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.