Alfréd Wetzler

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Alfréd Wetzler (born on 10. May 1918 in Trnava , Czechoslovakia - died on. 8. February 1988 in Bratislava ), was a Jewish Slovakia and one of the few prisoners who managed, from the extermination camp Birkenau (Auschwitz II) to Break out. His joint statements with Rudolf Vrba led to the Vrba-Wetzler Report (in the USA part of the Auschwitz Protocols) , which informed the Western allies very precisely about the German extermination machine. Wetzler became a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 , became a prisoner functionary like Vrba and escaped with Vrba on April 7, 1944. In 1945 he published a book in Košice, “Auschwitz, grave of 4 million people”, which also contained the entire Vrba-Wetzler report contains.

After the war, Wetzler joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party , was later imprisoned and expelled from the party, but was then rehabilitated. He worked as an editor for a Slovak newspaper in Bratislava . In 1964 he was a witness in the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt .

In 2007 he was posthumously awarded the Slovak Order (Kríž Milana Rastislava Štefánika) donated in memory of Milan Rastislav Štefánik .

Works

  • What Dante did not see  : Roman, From the Slovak. by Erich Mehnert, revision. New edition , Graz; Vienna: Nausner & Nausner 2007, ISBN 3-901402-43-8 (Lánik, Jozef)
  • Escape from hell. The true story of the Auschwitz protocol , New York, NY: Berghahn, Ed. by Péter Várnai. Transl. from the Slovak by Ewald Osers ISBN 978-1-84545-183-7 (Lánik, Jozef)

Movie

  • Mark Hayhurst, directed: 1944: Bombs on Auschwitz? Documentary with game scenes based on historical quotations and interviews with contemporary witnesses. Germany, 2019, first broadcast on January 21, 2020 ( information from the broadcaster , Jan 2020)

See also

literature

  • Ruth Linn: Escaping Auschwitz: a culture of forgetting . Ithaca; London: Cornell Univ. Press 2004, ISBN 0-8014-4130-7 DNB
  • Martin Gilbert , Auschwitz and the Allies . Munich: CH Beck 1982, 1985. 482 pages. ISBN 3-4060-8707-8
  • Peter Petro: On the Holocaust problem in the works of Rudolf Vrba and Jozef Lánik , in: Ludwig Richter (ed.), Slovak culture and literature in self and external understanding, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08676-5

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wetzler, Alfréd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lánik, Jozef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovak contemporary witness Auschwitz concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Trnava
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1988
Place of death Bratislava