Red Cross letter to McClelland/WRB Nov 1944

[Wetzelrad]

At the Kommandants office , he said .

That's not mentioned in the report translation you posted, but if that's the case it's quite strange that Rossel was unable to see that the barracks built right next to the commandant's office numbered ~28, far more than 6 or 8. Odd also that he mistook them for new buildings when all but one nearby were old. And there is a sort of outer wall that partially enclosed the camp, but if he could see that wall he definitely should have noticed that it did not enclose the side he was looking from.

I guess you're referring to his postwar interview with Lanzmann. My puzzlement only grows because in that interview he contradicts his own report by saying the barracks were wood, plus the interviewer takes issue with his attempts to identify the commandant. These incorrect details keep adding up.

I have to say I find this very confusing and would like to know what the truth of the matter of his visit is, but since you apparently have no interest I will drop it here.

[Wahrheitssucher]

The ICRC delegate was Dr Maurice Rossel, who had been based in Berlin and who also took part in the visit to Theresienstadt on 23 June 1944. He got as far as the Auschwitz I main camp on his visit there which is dated to 27 September 1944.
He never saw Birkenau, and by then the old crematorium had been converted to an air raid shelter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R ... witz_visit

Wikipedia is OBVIOUSLY NOT a credible source for anything concerning controversial or contested topics related to jews. So it is not reliable for WW2, and especially not reliable or credible for anything related to the jewish experience in eastern Europe during that world war.
I would expect anyone approaching the holocaust narrative fairly and objectively — and engaging in debate with doubters and skeptics of it — to know this obvious fact. Consequently, anyone presenting here ONLY a wikipedia link to prove a point — thereby implying that it gives credible, reliable and unbiased info — must therefore either be a deluded dimwit or a deceiver.

Plus, rather ironically, that linked wiki article on Rossel claims that Himmler actually permitted a Red Cross visit to Birkenau but it wasn’t taken up. Though the wiki article gives no verifiable reference supporting this claim.

Rossel's statement that Jews were not deported from Theresienstadt caused the ICRC to cancel a planned visit to the Theresienstadt family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, to which Heinrich Himmler had already given his permission.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R ... witz_visit

Czech historian Miroslav Kárný claimed that Rossel’s visit to Auschwitz was on the 29th September 1944.
The legally protected and compulsory pseudo-historical ‘holocaust’ narrative is that on that day “more than 1,000 Theresienstadt prisoners were gassed and cremated at Auschwitz II-Birkenau”. Yet Rossel neither saw, heard nor smelt anything confirming that narrative. According to the legally protected narrative, by being in the vicinity of Birkenau he should have been able to see smoke and even flames from its krema chimneys and smelt burning flesh.

P.S. The Red Cross itself states Rossel’s visit was on the 27th Sept.

Rossel's report on Theresienstadt was pretty misleading, …and it seems he allowed himself to be led up the garden path a lot of the time by the Germans.

Yeah, yeah! That is merely a true-believer explanation based upon a stubbornly steadfast and intransigent insistence upon cherished, quasi-religious, core beliefs regarded as sacrosanct. Or in other words the logical fallacy of ‘begging-the-question’. That is, S-C starts every discussion from a position that refuses to question certain steadfast and rigid beliefs. He then either accepts or rejects information based on whether it supports or undermines his a priori belief.

The ‘holocaust’ true-believer approach is flawed because it can never suspend belief and try-on ANY alternative explanations as to do so would be regarded as ‘blasphemous’ and an intellectual concession equivalent to ‘heresy’.

The reality being denied here by S-C is that to a trained observer (Rossel) everything did appear normal. In 1979 after he came to believe the official, consensus explanation he still retroactively was “astonished” by the evidence he saw and the lack of anyone even hinting to him of ANYTHING untoward.

Rossel says that he was — and still is — astonished by the passivity of the Jews. Nobody gave any sign that anything was wrong with their situation, not one tip-off or clue, which was quite unusual…
~ FILM ID 3251 -- Camera Rolls #11-13 -- 04:00:10 to 04:33:59
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004168

Something confirmed by another camp investigator the SS Judge Konrad Morgen. Someone who unlike Rossel had the ability to arrive unannounced and then to stay for weeks to investigate any wrong-doing.

Konrad Morgen: I was asked whether from my impressions of the concentration camps I gained the idea that they were extermination camps. I had to say that I could not get this impression. I did not mean to say that the concentration camps were sanatoria, or a paradise for the prisoners. If they had been that, my investigations would have been senseless.

To a great extent the horrible conditions at times prevailing in some concentration camps did not arise from deliberate planning, but developed from circumstances which in my opinion must be called force majeure, that is to say, evils for which the local camp leaders were not responsible. I am thinking of the outbreak of epidemics. At irregular intervals many concentration camps were visited by typhoid fever, typhus, and other sicknesses caused especially by the arrival of prisoners from the Eastern areas in the concentration camps. Although everything humanly possible was done to prevent these epidemics and to combat them, the death rate which resulted was extremely high.

Another evil which may be considered as force majeure was the fluctuating numbers of new arrivals and the insufficient billets. Many camps were overcrowded. The prisoners arrived in a weakened condition because, due to air raids, the transports were under way longer than expected.

Towards the end of the war, there was a general collapse of the transportation system. Supplies could not be carried out to the necessary extent; chemical and pharmaceutical factories had been systematically bombed, and all the necessary medicines were lacking. To top all, the evacuations from the East further burdened the camps and crowded them in an unbearable manner…

HERR PELCKMANN: That is enough on this point.

~ pg. 496, 8th August 1946. Nuremberg.

So… Herr Peckelmann didn’t appear to like hearing that, so stopped further elaboration. Hmmm? I wonder why…?

The ICRC letter to Roswell McClelland of the War Refugee Board in Switzerland indicates that the ICRC headquarters misrepresented or misinterpreted Rossel's report…

The ICRC headquarters was certainly plugged in to the receipt of the Vrba-Wetzler report and follow-ups, just like everyone else in Swizterland at the time.

Ironically, the same wikipedia article that S-C linked to says the opposite:

…Rossel's report, particularly his insistence that Jews were not deported from Theresienstadt, had the effect of diminishing the credibility of the Vrba-Wetzler Report [purportedly] written by two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler…
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R ... assessment

[Wahrheitssucher]

Perhaps the most interesting part of the letter is where the author describes the pressures they are under.

We are supplying you with this information personally and confidentially, because we obviously do not wish to publish the fact that this visit had been made. If it became known amongst the public, it might create the impression that the International Committee had means at their disposal of intervening in behalf of the detainees of this camp. Moreover, the Detaining Authorities might be tempted to assert that this visit by a delegate of the International Committee is sufficient proof that the detainees of the camp were receiving good treatment. The means available to us are unfortunately far from being adequate enough to secure improvement in the treatment of civilian prisoners at Auschwitz, or in other concentration camps.

In other words, the author did not feel it would be prudent to publically state anything positive or even neutral about the camps because it would favor the Germans. Any admission of that kind would lead inevitably to Jewish groups denouncing the Red Cross - exactly as later happened. Even informing the public that they had access to camps would mean pressure on them to do more for the Jews.

So this Red Cross author was not convinced of extermination, but he was terribly afraid of running afoul of Jewish power. It's easy to see where this would lead.

Well said.

[Wahrheitssucher]

…Rossel also remarks that the "buildings appear new" which is curious since Auschwitz I was mostly old prewar barracks, I think.

Yes, Auschwitz 1 was a pre-war barracks built to accommodate seasonal workers involved in fruit harvesting and transportation, built during the period of 1910 to 1916. I can’t remember when exactly. These original buildings were then added to later.

I did considerable primary-source investigation on this many years ago and published an article on it, complete with references, on Quora. At that time I rather naively assumed that I didn’t need to immediately keep a copy on my hard-drive as I could access it there. But Quora deleted the whole thing.
The web has since been ‘cleansed’ of sources confirming this. Grok for example didn’t know this fact and falsely said all the buildings were built as Polish army barracks and were “adapted” in 1940.

[SanityCheck]

Wikipedia is OBVIOUSLY NOT a credible source for anything concerning controversial or contested topics related to jews.

Grow up. Wiki like any other web based encyclopedia gets linked because it's convenient and it also cites at least some sources. You seem to have overlooked how my posts summarised what I read in the ICRC archival files - the wild goose chase about Waldsee, for example - which cannot be so easily linked to since they're not online. Or how I went on to look up my copy of Favez's book, which is also not so easily accessed. Forum discussions are going to be a mishmash of sources by their very nature, especially when replying quickly.

The end result is still the same: different organisations and observers producing contradictory conclusions with a whole variety of reasons why. The Polish government-in-exile, informed by the Polish underground, informed by the Auschwitz camp underground, obviously contradicts the ICRC, and they were not alone by 1944 (add in escapees reaching the Soviets, Slovakia, Hungary, and even western Europe).

Pointing to the Red Cross's neutrality, as Hoggan and Harwood did decades ago, might convince simpletons and those seeking to confirm their biases and priors, but isn't going to fool anyone else. One can just as easily point to Swiss military intelligence reports from 1944 interrogating SS deserters spilling their guts about methods of mass extermination of Jews (including knowing about gassing at Auschwitz and in great detail about gas vans) and exalt a genuinely neutral source.

[Wahrheitssucher]

Wikipedia is OBVIOUSLY NOT a credible source for anything concerning controversial or contested topics related to jews.

Grow up.
Wiki like any other web based encyclopedia gets linked because it's convenient and it also cites at least some sources.
…Forum discussions are going to be a mishmash of sources by their very nature, especially when replying quickly.

When someone is new to holocaust-revision discussions they will not be easily able to distinguish between credible explanations and/or credible source-material.
It takes a few years of reading and becoming familiar with the competing arguments to be able to form one’s own informed opinion.

My conclusion after about two decades of doing that is that, without exception, those who feel inclined to defend the official narrative in online debates are ONLY debating in order to give an impression to newbies and those who are inclined to let others think for them. Possibly also to each other. And the intended impression is that there IS an actual, credible defence against revisionist research and refutations.
This is an important point to consider if anyone wants to understand what is actually occurring here and what the motivations are behind the defender-discourse.

That understanding would explain why a University-employed academic would use a link to wikipedia as if it were a reliable source.
It is because he is NOT writing to convince those he is engaged in debate with. Instead he is writing for any undecideds or gullible true-believers who might read the discussion. THOSE are his intended audience. And it is expected that they will accept unquestioningly wikipedia as a credible source.

That would also explain why he resorted to one of the most popular and classic argument-fails: that of ad hominem. I.e. implying that pointing out Wikipedia’s infamous bias and unreliability on WW2 and controversial jewish topics, is something that only a child or juvenile would do. A peculiar response, but understandable if you realise the motivations at play.

That would also explain why almost everything else I wrote and the sources quoted was completely ignored. I.e. the intention isn’t to explore the topic together in order to increase our mutual understanding. The intention is to appear to be ‘winning’ the argument. That, I suggest, is what ALL the online holocaust-defenders are doing. It’s what Deborah Lipstadt is doing. They don’t want to fairly discuss the evidence.

That would also explain why this particular paid shoah-promoter chose this particular topic to defend. I suggest it is because of all the currently ongoing topics, this one has unequivocal, contemporary, primary-source documentation: the Red Cross and its inspection of an alleged ‘extermination camp’ that appeared to them NOT to be that.
Documentation that consequently lends considerable support to the revisionist position. Therefore it was decided to jump in with a ‘defence’. One was required to be given, in order to keep any undecided or unsure fence-sitters under the spell.

The end result is still the same: different organisations and observers producing contradictory conclusions with a whole variety of reasons why…

Pointing to the Red Cross's neutrality, as Hoggan and Harwood did decades ago, might convince simpletons and those seeking to confirm their biases and priors, but isn't going to fool anyone else.

This is bluster, presumably also aimed at the same audience: viz. any undecided lurkers and casual visitors. It isn’t an open-minded, objective, appraisal. Neither is it an open-ended, fair-minded and objective discussion of the actual evidence. It is what I referred to previously: viz. an argument from a fixed position, and one that continuously begs the question.

[Nessie]

It is odd that the letter refers to Auschwitz as "the camp". It was a complex of 40 camps. The letter even acknowledges "work outside the camp", yet it fails to reference any of the other camps. Dafties on X, who think Auschwitz was just one camp, obviously get all excited about the letter. They look so stupid when it is pointed out to them that the death camp in 1944, was Birkenau.

They are the same dafties who get all excited when they see the IRC letter listing deaths at the camps. Only 271k people died, they cry, as if over a quarter of a million people dying in only 13 camps is evidence of no Holocaust!

[SanityCheck]

Wikipedia is OBVIOUSLY NOT a credible source for anything concerning controversial or contested topics related to jews.

Grow up.
Wiki like any other web based encyclopedia gets linked because it's convenient and it also cites at least some sources.
…Forum discussions are going to be a mishmash of sources by their very nature, especially when replying quickly.

When someone is new to holocaust-revision discussions they will not be easily able to distinguish between credible explanations and/or credible source-material.
It takes a few years of reading and becoming familiar with the competing arguments to be able to form one’s own informed opinion.

And yet, you go on to say you've been at this for two decades....

My conclusion after about two decades of doing that is that, without exception, those who feel inclined to defend the official narrative in online debates are ONLY debating in order to give an impression to newbies and those who are inclined to let others think for them. Possibly also to each other. And the intended impression is that there IS an actual, credible defence against revisionist research and refutations.
This is an important point to consider if anyone wants to understand what is actually occurring here and what the motivations are behind the defender-discourse.

You're saying this on a forum with (checks) 128 members. Until the old forum was taken out in Michael Santomauro's attempted coup, it had 2000 registered members accumulated over two decades of activity, albeit most were inactive. It wasn't generally a place which tolerated criticisms of revisionism. The only other dedicated forum is RODOH, which has gone through several incarnations and which currently has 63 members, and is much less active than this one.

That understanding would explain why a University-employed academic would use a link to wikipedia as if it were a reliable source.

No, your understanding is entirely flawed. On an internet forum, Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias are good starting reference points, easily googled and quickly linked. Other posters were throwing facsimiled documents and other sources onto the collective pile, all of which would be grist to the mill for a discussion,

It is because he is NOT writing to convince those he is engaged in debate with. Instead he is writing for any undecideds or gullible true-believers who might read the discussion. THOSE are his intended audience. And it is expected that they will accept unquestioningly wikipedia as a credible source.

No, Wikipedia cites its secondary sources - with quite varying levels of quality between English, German etc Wikis, and inconsistencies between related (and hyperlinked) articles on the same theme. The citation of secondary sources and summarising of different views (where this is done) makes it a perfectly fine starting-point.

That would also explain why he resorted to one of the most popular and classic argument-fails: that of ad hominem. I.e. implying that pointing out Wikipedia’s infamous bias and unreliability on WW2 and controversial jewish topics, is something that only a child or juvenile would do. A peculiar response, but understandable if you realise the motivations at play.

No, that's your belief. There isn't some widespread notoriety around Wikipedia's accuracy on historical topics, except of course among those who badly need to delegitimise and dismiss consensus understanding. It ultimately wouldn't matter if someone cited Wikipedia, the USHMM/Yad Vashem online (unfootnoted) encyclopedias, other historical websites, the standard secondary literature or specialist works, all of these are suspect in your eyes. Whatever is cited will be attacked and dismissed, even when the web page has summarised its sources to a normal standard (i.e.: still liable to contain errors) of coherence.

Tertiary sources, which is what encyclopedias are, are quick introductions to a topic, but can contain a great deal of valuable material, especially when they cite sources. I realise that many do not know how to parse tertiary versus secondary versus primary sources since this is an issue which even university students in their final years can still misunderstand, but citing a quick reference is not a nefarious plot to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. It's citing a quick and readily available reference which in the case of Wikipedia can be followed up by looking up the secondary sources they cite.

That would also explain why almost everything else I wrote and the sources quoted was completely ignored. I.e. the intention isn’t to explore the topic together in order to increase our mutual understanding. The intention is to appear to be ‘winning’ the argument. That, I suggest, is what ALL the online holocaust-defenders are doing. It’s what Deborah Lipstadt is doing. They don’t want to fairly discuss the evidence.

No, that was because I had other things to do today, and will also be out for all of tomorrow, so neglecting to comment on every single 'point' made is not some nefarious plot.

The fact that you did go on to highlight a point made in the very Wiki page/section I linked to pretty much undermined the coherence of your attempt to poison the well of Wikipedia.

That would also explain why this particular paid shoah-promoter chose this particular topic to defend. I suggest it is because of all the currently ongoing topics, this one has unequivocal, contemporary, primary-source documentation: the Red Cross and its inspection of an alleged ‘extermination camp’ that appeared to them NOT to be that.
Documentation that consequently lends considerable support to the revisionist position. Therefore it was decided to jump in with a ‘defence’. One was required to be given, in order to keep any undecided or unsure fence-sitters under the spell.

LOL, dude, 128 members. Get over yourself.

The end result is still the same: different organisations and observers producing contradictory conclusions with a whole variety of reasons why…

Pointing to the Red Cross's neutrality, as Hoggan and Harwood did decades ago, might convince simpletons and those seeking to confirm their biases and priors, but isn't going to fool anyone else.

This is bluster, presumably also aimed at the same audience: viz. any undecided lurkers and casual visitors. It isn’t an open-minded, objective, appraisal. Neither is it an open-ended, fair-minded and objective discussion of the actual evidence. It is what I referred to previously: viz. an argument from a fixed position, and one that continuously begs the question.

No, it was a quick reminder that Hoggan, Harwood and indeed other revisionists (Butz too) fell into a similar trap with the ICRC postwar reports, misrepresenting these publications.

[SanityCheck]

Transports were far less frequent by late September 1944, and if the ICRC is correct that Rossel visited on 27 September 1944, there hadn't been a transport since September 20; the next transports arrived on September 29.

This could be a valid point, but it's very thin on evidence. We are usually told that this was the time at Auschwitz when there were mass gassings and mass cremations and the mass unburying of bodies to burn them outdoors. Your interpretation requires us to believe all of this was halted at this time. Is there any basis for that in the documents and witness reports, or is it pure speculation from a pause in transportation, probably one of many?

Regardless, that's only Rossel. The letter has it that there were no exterminations for a period of "several months", not seven days.

It doesn't matter what you believe you are 'told', it matters what is in the Auschwitz chronicle aka Kalendarium, which summarises and cites the evidence for incoming transports. The gap in late September is quite clear; there just hadn't been any transports for many days before Rossel's visit on September 27, 1944.

The reference to 'months' becomes much clearer when one considers that the Hungarian action was over by early July 1944. The ICRC via its Budapest representatives but also the Swiss based staffs who were conferring with other observers (War Refugee Board etc) in Switzerland had certainly received numerous reports about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, along with the Vrba-Wetzler and Mordowicz-Rosin reports.

From July to September 1944, there were the last remaining transports from western Europe, along with evacuation transports from labour camps in Poland, with the Lodz ghetto action in August 1944 the biggest spike. Around the time of Rossel's visit, starting up just after he visited according to the ICRC (27 September 1944), the final wave of transports from Theresienstadt arrived. The final wave of transports from Slovakia began to arrive in October 1944 and lasted until after the cessation of selections on arrival, thus the November 1944 transports were entirely registered since the Final Solution had stopped.

Remember that Belgium and France were almost entirely liberated by September 1944, that the Germans were pulling out of Greece, and were fighting heavily in the Netherlands, with very few Jews remaining to be deported from Westerbork, Haidari and the other holding camps. Romania had switched sides, the Soviets were in the eastern suburbs of Warsaw along the Vistula river, Estonia fell in September 1944 and the Germans had evacuated the remaining camps in Latvia and Lithuania. This was very much the winding-down phase of the Final Solution, which is undoubtedly why there were no more selections on arrival at Auschwitz after the end of October 1944.

So for the ICRC to think that there had been 'no further exterminations' based on a visit of a delegate to the Auschwitz main camp at the end of September 1944 meant that it had NOT been properly informed, or absorbed, news of the Lodz ghetto action nor had it fully absorbed news of the final Theresienstadt deportation wave.

This matches what I recall from when I went through the ICRC files. But it also matches a wider lack of reporting of the Lodz ghetto action in 'realtime'.

The Auschwitz camp underground was certainly reporting in great detail on activities in the summer and autumn of 1944 but these reports only went to the Krakow area, underground papers there did reprint many of them in considerable detail. Their transmission out of Poland is less clear.

From the start of August 1944, the main Polish underground centres to synthesise reports from across Poland was cut off, as the Delegatura main headquarters and related staffs were in Warsaw - the Polish uprising began in August 1944.

Contemporary Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports on the Lodz ghetto action reference transfers to camps in Germany, without mentioning the direction of all these transports via Auschwitz.

This is a good illustration of longer-range versus close-up reporting. The JTA correspondents were all in neutral countries, the ICRC was in Switzerland. News had to be transmitted from occupied Poland to be picked up by either. Local reporting and chronicling was massively more detailed and extensive than what made it out of the country with short notice. This includes the details noted down in the Sonderkommando manuscripts. The camp underground reported on the Sonderkommando uprising of October 7, 1944 (which is also noted in German documents), news of this did not reach the outside world for some time afterwards.