The publication of parts of the report in June 1944 is credited with helping to persuade the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, to halt the deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz, which had been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 a day since May 1944.

Under the title "German Extermination Camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau", the Auschwitz Protocols was first published in full in English on 25 November 1944 by the Executive Office of the United States War Refugee Board.

[7] The full text of the English translation of the Protocols is in the archives of the War Refugee Board at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in New York.

In a deposition for the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and in his book I Cannot Forgive (1964), Vrba said that he and Wetzler obtained the information about the gas chambers and crematoria from the Sonderkommando Filip Müller and his colleagues, who worked there.

[a] Jean-Claude Pressac, a French specialist on the gas chambers, concluded in 1989 that, while the report was wrong on certain issues, it "has the merit of describing exactly the gassing process in type II/III Krematorien as from mid-March 1943.

Vrba alleged that lives were lost in Hungary because it was not distributed quickly enough by Jewish leaders, particularly Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee.

But it remained an "inside story", according to historian Michael Fleming, unpublished or not published prominently, as a result of anti-Semitism and the British Foreign Office's refusal to confirm the reports as genuine.

Vrba believed until the end of his life that Kastner withheld it in order not to jeopardize negotiations between the Aid and Rescue Committee and Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the transport of Jews out of Hungary.

[28] Kastner copied the German translation of the report to Géza Soós, a Hungarian Foreign Ministry official who ran a resistance group, writes Bauer.

[30] According to Bauer, Ernő Pető, a member of the Budapest Jewish Council, said he gave copies to Horthy's son; the papal nuncio Angelo Rotta; and the finance minister Lajos Reményi-Schneller.

One day in late May or early June, his boss, Dr. Zoltán Kohn, gave him a carbon copy of the report, and told him that he should tell only his closest family and friends about it.

[31] In December, Soos made a daring escape in a stolen German airplane to help the report reach Allied lines,[32] not knowing that it already happened.

[34] According to the USHMM (United States Holocaust Museum) the US War Refugee Board released the report after an unusually long delay.

"In November 1944, the WRB released a report written by escapees from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, alerting Americans to the details of Nazi mass murder using gas chambers.

[37] Braham writes that the report was taken to Switzerland by Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern, and given to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva.

[39] As a result of the Swiss press coverage, details were published in The New York Times on 4 June 1944 while World War II was still in progress.

[43][c] Vrba and Oscar Krasniansky met Vatican Swiss legate Monsignor Mario Martilotti at the Svätý Jur monastery in Bratislava on 20 June.

[47][48] On 26 June, Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva sent a telegram to England calling on the Allies to hold members of the Hungarian government personally responsible for the killings.

[50] Horthy resisted Hitler's threats, and Budapest's 200,000–260,000 Jews were temporarily spared from deportation, until the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party seized power in Hungary in a coup on 15 October 1944.

[51][52] Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz rescued tens of thousands of Jews (according to the Yad Vashem museum display, in the order of 50,000) with help of Moshe Krausz (then Director of the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Office in Budapest) and the Zionist Youth Underground.

Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder form out of tin cans labeled 'CYKLON For use against vermin', which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern.

(full text) Also see Kathryn Berman and Asaf Tal, "The Uneasy Closeness to Ourselves", interview with Götz Aly, German historian, Yad Vashem.

E. C. Daniel, "Pole Says Nazis Plan Slave Town: Reports 75,000-Acre Plot in Poland Even Contains Permanent Factories", The New York Times, 4 June 1944, 6.