Auschwitz death toll disagreements | Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

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Auschwitz death toll disagreements

It was established as a fact at the Nuremberg Trial;

"about 4,000,000 persons were exterminated at Auschwitz."

Of that four million, 3,000,000 were Jews, according to such authorities as B'nai B'rith
details

But in 1990 the Auschwitz death toll was officially lowered from 4 to 1.1 million
details

But some people, including an Auschwitz escapee, who was among the very first to
provide details of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, dispute this lower figure.

Rudolf Vrba, Auschwitz prisoner number 44070, is a Czechoslovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944, after hiding in a wood pile for four days. Along with his fellow Czechoslovakian Jew & Auschwitz escapee;
Alfréd Wetzler, they complied the Vrba-Wetzler Report.

Written, and re-written several times, the Vrba-Wetzler report was finally completed on April 27, 1944. The report, by men who had actually witnessed the 'death-factory' which was Auschwitz-Birkenau, was distributed to governments and heads of state.

Details of it was published in the June 20th, 1944 edition of the New York Times, including the line: "gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz]." article

The report includes a "careful estimate" of the number of people murdered in the gas chambers between just April 1942 and April 1944 of "1,765,000." - Which is considerably higher than the now accepted total death toll at all Auschwitz camps.

Rudolf Vrba, went on to become a professor of pharmacology & therapeutics at a Canadian university. He died in March 2006, but he never accepted the lowering of the Auschwitz death toll, insisting in May 2002 that the correct figure was 2 - 3 million.... He wrote:

"According to the Vrba-Wetzler Report, a careful estimate of the total number of people murdered in Auschwitz by gassing was 1,765,000 at the date of our escape. It was relatively very well established that after April 7, 1944 (i.e., after the Vrba-Wetzler Report was released), there were further 400,000 victims from Hungary alone; moreover transports of Jews from theTerezin and Lodz Ghettos, Greece, Berlin, Paris, Trieste, Belgium, Northern Italy, Slovakia, Poland, Holland, Vienna, Kovno and other places arrived in Auschwitz after April 7, 1944 which would bring the number of victims close to 2.5 million in total...

The estimates made by former SS-officiers in Auschwitz about the number of victims murdered there are of great interest in this connection. Hermann Langbein collected numerous statements made independently of one another, and these all point to a number of two to three million...This is in good agreement with the estimate in the Vrba-Wetzler Report."

I Escaped from Auschwitz By Rudolph Vrba

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