Riegner, a trained lawyer, was appointed to staff the office of the newly founded World Jewish Congress in Geneva. He remained in Switzerland during the war.
On July 29, 1942, he received a phone call from a friend at the Federation of Jewish Communities in Switzerland with news that a German industrialist ( Eduard Schulte ) -- apparently with a bad conscience -- had told him of a plan being discussed by Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
"We discussed it for five or six hours, walking along the lake shore. Did we have to take it seriously? Was it conceivable to kill millions of people? Was it credible?" Riegner agonized. He decided it was.
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 the telegram to Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress and a personal friend of President Franklin Roosevelt.
"Received alarming report," Riegner cabled, "that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany, numbering 3 '/2 to four 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."
Riegner's telegram was the first authoritative word that the Nazis actually had a coordinated extermination plan.
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Eduard Schulte (1891-1966) was a prominent German industrialist and secret anti-Nazi who leaked the first report to the west that the Nazis intended to murder all Jews in Europe.
Eduard Schulte
Real History and Gerhart Riegner
Real History and the Camp at Auschwitz
The Riegner Report
Riegner Telegram
