Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006), was a professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. In April 1944, Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler became the second and third of only five Jews to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and pass 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 in April 1944 became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. It is regarded as one of the most important documents of the 20th century, according to BC BookWorld, because it was the first detailed information about the camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible.
Although the report's release to the public was controversially delayed until after the mass transport of 437,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz had begun on May 15, 1944, it is nevertheless credited with having saved many lives. Information from the report was published on June 15, 1944 by the BBC and on June 20 by The New York Times. World leaders subsequently appealed to Hungarian leader Admiral Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations, which stopped on July 9, 1944, thereby saving up to 200,000 Jews.
The timing of the report's distribution remains a source of significant controversy. It was made available to officials in Hungary and elsewhere before the deportations to Auschwitz had begun, but was not further disseminated until weeks later. Vrba believed that more lives could have been saved if it had been publicized sooner, reasoning that, had Hungary's Jews known they were to be killed and not resettled, they might have chosen to run or fight rather than board the trains to Auschwitz. He alleged that the report was deliberately withheld by the Jewish-Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee in order not to jeopardize complex, but ultimately futile, negotiations between the committee and Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the deportations, to exchange Jewish lives for money, trucks, and other goods — the so-called "blood for trucks" proposal.
There is no consensus among historians as to the validity of Vrba's allegations, which have revealed a fissure in Holocaust historiography between "survivor discourse" and "expert discourse." Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has called Vrba "one of the Heroes of the Holocaust," but also a "bitter Auschwitz survivor,"