Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I THE MAKING OF THE MULTIPLE TRAP
- PART II THE RESCUE DEBATE, THE MACRO PICTURE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
- PART III THE SELF-DEFEATING MECHANISM OF THE RESCUE EFFORTS
- PART IV THE BRAND–GROSZ MISSIONS WITHIN THE LARGER PICTURE OF THE WAR AND THEIR RAMIFICATIONS
- PART V THE END OF THE FINAL SOLUTION: BACK TO HOSTAGE-TAKING TACTICS
- 32 The Train
- 33 The Bombing Controversy – Speer and Zuckerman
- 34 The “Great Season”
- 35 Becher, Mayer, and the Death Marches
- 36 The “End” of the Final Solution – Budapest
- Epilogue: Self-Traps: The OSS and Kasztner at Nuremberg
- Notes on Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
36 - The “End” of the Final Solution – Budapest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I THE MAKING OF THE MULTIPLE TRAP
- PART II THE RESCUE DEBATE, THE MACRO PICTURE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
- PART III THE SELF-DEFEATING MECHANISM OF THE RESCUE EFFORTS
- PART IV THE BRAND–GROSZ MISSIONS WITHIN THE LARGER PICTURE OF THE WAR AND THEIR RAMIFICATIONS
- PART V THE END OF THE FINAL SOLUTION: BACK TO HOSTAGE-TAKING TACTICS
- 32 The Train
- 33 The Bombing Controversy – Speer and Zuckerman
- 34 The “Great Season”
- 35 Becher, Mayer, and the Death Marches
- 36 The “End” of the Final Solution – Budapest
- Epilogue: Self-Traps: The OSS and Kasztner at Nuremberg
- Notes on Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The evidence that we can add to the existing literature in regard to Himmler's order to stop the Final Solution late in 1944 (as seemed to Kasztner at the time to have been the case thanks to Becher's “complete victory” described earlier) is a message sent by McClelland to the WRB and State Department on January 20, 1945, which first quoted “German press denials of any intention to exterminate inmates” of Auschwitz and Birkenau, following a strongly worded warning to Himmler personally, signed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. McClelland added to this that he was unable to confirm reports “originated in Polish circles in London” that the SS was instructed to kill all inmates of Jewish camps “who could not be evacuated in face of Allied advance.” However, McClelland continued:
based on a great deal of fragmentary information collected during past several months regarding course of Nazi policy toward Jewish deportees in camps, and more particularly on very recent statements of two intelligent Jewish women who reached Switzerland during late December having spent three months in Auschwitz August through October 1944 … I think it can be reliably stated that Nazis have abandoned extermination of Jews as a general policy, and certainly of those capable of working. On other hand they show tendency continue doing away on small scale with elderly people and children.
(FDR Library WRB container 56, file Jewish refugees, Jan–June 1945, cable no. 416)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews , pp. 312 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004