Alfréd Israel Wetzler (10 May 1918 – 8 February 1988), who wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a
Slovak Jewish writer. He is known for escaping from
Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) d ...
and co-writing the
Vrba-Wetzler Report, which helped halt the deportation of Jews from Hungary, saving up to 200,000 lives.
Background
Wetzler was born in Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (now
Trnava
Trnava (, , ; , also known by other #Names and etymology, alternative names) is a city in western Slovakia, to the northeast of Bratislava, on the Trnávka river. It is the capital of the Trnava Region and the Trnava District. It is the seat o ...
,
Slovakia
Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...
). After his birthplace became part of
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
, he was a worker in Trnava during the period 1936–1940. He was sent to the
Birkenau
Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) d ...
(Auschwitz II) camp in 1942 and escaped from it with
Rudolf Vrba on 10 April 1944. Together with Rudolf Vrba he wrote up the story of his experiences in Slovak as ''Auschwitz, Tomb of Four Million People'', a factual account of the Wetzler–Vrba report and of other witnesses. The document combined the material from the Vrba–Wetzler report and two others, which were submitted together in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials as document no. 022-L, exhibit no. 294-USA.
He later wrote a fictionalized account under the alias Jozef Lánik called ''What Dante Did Not See''.
After the war, Wetzler worked as an editor (1945–1950), worked in
Bratislava
Bratislava (German: ''Pressburg'', Hungarian: ''Pozsony'') is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Slovakia, Slovak Republic and the fourth largest of all List of cities and towns on the river Danube, cities on the river Danube. ...
(1950–1955) and on a farm (1955–1970). After 1970 he stopped working owing to poor health. He died in Bratislava in 1988. He is buried in the Orthodox Jewish Cemetery.
Vrba–Wetzler report
Wetzler is known for the report that he and his fellow escapee, Rudolf Vrba, compiled about the inner workings of the Auschwitz camp–a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoria and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of
Zyklon B. The 33-page
Vrba–Wetzler report, as it became known, released in mid 1944, was the first detailed report about Auschwitz to reach the West that the
Allies regarded as credible (in 1943, Polish officer
Witold Pilecki wrote and forwarded his
own report to the Polish government in exile and, through it, to the British and other Allied governments).
The deportations from Hungary halted after Hungarian-Romanian Jew
George Mantello, then First Secretary of the El Salvador mission in Switzerland, publicized the report, which led to the saving of up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews. The publication of parts of the report in June 1944 is credited with helping to persuade the Hungarian regent,
Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya (18 June 1868 – 9 February 1957) was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who was the Regent of Hungary, regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946), Kingdom of Hungary Hungary between the World Wars, during the ...
, to halt the deportation of that country's Jews to Auschwitz, which had been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 a day since May 1944.
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
Döme Sztójay ( sr-cyr, Димитрије Стојаковић, 5 January 1883 – 22 August 1946) was a Hungarian soldier and diplomat of Serb origin, who served as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1944, during World War II.
Biography
Born in ...
, who passed it to Horthy. Horthy ordered an end to the deportations on 7 July, and they stopped two days later.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
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.
The historian Sir
Martin Gilbert
Sir Martin John Gilbert (25 October 1936 – 3 February 2015) was a British historian and honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He was the author of 88 books, including works on Winston Churchill, the 20th century, and Jewish history inc ...
said: "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of thousands of Jews – the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them."
See also
*
Bibliography of The Holocaust
*
Witold Pilecki
*
Pilecki's Report
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wetzler, Alfred
1918 births
1988 deaths
20th-century Slovak people
Escapees from Auschwitz
Jews from Austria-Hungary
Jewish escapees from Nazi concentration camps
Jewish resistance members during the Holocaust
People from Trnava
Slovak Jews