Rudolf Vrba
[back] Eye Witnesses  [back] Auschwitz-Birkenau

"I do not know. I was just an actor and I recited my text."

[Slovakian Jew Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg). Auschwitz eyewitness.]

Alfred Wetzler and “The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol”

Rudolf Vrba’s Gas Chamber Amnesia

Book by Vrba
I Cannot Forgive (later retitled I Escaped from Auschwitz)  Barricade Books, 2002

Quotes
The only two witnesses who were ever cross-examined had to admit in 1985 that their accounts were not true: Arnold Friedman confessed of never having experienced what he had claimed, and Rudolf Vrba admitted of having used poetic license to "embellish" his statements. Vrba is one of the most famous Auschwitz witnesses. However, once asked if all claims Vrba had made about Auschwitz in the famous movie Shoa were true, Vrba replied: "I do not know. I was just an actor and I recited my text." He told this with a sardonic smile to his Jewish friend Georg Klein (G. Klein, Pietà, Stockholm, p. 141). THE HOLOCAUST CONTROVERSY The Case For Open Debate An Introduction by Germar Rudolf

Witness Rudolf Vrba was internationally known. A Slovak Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz and at Birkenau, he said that he had escaped from the camp in April 1944 with Fred Wetzler. After getting back to Slovakia, he dictated a report about Auschwitz and Birkenau, and on their crematories and "gas chambers."
    With help from Jewish organizations in Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, his report reached Washington, where it served as the basis for the U.S. Government's famous "War Refugee Board Report," published in November 1944. Since then every Allied organization charged with the prosecution of "war crimes" and every Allied prosecutor in a trial of "war criminals" has had available this official version of the history of those camps.
    Vrba later became a British citizen and published his autobiography under the title of I Cannot Forgive. This book published in 1964, was actually written by Alan Bestic, who, in his preface, testified to the "considerable care [by Rudolf Vrba] for each detail" and to the "meticulous and almost fanatic respect he revealed for accuracy." On November 30, 1964, Vrba testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Then he settled in Canada and became a Canadian citizen. He has been featured in various films about Auschwitz, particularly Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Everything went well for him until the day at the Zündel trial in 1985 when he was cross-examined mercilessly. He was then shown to be an impostor. It was revealed that he had completely made up the number and location of the "gas chambers" and the crematories in his famous 1944 report. His 1964 book opened with a purported January 1943 visit by Himmler to Birkenau to inaugurate a new crematorium with "gas chamber." Actually, the last visit by Himmler to Auschwitz took place in July of 1942, and in January 1943 the first of the new crematories was still far from finished. Thanks, apparently, to some special gift of memory (that he called "special mnemonic principles" or "special mnemonical method") and to a real talent for being everywhere at once, Vrba had calculated that in the space of 25 months (April 1942 to April 1944) the Germans had "gassed" 1,765,000 Jews at Birkenau alone, including 150,000 Jews from France. But in 1978, Serge Klarsfeld, in his Memorial to the Deportation of the Jews from France, had been forced to conclude that, for the entire length of the war, the Germans had deported a total of 75,721 Jews from France to all their concentration camps. The gravest aspect of this is that the figure of 1,765,000 Jews "gassed" at Birkenau had also been used in a document (L-022) at the main Nuremberg trial. Attacked on all sides by Zündel's lawyer, the impostor had no other recourse than to invoke, in Latin, the "licentia poetarum," or "poetic license," in other words, the right to engage in fiction. His book has just been published in France (1987); this edition is presented as a book by "Rudolf Vrba with Alan Bestic." It no longer includes the enthusiastic preface by Alan Bestic, and the short introduction by Emile Copfermann notes that "with the approval of Rudolf Vrba the two appendices from the English edition have been removed." Nothing is said about the fact that those two appendices had also caused Vrba serious problems in 1985 at the Toronto trial. The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988) by ROBERT FAURISSON

In his book Pietà, Swedish Professor Georg Klein told of a conversation he had with Rudolf Vrba in 1987. Klein was a Hungarian Jew who had experienced the persecution of the Jews during the war, but he had no knowledge of mass extermination. In 1987, Klein talked to Vrba about the nine-hour film Shoa, produced by Claude Lanzmann a few years before.
    The topic of Vrba’s experiences at Auschwitz naturally came up, since Klein was a Holocaust survivor, too. Klein asked Vrba whether his colleagues knew about his experience during the war. At first, Vrba didn’t answer the question. But later, with a sarcastic smirk, he mentioned that one of his colleagues had gotten really excited upon unexpectedly seeing Vrba in Lanzmann’s film. The colleague, of course, wanted to know whether Vrba’s statements in the film were really true. Vrba’s answer was to the effect that: “I do not know. I was just an actor and I recited my text.” R: To which his colleague commented as follows: “Most extraordinary! I did not know that you were an actor. Seeing that, why was it said that the film was made without actors?” At this revelation, Klein was speechless and refrained from asking any further questions. In his book, he says he will never forget Vrba’s mocking smirk. L: In other words, Vrba isn’t just a witness using “poetic license,” he’s just a bald-faced liar.
    L: Well, Georg Klein only repeats what Vrba told him. But if Vrba was a liar, how do we know whether what he told Klein was true or not?
    R: Once a liar, always a liar…
    L: So if Claude Lanzmann gave Vrba a “script” to repeat, what does this tell us about the credibility of the other witnesses in Lanzmann’s film?
    R: Alright, now therefore to our next example of deliberate lying which I would like to mention, and that is, in particular, the greatest liar of them all – Claude Lanzmann. Perhaps you recall his strange statement that he would destroy any material or documentary proof of the existence of the gas chambers, if any such proof were ever found (see p. 179). Let us have a look at this case of apparent irrationality.
    As already mentioned, Claude Lanzmann created a monumental work with his 9½ hour film Shoah, in which he attempted to refute the revisionists. The film consists exclusively of interviews with witnesses. Some of these witnesses were former SS men. According to Lanzmann, several of these SS men only agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the interview was not to be recorded.
    He is then said to have recorded these interviews using a hidden camera. One of the SS men allegedly taken in by this trick was Franz Suchomel, said to have been active as an SS Unterscharführer in Treblinka. An analysis of Suchomel’s testimony shows that what he states cannot be true,931 but let’s leave that aside here. I would prefer to examine Lanzmann’s claim to have filmed this interview with a camera hidden in a bag. When you look at this interview, you note the following:
– Suchomel often looks directly into the camera throughout long passages;
– the camera is always correctly aimed and focused;
– when both of them look at a diagram of the camp, the diagram is held up to the camera; the camera then enlarges the pointer and follows it exactly as it moves across the diagram.
    L: But that is impossible, if the camera was hidden in a bag!
    R: Well, not unless both people knew that the camera was there.
    L: So Lanzmann is just taking the movie-goer for a ride.
Just so. But even worse: as early as 1985, in an interview, Lanzmann admitted to paying all his German witnesses the sum of 3,000 deutschmarks, after which the witnesses had to sign a pledge to keep quiet about the payments for 30 years. But money alone was not enough. To get witnesses to come forward at all, he invented a “Research Center for Contemporary History,” with fake letterheads from an “Académie de Paris” and fake identity documents in the name of “Claude-Marie Sorel,” “Doctor of Historical Scholarship.” In 2004, he even bragged about this before school children:
    “And then I paid them. No small sums, either. I paid them all, the Germans.”
    R: Let’s sum up: the “novelist” Vrba, who must have “known what was expected of him,” was given a “script” by Lanzmann, telling what to say! Question: what did the other “witnesses” receive during the making of the film Shoah? And what did the former SS men receive (perhaps in addition to a “script”)?
    Answer: large bribes to make them testify the way Lanzmann wanted them to.
    And what was the alleged purpose of the “documentary film” Shoah?
L: To tell the truth!
R: Correct. But the “truth” doesn’t need a “script,” and you don’t buy the “truth” like a whore.
L: Maybe not, but what they tell in that movie could still be true.
R: Hypothetically yes, but what is the probability of it? The actors’ credibility is so profoundly destroyed that I wouldn’t take anything for granted what they want me to believe about the Holocaust without independent corroboration. And now to my last example of lies. Sometimes it is quite simple to expose a liar. The case of Rudolf Kauer proves this. A former inmate of Auschwitz, he admitted that he lied when he accused former Auschwitz personnel of beating a Polish girl on her breasts with a bullwhip, ripping one breast off. “I lied,” he said, “That was just a yarn going about the camp. I never saw it.”  Which proves that not all of those who spread rumors and clichés as their own experience are unaware that they are untruthful. Lectures on the Holocaust by Germar Rudolf