Vrba-Wetzler report
Encyclopedia
The Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Vrba-Wetzler statement, the Auschwitz Protocols, and the Auschwitz notebook, is a 32-page document about the German Auschwitz concentration camp
in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. It was written by hand and dictated in Slovak
between April 25 and April 27, 1944 by Rudolf Vrba
and Alfréd Wetzler
, two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, and was typed up in the form of a report by Dr. Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovak Judenrat
, or Jewish Council, who simultaneously translated it into German.
The report represents one of the first attempts to estimate the numbers of people being killed in the camp. Copies of it are held in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in the Hudson River Valley, New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem
memorial in Jerusalem.
The Vrba-Wetzler report was first written in Slovak by Vrba and Wetzler and simultaneously translated into German by Oscar Krasniansky. Details from the report were leaked to the press in June 1944, but the full text of the report, under the title "German Extermination Camps — Auschwitz and Birkenau," was first published in an English translation on November 26, 1944 by the Executive Office of the U.S. War Refugee Board
.
It was this document that combined the testimony of Vrba-Wetzler with two other reports, and these came to be known jointly as the Auschwitz Protocols. The protocols consisted of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and an earlier two-part report from August 10 and 12, 1943 written by Witold Pilecki
who was a member of the Polish underground in Auschwitz, and sent to the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) (the forerunner to the CIA) in London
. The August 1943 Polish report included details about the gas chamber
s, "selection" process, and sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau with the capacity to incinerate 10,000 bodies daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life." Raul Hilberg
writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source. A four-to-seven page report based on information from Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, shortly after Vrba and Wetzler, was also attached.
All three reports were submitted in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials
and were assigned the document number 022-L. The full text is held in the archives of the War Refugee Board at the F.D. Roosevelt Library in New York. It is not known when the reports were first called the Auschwitz Protocols. R. Braham referred to them as the Auschwitz Protocols in The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary, volume 2, 1981, pp. 708–16.
Two weeks after escaping from Auschwitz, on April 24, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler met up with members of the Slovakian underground Working Group, or Jewish Council. The head of the Working Group, Dr. Oskar Neumann, a German-speaking lawyer, placed the men in separate rooms and asked them to begin writing down and describing their accounts.
The report was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together. In all, the report was written and re-written six times. Czech historian Miroslav Kárný
writes that this description of how the report was written was recorded in the first post-war edition, issued in 1946, Oswiecim, hrobka styroch milionov l'udi (Auschwitz, tomb of four milion people), Bratislava, p. 74. Wetzler also confirmed it in a letter to Miroslav Karny, dated April 14, 1982. As they were writing it, Dr. Neumann's aide, Oscar Krasniansky, an engineer and stenographer, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela Steiner, producing a 32-page report in German, which was completed by April 27, 1944.
The original Slovak version of the report was not preserved, according to Karny. The German version contained a precise description of the geography of the camps, its construction, the organization of the management and security, how the prisoners were numbered and categorized, their diet, how they lived, the selections, gassings, shootings, injections, and how the camp conditions themselves were causing deaths.
Karny writes that the report is an invaluable historical document because it provides details that were known only to prisoners, most of whom died — including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for prisoners who were gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were actively falsified.
, the report was written and translated by April 28, 1944 at the latest. Oscar Krasniansky had heard that Rudolf Kastner
, a Jewish lawyer and journalist, and de facto head of the Zionist
Aid and Rescue Committee
(Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah) in Budapest, was about to visit Bratislava, as he did regularly. According to one of Krasniansky's postwar statements, he personally handed a copy of the report to Kastner at the end of April. According to British writer Laurence Rees
, Kastner received a copy during his visit to Bratislava on April 28.
Although Kastner did not make the report public, he did pass it on. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
writes that Kastner gave a copy to Géza Soós, a Hungarian Foreign Ministry official who ran a resistance group, almost as soon as he received it on or around April 28. Bauer writes that Soós, in turn, gave it to József Éliás, head of the Jó Pásztor Misszió, the Good Shepherd Mission, a Protestant missionary organization. Éliás's secretary, Mária Székely, translated the report into Hungarian and prepared six copies. These went to Soós; the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklós Horthy
, the Hungarian head of state; Cardinal Justinian Serédi; Bishop László Ravasz of the Calvinist Church; Bishop Sándor Raffay of the Lutheran Church; and Ottó Komoly
, the de jure head of Kastner's Aid and Rescue Committee. Ernő Pető of the Judenrat said he gave other copies to Horthy's son; to Angelo Rotta, the papal nuntius
; and to Lajos Reményi-Schneller, the Hungarian finance minister. All had received the report, according to Bauer, by the time the mass deportations began on May 14.
A copy was sent to the Vatican
on May 22, according to Israeli historian Israel Gutman
, although there is disagreement among the sources as to when and by which route the Vatican first received the information. Miroslav Karny writes that the Bratislava Working Group, led by Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl
and Gisi Fleishmann provided one copy of the report to Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican chargé d'affaires
in Bratislava, and that Burzio sent it to the Vatican on May 22. However, according to Karny, the report did not arrive at the Vatican until five months later, in the second half of October, as he says is evident from the official Vatican edition of the document.
Oscar Krasniansky arranged for Rudolf Vrba and Czesław Mordowicz, an Auschwitz inmate who had escaped from the camp on May 27, 1944, to meet Vatican legate
Monsignor
Mario Martilotti secretly on June 20 at the Svaty Jur monastery. Vrba and Wetzler believed they had in fact met Monsignor
Burzio, but Burzio had arranged for Martilotti, who was his assistant, to attend the meeting. According to Ruth Linn
, Martilotti said he would take the report back to Switzerland the next day, then would forward it to the Vatican, which Linn writes that he did.
The Pope then issued an unprecedented appeal on June 25 in an open telegram to the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy
, addressing "the sufferings [...] endured on account of [...] national or racial origin" and calling on Horthy to "spare so many unfortunate people further sufferings," but without mentioning Jews. Karny, however, writes that there is no evidence that Martilotti's report of the meeting ever reached the Vatican, according to the Vatican's own papers on the report. Vatican State Secretary Domenico Tardini first asked one of the men working in his office to make a copy of the report on October 22, according to Karny. Karny writes that Vatican editors have concluded from this that the report did not arrive until on or just before this date.
Historian Raul Hilberg
writes that the report was also brought to Switzerland, where it was passed to Jaromír Kopecký (1899–1977), representative of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, on or around June 10. Kopecký passed it to Roswell McCelland, representative of the War Refugee Board, who sent it to the Board's executive director on June 16.
The report is known to have reached the British and U.S. governments by mid-June. Elizabeth Wiskemann of the British Legation in Bern sent it to Allen Dulles
, the head of U.S. intelligence, who sent it to the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on June 16.
[Auschwitz]."
Several world leaders, including Pope Pius XII
, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
, and King Gustaf V of Sweden
, subsequently appealed to Admiral Horthy to stop the deportations. On June 26 1944, Richard Lichtheim, a member 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 Hungary and shown to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay
, who passed it to Horthy, and the mass deportations stopped on July 9 1944, after 437,402 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz in 147 trains, most of them to their deaths. Hitler was infuriated by Horthy's decision and instructed the Nazi representative to Hungary, Edmund Veesenmayer
, to relay an angry message to the Admiral. Hitler's ultimatum to Horthy read:
Horthy, however, resisted Hitler's threats and Budapest's 200,000-260,000 Jews were temporarily spared from being deported to Auschwitz until the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party
seized power in Hungary in a coup on October 15, 1944. Henceforth, the deportations of some of Budapest's Jews to German death and labour camps resumed but, by this time, the heavy diplomatic involvement of the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish and Portuguese embassies at Budapest as well as that of the Vatican's papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta
, saved tens of thousands of the city's Jews from being expelled. The Swedish delegation under Raoul Wallenberg
saved 70,000 Jews until the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest in January 1945.
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. It was written by hand and dictated in Slovak
Slovak language
Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
between April 25 and April 27, 1944 by Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, who came to public attention during the Second World War when, in April 1944, he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland with the first...
and Alfréd Wetzler
Alfréd Wetzler
Alfréd Israel Wetzler , who later wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a Slovak Jew, and one of a very small number of Jews known to have escaped from the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust. Wetzler was born on 10 May 1918, in the Slovak town of Trnava where he was a worker in the period...
, two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, and was typed up in the form of a report by Dr. Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovak Judenrat
Judenrat
Judenräte were administrative bodies during the Second World War that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union It is the overall term for the enforcement bodies established by the Nazi occupiers to...
, or Jewish Council, who simultaneously translated it into German.
The report represents one of the first attempts to estimate the numbers of people being killed in the camp. Copies of it are held in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in the Hudson River Valley, New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
memorial in Jerusalem.
Name
The report is often referred to as the Auschwitz Protocols, although in fact the protocols incorporated information from three reports, of which the Vrba-Wetzler report is only one.The Vrba-Wetzler report was first written in Slovak by Vrba and Wetzler and simultaneously translated into German by Oscar Krasniansky. Details from the report were leaked to the press in June 1944, but the full text of the report, under the title "German Extermination Camps — Auschwitz and Birkenau," was first published in an English translation on November 26, 1944 by the Executive Office of the U.S. War Refugee Board
War Refugee Board
The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency created to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers...
.
It was this document that combined the testimony of Vrba-Wetzler with two other reports, and these came to be known jointly as the Auschwitz Protocols. The protocols consisted of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and an earlier two-part report from August 10 and 12, 1943 written by Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki was a soldier of the Second Polish Republic, the founder of the Secret Polish Army resistance group and a member of the Home Army...
who was a member of the Polish underground in Auschwitz, and sent to the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
(OSS) (the forerunner to the CIA) in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. The August 1943 Polish report included details about the gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
s, "selection" process, and sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau with the capacity to incinerate 10,000 bodies daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life." Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source. A four-to-seven page report based on information from Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, shortly after Vrba and Wetzler, was also attached.
All three reports were submitted in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials
Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
and were assigned the document number 022-L. The full text is held in the archives of the War Refugee Board at the F.D. Roosevelt Library in New York. It is not known when the reports were first called the Auschwitz Protocols. R. Braham referred to them as the Auschwitz Protocols in The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary, volume 2, 1981, pp. 708–16.
How the report was written
The report was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together. In all, the report was written and re-written six times. Czech historian Miroslav Kárný
Miroslav Kárný
Miroslav Kárný was a historian and writer from Prague, Czechoslovakia.- Biography :He was born into an assimilated Jewish family, his mother ran a shop selling candy and haberdashery. His father, a tradesman, left the Jewish community during the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy...
writes that this description of how the report was written was recorded in the first post-war edition, issued in 1946, Oswiecim, hrobka styroch milionov l'udi (Auschwitz, tomb of four milion people), Bratislava, p. 74. Wetzler also confirmed it in a letter to Miroslav Karny, dated April 14, 1982. As they were writing it, Dr. Neumann's aide, Oscar Krasniansky, an engineer and stenographer, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela Steiner, producing a 32-page report in German, which was completed by April 27, 1944.
The original Slovak version of the report was not preserved, according to Karny. The German version contained a precise description of the geography of the camps, its construction, the organization of the management and security, how the prisoners were numbered and categorized, their diet, how they lived, the selections, gassings, shootings, injections, and how the camp conditions themselves were causing deaths.
Karny writes that the report is an invaluable historical document because it provides details that were known only to prisoners, most of whom died — including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for prisoners who were gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were actively falsified.
The report's distribution
According to Miroslav KarnyMiroslav Kárný
Miroslav Kárný was a historian and writer from Prague, Czechoslovakia.- Biography :He was born into an assimilated Jewish family, his mother ran a shop selling candy and haberdashery. His father, a tradesman, left the Jewish community during the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy...
, the report was written and translated by April 28, 1944 at the latest. Oscar Krasniansky had heard that Rudolf Kastner
Rudolf Kastner
Rudolf Israel Kastner was a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and lawyer who became known for facilitating the departure of Jews out of Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust...
, a Jewish lawyer and journalist, and de facto head of the Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
Aid and Rescue Committee
Aid and Rescue Committee
The Aid and Rescue Committee, or Va'adat Ha-Ezrah ve-ha-Hatzalah be-Budapesht was a small committee of Zionists based in Budapest in 1944-5, who were dedicated to helping Jews escape the Holocaust during the German occupation of Hungary.The main personalities of the Vaada were Dr...
(Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah) in Budapest, was about to visit Bratislava, as he did regularly. According to one of Krasniansky's postwar statements, he personally handed a copy of the report to Kastner at the end of April. According to British writer Laurence Rees
Laurence Rees
Laurence Rees is a British historian. He is the former Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC, a documentary filmmaker, and the author of five books on war.-Biography:...
, Kastner received a copy during his visit to Bratislava on April 28.
Although Kastner did not make the report public, he did pass it on. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
writes that Kastner gave a copy to Géza Soós, a Hungarian Foreign Ministry official who ran a resistance group, almost as soon as he received it on or around April 28. Bauer writes that Soós, in turn, gave it to József Éliás, head of the Jó Pásztor Misszió, the Good Shepherd Mission, a Protestant missionary organization. Éliás's secretary, Mária Székely, translated the report into Hungarian and prepared six copies. These went to Soós; the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar years and throughout most of World War II, serving from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. Horthy was styled "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary" .Admiral Horthy was an officer of the...
, the Hungarian head of state; Cardinal Justinian Serédi; Bishop László Ravasz of the Calvinist Church; Bishop Sándor Raffay of the Lutheran Church; and Ottó Komoly
Ottó Komoly
Otto Komoly was a Hungarian Jewish engineer, officer, zionist, and humanitarian leader in Hungary. He is credited with saving thousands of children during the German occupation of Budapest in World War II....
, the de jure head of Kastner's Aid and Rescue Committee. Ernő Pető of the Judenrat said he gave other copies to Horthy's son; to Angelo Rotta, the papal nuntius
Nuncio
Nuncio is an ecclesiastical diplomatic title, derived from the ancient Latin word, Nuntius, meaning "envoy." This article addresses this title as well as derived similar titles, all within the structure of the Roman Catholic Church...
; and to Lajos Reményi-Schneller, the Hungarian finance minister. All had received the report, according to Bauer, by the time the mass deportations began on May 14.
A copy was sent to the Vatican
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
on May 22, according to Israeli historian Israel Gutman
Israel Gutman
Israel Gutman is a Polish-born Israeli historian of the Holocaust.Israel Gutman was born in Warsaw, Poland. After playing an important role in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he was deported to the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps. His older sister died in the ghetto. After...
, although there is disagreement among the sources as to when and by which route the Vatican first received the information. Miroslav Karny writes that the Bratislava Working Group, led by Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl
Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl
Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl was a rabbi and shtadlan...
and Gisi Fleishmann provided one copy of the report to Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican chargé d'affaires
Chargé d'affaires
In diplomacy, chargé d’affaires , often shortened to simply chargé, is the title of two classes of diplomatic agents who head a diplomatic mission, either on a temporary basis or when no more senior diplomat has been accredited.-Chargés d’affaires:Chargés d’affaires , who were...
in Bratislava, and that Burzio sent it to the Vatican on May 22. However, according to Karny, the report did not arrive at the Vatican until five months later, in the second half of October, as he says is evident from the official Vatican edition of the document.
Oscar Krasniansky arranged for Rudolf Vrba and Czesław Mordowicz, an Auschwitz inmate who had escaped from the camp on May 27, 1944, to meet Vatican legate
Papal legate
A papal legate – from the Latin, authentic Roman title Legatus – is a personal representative of the pope to foreign nations, or to some part of the Catholic Church. He is empowered on matters of Catholic Faith and for the settlement of ecclesiastical matters....
Monsignor
Monsignor
Monsignor, pl. monsignori, is the form of address for those members of the clergy of the Catholic Church holding certain ecclesiastical honorific titles. Monsignor is the apocopic form of the Italian monsignore, from the French mon seigneur, meaning "my lord"...
Mario Martilotti secretly on June 20 at the Svaty Jur monastery. Vrba and Wetzler believed they had in fact met Monsignor
Monsignor
Monsignor, pl. monsignori, is the form of address for those members of the clergy of the Catholic Church holding certain ecclesiastical honorific titles. Monsignor is the apocopic form of the Italian monsignore, from the French mon seigneur, meaning "my lord"...
Burzio, but Burzio had arranged for Martilotti, who was his assistant, to attend the meeting. According to Ruth Linn
Ruth Linn
Ruth Linn is an Israeli academic and currently Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa in Israel. Her research interests are how moral decisions are made in stressful situations such as war and the Holocaust, and women's psychology and education.She is the author of four books,...
, Martilotti said he would take the report back to Switzerland the next day, then would forward it to the Vatican, which Linn writes that he did.
The Pope then issued an unprecedented appeal on June 25 in an open telegram to the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar years and throughout most of World War II, serving from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. Horthy was styled "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary" .Admiral Horthy was an officer of the...
, addressing "the sufferings [...] endured on account of [...] national or racial origin" and calling on Horthy to "spare so many unfortunate people further sufferings," but without mentioning Jews. Karny, however, writes that there is no evidence that Martilotti's report of the meeting ever reached the Vatican, according to the Vatican's own papers on the report. Vatican State Secretary Domenico Tardini first asked one of the men working in his office to make a copy of the report on October 22, according to Karny. Karny writes that Vatican editors have concluded from this that the report did not arrive until on or just before this date.
Historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
writes that the report was also brought to Switzerland, where it was passed to Jaromír Kopecký (1899–1977), representative of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, on or around June 10. Kopecký passed it to Roswell McCelland, representative of the War Refugee Board, who sent it to the Board's executive director on June 16.
The report is known to have reached the British and U.S. governments by mid-June. Elizabeth Wiskemann of the British Legation in Bern sent it to Allen Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles was an American diplomat, lawyer, banker, and public official who became the first civilian and the longest-serving Director of Central Intelligence and a member of the Warren Commission...
, the head of U.S. intelligence, who sent it to the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on June 16.
Broadcast of the report and impact
Details from the report were first broadcast by the BBC on June 15 1944, and on June 20, The New York Times published the first of three stories about the existence of "gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and OświęcimOswiecim
Oświęcim is a town in the Lesser Poland province of southern Poland, situated west of Kraków, near the confluence of the rivers Vistula and Soła.- History :...
[Auschwitz]."
Several world leaders, including Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII
The Venerable Pope Pius XII , born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli , reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958....
, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
, and King Gustaf V of Sweden
Gustaf V of Sweden
Gustaf V was King of Sweden from 1907. He was the eldest son of King Oscar II of Sweden and Sophia of Nassau, a half-sister of Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourg...
, subsequently appealed to Admiral Horthy to stop the deportations. On June 26 1944, Richard Lichtheim, a member 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 Hungary and shown to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay
Döme Sztójay
Döme Sztójay born Demeter Sztojakovich was a Hungarian soldier and diplomat of Serb origin, who served as Prime Minister of Hungary during World War II.- Biography :...
, who passed it to Horthy, and the mass deportations stopped on July 9 1944, after 437,402 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz in 147 trains, most of them to their deaths. Hitler was infuriated by Horthy's decision and instructed the Nazi representative to Hungary, Edmund Veesenmayer
Edmund Veesenmayer
Edmund Veesenmayer was a German politician, officer and war criminal. He significantly contributed to The Holocaust in Hungary and Croatia...
, to relay an angry message to the Admiral. Hitler's ultimatum to Horthy read:
- "The Führer expects that the Hungarian Government will take measures against the Budapest Jewry without any further delay...[and would not tolerate anything] that could or would weaken their fighting spirit or that could possibly stab the fighting soldiers in the back."
Horthy, however, resisted Hitler's threats and Budapest's 200,000-260,000 Jews were temporarily spared from being deported to Auschwitz until the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party
Arrow Cross Party
The Arrow Cross Party was a national socialist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which led in Hungary a government known as the Government of National Unity from October 15, 1944 to 28 March 1945...
seized power in Hungary in a coup on October 15, 1944. Henceforth, the deportations of some of Budapest's Jews to German death and labour camps resumed but, by this time, the heavy diplomatic involvement of the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish and Portuguese embassies at Budapest as well as that of the Vatican's papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta
Angelo Rotta
Angelo Rotta , originally from Milan, Italy, was the Apostolic Nuncio in Budapest at the end of World War II.During his previous diplomatic activity in Bulgaria, he already saved many Bulgarian Jews by issuing them baptismal certificates and safe conducts for the trip to Palestine.In 1944 - 1945 he...
, saved tens of thousands of the city's Jews from being expelled. The Swedish delegation under Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. He is widely celebrated for his successful efforts to rescue thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary from the Holocaust, during the later stages of World War II...
saved 70,000 Jews until the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest in January 1945.