Weissmandel, Dov

Michael Dov Weissmand(e)l (25 Oct. 1903 – 29 Nov. 1957) was a Slovakian Rabbi who was summoned to meet the Slovakian Jews Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler after their escape from Birkenau. Weissmandel was either hoodwinked by Vrba and Wetzler to believe their mendacious propaganda story about Auschwitz, or else he even helped create its contents. Once the report had been typed up, Weissmandel helped distribute it. He used this occasion to appeal to the Allies in a letter of 16 May 1944 to bomb the Auschwitz Camp, asking them why they are “silent about this slaughter, in which some six million Jews have been murdered thus far, and in which tens of thousands are now being murdered every day?” This was one day before the arrival of the first mass-deportation trains carrying Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. This letter is one of the earliest references to six million victims of the Holocaust during the final phase of the Second World War. (See Heddesheimer 2017, p. 12; Mattogno 2021, p. 221; Vrba-Lanzmann interview transcript, USHMM, RG-60.5016.)