This image of Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hoess at Auschwitz was found in The Death Factory by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka (Pergamon Press, 1966). It might well well have been taken on the same day described in Vrba’s memoir when he came face-to-face with Himmler. Both Kraus and Kulka gave evidence for the March, 1947 trial of Hoess in Warsaw. Hoess’ confessions and memoir, written in prison, were sent to Rudolf Vrba to read for his comments prior to their publication. Hoess’s sometimes candid confessions were used as the basis for a novel in French by Robert Merle, La Mort Est Mon Metier, republished in Czech in 1955.The following year, Hoess’ memoir was published in Poland and it was made available in German in 1959.

“We Germans — who are the only people to treat animals decently — will also treat these human animals decently.”  Heinrich Himmler, 1943.

There is an axiom in storytelling that every good hero requires a formidable villain. Rudolf Vrba’s story of perseverance, pluck, luck and ingenuity does not overtly conjure forth Adolf Hitler as his nemesis. Instead, with a storyteller’s instinct, Vrba and his co-his writer Alan Bestic opted to start I Cannot Forgive with a second visit to Auschwitz that was made by its top-ranking overseer, Heinrich Himmler, in July of 1942, some seventeen days after Vrba’s arrival.

“We stood in erect lines,” he recalls, “before our respective block buildings, near and erect in our uniforms, like well-trained Zebras; and I was a very prominent Zebra indeed, standing in the front row of my block, where I had been placed deliberately because, after only seventeen days in the camp, I still looked fairly healthy.”

This tragic-comic narrative deftly includes the execution of a helpful, frail, simple-minded prisoner named Yankel Meisel simply because one of the buttons on his striped prisoner’s garb is undone. For this sin, he is clubbed to death, just minutes before the Nazi inspectors arrive, because his overseer was enraged to notice the gaping neck of his tunic. And so the scene is set for a face-to-face, nose-to-nose, silent encounter between hero and villain. Because Vrba’s barracks were closest to the gates with its Arbeit Macht Frei sign, and he was placed in a front row because he was still relatively fit, his face would be one of the first that Himmler would see upon examining the camp with Commandant Rudolf Hoess.

Prisoners’ Orchestra, Auschwitz 

Before Himmler appeared after a prolonged breakfast, the Auschwitz orchestra–consisting of the finest musicians drawn from the capitals of Europe, with a conductor who had been in charge of the Warsaw Philharmonic orchestra–had been playing a superb rendition of ‘Why Should We Not Be Merry, When God Gives Us Strength?’ from the Czech opera The Bartered Bride. On cue, as Himmler appeared in his slow-moving, chauffeur-driven Mercedes, the orchestra started playing “The Triumph March” from the opera Aida.  Vrba then recalls how Himmler gets out of the vehicle smiling, seemingly charmed by the music.

Having anticipated the arrival of an all-powerful ogre, Vrba was disconcerted to see the somewhat portly Himmler parading himself with a grace and charm that made him think of echelons of English royalty at an English garden party. “Like English royalty, too, he seemed to have the knack of putting others at their ease quickly, effortlessly.” [The reader should bear in mind this memoir was co-written. As a teenager growing up in smalltown Slovakia, Vrba had minimal knowledge of English garden parties. Likely the analogy is derived from the perspective of his Irish-born co-writer Alan Bestic.]

Himmler at the age of 29.  

The narration continues to describe how the assembled prisoners were awestruck by the Nazi leaders’ razor-edged trouser creases, the clicking of heels as arms speared the air with a Nazi salute. Vrba then describes a face-to-face encounter. “I studied his pale, flaccid face, his expression that was tolerant and condescending, slightly bored and slightly amused. His rimless glasses glinted in the sunshine. His uniform, unlike all the others, did not seem to fit very well and I thought: ‘This man is no monster. He’s more like a schoolteacher. An ordinary, run-of-the-mill schoolteacher! Years later I learned that in fact he had been a teacher of mathematics before he became architect of Hitler’s extermination camps. To him, indeed, death was no more than simple arithmetic, row upon row of figures in a neatly kept ledger…

“The photographic sycophants scurried before him, their Leicas and their cine-cinemas clicking and whirring. They postured and pranced backwards, shooting from their knees, from their stomachs, searching frantically for new, improbable angles on a little piece of history, darting to and fro like tugs before an ocean liner.

“He reached the end of the row, turned and came back again, eyeing the prisoners with polite interest. Again, he passed close to me, close enough for me to touch him, and for a moment our eyes met. They were cold, impersonal eyes that seemed to see little; and yet I found myself thinking: ‘If he finds out what’s going on, maybe he’ll improve things. Maybe the food will get better. Maybe there won’t be so many beatings. Maybe . . .  maybe we’ll see some justice around here for a change…

“Already, you see, I had forgotten Yankel Meisel. And so had everyone else because Heinrich Himmler was smiling. I remember thinking: ‘If only they let him see everything! If only he insists on seeing everything. . . the gassings, the burnings, the brutality, the lot!’”

Himmler did proceed to see it all. Before examining the burgeoning Buna complex (Auschwitz III), Hoess treated Himmler to a display of his successful mass gassing experiments using the pesticide developed as Zyklon B in one of the two gassing chambers he had established by renovating two nearby Polish houses. Vrba would learn a great deal about Hoess after the war when he was sent an advance version of Hoess’ memoir to provide critical feedback. Only then would Vrba know for certain that Himmler and Hoess also proceeded to witness the emaciated victims of disease, the crowded hospital block, the primitive latrines, the selection process for extermination, the women’s camp, the whipping of a female prostitute… as well as the experimental gassing of prisoners with Zyklon-B prior to their inspections of Auschwitz III [primarily the IG Farben industrial complex].

Left to right: Rudolf Brandt, Heinrich Himmler, Max Faust (an IG Farben engineer who was head of building operations at Auschwitz III), possibly Ernst-Heinrich Schmauser, and the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess. 

Himmler had first visited Auschwitz on March 1, 1941. After that visit, he had ordered the camp to be expanded beyond its 10,000 prisoners. The goal was not genocide. He was planning to enhance the viability of a planned I.G. Farben factory complex at Dwory, several miles away, by supplying a massive workforce of slave labourers. As outlined In London Has Been Informed… (issued by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1997, and edited by Polish historian Henryk Świebocki), Nazi Germany was planning on accommodating 100,000 Russian prisoners of war, while optimistically planning an attack on the USSR.

With evidence supplied by this website, we can now be certain that Himmler also returned to Auschwitz on July 17-18, 1942–as Vrba had first described in 1963–in order to witness the murder of 499 Jews with Zyklon-B in Bunker #2 (as would be reported later that same month by the German industrialist Edward Schulte). There is no doubt that Himmler  admired the efficacy of the gas chamber that Hoess had contrived, and this would stimulate the construction of much larger and more efficient crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Vrba writes, “Commandant Hoess, anxious to display his new toy at its most efficient, had arranged for a special transport of 3,000 Polish Jews to be present for slaughter in the modern, German way. This time I was glad to see him arrive, though not because I still nursed any faint hope that he would improve our lot through benevolence or any sense of justice. His presence was welcome to us all merely because it meant that for one day there could be no unscheduled beatings or killings.”

Later, in Czechoslovakia, Vrba would strive for approximately ten years to have his Auschwitz memoir published in his homeland. Because Himmler’s presence at Auschwitz in 1942 could not be proiven, the Czech publishing house eventually decided to omit Vrba’s gripping, opening chapter in which he describes his face-to-face encounter with Himmler–the progenitor of the concentration camp system as the head of the SS. If Vrba indeed had such a stupendous memory for train arrivals, how is it that his memory could be so fallible about Himmler? If would-be debunkers could only find just one narrative error in his story, that miscue could be pounced upon in order to attack the credibility of not only his entire book, but also of the Holocaust itself. If Vrba had “made it all up,” well, the naysayers could assert it was ALL a fiction.  The Holocaust didn’t really happen, etc…. [This is the sort of bafflegab that has given rise to the absurdist bafflegab of Donald Trump. The Big Lie is so dumbfounding that all attempts to denigrate it only serve to enhance its existence as a concept that must be viable in order to merit such opposition. Or, in the words of the British novelist John Fowles in Daniel Martin,  “To draw attention to anything is to glorify it.”]

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Interviewed in late 2023, Robin Vrba confided that even Rudolf Vrba, when faced with such perplexing opposition from the Czech publishing house, had begun to wonder if it were possible that he might have NOT seen Himmler, as he had once been so certain he had. After all, his co-writer [Alan] Bestic had hustled the book into print. “Look,” Bestic told Vrba [according to Robin Vrba], “if this book survives a year, we’re lucky.” According to Robin Vrba, when her husband was unable to find any documented proof that Himmler had visited Auschwitz in 1942, she, too, had begun to wonder about what might be true and what might be an illusion. Was there a middle path through it all?

Robin Vrba’s co-editor Zimring has since presented a Master’s thesis for Jewish History to the Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities within the Department of Jewish History entitled The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she takes care to forge a middle ground between Vrba’s maverick perspective and the indentured opinions of Professor Yehuda Bauer, still alive at the time of its presentation, and she thanks Yad Vashem, the institution that stonewalled adequate recognition of Vrba for all his adult life. Jettisoning Vrba’s opening chapter was playing it safe; it was ensuring that the editors of the book could not possibly be blameworthy for any dreaded mistake, any historical inaccuracy.

After the book’s title I Cannot Forgive had been changed to I Escaped From Auschwitz, the memoir had been re-issued in 2002 with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert and it had retained the chapter called ‘When The Music Stopped’ about how Yankel Meisel, the frail old man who was murdered for not doing up his button–so perhaps if Gilbert had given Vrba’s narrative his blessing, some 18 years later, perhaps a simple asterisk could have sufficed at the bottom of the page: “Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz Camp again in January, 1943. A visit he made in 1942 has yet to be substantiated.”

Rudolf Vrba didn’t get out of Auschwitz and save 200,000 lives by playing it safe.

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This website has also found evidence of at least one other purportedly ‘undocumented’ visit was made by Himmler to Auschwitz… to further cultivate some confusion… If one consults the rather clunky English translation of the foreword to London Has Been Informed…  edited by Henryk Świebocki, on page 286 one discovers the editors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum state that according to the statement of a Jew from the Special Commando [Sonderkommando], Reichfuhrer Himmler was said to have visited BIRKENAU on the 15th or 16th of May. “On one of those days I myself saw three automobiles and five men in civilian clothing drive toward the crematoria. The Jews who made this statement that he, as well as others, recognized Himmler, who had visited crematorium No. 1 and after a stay of about half an hour had again driven off with those accompanying him. On the day after there was an account in the Silesian newspapers of Himmler’s visit to Cracow, so that this report could be true.” The Auschwitz Museum editors have added a footnote: “In the preserved camp documents there is no evidence of a visit by Heinrich Himmler to Auschwitz [on May 15 or 16, 1944], but this does not mean the information is not true. Himmler stayed in Cracow on May 18 and 19, 1944. During that time he might well have visited Auschwitz.” It is more likely this “sighting” of Himmler was dated incorrectly and the visit purportedly made on May 15-16 refers to the aforementioned visit we now know for certain was made on July 17-18.

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Occasionally, one comes across something on the internet that cannot be improved upon. Here, with a link, is one such article on Heinrich Himmler. This digest of his horrific accomplishments as the principal architect and administrator of the concentration camps is uncredited to any individual. The final sentence of this adroit summary states, “Serving as Hitler’s right-hand man, Himmler was a true architect of terror during World War II.”  The source is the National WWII Museum of New Orleans. You can visit this site at:

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/heinrich-himmler-holocaust

Here is a selection of photos from the article above.

Here is a speech by Heinrich Himmler in October of 1943 about his plans for the extermination of all Jews at: https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-human-behavior/himmler-speech-posen-1943

“Letter of 9th June 1943 from Messrs Topf and Sons to the Auschwitz Bauleitung following the meeting of the 18th May concerning 2 air extraction installations for Krematorien IV and V to be supplied at a cost of 2,510RM. Two copies of Topf drawing D 59,620 were enclosed, showing the construction of the brick-built air extraction ducts and the arrangement of the suction duct, blower and pressure duct to be supplied by Topf. The electric motors to be used were of 3.5 HP and the system would have had a capacity of 8000 m² per hour. The installation was never fitted in either of the two Krematorien.”

Next: VRBA ON THE ESCAPE