Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Rosenberg and Wetzler are said to be the principal authors of the document on
Auschwitz that was published by the U.S. War Refugee Board in November 1944.
Supplements to the report are said to have been contributed by two Jews (Czeslaw
Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin) who escaped on May 27, 1944, and by a non-
Jewish Polish major who also escaped. In writing this book, I thought the document,
which I call the WRB report, was important to the subject because it
marked the first major commitment of an Allied power to the Auschwitz extermination
claim.
A booklet published in New York in March 1944 with the endorsement of the
U.S. government’s Office of War Information and the National CIO War Relief
Committee and purporting to be a compilation of reports about Auschwitz received
through the Polish underground illustrates what was being said about
Auschwitz at the time. The camp is portrayed as a “camp of death” but not as a
site of mass exterminations of Jews. Such exterminations are claimed, but only as
taking place at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. 617 This is an example of the failure
of the Allies to claim that Auschwitz was an extermination camp even two years
after its alleged attainment of that status, despite its being a huge and not at all secret
operation. (The great extent of involvement by non-SS personnel ruled out
secrecy for whatever transpired there.)
A chapter of Pressac’s book is devoted to arguing the essential accuracy of the
WRB report, despite various errors and contradictions that he notes (mainly the
number and arrangement of the crematorium ovens at Birkenau).
The authorship of the WRB report remains a problem, but not an important
one. What is indisputable is that it came from the circle of Rabbi Michael Dov
Ber Weissmandel in Slovakia, whose members claimed to have received the story
from the escaped Jews. The five escapees allegedly did a lot of name changing.
According to an article by Erich Kulka in a book published in 1967, 618 in order to
live under cover after escape, Rosenberg became Rudolf Vrba, Wetzler became
Josef Lánik, Mordowicz became Petr Podulka, and Rosin became Jan Rohác.
Rosenberg remained Vrba after the war and at present is on the Faculty of Pharmacology
at the University of British Columbia in Canada. The other three Jews
might have dropped their aliases, although Wetzler retained Lánik as a literary
pseudonym.
In his 1967 article, Kulka did not mention the Polish major, who is sometimes
identified as a Pole named Jerzy Wesolowski who escaped and changed his name
to Jerzy Tabeau. In a 1964 article, Auschwitz State Museum (PMO) official T.
Iwaszko mentioned Wesolowski/Tabeau, reporting that he was registered as prisoner
No. 27273 on March 26, 1942, escaped from the camp on November 19,
1943, and made some contributions to underground literature, but Iwaszko did not
quite make him the Polish major. 619 In 1979, John S. Conway wrote that the Polish
major’s “identity has not been revealed thus far. It is also not known by what
617
618
619
424
Vol. 7, 1964, p. 67.; E. Kulka, “Five Escapes from Auschwitz,” in Suhl, p. 205.
Oswiecim. Camp of Death (New York: Poland Fights, 1944), esp. pp. 45f.
E. Kulka, in Suhl..
T. Iwaszko in Hefte von Auschwitz (1964), cited above, pp. 7f, 38.