The Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Vrba-Wetzler statement, the Auschwitz Protocols, and the Auschwitz notebook, is a 32-page document about the German Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. It was written by hand and dictated in Slovak between April 25 and April 27, 1944 by Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, and was typed up in the form of a report by Dr. Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovak Judenrat, or Jewish Council, who simultaneously translated it into German.

The report represents one of the first attempts to estimate the numbers of people being killed in the camp. Copies of it are held in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in the Hudson River Valley, New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The report is often referred to as the Auschwitz Protocols, although in fact the protocols incorporated information from three reports, of which the Vrba-Wetzler report is only one.

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, who came to public attention during the Second World War when, in April 1944, he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland with the first information about the camp that the Allies regarded as credible. The 32 pages of information Vrba and his fellow escapee, Alfréd Wetzler, dictated to horrified Jewish officials in Žilina, Slovakia—in which they offered extensive detail about the mass murder taking place inside Auschwitz, including a description of the layout of the camp and the use of gas chambers—became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report.

Three weeks before Vrba escaped, German forces had invaded Hungary—an ally of Nazi Germany—and SS officer Adolf Eichmann had arrived in Budapest to oversee the deportation to Auschwitz of the country's Jewish population. Mass transports began on May 15, 1944 at a rate of 12,000 people a day; they were led to believe they were being resettled, but most were sent straight to the gas chambers. Details from the Vrba-Wetzler report alerting the world to what was happening inside the camp were broadcast in Czech and Slovak on June 15, 1944, by the BBC World Service and reported several days later by The New York Times, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations. He ordered them to be stopped on July 7, fearing he would be held personally responsible after the war; 475,000 had already been deported, but another 200,000 were probably saved.

Claude Lanzmann (born 1925) is a French filmmaker and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Lanzmann was born in Paris. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His Jewish family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed the 1960 antiwar petition Manifesto of the 121.

Lanzmann's most renowned work is the nine-and-a-half hour documentary film Shoah (1985), which is an oral history of the Holocaust, and is broadly considered to be the foremost film on the subject. Of particular note is that Shoah is made without the use of any historical footage, and only utilizes first-person testimony from Jewish, Polish, and German individuals, and contemporary footage of several Holocaust-related sites.

Lanzmann persuaded Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski to be a witness in Shoah by calling forth—once again—his historical responsibility. Simultaneously, the complete text appeared in English translation, with introductions by Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, providing multiple keys to the philosophical and linguistic preoccupations of the producers. It was also through Shoah that many viewers were first introduced to the work of American Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg.