Alfréd Wetzler

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Alfred Wetzler
Alfred Wetzler.JPG
Born
Alfred Israel Wetzler

10 May 1918
Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (present-day Trnava, Slovakia)
Died8 February 1988 (aged 69)
Bratislava, Czechoslovakia
Other namesJozef Lánik (pen name)
OccupationWriter, editor, farmer
Known forEscapee of Auschwitz Concentration Camp (10 April 1944)
Writing the Vrba-Wetzler report, alongside fellow escapee Rudolf Vrba (released mid-1944)

Alfréd Israel Wetzler (10 May 1918[1]– 8 February 1988), who wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a Slovak Jew. He is known for escaping from Auschwitz concentration camp and co-writing the Vrba-Wetzler Report.

Background[]

Wetzler was born in Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (now Trnava, Slovakia). After his birthplace became part of Czechoslovakia, he was a worker in Trnava during the period 1936–1940. He was sent to the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) camp in 1942 and escaped from it with Rudolf Vrba on 10 April 1944. Using the pen name Jozef Lanik, 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, and later a fictionalized account called What Dante Did Not See.

After the war, Wetzler worked as an editor (1945–1950), worked in Bratislava (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.[2]

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 evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. 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 historian Sir Martin Gilbert 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."[3]

See also[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Kárný, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 553.
  2. ^ Alfréd Wetzler at Find a Grave
  3. ^ Alfred Wetzler (April 2007). Peter Varnai (ed.). Escape from Hell. Translated by Ewald Osers. Berghahn Books. p. 292. ISBN 978-1-84545-183-7.
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