Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006) was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. He came to public attention in 1944 when, in April that year, he and a friend, Alfréd Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp and passed information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there. The 32 pages of information that the men dictated to h...
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Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006) was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. He came to public attention in 1944 when, in April that year, he and a friend, Alfréd Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp and passed information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there. The 32 pages of information that the men dictated to horrified Jewish officials in Slovakia became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. It was the first detailed information about the camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible.
Details from the report were broadcast on June 15, 1944 by the BBC, and on June 20 by The New York Times, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, which had been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 a day. After 475,000 had already been deported, the mass deportations were stopped on...
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