Vrba–Wetzler report

Contents

How it was written

According to the report's first post-war Slovak edition, Oswiecim, hrobka štyroch miliónov ľudí ("Auschwitz, the tomb of four million"), published in Bratislava in 1946, the report was first written in Slovak by Vrba and Wetzler, beginning on 25 April 1944, and simultaneously translated into German by Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovak Jewish Council in Žilina. It was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and they wrote the second part together. They then worked on the whole thing together. Wetzler confirmed this version of how the report was written in a letter to Miroslav Kárný, dated 14 April 1982. Oscar Krasniansky, an engineer and stenographer, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela Steiner. They produced a 40-page report in German, which was completed by Thursday, 27 April. Vrba wrote that the report was also translated into Hungarian. The original Slovak version of the report was not preserved. Historians studying the Holocaust today usually base their research on the German translation, which Allied forces also used when translating the report into English shortly after the end of the war.

The Vrba–Wetzler report contains a detailed description of the geography and management of the camps, and of how the prisoners lived and died. It lists the transports that had arrived at Auschwitz since 1942, their place of origin, and the numbers "selected" for work or the gas chambers. Kárný writes that the report is an invaluable document because it provides details that were known only to prisoners, including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for prisoners who had been gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were actively falsified.

Crematoria

The report contains sketches and information about the layout of the gas chambers, describing the large room where victims were made to undress before being pushed into the gas chambers, as well as the attached crematoriums. In a deposition for the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and in his book I Cannot Forgive (1964), Vrba said that he and Wetzler obtained the information about the gas chambers and crematoria from the Sonderkommando Filip Müller and his colleagues, who worked there. Müller confirmed Vrba's story in his Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979). The report offered a description of the camp's four crematoria.

Jean-Claude Pressac, a French specialist on the gas chambers, concluded in 1989 that, while the report was wrong on certain issues, it "has the merit of describing exactly the gassing process in type II/III Krematorien as from mid-March 1943. It made the mistake of generalizing internal and external descriptions and the operating method to Krematorien IV and V. Far from invalidating it, the discrepancies confirm its authenticity, as the descriptions are clearly based on what the witnesses could actually have seen and heard." Auschwitz scholar Robert Jan van Pelt agreed, writing in 2002: "The description of the crematoria in the War Refugee Board report contains errors, but given the conditions under which information was obtained, the lack of architectural training of Vrba and Wetzlar [sic], and the situation in which the report was compiled, one would become suspicious if it did not contain errors. ... Given the circumstances, the composite 'crematorium' reconstructed by two escapees without any architectural training is as good as one could expect."

Impact

Background

The dates on which the report was distributed became a matter of importance within Holocaust historiography. Vrba alleged that lives were lost in Hungary because it was not distributed quickly enough by Jewish leaders, particularly Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee.

The Allies had been told on 12 November 1942 that Jews were being killed en masse in Auschwitz; the New York Times published a report to that effect on 25 November 1942. From March 1943, the Polish government-in-exile forwarded intelligence about what was happening inside the camp. But it remained an "inside story", according to historian Michael Fleming, unpublished or not published prominently, as a result of anti-Semitism and the British Foreign Office's refusal to confirm the reports as genuine. A document named Aneks 58 from the Polish underground (which named its report Aneks) was received by Britain's Special Operations Executive in November 1942 and noted that, by the end of 1942, 468,000 Jews had been killed at Auschwitz.

Fleming writes: "[N]ews of the true function of Auschwitz was effectively embargoed by British government policy." By issuing advice to newspaper owners and editors, by refusing to confirm Polish intelligence, and by insisting that Jews were simply citizens of the country in which they lived like any other citizen, the British government "was able to choreograph news of the Holocaust".

Distribution

Oscar Krasniansky of the Jewish Council, who translated the report into German as Vrba and Wetzler were writing and dictating it, made conflicting statements about the report after the war, according to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer. In his first statement he said he had handed the report to Rudolf Kastner on 26 April 1944 during the latter's visit to Bratislava, but Bauer writes that the report was not finished until 27 April. In another statement, Krasniansky said he had passed it to Kastner on 28 April in Bratislava, but Hansi Brand, Kastner's lover and the wife of Joel Brand, said that Kastner was not in Bratislava until August. It is clear from Kastner's post-war statements that he did have early access to the report, Bauer writes, but perhaps not in April. According to Randolph L. Braham, Kastner had a copy by 3 May, when he paid a visit to Kolozsvár (Cluj), his home town.

Kastner's reasons for not making the document public are unknown. Vrba believed until the end of his life that Kastner withheld it in order not to jeopardize negotiations between the Aid and Rescue Committee and Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the transport of Jews out of Hungary. Shortly after Vrba arrived in Slovakia from Auschwitz in April 1944, Eichmann proposed—to Kastner, Joel Brand and Hansi Brand in Budapest—that the Nazis trade up to one million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks and other goods from the Western Allies. The proposal came to nothing, but Kastner did obtain safe passage to Switzerland for 1,684 Jews on what became known as the Kastner train. Vrba believed that Kastner suppressed the Vrba–Wetzler report in order not to damage these negotiations.

Kastner copied the German translation of the report to Géza Soós, a Hungarian Foreign Ministry official who ran a resistance group, writes Bauer. Soós gave it to József Éliás, head of the Good Shepherd Mission, and Éliás's secretary, Mária Székely, translated it into Hungarian and prepared six copies. These copies made their way to several Hungarian and church officials, including Miklós Horthy's daughter-in-law. Braham writes that this distribution occurred before 15 May. According to Bauer, Ernő Pető, a member of the Budapest Jewish Council, said he gave copies to Horthy's son; the papal nuncio Angelo Rotta; and the finance minister Lajos Reményi-Schneller.

The Jewish Council in Budapest did hand the report out to individuals. The Hungarian biologist George Klein, as a teenager in Budapest, was working for the Jewish Council as a junior secretary at the time. One day in late May or early June, his boss, Dr. Zoltán Kohn, gave him a carbon copy of the report, and told him that he should tell only his closest family and friends about it. Klein told his uncle, a well-known physician, who "became so angry that he nearly hit me", and asked how he could believe such nonsense. It was the same with other relatives and friends. The older ones refused to believe it, while the younger ones believed it and wanted to act. When it came time for Klein to get on the train, he chose to run instead, and that saved his life.

According to Gábor Havas, a member of the Hungarian resistance, Soos had also prepared English translations. In December, Soos made a daring escape in a stolen German airplane to help the report reach Allied lines, not knowing that it already happened. Curiously, OSS records of Soos's interrogation that have been made public do not mention the report. According to Soos's wife, Raoul Wallenberg was also trying to transport a copy to the interim Hungarian government in Debrecen when he disappeared.

According to the USHMM (United States Holocaust Museum) the US War Refugee Board released the report after an unusually long delay. "In November 1944, the WRB released a report written by escapees from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, alerting Americans to the details of Nazi mass murder using gas chambers."

Deportations to Auschwitz continue

On 6 June 1944, the day of the Normandy landings, Arnošt Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz arrived in Slovakia, having escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May. Hearing about the Battle of Normandy and believing the war was over, they got drunk using dollars they had smuggled out of Auschwitz. As a result they were arrested for violating the currency laws, and spent time in jail before the Jewish Council paid their fines. On 15 June, the men were interviewed by Oscar Krasniansky. They told him that, between 15 and 27 May, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and that most were killed on arrival, apparently with no knowledge of what was about to happen to them. John Conway writes that Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their report had been suppressed.

Report's arrival in Switzerland, press coverage

Braham writes that the report was taken to Switzerland by Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern, and given to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. It was thanks to Mantello, according to Braham, that the report received, in the Swiss press, its first wide coverage. According to David Kranzler, Mantello asked for the help of the Swiss-Hungarian Students' League to make around 50 mimeographed copies of the Vrba–Wetzler and other Auschwitz reports (the Auschwitz Protocols), which by 23 June he had distributed to the Swiss government and Jewish groups. The students went on to make thousands of other copies, which were passed to other students and MPs.

As a result of the Swiss press coverage, details were published in The New York Times on 4 June 1944 while World War II was still in progress. Details were disseminated by the BBC World Service on 15 June, with a second report in The New York Times on 20 June, which carried a 22-line story that 7,000 Jews had been "dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz]".

On 19 June 1944, Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, who had received a copy of the report from Mantello, wrote to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to say that they knew "what has happened and where it has happened", and reported the Vrba–Wetzler figure that 90 percent of Jews arriving at Birkenau were being killed. Vrba and Oscar Krasniansky met Vatican Swiss legate Monsignor Mario Martilotti at the Svätý Jur monastery in Bratislava on 20 June. Martilotti had seen the report and questioned Vrba about it for six hours. According to Bauer, Martilotti said he was travelling to Switzerland the next day. On 25 June Pope Pius sent a public cable to Horthy, asking that he "do everything in ...[his] power to save as many unfortunate people from further pain and sorrow". Other world leaders followed suit. Daniel Brigham, New York Times correspondent in Geneva, published a longer story on 3 July, "Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps", and on 6 July a second, "Two Death Camps Places of Horror; German Establishments for Mass Killings of Jews Described by Swiss".

Deportations halted

On 26 June, Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva sent a telegram to England calling on the Allies to hold members of the Hungarian government personally responsible for the killings. The cable was intercepted by the Hungarian government and shown to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay, who passed it to Horthy. Horthy ordered an end to the deportations on 7 July, and they stopped two days later.

Hitler instructed the Nazi representative to Hungary, Edmund Veesenmayer, to relay an angry message to Horthy. Horthy resisted Hitler's threats, and Budapest's 200,000–260,000 Jews were temporarily spared from deportation, until the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party seized power in Hungary in a coup on 15 October 1944. Henceforth, the deportations resumed, but by then, the diplomatic involvement of the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, and Portuguese embassies in Budapest, as well as that of the papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta, saved tens of thousands until the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest in January 1945. Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz rescued tens of thousands of Jews (according to the Yad Vashem museum display, in the order of 50,000) with help of Moshe Krausz (then Director of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Office in Budapest) and the Zionist Youth Underground. Raoul Wallenberg and others in the Swedish delegation also saved tens of thousands of Jews (according to some, between 70,000 and 100,000). As can be expected, there are varying estimates of the number of Jews rescued.