On Novem­ber 25, 1944, the gas cham­bers and cre­ma­to­ria at Auschwitz-Birke­nau came crash­ing down. For sev­en decades, most Holo­caust his­to­ri­ans believed that the Nazis ordered the destruc­tion of the killing appa­ra­tus to hide their crimes ahead of the advanc­ing Red Army. In the Name of Human­i­ty presents new­ly dis­cov­ered evi­dence that Hein­rich Himm­ler was deceived into end­ing the Final Solu­tion and destroy­ing the killing appa­ra­tus through a secret deal mas­ter­mind­ed by a Swiss res­cue com­mit­tee, led by an ultra-Ortho­dox Jew­ish woman named Recha Stern­buch, who enlist­ed the for­mer pres­i­dent of Switzer­land to nego­ti­ate with Himm­ler on behalf of the Union of Ortho­dox Rab­bis. Cul­ti­vat­ing his delu­sion, the res­cuers insist­ed that the West was ready to forge an alliance against Stal­in but only if the Nazis end­ed the geno­cide. The new evi­dence — dis­cov­ered in the archives of New York’s Yeshi­va Uni­ver­si­ty along with declas­si­fied files from the War Refugee Board — demon­strates that Himmler’s Novem­ber decree was almost cer­tain­ly linked to these nego­ti­a­tions. These new find­ings may very well rewrite the his­to­ry of the Holocaust.