Agreement between Himmler and Musy

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The Himmler – Musy agreement , which was made in Bad Wildbad at the beginning of 1945 between the former Swiss Federal President Jean-Marie Musy and the German Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , enabled 1200 Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto to emigrate to Switzerland .

procedure

With his guilt for the Holocaust and the fall of the National Socialist German Reich in mind, Heinrich Himmler tried to mitigate future sentences for his crimes by saving Jews . In October 1944 he met with the former Swiss Federal President Jean-Marie Musy in Vienna . He offered to let Jews emigrate to the United States via Switzerland in return for trucks and cash benefits . In 1948 Musy made an affidavit that Himmler had given him the number of 500,000 Jews. After this preliminary talk, Himmler and Musy had a top secret final talk on January 15, 1945 in Bad Wildbad . Himmler promised the exemption of Jews and commissioned Franz Göring to carry it out. Every two weeks 1200 to 1300 Jews were to be brought from the concentration camps to Switzerland and from there to the USA. Musy had previously reached out to Roswell McClelland to get the Orthodox Rabbis Association in the USA and Canada to deposit 5,000,000 Swiss francs with a Swiss bank. As an American diplomat, McClelland headed the American Friends Service Committee in Geneva from 1940 to 1944 . From January 1944 he was a representative of the War Refugee Board in Switzerland. On January 22, 1945, Göring was commissioned by Walter Schellenberg to transfer 1200 Jews to Musy at the Swiss border. The action should create a more favorable mood for Germany in the international press.

Göring immediately got in touch with Heinrich Müller and the camp manager of the Theresienstadt ghetto, Karl Rahm . Accompanied by Göring, a special train with 17 express train wagons left Theresienstadt on the afternoon of February 5, 1945. In the evening, the SS checked the ID cards of the 1,200 Jews in Bauschowitz . The train drove unlit through the night. In Augsburg who ordered (always politely be) SS Jewish wagon conductors Jewish stars remove. After the journey through Constance , the transport was taken over by the Swiss Army around midnight . It was important that the sidings and the roll-off hill from the Konstanz freight yard were located on Swiss territory. Despite the war and the closed border, a wide, open route with numerous tracks led into Switzerland. After a “great reception” in Kreuzlingen , the liberated arrived in St. Gallen on the evening of February 7, 1945 . They were housed in different places in Switzerland until they were allowed to travel to the USA.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner , head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), reported this action to Adolf Hitler . Not only did he forbid all further actions of this kind, but also, urged by Kaltenbrunner and Joachim von Ribbentrop , ordered the immediate execution of all German escape helpers of Jews or British and American prisoners of war . The fact that this transport remained the only one was also due to the report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of February 8, 1945. It said that former Federal President Musy had been able to carry out this transfer on the basis of “Himmler's personal approval”. In the clash with Hitler, the Reichsführer SS justified his actions with the need for material and foreign currency essential to the war effort .

In St. Gallen, the Jews were housed in the Hadwig school building, which later became the St. Gallen University of Education . In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum many photographs have been preserved from that time.

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Himmler's transcript of the meeting with Musy on January 15, 1945, January 18, 1945, Federal Archives, NS 19/2776, pp. 4-5.
  2. ↑ The Noel Field Case (arte)
  3. ↑ a b c Fritz Barth: Secret hearing shortly before the end of the war in Wildbad (Wildbader advertising paper of May 28, 2008)
  4. ↑ ghetto-theresienstadt.de
  5. ↑ That was also the place where Georg Elser was found and arrested by the German mobile border guards while attempting to escape to Switzerland, literally when crossing the border.
  6. ↑ Photo Archives