Historian has ‘compelling’ evidence Himmler saved 300k Jews before end of war
Author of book about the architect of the Holocaust claims the Nazi leader tried to end the genocide early to pursue other negotiations
The author of a book due to be published next year says he has “compelling” evidence that Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler saved 300,000 Jews in the months before the war ended.
Canadian author Max Wallace says he can show how Himmler banned the further mass killing of Jews at the camps not because he wanted to cover the Nazis’ tracks, but because he thought he could negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies if he put an end to the Holocaust.
The claims are made in forthcoming book, ‘In The Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust,’ based on what Wallace calls “compelling documentation that links Himmler’s decree to these secret negotiations”.
These negotiations, Wallace says, were facilitated by an Orthodox Jewish woman called Recha Sternbuch, who was working in Switzerland, by the Austrian border, to help smuggle 800 Jews out. A local Jewish leader informed on her, and she was arrested, but upon her release set about sending thousands of forged Swiss visas to Jews across the border, facilitating their escape.
Together with her husband Yitzchak, who led a Swiss Jewish rescue committee, she is alleged to have worked with Jean-Marie Musy, a former president of Switzerland, who let Himmler think that a peace with the Allies was possible, if only he ordered the killing in the camps to end.
“It appears that these negotiations, these events, may have saved as many as 300,000 Jews,” said Wallace, a filmmaker and historian.
“At the time Himmler was “desperate to forge a separate alliance with the Allies. He thinks that Nazi Germany can band together with the western allies against their common enemy – Stalin – to stamp out Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks were the only people he hated as much as the Jews.”
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