Gerhart Riegner

Gerhart Moritz Riegner, lawyer: born Berlin 12 July 1911; Secretary-General, World Jewish Congress 1965-83; died Geneva, Switzerland 3 December 2001.

Gerhart Riegner was the grandfather of Jewish-Catholic dialogue in the 20th century.

He was appointed by Pope John Paul II as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great for this work, while he received the Nahum Goldmann Medal of the World Jewish Congress, together with various honours and communal posts which established him as one of the great Jewish leaders of our time.

To the world, however, his astounding career seemed frozen in one moment of time: 8 August 1942, when he sent what became known as the "Riegner telegram" his attempt to relay to the world the truth of Hitler's "Final Solution". Acting on reliable sources, including a German industrialist, Eduard Schulte, who had relayed information to Switzerland and to a Jewish journalist, Benjamin Sagalowitz, Riegner, then a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, became convinced that action to kill between three and four million Jews had been initiated. The telegram he sent to London and Washington stated:

Received alarming report that in the Führer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled Germany numbering three and a half or four millions should after deportation and concentration in East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish Question in Europe.

These details had somehow emerged from the meeting of Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, and Hitler's speech of 9 February stating that "the Jews will be liquidated for at least a thousand years" made the information Riegner had received seem more than plausible, even though he himself was torn between belief and disbelief. Earlier, in October 1941, he had already written to Nahum Goldmann, the head of the executive of the World Jewish Congress, that the news of the destruction of the Jews in the East was so horrifying that "I ask myself how many Jews would survive the war if this continued."

When he realised that the rumour was now fact, he sent his telegram to American officials to transmit to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, the telegram was not initially sent on to Rabbi Wise by the US State Department, since it was judged to be rumour-mongering.

In Britain, the Foreign Office also discounted the report, although it was passed to Sidney Silverman MP, a spokesman for British Jewry. It was suggested to him that distributing the report would only infuriate the Germans and lead to an increase in their persecution of the Jews.

Only later, on 8 December, did Wise, during a half-hour meeting with Roosevelt, convince the president of the urgency of the situation. This led to a declaration on 17 December by the Allies condemning the mass murders being carried out by the Germans; and the Bermuda Conference to discuss the rescue of Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe took place nine months later.

Gerhart Riegner was stunned by the apathy he had encountered. "It was a catastrophe," he recalled later, but his efforts to warn the world continued. In 18 March 1942, the Vatican too had received a report written by Riegner and Richard Lichtheim which concentrated on the murderous measures being enacted against the Jews in Croatia, Hungary, occupied France and other countries, all confirming that a master plan of murder was on its way. The world did not want to hear; but Riegner could not be silenced. He was disappointed with the western world, and with a Christianity which preserved itself by ignoring others.

His own life had been a quest for justice. Born in Berlin in 1911, he had studied law in Berlin, Heidelberg and Freiburg, but he and his family were cast out of the legal profession by the Nazis in 1933 and fled the country. His studies continued at the Sorbonne where he received his law degree in 1935, and he continued legal research in Switzerland, where he settled and became an international lawyer.

His concern for the Jewish community became his full-time occupation in 1936, when he joined the World Jewish Congress as a legal advisor until, in 1939, he became the head of its Swiss office. Until the end of the war, he battled for rescue and awareness of what was taking place during this Holocaust period. In 1959, he became the Director of Coordination of the World Jewish Congress until 1965, when he became its Secretary-General until 1983. This gave him ample opportunity to become the great diplomat of the interfaith world, particularly in relation to the Vatican.

Thus he edited, together with Cardinal Jan Willebrands, Fifteen Years of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue: 1970-1985 (1988). He fought for human rights in Africa as much as in Europe. Other publications, Nostra Aetate: 20 years after (1988), The Church and the Jews, and his opening lecture on 23 March 1998 of the major interfaith organization he had founded, ICJLC (the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations), all showed a man of prophetic fervour whom age could not affect.

Often, his early actions led the way to later achievements: in 1975, his effective work in the United Nations Organisation played an important part in the eventual discarding in 1991 of the infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution. And his concern for civil rights for other minorities, in other countries, was proof of an enduring philosophy of life which never became parochial.

Albert H. Friedlander