The “End” of the Final Solution – Budapest.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]