Talk:Auschwitz Protocols

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Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 4 November 2025

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After the War, the Vrba-Wetzler report was given credit by many historians and cinematographers for ending the deportation to Auschwitz. However, recent research shows that the Vrba-Wetzler report did not have major impact until it was corroborated by the addition of the Mordowicz-Rosin testimony in late June of 1944. The order to halt deportation of the last 220,000 Budapest Jews did not happen until July 7, 1944. The first international recognition came last year by the B'nai B'rith international when it cited both sets of escapees as “Jews who Saved Jews.” Then on 23-24 May 2024, the International Conference “The Holocaust in Northern Transylvania – 80 Years Later, and 20 Years since the Adoption of the Wiesel Commission Report,” organized by the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj in partnership with the “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust from Bucharest, speaker Fred R. Bleakley, laid out a timeline of four instances which included the addition of the “Mordowicz-Rosin testimony” that led to a worldwide outcry to end the deportations to Auschwitz. The clock was ticking in early July 1944 on the fate of two hundred twenty thousand Jews in Budapest. They were days away from being crowded into trains bound for Auschwitz. The focus of documentary filmmakers and many historians have been on the detailed testimony of Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler for not letting that happen. At least equal credit, I believe, should go to two other Auschwitz prisoners, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin. They escaped on 27 May 1944, seven weeks after Vrba and Wetzler. Hungary’s leader Miklós Horthy succumbed to worldwide pressure to ban deportation of Budapest’s Jews on 6 July 1944. By itself, the Vrba-Wetzler account had been too incredible to believe. also, the Nazi deception that Jews were being deported simply for labor masked the truth. It took the Mordowicz-Rosin testimony to corroborate and make believable the Vrba-Wetzler report. Without that affirmation and combination of the matching reports of those four escapees, the outcry heard around the world would not have come on time to save the last large group of Hungarian Jews. Several events and key intermediaries were responsible for the international pressure on Horthy to ban deportations from Budapest. all stemmed from the Mordowicz-Rosin testimony given to the same Slovakian Jewish Council that had interviewed Vrba-Wetzler. It led to belief in the atrocities described by Vrba and Wetzler. The seminal moment occurred when Oskar Krasňanský and other Council members brought the four escapees together in the former half of June 1944. Krasňanský went back and forth between two rooms to cross-examine each pair. (Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 2001, p. 231.) The accounts matched. (Braham, Politics of Genocide, 2016, vol. 2, p. 961.) The Council put the two reports together and sent them to the same allied and Jewish leaders as before. (Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 2001, p. 232; Świebocki, London Has Been Informed, 2002, p. 52.) The second event that spurred action was a meeting where the Pope’s representative, Msgr. Mario Martilloti, met with Czesław, Rudi, and Oskar Krasňanský on 19 May 1944. The Monsignor remained skeptical after five-and-a-half hours of discussion. Czesław then pointed out that truckloads of boxes filled with corpses of priests had been arriving for cremation at Auschwitz. It was shocking news to the Monsignor who knew that hundreds of priests had gone missing in Eastern Europe. He told Czesław, Rudi, and Oskar that he believed all they had said. (Mordowicz, Conversation with Fred Bleakley, Toronto, 9 September 1995.) A plea from the Pope to Horthy followed. (Braham, Politics of Genocide, 2016, vol. 2, pp. 966-967.) The third turning-point event was a press campaign engineered by George Mantello, a Salvadoran diplomat in Geneva. He asked a friend and fellow diplomat, Florin Manoliu, to visit Hungary to see if Mantello’s Jewish family was safe. The Romanian friend learned in Budapest from Miklós Krausz, of the Palestine Office of Zionist Jews, that he had received two reports that were not good news. One contained excerpts of the reports Krasňanský had taken from Vrba-Wetzler and Mordowicz-Rosin. (Kranzler, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz, 2000, p. 87.) The other was a list of deportations to Auschwitz from towns in Transylvania and Hungary where Jews, including Mantello’s family, lived. Krausz gave copies of both reports to Mantello’s friend, who delivered them to Mantello at his Geneva hotel suite on 20 June 1944. (Kranzler, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz, 2000, p. 89.) The latter’s ingenious press campaign sparked world-leader pressure on Horthy over the following two weeks. Again, it took inclusion of the Mordowicz-Rosin report to get that response. The fourth event and another key intermediary was when Richard Lichtheim, an influential leader of the Jewish agency for Palestine, sent telegrams on 19 June 1944. “Additional reports” (meaning those of Mordowicz and Rosin) had been received, he said, adding: “We now know what has happened and where it happened” (Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 2001, pp. 234-235.) Help also came a week later from Elizabeth Wiskemann of the British Delegation in Switzerland. She and her colleagues were discussing the telegram Lichtheim had sent. In it, he urged the allies to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz. Wiskemann suggested adding a fictitious call to bomb the offices and homes of seventy Hungarian and German officials in Budapest responsible for the Hungarian deportations. She sent the telegram without the usual complex secret code, knowing the Germans were attempting to intercept every communiqué from the delegation’s Bern office. All the efforts of the aforementioned intermediaries put international pressure on Horthy to act. His first attempt, on 26 June 1944, to get his quisling government to follow his lead on banning deportations failed. His second attempt on 6 July 1944 succeeded. Ironically, a smoke covering the city from a massive US army bombing raid inadvertently caused bombs to fall on some of the locations of the seventy officials responsible for the deportations. Wiskemann’s ploy helped frighten Horthy’s Council to give him the backing he needed. (Feingold, Bearing Witness, 1995, p. 155, footnote 40.) The dramatic showdown of late June and early July 1944 included a failed coup on Horthy’s life. Then, following the successful Council vote of 6 July, factions of the Hungarian army loyal to Horthy overpowered the antisemitic faction of the Gendarmes. Positioned in Budapest, they were routed by Horthy’s loyal army hours before they were to lead a “lightening” roundup of Budapest’s two hundred twenty thousand Jews from their ghettos. Although the mass deportations ended, nearly half of the remaining Budapest Jews were killed in coming months by Adolph Eichmann and the savage antisemitic “Arrow Cross” Party. The Russian army liberated Budapest in the spring of 1945. So why then has the Mordowicz-Rosin report not received more postwar recognition for the catalytic role it played? One reason was that Rudi Vrba actively promoted himself without mentioning his partner Alfred Wetzler or the collaboration by Czesław and Arnost. Rudi was the only one of the four who spoke English in the immediate decades after the war. The major reason for which the record is not straight is that the US War Refugee Board in Switzerland got several important facts wrong in communicating the Auschwitz Protocols to Washington. The WRB released them to the public on 26 November 1944. The prosecution in the postwar trials of Nazi officials cited the Protocols. Over 400 Jewish organizations ordered copies. It was “the most shocking document ever issued by a US government agency,” The International Herald Tribune said. The Protocols remain the template for the Auschwitz genocide. (The Auschwitz Protocols are online at www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/franklin. War Refugee Board, Series 1, General Correspondence Box 7, German Extermination Camps – Auschwitz and Birkenau, 26 November 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.) A close reading of the preface to the Protocols, based on information from Roswell McClelland, head of the WRB in Switzerland, and a cover note he wrote on 12 October 1944 to John Pehle, his boss in Washington, D. C., revealed the errors. It showed McClelland was confused about the relevance and timing of the Mordowicz-Rosin report. The WRB’s document accurately said the report of two unnamed Slovak escapees (later identified as Vrba and Wetzler) on 7 April 1944 was verifiable. McClelland told his Washington boss that it was not possible to check the other report (that of Mordowicz and Rosin) as closely as the first, because “on 6 August 1944, a report was received in Switzerland (that of Czesław and Arnost) covering the happenings in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the period between 7 April and 27 May”. The 6 August date was wrong. Many historians, including Randolph L. Braham and Sir Martin Gilbert, reported that both sets of escapee reports reached diplomats in Switzerland, including McClelland, not in August, after the deportation ban, but in the latter half of June 1944, before the ban on deportations on 6 July. (Świebocki, London Has Been Informed, 2002, p. 56, footnote 49.) As noted earlier, members of the Slovakian Jewish Committee interviewed Czesław and Arnost with the same vigorous interrogation as that of Vrba and Wetzler. They attested to the accuracy of both. (Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 2001, pp. 231-233.) Another misunderstanding can be seen in the cover letter McClelland sent with the Protocols in October. He said that he had met with the papal nuncio, who had personally interviewed “two young Slovak Jews” and declared the impression they created in telling their story to be “thoroughly convincing”. As noted earlier, it was Czesław, a Polish Jew, the nuncio interviewed with Vrba, not Wetzler. Both Vrba and Wetzler were Slovakian. Czesław died in 2001, after being hit on a sidewalk in Toronto by a car that jumped the curb. He and Arnost, who had died in 2000, left a legacy of helping to save some one hundred ten thousand Jews who survived the war. Some recognition of the importance of the Mordowicz-Rosin testimony occurred in 2016, when a Holocaust Center in Slovakia published papers from a conference held the year before. In The Shoah: Resistance of Jews and Their Efforts to Inform the World of Genocide, the co-editors referenced the ongoing dispute among historians or when and where the information about Auschwitz was received. They wrote that the conference placed the “heroic acts” of Vrba and Wetzler in a “broader context of information, misinformation… and stories of Arnost Rosin and (Czesław) Mordowicz who supplemented the information from the first pair.” B’nai B’rith International went further in February 2024, putting Mordowicz and Rosin on equal footing with Vrba and Wetzler. It held a ceremony in Jerusalem, where it unveiled a monument listing all four as “Jews who saved Jews.”

Sources Bleakley, Fred R., The Auschwitz Protocols: Czesław Mordowicz and the Race to Save Hungary’s Jews. New York, Post Hill Press. 2022. • Braham, Randolph L., The Politics of Genocide, 3rd revised edition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016. • Feingold, Henry L., Bearing Witness, Syracuse (New York), Syracuse University Press, 1995. • Gilbert, Martin, Auschwitz and the Allies, London, Pimlico, Random House, 2001. • Kranzler, David, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz, Syracuse (New York), Syracuse University Press, 2000. • Świebocki, Henryk (ed.), London Has Been Informed, Oswiecim (Poland), Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2002. 95.76.16.127 (talk) 05:05, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: You have produced a very interesting essay, but it needs substantial revision before any of it can be incorporated into the article. Wikipedia articles describe their subjects in a neutral, factual tone, summarizing what all the available sources have to say, rather than arguing for a certain point of view as you have done here. Sentences should never be written in the first person or phrased as questions. Day Creature (talk) 17:48, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Everything in the added text is documented with already published mainstream scholarly works. No sentences are written in the first person or phrased as questions; I really do not understand this observation. ~2025-31374-28 (talk) 03:49, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

The sentences I was referring to:

• "At least equal credit, I believe, should go to two other Auschwitz prisoners, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin."
• "So why then has the Mordowicz-Rosin report not received more postwar recognition for the catalytic role it played?"

Day Creature (talk) 07:14, 5 November 2025 (UTC)