Witold's Report

Witold's Report, also known as Pilecki's Report, was an official report of over 100 pages (in its final version) that was prepared in 1943 by Witold Pilecki, a soldier in the Polish Army and a secret agent of the Polish resistance, who entered and escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was the world's first record of a Holocaust death camp.

The report included details about the gas chambers, "selection," and the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 8000 people daily. (Note to wikipedia editor: Pilecki wrote in his report that 8000 was the projected capacity in April 1943 when Pilecki escaped - I have deleted '1000 people daily and that 30,000 people had been killed in one day' End Note) Raul Hilberg wrote that the Office of Strategic Services in London, which received the report, filed it away with a note that there was no indication as to its reliability.

Pilecki's Report supplemented the report of "the Polish major" Jerzy Tabeau, one of three reports, known jointly as the Auschwitz Protocols, that warned about the mass murder that was taking place inside the camp. The others are the 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report, written by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler in April 1944, and the four- to seven-page report from Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, who escaped from Auschwitz in May 1944. The text of the Protocols is held by the War Refugee Board at the F.D. Roosevelt Library in New York.

Background of Witold's Report
On November 9, 1939, after the defeat of the Polish Army in the Invasion of Poland, the cavalryman Witold Pilecki together with his commander Major Jan Włodarkiewicz founded the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska, TAP), one of the first underground organizations in Poland. In 1940, Pilecki presented to his superiors a plan to enter Germany's Auschwitz concentration camp, gather intelligence on the camp from the inside, and organize inmate resistance. At that time little was known about the Germans' running of the camp, and it was thought to be an internment camp or large prison rather than a death camp. His superiors approved the plan and provided him with a false identity card in the name of "Tomasz Serafiński". On September 19, 1940, he deliberately went out during a Warsaw street roundup (łapanka), and was caught by the Germans along with some 2,000 innocent civilians. After two days detention in the Light Horse Guards Barracks, where prisoners suffered beatings with rubber batons, Pilecki was sent to Auschwitz and was assigned inmate number 4859.

In Auschwitz
Inside the camp Pilecki organized the underground Union of Military Organizations (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW), which was connected with other smaller underground organizations. Pilecki planned a general uprising in Auschwitz and hoped that the Allies would drop arms or troops into the camp (most likely the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, based in Britain), and that the Home Army would organize an assault on the camp from outside. In 1943 Gestapo redoubled its efforts to ferret out ZOW members, succeeding in killing many of them. Pilecki decided to break out of the camp, with the hope of personally convincing Home Army leaders about his idea of uprising in Auschwitz. On the night of April 26/27, 1943, made a daring escape from the camp but his plan was not accepted by the Home Army as the Allies considered his reports about the Holocaust exaggerated.

Report
ZOW's intelligence network inside the camp started to send regular reports to the Home Army from October 1940. Starting in November 1940, the first information about the genocide that was occurring in the camp was sent via ZOW to Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw. From March 1941 Witold Pilecki's reports were forwarded to the Polish government in exile and through it, to the British government in London and other Allied governments. These reports informed the Allies about the Holocaust and were the principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz-Birkenau for the Western Allies.

On June 20, 1942, Ukrainian Eugeniusz Bendera and three Poles, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart made a daring escape from Auschwitz camp. Dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, fully armed and in an SS staff car they drove out the main gate in a stolen automobile, a Steyr 220 belonging to Rudolf Hoss. Jaster, a member of ZOW, carried with him a detailed report about conditions in the camp, written by Pilecki. The Germans never recaptured any of them.

After a daring escape from Auschwitz on April 27, 1943, Pilecki wrote "Raport W". The report was signed by other members of the Polish underground who worked with ZOW: Aleksander Wielopolski, Stefan Bielecki, Antoni Woźniak, Aleksander Paliński, Ferdynand Trojnicki, Eleonora Ostrowska and Stefan Miłkowski. The report included a section called "Teren S" that contained a list of ZOW members. Later, after his release from the German prisoner-of-war camp at Murnau in 1945, Pilecki prepared a version of the report that was over 100 pages long.

The first publication of Witold's Report took place in 2000, 55 years after the war.

Cultural References

 * Swedish power metal band Sabaton's song Inmate 4859 about Witold Pilecki was released in the 'Heroes' album (2014).