The next day, 23 June 1944, Garrett himself had contacted Allen Dulles, the most senior US intelligence official in the neutral, and therefore crucial, country of Switzerland. Dulles ran the Swiss bureau of the Office of Strategic Services, then the lead US intelligence agency, and would go on to head the CIA. Garrett found Dulles stunned and shaken by the report. The American’s response was unequivocal: ‘We must intervene immediately,’ he said, promising to cable the report to Washington right away.
Garrett would not rely on that promise. That evening, as he wired his story to London, and just before he got on his bike, he telegraphed versions not only to the world’s press but also to the offices of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Queen of Holland, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.
And yet Garrett was not the first to feel the urge to share with the most powerful people in the world this new, comprehensive and detailed account of Auschwitz and to do so immediately. Others had made the same move, even via the same people. For all his apparent shock, Dulles had almost certainly seen the Auschwitz Report already.
In fact, the testimony of Vrba and Wetzler had travelled along multiple pathways, passed from hand to hand and across borders. One copy reached Jaromír Kopeck?, clinging on in Geneva as the last diplomat of a country that no longer existed: Czechoslovakia. Armed with a radio transmitter and assisted by a courier able to bring secret messages from the resistance – her codename was ‘Agenor’ – Kopeck? was a critical point of contact with the Czechoslovak government in exile, by then based in London.
On 10 June, ‘Agenor’ brought Kopeck? the Auschwitz Report. Amid the horror, what leapt out was Vrba and Wetzler’s account of the Czech family camp, and especially the second transport that had arrived at Auschwitz on 20 December 1943. The document said that those inmates were due to face ‘special treatment’ – death by gas – exactly six months later. Kopeck? had only to look at the calendar to realise that was a matter of days away.
He spoke to the World Jewish Congress’s man in Geneva, Gerhart Riegner, who was as appalled as he was. Together they contacted a British diplomat in Bern, Elizabeth Wiskemann, who was an expert on, and therefore, they hoped, especially sympathetic to, Czechoslovakia. Their telegram to her began, ‘According report made by two Slovakian Jews who escaped from Birkenau …’ They spelled out the imminent threat to the Czech families of Camp B, stressed that ‘Bratislava’ should not be mentioned as the source, presumably to limit the risk of exposing Vrba and Wetzler, and made a very specific request: that the revelations made by those two Slovak escapees ‘be broadcasted immediately through BBC and American radio in order to prevent at last moment this new massacre.’
Wiskemann did as she was asked and at speed, transmitting her message to London on 14 June. The next day, as requested, the BBC’s services in Czech and Slovak broadcast a brief item on the looming threat to 4,000 Czech deportees imprisoned in Birkenau. The radio monitoring arm of the Reich Protector Office in Berlin noticed that broadcast. ‘London has been informed ,’ it reported. The same office took note of the BBC transmission the following day, which warned that all those responsible for the murder of the Czech families would be brought to account, though without spelling out exactly how that would be done or by whom. The eavesdroppers of the Third Reich were not the only Germans to hear the item on the BBC. Listeners to the News for Women programme on the BBC’s German service would also have heard it at noon on 16 June. Even in Auschwitz itself, via Kanada, there was the odd illicit radio set. And so the inmates of Auschwitz heard the BBC relay the Allies’ warning to the SS not to go ahead with their plan to murder the children, women and men of the family camp.
But even before her cable had reached London, Wiskemann contacted Allen Dulles, the American spymaster in Switzerland. The two of them were often in touch, Dulles seeing the Englishwoman as a useful source of information which he tended to tease out of her with flowers, flirtatious notes and high-end meals prepared by his personal chef. ‘I have just wired this,’ she wrote, attaching the telegram with its summary of the Vrba–Wetzler Report. ‘Could you also? ’ In other words, a full week before Garrett would register Dulles’s apparent shock at reading the Auschwitz Report, seemingly for the first time, the American had, in fact, been given his own copy.
He did not do as Wiskemann had suggested and wire the news to his bosses in Washington, nor did he mark the document as extremely urgent. Instead, he passed the information to Roswell McClelland, the representative in Switzerland of a new US body, the War Refugee Board, with a cover-note that deployed a well-worn idiom of bureaucratic buck-passing: ‘Seems more in your line .’
Whether he was moved by what he read, or simply stung into action by the publicity Mantello and Garrett had begun to generate, McClelland wrote a three-page memo, summarising the report, to John Pehle, the head of the WRB, on 24 June. He accepted that there was ‘little doubt’ that Vrba and Wetzler’s word should be trusted, even if he did slightly downgrade their estimate of the dead to ‘at least 1,500,000’ . But, beyond that, McClelland was almost as lethargic as Dulles had been. He did not send the full text of the Auschwitz Report to Washington until 12 October, nearly four months after he had received it, and, even when he did, he wondered out loud if there was any point. ‘I personally feel that the handling of such material as the enclosed reports cannot be considered as a positive contribution to real relief or rescue activities,’ he wrote, in words that would have incensed Rudolf Vrba. Rudi had escaped because he believed that secrecy was the Nazis’ most lethal weapon. Yet at his desk in Geneva a senior official of the US government was musing on whether shattering that secrecy was of any value.
On 1 November, McClelland’s boss, John Pehle, decided that the Vrba–Wetzler Report ought finally to be made public, with the full text given to the press. But even that ran into resistance. The head of the Office of War Information refused to authorise publication. He argued that no one would believe the report, that it would therefore destroy the credibility of any future information issued by the US government about the war. It took Pehle until the end of the month to overcome that opposition. Meanwhile, Yank , a US Army journal which had asked the WRB for material on Nazi war crimes for an upcoming feature, declined to use the copy of the Auschwitz Report it had been given. Yank found it ‘too Semitic’ and requested a ‘less Jewish account’ .
In fact, the words of Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler would not be officially published in English and in full until a press conference in Washington on 25 November 1944, exactly seven months after the pair had completed their testimony to Krasň ansk? in that cramped room in ?ilina. It had come so late that, on that same day, the Nazis had been hard at work demolishing Crematorium II and its gas chamber, after killing the last thirteen people who would be murdered on that spot on 25 November.
Still, the Auschwitz Report was never an end in itself; its goal was not merely its own publication. Those who wrote and distributed it hoped it would stir the conscience of the world, pushing the Allies to use their military might to halt the killing. Oskar Krasň ansk? had appended an afterword to the report, calling for the Allies to destroy the Auschwitz crematoria and the approach roads. Meanwhile, one of Krasň ansk?’s colleagues in the Working Group, the orthodox rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl – incidentally, the man who produced that five-page summary that reached Zurich – further pressed the case for military action. It fell to him to translate the report into Yiddish, but he also wrote a pair of coded telegrams, sent out on 16 and 24 May, which, brimming with desperation, spelled out what was needed.