Eduard Schulte, as they assert. . . .

It seems to me that we have a credibility problem with Riegner. This problem is magnified by the fact that the World Jewish Congress archival papers in Switzerland have not yet been made available to the public; not coincidentally, they are under the control of Riegner. . . .

There are other problems that must be addressed:

If the German industrialist was also working for the Allies, why did he order his name to be kept secret when he passed his intelligence on to Western governments?

The purported reason for keeping Schulte’s name secret was to protect him from the Gestapo; why does Riegner still refuse to publish the name nearly forty years after the war? . . .

A careful reading of State Department papers shows that information concerning the extermination of Jews . . . [was] received by Jewish representatives in Switzerland from various sources. Why such an emphasis was given to a single German informer is beyond my understanding. It seems to me that Riegner, who gave Morse the wrong information, confused many researchers into believing that in sending the famous telegrams his role was crucial. . . . Riegner’s activities during the war years are a great mystery. . . . If the basis of the research done by the authors is Riegner’s testimony, then it cannot bear the weight of their conclusion.

As far as the identity of the German is concerned, I would suggest more care than the authors’ quick identification, based only on the National Archives or on Riegner’s testimony. State Department documents dated August—October 1942 reveal the following:

1. A memorandum from Howard Elting, Jr., American vice consul, Geneva, Switzerland (August 8, 1942): “Conversation with Mr. Gerhart M. Riegner, Secretary of the World Jewish Congress. . . .: He [Riegner] stated that he had just received a report from a German business man [sic] of considerable prominence [we now know that Riegner did not receive this report directly from the German . . .] who is said to have excellent political and military connections in Germany and from whom reliable and important political information has been obtained on two previous occasions. . . .” Riegner’s famous telegram was attached to Elting’s memorandum.
2. On September 28, 1942, Riegner appeared before Paul C. Squire, American consul at Geneva. Squire’s memorandum to the State Department said: “The following information was supplied by Mr. Gerhart M. Riegner, Secretary of the World Jewish Congress . . . who stated that the data came to him through the intermediary of a Swiss university professor, originating with a German officer attached to OKW [Army High Command] and belonging to a group opposed to the Nazi regime.” Apparently we have here a second German reporting the atrocities against the Jews.
3. On October 29, 1942, at Geneva, Professor Paul Guggenheim gave an affidavit to Squire. It is still not clear why an affidavit of this sort was necessary on October 29, when, according to Messrs. Breitman and Kraut, on October 22, Riegner had given Leland Harrison, another American diplomat, a sealed envelope containing Schulte’s name and position. It is interesting to read Guggenheim’s affidavit, in which he reveals “[t]he existence of Hitler’s order mentioned herein has reached Professor Guggenheim’s informant [a Swiss citizen] through two sources, each independent of the other, as follows: (a) an official of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Berlin, (b) an official of the German Ministry of War at Berlin.”

It is obvious from State Department documents that Riegner was active in transmitting information about the order to massacre European Jews to the U.S. . . . I doubt, however, whether he personally knew his German source, since, as I have shown, there was more than one source for the information. When an affidavit concerning the order was requested by U.S. officials, it was Paul Guggenheim who provided it. And Guggenheim claimed that two Germans had supplied the information. Why Messrs. Breitman and Kraut failed to read these State Department documents is not clear.

Eli Matz
Forest Hills, New York

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To the Editor:

Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut have found no proof that Eduard Schulte informed the Allies directly of the death camps for Jews. They only speculate that he did so. As chief of Polish underground civil resistance, I sent several radio dispatches from Warsaw to London with the information that on July 22, 1942 the Germans had begun to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In Stawki Street, 7,000 people were loaded daily into freight cars and transported to Maidanek where they were all killed in gas chambers. But neither the Polish government-in-exile in London nor the British believed my messages; they came to the conclusion that I was exaggerating for the sake of anti-German propaganda. About one month later, however, after the British received confirmation of my information through their own channels, they disclosed the contents of my dispatches.

This incident is mentioned in Walter Laqueur’s book The Terrible Secret and by Yisrael Gutman in his recent book, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943.

Stefan Korbonski
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

As a former prisoner at Buchenwald, I read with great interest “Who Was the ‘Mysterious Messenger’?” I was chiefly frightened to learn of the existing atmosphere in the outside world. While we were being slaughtered, the world at large was either hesitant or hostile. Thus we read in the article that the State Department called Riegner’s message about the Final Solution a “wild rumor inspired by Jewish fear.” . . . Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut further note that even after news of the Final Solution had been received, “American policy-makers remained consistent in their refusal to treat the Jews’ plight as unique.” . . . It hurts deeply. . . .

[Rabbi] Dov Rapaport
Woodmere, New York

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Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut write:

One measure of an article’s usefulness is the amount of informed debate it encourages among serious scholars. We are grateful to those critics whose hunt for the fault lines in our research and argument permit us to test our work’s foundation.

We remain convinced that Eduard Schulte’s message, successfully designed to reach Washington and London, was the first inside report to reveal the scope of Nazi intentions—the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We are aware of Stefan Korbonski’s courageous service in the Polish resistance and wartime government. We have no reason to doubt that he transmitted to London information regarding Nazi killings of Jews in gas chambers.

Both Monty N. Penkower and David Kranzler note our error in following Arthur Morse’s translation of the coded letter to E.S. We had good reason to do so. This was the translation of the letter found in the American diplomatic records. (Since this translation first shows up in Geneva, it appears likely that Sagalowitz or Riegner was the translator.) Since we are engaged in writing a study of American refugee policy, we are primarily concerned with the information reaching Washington and with the U.S. response to it. Messrs. Penkower and Kranzler have uncovered an interesting and ironic twist—that the code was misinterpreted from the start.

We had assumed that the two letters to E.S., which Riegner passed along to the American consulate in Geneva, were to Eduard Schulte. We are persuaded by Mr. Penkower’s and Mr. Kranzler’s presentations that Elie Sternbuch was the recipient this time. The implications of this error, however, are not as serious as Mr. Penkower would have us believe.

Although we are reserving our footnotes for our forthcoming book on American refugee policy, we are willing to inform readers how we made our discovery. We began an intensive search in the fall of 1982, knowing a good deal already. Previous scholars, particularly Arthur Morse and Walter Laqueur, had uncovered a number of important clues about the mysterious industrialist. We knew that his last name began with “S,” that he headed a very large firm employing 30,000 workers, and that he was a convinced democrat. Moreover, the man had given important intelligence to the Allies at least twice. There could not be very many who fit all the known facts, which Riegner confirmed for us in an interview.

While seizing upon every conceivably relevant document in the National Archives, we had photocopied an unusually explicit description of the intelligence exploits of a German named Eduard Schulte. But who was this Schulte? His occupation was not mentioned. None of the standard works on World War II espionage mentioned him, and we had not run across him in our first search through the literature on German wartime industry.

Henry Turner of Yale University alerted Richard Breitman, his former student, that there was a directory of German business executives published in 1941-42, entitled Wer lettet? Die Männer der deutschen Wirtschaft und der einschlägigen Verwaltung. If Schulte was an important industrialist, he would be listed here. Schulte, it turned out, was not only managing director of a very large mining company with a Swiss subsidiary, but also was a member of the board of supervisors of seven other corporations. Further investigation turned up the fact that his firm employed 30,000 workers.

We did not yet have absolute proof that Schulte was the mysterious messenger. In fact, we still had one rival candidate. But the documents describing the exploits of Eduard Schulte mentioned that his family had links to a “colonel and commander of an armored regiment on the Eastern front.” When we reexamined all the information that Riegner had received from his German industrialist, we found that the industrialist had also mentioned a colonel and commander of an armored regiment on the Eastern front. Perhaps there could conceivably have been more than one German industrialist whose last name began with S, whose firm employed 30,000 workers, who was a convinced democrat, and who supplied intelligence to the Allies. But it was not possible that there were two men meeting all these requirements and who both talked about their link to a colonel and commander of an armored regiment on the Eastern front. We had our man.

After we had settled conclusively on Schulte, we received final confirmation from a well-informed source who prefers to remain anonymous. There was absolutely no possibility that we were wrong. We wrote up our findings, copyrighted them (on June 10, 1983) in the Library of Congress, and sent our article to COMMENTARY.

Since Mr. Penkower maintains that he came across Schulte’s name as early as 1979, it appears that Mr. Penkower preceded us—although, as the above account makes clear, his implication that we learned of Schulte only through his work is completely untrue. We find it curious, moreover, that he did not find more information on Schulte in the National Archives, in reference works, as well as from surviving friends and relatives of Schulte. The newspaper story on Mr. Penkower’s find which appeared in the Jewish Week of New York on August 19, 1983 contained only a small fraction of the information in our COMMENTARY article. If Mr. Penkower made his discovery as early as 1979 but still turned up only part of the story, there seems little justification for him to complain about the “flurry of press coverage” we received for our article.

The Jewish Week story contained a major error: citing Mr. Penkower, it described Schulte as a leader of the German war economy. The successive Ministers of Armaments and War Production, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer, would certainly have been astonished to learn that Schulte ran the German war economy. In actuality, Schulte was one of perhaps fifty prominent German industrialists, including a fair number of anti-Nazis, who received the purely honorary title of Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer. This information, too, is available in the National Archives.

It is unclear to us why Mr. Penkower should raise dubious evidence regarding an alleged order signed by Hitler to exterminate four million European Jews. Schulte, as quoted by Mr. Penkower, seems to have been uncertain about the existence of such a document. We are not persuaded by Koppelman’s claim that “a nephew of one of his female acquaintances” had seen the order. The David Irvings of this world will certainly not be swayed by such hearsay evidence. Irving will accept only a written order signed by Hitler as proof of Hitler’s authorization of the Final Solution. By raising the hope of finding such a document, Mr. Penkower is playing David Irving’s game. Other scholars have found the evidence of Hitler’s authorization of the Final Solution overwhelming—even without a signed order. British scholar Gerald Fleming, in his study, Hitler und die Endlösung [Hitler and the Final Solution], has recently summarized this evidence and added to it. What is just as important, Fleming has explained how and why Hitler avoided issuing an explicit written order for the Final Solution.

We look forward to the publication of David Kranzler’s book, which should fill an important gap in the literature. Nonetheless, our sources provide a much different picture of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise from Mr. Kranzler’s account here. To give only one example, we have evidence that Wise made the Schulte report public on September 28, 1942, almost two months before the date Mr. Kranzler gives. Mr. Kranzler also fails to note that the report of Jewish bodies being turned into fertilizer and soap was then inaccurate. Knowing how damaging the release of exaggerated reports could be to the credibility of Jewish organizations, Wise asked the State Department to verify the information. If one hoped to get the government to take action against the killing, this was a logical move.

Eli Matz calls Riegner’s credibility into question for no good reason. Neither Riegner nor we concealed the important role played by Benjamin Sagalowitz in the Schulte affair. Riegner has continued to conceal Schulte’s identity because of a promise to Schulte himself. In Riegner’s words, “that was the only thing he ever asked for.”

We had seen previously all the 1942 documents mentioned in Mr. Matz’s letter. Quite obviously, Riegner and American Foreign Service officers were receiving atrocity reports from sources besides Schulte; but again, Schulte was the first to reveal the Final Solution. Guggenheim’s affidavit came more than two months later. As American Consul Paul Squire quickly learned, Guggenheim’s informant was former League of Nations High Commissioner Carl Burckhardt, then an official of the International Red Cross, a source with very good contacts in Germany. Burckhardt’s information represented independent confirmation of the Schulte report—that was why it was so important to a skeptical State Department.

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