Schulte Eduard

Schulte, Eduard During the war Eduard Schulte headed a large mining company near Breslau (today Wroclaw in Poland) with some 30,000 workers. As the head of a big industrial concern, which was considered essential to the war effort, he had access to classified information. In 1942, he learned from reliable SS sources of the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe and, in July, made a special trip to Switzerland to tip off a Jewish business friend, Isidor Koppelmann. He was fully aware that Koppelman would not keep the terrible secret to himself. Koppelman indeed transmitted the news to the press secretary of the Federation of Swiss Jewish Communities, Dr. Benjamin Sagalowitz, who, in turn, alerted the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Lausanne, Gerhart M. Riegner. This was the basis of the by-now famous telegrams of Riegner to Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress in New York, and to Sydney Silverman, head of the British section. Although the information provided by Schulte failed to halt the Nazi murder machine, it did play a role in the activities that led to the publication of the Declaration of the Allied Governments of December 17, 1942, regarding the extermination of the Jewish people. Schulte himself, who also passed to the American intelligence essential information concerning the V-1 and V-2 rockets and the surprise attack on the Soviet Union, fled to Switzerland in November 1943, after the Gestapo had uncovered his activities. The identity of the German industrialist remained undisclosed long after the war, until in 1986 – some 20 years after Schulte’s death – the historians Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman finally found out and published it in their biographical study Breaking the Silence. On September 5, 1988, Yad Vashem recognized Eduard Schulte as Righteous Among the Nations