(Minghui.org) Two prisoners escaped from Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1944. Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler hid under a pile of wooden planks and coated the area with gasoline and tobacco to mask their scent from the Nazi sniffer dogs. The Nazi guards left after three days, and the two successfully escaped. Over the next three months, 430,000 Jews from Hungary were sent to that camp, unaware that their fate was either slaughter or death in a gas chamber.

So Shocking, People Refused to Believe the Report

Two months after escaping, Vrba and Wetzler informed the Allies about what was happening at Auschwitz. The Vrba-Wetzler Report is the first document exposing the Nazi’s crimes in their concentration camps.

The document detailing the ongoing crimes at Auschwitz was sent to leaders in Slovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland, but it did not gain widespread attention. The leaders withheld the information because they found it difficult to believe. Even then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said he did not believe it.

Viewers Shocked by Scenes Inside the Camps

Camp Auschwitz was closed in January 1945. Allied military photographers captured footage of the camps immediately after liberation, which was compiled into a documentary film—Nazi Concentration Camps—condensed from 80,000 feet of film to 6,000 feet.

The film was shown at the Nuremberg Trial on November 20, 1945, to hold Nazi leaders accountable for the atrocities they committed during World War II. As the lights dimmed and the screen lit up, the audience fell silent. They saw about 200 people being rushed into a warehouse in a concentration camp near Leipzig. The SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Party soldiers) drenched the warehouse with gasoline and set it on fire. The guards used machine guns to shoot those who escaped from the warehouse.

The hour-long film showed many pale, broken, or scorched bodies. The victims were emaciated with protruding ribs and sunken eyes. Some in the court room began to sob, and one woman fainted.

When the film ended, everyone in the tribunal remained silent, including the American prosecutor Robert Jackson and Judge John Parker. When people first heard about the Vrba-Wetzler Report in the United States, they thought it was exaggerated and remained skeptical.

The moral of the story is that if people had believed the Vrba-Wetzler Report when it first came out and taken decisive actions to end Germany’s war crimes, the number of deaths in the camps might not have been so staggering.

Concentration Camps in 21st-century China

Unfortunately, history often repeats itself. There have been unofficial reports revealing the existence of, and events that occurred in, concentration camps in China. The following lists a few cases documented by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), a meditation practice persecuted in China since July 1999.

1. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were incarcerated in the Sujiatun prison camp in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. Annie (alias) used to work as a nurse in the Liaoning Thrombosis Treatment Center. Her ex-husband was a surgeon. She fled to Washington, D.C. on March 9, 2006. On April 20, 2006, Annie disclosed that her ex-husband surgically removed many Falun Gong practitioners’ kidneys, livers, and corneas that were sold for profit and transplanted. She also said that there was an incinerator in the camp to dispose of the bodies.

2. In a WOIPFG report published on March 14, 2016, an armed guard witnessed two military doctors (one with the badge number 0106069) harvesting organs from a Falun Gong practitioner on April 9, 2002. It happened in an operating room on the 15th floor of Shenyang Military Region General Hospital. The practitioner was a middle school teacher in her thirties.

3. In a report published on December 29, 2020, Lu Shuheng said that his sister-in-law, Zhou Qing, participated in the organ removal of a Falun Gong practitioner at Shanghai Armed Police Hospital. It was equivalent to torture because no anesthetic was used during the procedure.

4. A November 23, 2022, report describes what Sugawara, former leader of a Japanese criminal organization, who is now an economic commentator, witnessed at the Liver Transplant Institute of Beijing Armed Police General Hospital in 2007. He saw a young man laying on a bed. The Chinese surgeons said they had severed the tendons of a Falun Gong practitioner’s arms and legs so he couldn’t move, and intended to carve out his liver and transplant it into a waiting patient.

As cases continue to be exposed one after another, organ harvesting in China is no longer an isolated phenomenon but a systemic, government-sanctioned operation.

Intern Doctor’s Death and an Incriminating 11,000-Page Document

Dr. Luo Shuaiyu was found dead outside his dorm at Xiangya Second Hospital of Central South University in Hunan Province on May 8, 2024. He was 28. The police concluded that he had jumped off the building and committed suicide. His parents recovered data deleted from his computer and discovered information on organ trafficking and other crimes carried out by the hospital staff. The data included audio recordings and printed materials totaling 11,119 pages.

A year later, on June 11, 2025, Dr. Luo’s parents posted some documents and audio recordings on social media. These included evidence that medical practitioners falsified information, claiming the patients had terminal illnesses, to justify organ harvesting; doctors failed to take timely action in the emergency room; and they injected patients with drugs that prevented them from waking up, creating the illusion that they were brain dead, among other atrocities. These actions occurred because the hospital planned to remove and transplant the patients’ organs.

In an audio recording, Dr. Luo recounted that he was asked to pick up an organ from somewhere. When he arrived, he told the surgeon that he didn’t want the liver that had been removed. The surgeon then asked others at the scene if they could use it. There were several people from different hospitals waiting to retrieve fresh organs, some of whom were laughing during the exchange. Luo said that they were used to the situation and seemed comfortable with it.

Where Are the One Million Missing People?

Toutiao (Today’s Headlines), a Chinese news platform, runs a corporate social responsibility project called “Toutiao Alert for Missing Persons.” On February 25, 2021, the project and Zhongmin Social Help Research Center issued a joint report on missing persons in China, estimating that one million people went missing in China in 2020.

In recent years, the number of missing students has increased significantly in Hubei and Guangzhou Provinces, as well as Guangzhou City. In one of Dr. Luo’s audio recordings, an employee of Xiangya Second Hospital told him that the hospital director wanted him to find 12 organ-donor children between the ages of three and nine. In another recording, the person specified the requirements for the children’s age, sex, and number: three boys and three girls from the 3-5 age group, and three boys and three girls from the 6-9 age group. “We need their venous blood ...” said the person.

The information retrieved from Dr. Luo’s computer revealed that there is a production line running the organ harvesting industry. It also exposed how doctors lied about patients being brain dead, the existence of a black market for organs, and widespread corruption and unethical practices in the medical industry.

High-ranking Officials’ Organs

On December 11, 2022, Zhu Yongxin, a standing member of the 12th National Committee of China’s Political Consultative Conference, issued a eulogy. In it, he mourned the death of Gao Zhanxiang, deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism. Zhu wrote, “Over the years, Gao has battled his illnesses with strong willpower. Many of his organs were replaced. He even said jokingly, ‘many of the parts aren’t mine anymore.’”

The eulogy sparked heated discussion on the Internet: “If a former deputy Minister of Culture can afford to have all of his organs replaced, imagine what could be available for officials above the rank of Minister?”

In September 2019, a promotional advertisement from Beijing 301 Hospital (the General Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army) surfaced. The hospital has long been a key healthcare provider for China’s top leaders. The advertisement claimed that the average life expectancy of China’s officials was 88 in 2008, which is higher than that of Western leaders. It mentioned launching a Longevity Project for senior officials in 2005, aiming to extend their life expectancy to 150.

Massive Number of Retired Officials, Massive Demand for Organ Transplants

When the widespread organ harvesting scheme was exposed after Dr. Luo’s death, people began to wonder where the harvested organs had gone.

Someone commented online, “Live organ harvesting first targeted Falun Gong practitioners. Maybe there is a shortage of organs now. With the enormous profit margin, the reapers have extended their knives to the general public. This explains why college students go missing and young people are dying and disappearing for strange reasons.”

Another person said, “For the retired officials to live that long, wouldn’t their organs fail? After years of hard work, how could they possibly live so long and stay healthy? It terrifies me just thinking about it.”

There is a massive number of officials in China who would abuse their authority to ensure their survival. Consequently, the general public becomes the source of body parts for officials, making organ transplants easily accessible.

Imagine if the Chinese Communist Party’s atrocity of live organ harvesting was made into a documentary and shown in a courtroom in the same way Nazi Concentration Camps was 80 yeas ago. Would viewers, after seeing the surgeries, the incinerators, and the incarcerated organ donors, regret their inaction when they first learned about it?

I urge people of conscience to pay attention to this decades-long, well-concealed crime, and do your best to expose the unprecedented evil.

Reference:Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico (Penguin Publishing Group)