“Nobody cared enough to tell us, ‘Don’t go.'” — Elie Wiesel

“In the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry… a dramatic turn came about
with the disclosure of the Auschwitz Report [aka Vrba-Wetzler Report],”
— Ernő Munkácsi, How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of the Hungarian Jewry

Sir Winston Churchill expressed revulsion immediately upon being told of the contents of the ground-breaking Vrba-Wetzler Report near the end of June in 1944. “There is no doubt,” Churchill said, “that this is possibly the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy with Adolf Hitler.

Directly prompted by Vrba and Wetzler’s reportage, Churchill urged other leaders—most notably Pope Pius XII, FDR, King Gustaf V of neutral Sweden and the governments of Turkey, Spain and Switzerland—to pressure Hungarian leader Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya to curtail the deportations of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They didn’t response promptly. The Pope’s appeal on June 25 did not specifically mention Jews but instead only referred to “a large number of unfortunate people.” FDR would wait to add his voice until June 26; King Gustav waited until June 30.

It was a leading member of the Jewish Council, lawyer Ernő Pető, who can be credited with first bringing the Vrba-Wetzler Report to the attention to the regent Horthy by taking advantage of his connections to the regent’s son, Miklós Horthy Jr. Many years later, Horthy Sr. would righteously claim he had stopped the deportation of Jews from Hungary on his own volition, as a direct result of reading the Vrba-Wetzler Report, while also being pressured by friends and confidants that included Count István Bethlen de Bethlen (Prime Minister from 1921 to 1931) and Count Moric Esterhazy de Galantha et Frakno (briefly Prime Minister during WW I).

Any notion that Admiral Horthy took a moralistic stand cannot be taken seriously. While it’s true that Horthy Sr. had once formally renounced the notion of a German occupation of Hungary and stated, “I shall not tolerate this any further! I will not permit the deportations to bring further shame on the Hungarians!”, at the same time the German forces directly controlled by Adolf Eichmann and the Sonkerkommando in Hungary numbered less than 200 men. It would have been easy for Hungary to overpower those 200 German troops.

Privately, Horthy had acceded to Hitler’s blackmailing compromise: In essence, Horthy could serve as head of state as long as the Nazis held sway in terms of policies regarding Jewry, as managed by Eichmann. Consequently, the mass deportation of rural Jewry from Hungry had commenced on May 14, 1944 in the Kassa district where 3,200 Jews from Nyíregyháza and 3,169 Jews from Munkács boarded the first 45 cattle trucks. 

Perhaps the true prejudices of Horthy are evidenced by this quote from Horthy in Raphael Patai’s The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Wayne State University Press, 1996):

“As regards the Jewish problem, I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theatre, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad. Since, however, one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard of living, i.e., we have to acquire wealth, it is impossible, in a year or two, to replace the Jews, who have everything in their hands, and to replace them with incompetent, unworthy, mostly big-mouthed elements, for we should become bankrupt. This requires a generation at least.”

It is seldom noted that Horthy, a Catholic-raised Nazi-puppet, only agreed to cease Eichmann’s mass deportations of Jews on July 9, 1944 after he had been threatened with aerial bombings of government and industrial facilities in Budapest. This was not an idle threat. The 461st Bombardment Group (H) had already bombed Hungary’s Komarno Oil Refinery on June 14, 1944. Then American and British forces dropped bombs and leaflets on German-occupied Budapest during an unusually heavy air raid on July 2, 1944, as part of the British and American strategy to lay mines in the Danube River. Some 31 Allied aircraft attacked the Shell Oil refinery and Allied leaflets threatened harsh reprisals for failing to curtail the transports to Auschwitz.

Horthy knew that Budapest could also be targeted for the major refineries operated by Magyar Petrol, and Asvanyol-Fant, as well as the Duna Repülőgépgyár Szigentmiklos assembly plant that built Messerschmitt Me 210s and 410s. While these Allied bombing missions were militaristic rather than humanitarian, the leaflets dropped on Budapest threatened punishment for those who were responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. (Proof that there was a formal agreement between Nazi Germany and Hungary to expedite the eradication of Jews would only surface after the war in the form of a telegram that was sent by Döme Sztójay, a former ambassador to Berlin who Horthy had appointed as Prime Minister on March 23, 1944.)

Meanwhile, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt consistently allowed his minions in the War Department — most notably Assistant War Secretary John J. McCloy, who was handling much of the responsibilities of the aging War Secretary Henry Stimson [see DESK MURDERER section] — to do next-to-nothing to help Jews in Europe throughout World War II. While Roosevelt remained conspicuously silent, Horthy nonetheless knew Churchill’s wrath was not to be taken lightly. “This [the Holocaust] was done with the aid of scientific devices and by a so-called civilized people,” Churchill would subsequently write to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on July 11, 1944. “It is clear beyond doubt that everybody involved is this crime who may fall into our hands, including those who only obeyed orders in committing these butcheries, must be killed.” The moralistic outrage articulated by Churchill–directly fuelled by the contents of the Vrba-Wetzler Report–would be a crucial factor in Horthy’s cessation of the death trains.

It is also important to note that a member of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, Richard Lichtheim, had sent a telegram to England on June 26 in which he requested the Allies to hold members of the Hungarian government criminally liable for prosecution if they failed to curtail the shipments of Jews. When this telegram was intercepted by the Hungarian government, it was passed onto Prime Minister Döme Sztójay who showed it to Horthy. Whether it was Churchill’s threat, Lichtheim’s telegram or the leaflets that swayed Horthy, all these various communications and threats were prompted by the creation of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. (Horthy would later lie in his memoirs, published in 1953, while he was in exile in Portugal, and claim, “Not before August did secret information reach me of the horrible truth about the extermination camps.”)

More bombings ensued on July 6. Hitler’s representative in Hungary, Edmund Veesenmayer, was ordered to threaten Admiral Horthy in order to continue the Hungarian transports of Jews to Auschwitz, but Horthy ultimately relented to pressure from the Allies and ordered the cessation of transports on July 7. The actual cessation did not take effect until July 9. There was nothing moralistic about Horthy’s decision. The Nazi forces in Hungary were stretched thin on the ground and the Allied bombers were taking aim on Hungarian infrastructure. The tide of war was turning and Horthy turned with it.

The Allies showed Horthy they meant business even after he relented when the 461st Bombardment Group (H) made good the Allies’ threat to bomb selected targets near Budapest on July 14, 1944. Mission #61 targeted the Petfurdo Oil Refinery and a nitrogen fertilizer plant.

*

Rudolf Kasztner who negotiated with Eichmann.

To this day, a controversy persists among Jews and scholars-at-large as to the extent to which prominent Jewish and Zionist leaders should be held accountable for failures to adequately inform Jews about the lethal dangers of boarding the trains.

Specifically and most famously, it was Rudolf Vrba who laid the blame for the failure to adequately inform approximately 800,000 Jews in Hungary about the Holocaust chiefly on the duplicitous lawyer Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner, a Zionist leader from northern Transylvania who had settled in Budapest after his native territory was acquired by Hungary in 1940.

As one of the Vice-Chairmen of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, it was primarily Kasztner who eventually chose not to publicize the contents of the Vrba-Wetzler Report to Jews at large while he was engaging in private negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, the foremost Nazi primarily responsible for transporting Jews to the world’s most infamous death camp.

But the story is not clear cut.

We now know that Rudolf Kasztner was the first non-Slovakian to receive a copy of the Vrba-Wetzler report.  After Vrba and Wetzler had dictated the contents, Oskar Krasnansky, a chemical engineer who was also president of the Zionist Organization of Czechoslovakia, gave the original report to typist, Gisi Farkas, who made several copies. Krasnansky hastily travelled to Bratislava from Zilina to meet Kasztner and give him a copy on April 28, 1944.

Astonished, Kasztner met with the Jewish Council of Budapest at their headquarters on Sip Street the following day. The Council president Samu Stern was incredulous, as were others who feared they would  be arrested if they dared circulate its contents. Essentially, these Jewish leaders resolved to do nothing in order to save their own skin. “By then,” Vrba later wrote, “Kasztner and his colleagues in the Zionist leadership in Hungary were already committed to their negotiations with Eichmann, and to the dispatch of their colleague, Joel Brand, to Istanbul. They therefore gave no publicity whatsoever to the facts about Auschwitz which were now in their possession.”

Otto Komoly

A few days later, still feeling burdened by what he knew, Kasztner went to the opulent home of the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, Carl Lutz, a man who would soon be responsible for saving far more Jews than the much better-known Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (See SAVIOURS). Galvanized by what he read, Lutz drove in his car with Kasztner to immediately make contact with the head of the Hungarian Zionist Organization, Otto Komoly, who wanted to spread the news and initiate a self-defence initiative.

But now it was Kasztner who urged caution. As friends and rivals, Rudolf Kasztner and Joel Brand were leading figures in the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, aka Vaadah, established in 1943. As Randolph L. Braham makes clear in The Politics of Genocide, “The SS preferred to negotiate with the Vaadah rather than with the Jewish Council leadership, as they valued the international contacts and foreign currency sources of the Zionists.” The Vaadah leaders established contacts with SS occupation forces in consort with Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel of Bratislava. Weissmandel believed he had successfully halted the deportation of Jews from Slovakia in June of 1942 by bribing the Nazi administrator Dieter Wisliceny. Therefore, the Vaadah leadership believed it was reasonable to attempt to rescue Hungarian Jews through financial dealings with the SS. [In fact, by the autumn of 1944, it would become tragically apparent that the Nazis had only suspended the deportations of Slovakian Jews and the bribes paid to Wizliceny were irrelevant.]

On April 5, the first day that Hungarian Jews were forced to wear the telltale Star of David [Jews had been forced to oversee, and pay for, their manufacture], Kasztner and Brand had their first meeting with the SS whereupon Wisliceny gave them assurances that Hungarian Jews would not be ghettoized or deported. Naively unaware that SS still didn’t have the manpower necessary in Budapest to implement large-scale round-ups of Jews, and that Wisliceny and Eichmann had no independent power concerning the Final Solution, and that these two Nazis were subject to the dictates of Himmler and the Nazi regime in Berlin, the Vaadah leadership agreed to pay $2 million dollars [roughly 6.5 million pengő in Hungarian currency] to Wisliceny as proof of Zionist good will and liquidity. It was Kasztner who delivered the first instalment of 2.5 million pengő on April 21. By then, ghettoization was well underway. As compensation for this broken promise, the SS freed some prominent Jews and began to pose the possibility of special emigration opportunities for selected Jews, with transit to either the United States or a neutral country that would accept them.

On April 25, Eichmann met with Vaadah’s Joel Brand and suggested bartering the safety of one million Jews in exchanges for goods that would support the German war efforts. Brand would gain the personal freedom to travel abroad and seek the financial backing of world Jewry. Meanwhile, Kasztner’s backroom dealings with Eichmann–which were separate from the protracted ‘Blood for Goods’ or ‘Blood for Trucks’ backroom meetings mainly with Brand–succeeded for both parties: While retaining his own freedom of movement and not being required to wear the yellow star, Kasztner was able to organize and finance safe passage to Switzerland for a trainload of approximately 1,684 Jews, many of whom were of Kasztner’s own choosing, including many wealthy Jews who paid enormous sums for safe passage out of Hungary. The Nazis received approximately $1,000 for every Jew on the Kasztner train and Kasztner kept the contents of the Vrba-Wetzler Report limited to a coterie of Jewish leaders who never told Jews to resist deportation. Trouble was, the privileged trainload of Jews that left Budapest on June 30 was halted by Eichmann en route and on July 8 all the passengers were forced to remain in a camp for privileged inmates (Bevorzugtenlager) in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; some passengers never made it to Switzerland until December of 1944, only after Himmler had authorized their departure.

While constantly delaying negotiations with both Kasztner and Brand, Eichmann was able to efficiently murder a majority of Hungary’s mostly pliant and uninformed 800,000 Jews.

Kasztner’s first meeting with Eichmann had occurred on April 25, 1944, with a second meeting on April 28, around the same period that he was made privy to the contents of the Vrba-Wetzler Report.

In Randolph L. Braham’s The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, revised and updated in 1998, we learn that most Hungarian Jews, although subjected to harsh discriminatory practices since 1938, had continued to believe that Miklós Horthy would continue to protect them until the war was over. “Influenced by their leaders,” Braham writes, “Hungarian Jews never believed they would befall the same fate as Polish Jews after four years or relative security during World War II. They knew Allied forces were advancing towards Hungary. Soon Hungary would be liberated from the yoke of Nazi constraints. Hungary would never be made judenrein. Everything would soon revert to normal again.”

Even when German occupation led to the ghettoization and deportation of Jews from parts of northern and eastern Hungary, Jews in Budapest believed that such catastrophic events in the countryside would never be replicated in the much more sophisticated arena of the capital “in full view of foreign diplomats.” Soviet troops were approaching the Carpathians. It was only a matter of time before the relatively small contingent of Nazi soldiers in Budapest would be routed, or forced to flee. The huge contingent of Jews in Budapest were reassured by Adolf Eichmann, who promised that nobody would be harmed unless they were foolish enough to support, or join, the partisan rebels or Tito’s units.

A cabinet minister in Horthy’s administration assured the public they would never consent to planning “the extirpation, destruction, or torment of the Jews” when the liberation of Hungary was imminent. It would not make sense militarily for the Nazis to divert their outnumbered troops from counteracting the Russians and partisans in order to rid Budapest of its many thousands of Jews. Jewish leadership completely failed to anticipate that the Nazis would choose to re-double their efforts to win their campaign against the Jews when they knew they would be simultaneously unable to vanquish the incoming Soviets.

The chilling truth became decipherable only when gendarmes were suddenly patrolling the civilized streets of Budapest.

Braham recounts the fate of a young Budapest physician, Dr. Imre Varga, who led a delegation of leftist and resistance-oriented Jews. In early June, as soon as the Nazis exhibited signs of shifting their repression of Jews from rural parts of Hungary to “Zone III,  in Trianon Hungary proper” where urban Jews would be rounded up, Varge pleaded with the Jewish Council to discontinue its policies of conciliation and passivity in order to obviate complete annihilation. Varge was told that Jewish resistance would be futile and failure to comply with Nazi directives would “unimaginably aggravate the situation of others.” In despair, Varga committed suicide the following day.

For the rest of his life, Rudolf Vrba claimed Kasztner’s duplicity included giving Eichmann knowledge of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. “As soon as he received our reports,” Vrba said, “Kasztner had shown them to Adolf Eichmann in Budapest; and Eichmann, who was responsible for getting the Hungarian Jews into Auschwitz ovens without undue fuss, knew that the whole operation was in jeopardy while we were alive and at liberty.”

In essence, Vrba believed Kasztner had used his Vrba-Wetzler Report as a bargaining chip in his private negotiations with Eichmann. Rudolf Vrba first raised this matter in print, in English, in London’s Daily Herald in February of 1961.

“I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kasztner up in SS uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends.”

The so-called Kasztner Train of privileged Jews arrives in Switzerland in August of 1944 including Jews who were either wealthy or were chosen by Rudolf Kasztner. (Click)

As a senior official in Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Kasztner was eventually found guilty of collaborating with the Nazis in 1955. After the Supreme Court of Israel reversed the lower court’s decision, Kasztner was assassinated on a Tel Aviv street by an enraged Israeli citizen on March 4, 1957.

A few years later, in his memoir, Vrba would not relent. He wrote, “It is my contention that a small group of informed people, by their silence, deprived others of the possibility or privilege of making their own decisions in the face of mortal danger. In the fifth year of the war, there were some Kasztners who were thinking that the Nazis could be negotiated with. Only an idiot would believe that–or else a traitor covering up something…”

“I am a Jew. In spite of that, indeed because of that, I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. Kasztner, leader of the council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary.

“While I was prisoner number 44070 at Auschwitz – the number is still on my arm – I compiled careful statistics of the exterminations . . . I took these terrible statistics with me when I escaped in 1944 and I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers . . .

“Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kasztner up in S.S. uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends. Nor did the sordid bargaining end there. Kasztner paid Eichmann several thousand dollars. With this little fortune, Eichmann was able to buy his way to freedom when Germany collapsed, to set himself up in the Argentine.”

The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer have subsequently sought to limit awareness of Rudolf Vrba in Israel because Vrba would not remain silent about the transgressions of Jewish and Zionist leadership in Hungary. Vrba’s memoir was kept from the Israeli /Hebrew-reading public for decades. “This failure to acknowledge Vrba,” Wikipedia states, “has played into the hands of Holocaust deniers who have tried to undermine his testimony about the gas chambers.”

Recognition of Vrba has also been limited in his second homeland where Canada’s “None Is Too Many” approach to would-be Jewish immigrants during World War II remains shameful. In 1992, Sir Martin Gilbert teamed with one of Canada’s foremost human rights lawyers, Irwin Cotler—a former Attorney General of Canada who became the primary force behind the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal—to nominate Rudolf Vrba for the country’s top honour for a private citizen, the Order of Canada, but their efforts fell short.

*

Georg Klein: “It is in no small part due to Rudolf Vrba that I am alive today.”

One of the early readers of the Auschwitz Report was the renowned scientist Georg Klein, at age eighteen. It was seeing a copy of the Vrba-Wetzler Report in May of 1944 that convinced Georg Klein he must either flee from Budapest or go into hiding. At the time, he was serving as an assistant to Dr. Zoltán Kohn, a member of the Jewish Council in Budapest.

“I still remember the feeling of nausea and intellectual satisfaction I felt when I first read what later became known as The Auschwitz Protocols,” Klein has recalled. “Nausea because I realized that I was reading about the fate of my beloved grandmother, my uncles, and many other relatives and friends who had already been deported from my father’s village in the north-east. I also knew I was reading about my own probable fate. The paradoxical but very distinct intellectual satisfaction stemmed from the fact that this was first text that made sense. Nothing else that we were told or were telling each other made any sense whatsoever. The dry, nearly scientific language of the report made a stronger impact than a thousand emotional outbursts. It was this report that prompted me to escape. The definite knowledge of what was waiting at the other end of the railway line overcame my fear of being caught and shot. I tried to warn all my relatives and friends, but no one believed me.”

The truth of the report in his hands was impossible for him to doubt. These were simply facts. Klein later wrote: “My supervisor gave me permission to tell my relatives and close friends about the report so that they could go underground in time. Of the dozen or so people I warned, not one believed me.” In a film interview Dr. Klein also related what he experienced when he tried to explain what he had learned to his uncle, a well-educated man, a dermatologist. The uncle became very angry. He almost hit Klein. He shouted: “Idiot. How can you believe such a thing?! That can’t be real. Such things just cannot be done!”¹

Klein became a prominent scholar in the field of cell biology in Sweden. For decades after the Holocaust, Klein (1925-2016) assumed Rudolf Vrba must be dead. Then, in 1987, the Karolinska Institute professor and Nobel Prize committee member saw Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, realized that Vrba was alive, and promptly bought a plane ticket from Stockholm to Vancouver to meet the man who he credited with saving his life.

“I first ‘met’ him on the cinema screen in Shoah,” Klein recalled. “When he spoke about his escape from Auschwitz with his friend Wetzler and of the report he had written to warn Hungarian Jews against entering the trains from Auschwitz, I immediately realized that this was the report I had been shown by one of the members of the Jewish Council in Budapest in greatest secrecy, only a few weeks after it has been written. Apart from its historical significance as the first authentic eyewitness account from the largest death camp, the Vrba-Wetzler Report significantly and perhaps decisively contributed to the survival of approximately 200,000 Hungarian Jews (out of 800,000), representing most of the Jewish population of the capital, Budapest. The information conveyed by that report both directly and indirectly contributed to the veto of the continued deportations, by the Hungarian head of state, Horthy, in the first week of July, 1944.”

When the Swedish-Hungarian scientist came to British Columbia and asked Vrba how he could manage to live in such a docile place like Vancouver, where hardly anyone knew about his heroism, Vrba told him about a colleague who, after seeing him featured in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, had asked if the story was true. “I do not know,” Vrba had told him. “I was only an actor reciting my lines.” Missing the sarcasm, the man replied, “I didn’t know you were an actor. Why did they say that film was made without any actors?”

Klein continued: “Only then did I understand that this was the same man who lay quiet and motionless for three days in the hollow pile of lumber while Auschwitz was on maximum alert, only a few yards from the armed SS men and their dogs combing the area so thoroughly. If he could do that, then he certainly could also don the mask of a professor and manage everyday conversation with his colleagues in Vancouver, Canada, that paradise land that is never fully appreciated by its own citizens, a people without the slightest notion of the planet Auschwitz.” This information is derived from an essay by Georg Klein written in Swedish, translated by Peter Stenberg and Lena Karlsröm, for Contemporary Jewish Writing in Sweden (University of Nebraska Press 2004).

*

Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó, Director and remarkable researcher.

As the Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and associate professor of communication sciences at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj (Romania), Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó has made a remarkable contribution to Holocaust research into the outcomes of the Vrba-Wetzler Report by compiling a chronological list of 61 people in May and June 1944 who had been made aware of the content of the Report. He did so within his academic paper, “The Auschwitz Reports: Who Got Them, and When? The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary.”

Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó has provided, as well, an edited list of nineteen individuals who affected the decision of Regent Miklós Horthy to eventually terminate the train transports from Budapest to Auschwitz.

1 Rezső Kasztner (Rudolf Kastner), Vaada deputy head, on April 28th 1944
2 Géza Soos (Soós), counselor of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Independence Movement, at the end of April or the beginning of May 1944.
3 Reverend József Éliás, leader of the Good Shepherd Committee of the Hungarian Protestant churches, at the end of April or the beginning of May 1944.
4 Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, head of the Palestinian Office in Budapest, at the beginning of May 1944.
5 Mária Székely, later Mrs. László Küllői-Rhorer, the Hungarian translator of the Vrba-Wetzler report, at the very beginning of May 1944.
6 Nathan Schwalb, head of the Hechalutz movement office in Geneva, on May 17th 1944.
7 Cardinal Jusztinián Serédi, Archbishop of Hungary, on May 10th 1944.
8 Bishop László Ravasz, president of the Reformed Church General Synod, on May 12th–14th 1944.
9 Writer Sándor Török, acting member of the Committee of Christian-Jewish Alliance in Hungary, after the middle of May 1944.
10 Giuseppe Burzio, representative of the Vatican in Slovakia, sending Cardinal Maglione the Auschwitz Report on May 24th.
11 Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai [widow of István Horthy and daughter-in-law of the regent], at the end of May or beginning of June 1944.
12 Miklós Horthy Jr., son of Regent Horthy, in June 1944.
13 Regent Miklós Horthy. Copy sent through Sándor Török, at the end of May or the beginning of June; the one sent by Ernő Pető through the Regent’s son in June 1944; the regent also received copies from Cardinal Serédi and Bishop Ravasz, most probably about the middle of May.
14 Elizabeth Wiskemann, British representative in Bern, on June 13th 1944.
15 Leland Harrison, American Minister in Bern, on June 13th 1944.
16 Richard Lichtheim, head of the Jewish Agency [for Palestine] in Geneva, [and Gerhart Riegner of the Jewish World Congress], in the middle of June 1944.
17 Monsignor Mario Martilotti, Vatican legate in Switzerland, middle of June 1944.
18 Jaromir Kopecky, Swiss representative of the Czechoslovakian Government in Exile, on June [13th ] 1944.
19 Georg(es) Mantello (György Mandel), businessman from Beszterce (Bistrija), Northern-Transylvania, first secretary of the Consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, on June 21st 1944.

Here is the complete list that Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó has compiled and shared with the world to further Holocaust research. Notably, it includes Adolf Eichmann as one of the first people to have access to the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Eichmann’s relative preeminence in this list explains why Rudolf Vrba maintained a lifelong aversion to the first two people named in this chronological of events.

MAY, 1944

1. Rezső Kasztner, Vaada deputy head, on April 28, 1944.
2. Rabbi Michael Beer Dov Weissmandel, one of the leaders of the working group (Pracovna Skupina) in Bratislava, on April 28, 1944.
3. Samu Stern and the members of the Jewish Council in Budapest, on April 29, 1944.
4. Adolf Eichmann, SS-Obersturmbannführer, one of the officers in charge of the deportations in Hungary, at the end of April or the beginning of May, 1944.
5. Géza Soós, counselor of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one of the leaders of the resistance group called the Hungarian Independence Movement, at the end of April or the beginning of May, 1944.
6. Reverend József Éliás, leader of the Good Shepherd Committee of the Hungarian protestant churches, at the end of April or the beginning of May, 1944.
7. The Istanbul branch of the Jewish Agency, at the beginning of May, 1944.
8. Giuseppe Burzio, the representative of the Vatican, delegated to the independent Slovakian state, at the beginning of May, 1944.
9. Fülöp Freudiger, president of the Budapest Autonomous Orthodox Israelite Community, at the beginning of May, 1944.
10. Carl Lutz, Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
11. Carl Ivan Danielsson, Swedish Minister in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
12. Per Anger, secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
13. Ottó Komoly, president of the Hungarian Zionist Organization, at the beginning of May, 1944.
14. Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, head of the Palestine Office in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
15. Mária Székely, later Mrs. László Küllői-Rhorer, the Hungarian translator of the Vrba3Wetzler Report, at the very beginning of May, 1944.
16. József Cavallier, the head of the Holy Cross Society, at the beginning of May, 1944.
17. Miklós Esty, secular papal chamberlain, vice president of the Actio Catholica, at the beginning of May, 1944.
18. Lajos Reményi-Schneller, Hungarian Finance Minister, at the beginning of May, 1944.
19. Jean de Bavier, the delegate of the International Red Cross in Budapest, no later than May 13, 1944.
20. Nathan Schwalb, the head of the Jewish Agency and of the Hehalutz office in Geneva, on May 17, 1944.
21. Abraham Silberschein, the delegate of the Jewish World Congress, no later than May 17, 1944.
22. Zeev (Vanya) Pomerantz, Jewish Agency emissary in Istanbul, on May 19, 1944.
23. Angelo Rotta, Papal Nuncio in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
24. Gennaro Verolino, Vatican counselor (uditore) in Budapest, at the beginning of May, 1944.
25. Jusztinián Cardinal Serédi, Prince Primate of Hungary on May 10, 1944, but no later than May 20, at least one copy.
26. András Zakar, Cardinal Serédi’s secretary, at the end of May, 1944.
27. Reverend Albert Bereczky, Reformed priest in Budapest, at the beginning of May.
28. Bishop László Ravasz, president of the Reformed (Calvinist) Church General Synod, on May 12-14, 1944.
29. Lajos Kemény, Lutheran dean from Budapest, at the beginning of May 1944.
30. Bishop Sándor Raffay, leader of the Lutheran (Evangelical) Church in Hungary, on May 10-14, 1944.
31. Judge Géza Kárpáti (Kárpáty), at the beginning of May, 1944.
32. Sándor Török, writer and acting member of the Committee of Christian Jewish Alliance in Hungary, middle of May, 1944.
33. Rabbi Solomon Schönfeld, in the second part of May, 1944.
34. Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, the widow of István Horthy, at the end of May or the beginning of June, 1944.

JUNE 1944

35. Mrs. Miklós Horthy, at the end of May or beginning of June, 1944
36. Miklós Horthy Jr., the son of the Regent, in June, 1944.
37. Regent Miklós Horthy, a copy sent through Sándor Török at the end of May or the beginning of June; a copy sent by Ernő Pető through Miklós Horthy, Jr., the Regent’s son, in June 1944. The Regent also received copies from Cardinal Serédi and Bishop Ravasz, most probably sometime in the middle of May.
38. Rabbi Fábián Herskovits, in the first part of June, 1944.
39. Elizabeth Wiskemann, British representative in Bern, on June 13, 1944.
40. Leland Harrison, American Minister in Bern, on June 13, 1944.
41. Richard Lichtheim, the head of the Jewish Agency office in Geneva, in the middle of June, 1944.
42. Lea Komoly Fürst, in the middle of June, 1944.
43. Sára Friedländer, in the middle of June, 1944.
44. Monsignor Mario Martilotti, Vatican legate in Switzerland, in the middle of June, 1944.
45. József Reisinger, a Turkish consulate employee of Jewish origin, in Budapest, in the middle of June, 1944.
46. Florian E. Manoliu, Romanian diplomat and attaché of the Romanian consulate in Bern, on June 18, 1944.
47. Jaromír Kopeczký, Swiss representative of the Czechoslovakian Government in Exile, on June 19 or 20, 1944.
48. George Mantello (György Mandel), businessman from Beszterce, Northern Transylvania, first secretary of the Consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, on June 21, 1944.
49. Chaim Pozner, representative of the Palestine Office in Switzerland, in the second part of June, 1944.
50. Saly Mayer, Swiss representative of the Joint organization, no later than June, 1944.
51. Mihály Bányai, head of the Swiss Aid for Hungarian Jews (Schweitzerisches Hilfskomitee für die Juden in Ungarn), on June 24, 1944.
52. Walter Garett, a British Exchange Telegraph-Independent News Agency correspondent in Zürich, on June 24, 1944.
53. Pope Pius XII probably found out about the situation of the Hungarian Jews from Angelo Rotta by the beginning of May, 1944, but no later than June 25, via Switzerland.
54. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, no later than June 25, 1944.
55. King Gustav V of Sweden, in the second part of June, 1944.
56. General F. M. West, British military attaché, in the second part of June, 1944.
57. Allen W. Dulles, American OSS representative in Switzerland, in the second part of June, 1944.
58. Max Kimche, Swiss lawyer and businessman, in the second part of June, 1944.
59. Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, at the end of June, 1944
60. Robert Anthony Eden, British Foreign Minister, at the end of June, 1944.
61. Leaders of Swiss International Red Cross Committee, no later than the end of June, 1944

*

¹ George Klein, “Confronting the Holocaust: An Eyewitness Account,” in: Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuevel (eds.), The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary, pp. 255–284. George Klein, Pietà (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 128. The German-language interview was produced by Michael Muschner and is available today with a brief summary.

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