The CODOH Revisionist Forum

This is a well known document that I have been seeing on X.



For an archival source for this, please see
War Refugee Board archives (FDR Library), Box 69
"Miscellaneous Documents and Reports re Extermination Camps for Jews in Poland (2)"
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archiv ... &id=534&q=

Here's the direct link to the pdf of the folder. Go to page 41 out of 69 of the pdf.
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resou ... rb1392.pdf

The Revisionist Interpretation

The document says the Red Cross delegate went to the Auschwitz and saw "no trace of installations" for mass exterminations. This is OBVIOUSLY totally at odds with the legendary version of Auschwitz (thousands slaughtered per day).

The Apologetic Interpretations

There seem to be two main counterpoints that are offered.

1) They latch on to the phrase "no further exterminations at Auschwitz" since the way this is phrased would seem to imply that there were exterminations at some earlier point.

The obvious problem with this explanation is that Himmler is said to have stopped the exterminations in late Nov 1944 so supposedly there WERE exterminations in the months prior in 1944. So even assuming that interpretation, that still contradicts the official story. Moreover, if you read the document with some attention, we see this isolated phrase is not even talking about the Red Cross visit but some second account. It clearly says that the Red Cross delegate went to Auschwitz and found nothing. And then it says that this impression was confirmed by a SECOND report which said there had not been exterminations for at least a few months. Regarding the language, you could interpret the phrase to mean that there could have been earlier exterminations, but surely the more important point would be that exterminations were not ongoing. Nor would an observer be in a position to say what had happened earlier.

This is so typical of how they interpret documents. Ignore what it says. Ignore the context. Latch on to the one little phrase that is most convenient and run with it.

2) They say the Red Cross did not investigate Birkenau

See here, for example.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... crosscamps

https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/file ... r-1944.pdf

I will concede that it would be more damning if they had actually gone to Birkenau. But that doesn't change the fact that it's still bad for the Holocaust that the Red Cross didn't think Auschwitz was an extermination camp even in late 1944. Again, so typical of their methods. They've found something that mitigates the problem only slightly and they pretend like the problem has vanished completely when it hasn't.

Birkenau was about 3 kilometers from Auschwitz. Weren't there 10 foot tall flames coming out the chimneys day and night? How did they miss that?

Summary

This document is clearly GOOD for revisionists and BAD for Holohoax promoters. It is not consistent with Auschwitz being a huge murder factory. Had that been the case, the Red Cross would have noticed by Nov 1944.

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

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.

So that basically neutralises the significance of his visit, as it fell in between any known selections.

Rossel's report on Theresienstadt was pretty misleading, claiming that there were no onward transports, which was flat-out false, and it seems he allowed himself to be led up the garden path a lot of the time by the Germans.

The ICRC representative in Hungary, Friedrich Born, took part in the general rescue effort in Budapest along with the Swiss, Swedes, Vatican and other neutrals.

The ICRC letter to Roswell McClelland of the War Refugee Board in Switzerland indicates that the ICRC headquarters misrepresented or misinterpreted Rossel's report, seeing this as confirmation of 'a report which we had already received from other sources' that extermination had stopped 'months' ago.

In fact, the final selections and gassings took place at the end of October 1944 - the last transport to undergo selection arrived from Theresienstadt on October 30, 1944. The next big transport was from Slovakia, arriving November 3, 1944, and was not selected, so there were Slovakian Jewish children registered into the camp, as has been pointed out to correct a misunderstanding of photos of Jewish children after liberation. Those were either from Slovakia or had been Mengele twins.


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. But they also wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the 'Waldsee' deception which was used against the Hungarian Jews. There were ICRC officials trying to write to every Waldsee in Germany looking for the camp and drawing a huge blank, into the spring of 1945.

That is rather damning for revisionism since this documents yet another Nazi lie. As I keep on saying, the Nazis were the world's worst at orchestrating a believable cover-up.

SanityCheck wrote: ↑Wed Nov 13, 2024 11:28 pm 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.

So that basically neutralises the significance of his visit, as it fell in between any known selections.

You are ignoring the greater difficulty that the Red Cross doesn't seem even remotely suspicious about Auschwitz. They aren't saying "we heard a lot of serious allegations and we think they are credible and have really tried to confirm everything, but we just couldn't get access." They say point blank that it's not an extermination camp. That's a problem for you. You can still argue that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, but you have to argue that the Germans successfully kept it a secret from the Red Cross.

Regarding the Theresienstadt visit, here is what Reitlinger says (pg. 170).

M. Jacques Sabille suggests that the head of the Red Cross delegation, Dr. Juel Heningsen, was quite aware of the 'Potemkin' nature of the display, though his published report was extremely prudent; so prudent that it evoked protests from Jewish organisations throughout the world and from Geneva there came a request to the German Government that the Red Cross should send an international delegation Theresienstadt.

Jews got made because the Red Cross report was too favorable.

Archie wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 12:17 am

SanityCheck wrote: ↑Wed Nov 13, 2024 11:28 pm 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.

So that basically neutralises the significance of his visit, as it fell in between any known selections.

You are ignoring the greater difficulty that the Red Cross doesn't seem even remotely suspicious about Auschwitz. They aren't saying "we heard a lot of serious allegations and we think they are credible and have really tried to confirm everything, but we just couldn't get access." They say point blank that it's not an extermination camp. That's a problem for you. You can still argue that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, but you have to argue that the Germans successfully kept it a secret from the Red Cross.

Regarding the Theresienstadt visit, here is what Reitlinger says (pg. 170).

M. Jacques Sabille suggests that the head of the Red Cross delegation, Dr. Juel Heningsen, was quite aware of the 'Potemkin' nature of the display, though his published report was extremely prudent; so prudent that it evoked protests from Jewish organisations throughout the world and from Geneva there came a request to the German Government that the Red Cross should send an international delegation Theresienstadt.

Jews got made because the Red Cross report was too favorable.

It's quite clear that the Germans successfully prevented an ICRC delegate from wandering around Birkenau when it was working full blast.


The ICRC files show their delegates and the central office received a slew of reports of mass killings earlier in the war from their own sources, or sources independent of Allied channels, and they had the issue of how to deal with requests for information on the whereabouts of deportees, which became a big issue in 1942. The German rebuffed all demarches by saying that they would not provide information on the whereabouts of political deportees or civilians, unlike the general cooperation with the ICRC over prisoners of war. Once rebuffed, there were sharp debates internally as to whether to go public; this idea was rejected in order to preserve neutrality.

It's very much the same issue as with the Vatican, the difference being that the ICRC and its leaders were far more clear that the Germans were in fact exterminating the Jews. This is why Carl Burckhardt confirmed this with US diplomats in autumn 1942 at a crucial moment.

The letter in the OP doesn't say what you want it to say, it says they had other reports indicating 'no further exterminations at Auschwitz' were taking place. The ICRC had definitely received the same reports on Auschwitz as everyone else in mid-1944. The caution is in any case basic diplomatese.

The ICRC's knowledge of Poland was relatively limited; it seems to have only belatedly and occasionally inspected POW camps there, which would have been one source of information. Maurice Rossel was evidently a bit of a Mr Magoo who allowed himself to be led by the nose by the Germans, and likely had few opportunities to make independent enquiries.

The ICRC was fully in the loop about deportations across Europe, and knew just like the WJC and Jewish Agency in Geneva that some deportees were surfacing in Auschwitz or nearby camps in the complex or the Schmelt camps in Silesia. They were clued in on the parcels campaign just like everyone else. But like the other observers in Switzerland, they did not receive further reports really detailing what was going on at Auschwitz until 1944, i.e. Vrba-Wetzler. Such reports went from Poland to London in 1943-early 1944, with a few going via Istanbul or reaching Palestine through the Balkan route, and some heading east to the Soviets.

In 1944, further reports of Auschwitz fugitives reached Budapest, but this followed many other reports on the progress of deportations in the Hungarian provinces (which are also in the WRB files and found widely elsewhere) which were clear about the destination. These reports only reinforced the general wave of publicity (which was still inside-page) for the Hungarian Action, which was all over the Swiss press and saturating everybody in Switzerland in the summer of 1944.

ICRC files are chock full of correspondence about Hungary, and their delegates in Budapest were talking about the deportees being gassed in Poland by the end of May 1944, i.e. *before* Vrba-Wetzler fully broke as a story/source, based on Hungarian as well as Hungarian Jewish sources.

The Red Cross was Mr. Magoo. And the Vatican was Mr. Magoo. And the US State Department was Mr. Magoo. And the British Foreign Office was Mr. Magoo. And the New York Times. At some point we have to conclude that there wasn't anything to see.

The flaw with most of the wartime knowledge literature is that they equate receiving a "report," even an absurd one, with having "knowledge" about "the Holocaust" even when it's clear the entities in question didn't take the "reports" at face value.

Here's a translated version of the actual Red Cross visit, with me bolding sections that may be relevant.

https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/file ... r-1944.pdf

ICRC Report No. PP25.D.1

Regarding: Visit to K.Z. Auschwitz

In accordance with Mr. Schwarzenberg's wishes, we visited Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, and finally Auschwitz.

For this last camp, we took advantage of a trip to Teschen, so the detour was not very significant.

All along the roads, or more accurately the Polish tracks, that lead from Teschen to Auschwitz, we encountered groups of men and women, surrounded by SS, wearing the striped uniform of the K.Z. and forming small Kommandos. These Kommandos work either in agriculture or in the mines.

These people, despite working in the open air, all have an ashen, pallid complexion. They all march in step and in rows of four; the guards, rifles under their arms, are SS from the Totenkopf Division. We will not try to describe the "atmosphere"; everyone can easily imagine these columns of convicts where there are no longer individuals, only numbers. Each internee in K.Z., man or woman, is dressed in fabric with large faded blue and gray stripes. The number is marked on the chest and left arm. Women wear a smock in this fabric, men wear jackets and pants. Each wears a beret-like cap. When a group passes in front of an SS black flag, an officer or a guard, the internees remove their berets with a very quick mechanical gesture and together put them back on with frightening synchronization.

All these shaved heads are remarkably similar from a distance. Seen up close, bareheaded or with the beret straight on their foreheads, their thin and tired faces show remarkable intelligence. Without moving their heads, their eyes examine us with curiosity.

We finally arrive at Auschwitz and after having the necessary patience, we are introduced inside the K.Z. Of the camp itself, we only see 6 or 8 very large red brick barracks. These buildings appear new, all windows are fitted with bars, the camp is surrounded by a very high concrete wall topped with barbed wire.

The discussions with the commandant, like at Oranienburg and Ravensbrück, show the officers to be both friendly and reticent. Each word is well calculated and one senses the [reluctance] to give the slightest information.

1. The distributions of shipments made by the Committee appear to be regulated and even governed by a general order valid for all K.Z.

2. The commandant tells us that packages personally addressed to a Schutzhäftling are always delivered.

3. There exist men of confidence for each nationality (French, Belgian, no other nationality cited, but certainly several others).

4. There exists a Judenälteste responsible for the approximately 3,000 Jews.

5. The men of confidence and the Judenälteste can receive collective shipments (these shipments are freely distributed by them). Personal packages arriving for someone unknown to the camp are given to the man of confidence of the nationality in question.

6. The distribution of shipments made by the Committee appears certain. We have no proof, but our impression is that the commandant speaks truthfully when he states that these distributions are made regularly. A very strict discipline prevents exchanges - if it happens that internees of one nationality who have not received shipments from Geneva are found in possession of one or another article sent by the Committee. To prevent this, the commandant has ordered that all packages must be consumed immediately upon distribution. The commandant seemed satisfied with this order and asked us if it was also our intention that packages sent to one nationality should be strictly reserved for that nationality. We responded affirmatively while thanking the commandant, emphasizing however the humanitarian character of these shipments and that we would not consider it serious if part of the packages were given to other internees. Indeed, control through segregation is not entirely intelligent - immediate consumption can transform into a new form of refined torture. It might be good to send a letter from Geneva on this subject, specifying the position...

We hope to soon be able to provide you with names, first names, and numbers of Schutzhäftlinge detained at Auschwitz as well as their nationality. Indeed, a Kommando of British POWs works in a mine at Auschwitz in contact with these people. We have asked the main man of confidence at Teschen to do his best to obtain all useful information from the man of confidence of the Auschwitz Kommando.

Spontaneously, the main British man of confidence at Teschen asked us if we were aware of the "shower room". There are rumors indeed that there exists in the K.Z. a very modern shower room where detainees would be gassed in series. The British man of confidence, through his Auschwitz Kommando, tried to obtain confirmation of this fact. It was impossible to prove anything. The Schutzhäftlinge themselves did not speak of it.

Once again, leaving Auschwitz, we have the impression that the mystery remains well guarded. We take away however the certainty that shipments should be made, in the largest possible quantity and as quickly as possible. Once again, let us say that we believe that what is sent is delivered in full to the detainees.

Dr. Rossel
Delegate of the ICRC

It's clear they weren't invited in to do a thorough or even limited inspection, so what's the point of this? Your expectation is, if there was indeed a top-secret mass gassing operation ongoing, the Red Cross would get confirmation of this. But why?

This document refutes thoroughly refutes your notion that the Red Cross "didn't think Auschwitz was an extermination camp even in late 1944"

I'll quote from the primary source "Once again, leaving Auschwitz, we have the impression that the mystery remains well guarded."

Archie wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 2:49 am The Red Cross was Mr. Magoo. And the Vatican was Mr. Magoo. And the US State Department was Mr. Magoo. And the British Foreign Office was Mr. Magoo. And the New York Times. At some point we have to conclude that there wasn't anything to see.

The flaw with most of the wartime knowledge literature is that they equate receiving a "report," even an absurd one, with having "knowledge" about "the Holocaust" even when it's clear the entities in question didn't take the "reports" at face value.

No, the ICRC received plenty of reports of extermination and gassing, and evidently believed them. I noted one example from the delegate in Budapest who was replaced in mid-May 1944 by a German speaker (a better choice now the Germans had occupied the country) who came back having heard from Hungarians as well as Hungarian Jewish leaders in May 1944 that deportees to Poland were being gassed.

Rossel was Mr Magoo, but the Magoo-like aspects were in part down to being a neutral and not wishing to offend the Germans. The ICRC as an institution emphasised its neutrality, and could come across as terrifyingly disengaged as a result, a point made several times in Jean-Claude Favez's book, which I looked at again last night after this came up.

The Vatican's secretary of state acted in a similar way, because of the imperative of neutrality. How the Vatican reacted is secondary to the significance of reports from nuncios but especially the cardinals, bishops and affiliated churches out in the occupied territories, as well as other Catholic priests who passed information on.

The metropolitan of Lviv, the head of the affiliated Uniate Church, Sheptytsky, wrote to the Vatican in 1942 speaking of hundreds of thousands of Jews killed. The Italian military chaplain Pirro Scavizzi directly informed Pius XII and his contemporary reports survive. They came through internal channels and are on a par with news spreading back to Germany for that reason, and on a par with the notes made by Axis diplomats likewise confirming a general policy of extermination. This could be inferred just from reports from the occupied Soviet Union of mass shootings.

The Vatican also received reports via the British and Polish ambassadors to the Holy See, and was further asked questions by Roosevelt's delegate Myron C Taylor in autumn 1942, to see if they could confirm reports that had already reached the US. The Vatican declined to confirm the reports based on its neutrality and stuck to that line through 1942-3. But the internal memos indicate that they had received accurate summaries of Polish government-in-exile reports in spring 1943 with Treblinka identified using gas (not steam). In 1944 the arrival of the Vrba-Wetzler report was delayed but this did not stop the Vatican after the fall of Rome from joining in the pressure on Horthy to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews.

Neutrals like the Vatican, ICRC, Switzerland and Sweden were at pains to act neutrally so as not to alienate the Germans. The Swedes were the first to really 'act' by receiving Jewish refugees from Norway and Denmark, but all the neutrals were in on the rescue efforts in Hungary in 1944.

The US State Department and British Foreign Office both pursued foreign policies that did not recognise Jews as a national group and which strongly opposed Zionist arguments over opening up Palestine following the 1939 White Paper. This can be most clearly seen in the kicking of the rescue agitation into touch with the Bermuda conference, and with minor shenanigans that led to the eventual formation of the War Refugee Board. The diplomats also tended to oppose expansive prosecutions of war crimes thus hobbling the UN War Crimes Commission and restricting the mandate to crimes against Allied nationals, i.e. crimes against German and Austrian Jews were not being seriously considered for Allied war crimes prosecutions.

Despite this, in autumn 1942 enough reports accumulated to overrule the diplomats and make the UN declaration on the extermination of the Jews of December 17, 1942 possible. The State Department watered down the language to 'be on the safe side', but this represents typical caution and also makes the wailing from revisionists less plausible.

Allied diplomacy had to contend with multiple governments-in-exile who were keen to publicise the postwar punishment of war criminals already in 1941-2, cueing off the increased rate of general reprisals in late 1941. Thus the St James Palace meeting and declaration. The WJC was miffed not to be included, but its own diplomacy to achieve recognition of Jews as a nationality, co-combatant, co-plaintiff consistently failed all the way through to 1945.

The governments-in-exile were also major sources for publicity in 1942 and beyond. An analysis of wartime public reports makes this clear, they were at least as significant as Jewish organisations, with some like Ignacy Schwarzbart straddling the roles. But unless Schwarzbart received something via underground channels from the Bund in Poland, he was dependent on Polish government-in-exile reports.


The literature on wartime knowledge has long distinguished between knowledge and comprehension or belief. It is certainly very easy to overinterpret the transmission of reports as meaning instant acceptance, when this is demonstrably not the case. Hindsight also reveals many more reports travelling in different directions which cannot have all been known to any one person or institution or outpost/embassy etc.

Both the neutrals and Allies had strong interests in downplaying the reports, the neutrals to remain neutral and the western Allies to maintain their basic foreign policy positions especially regarding Palestine. This also extended by 1943 to needing to rein in the Polish government-in-exile and not jeopardise the Grand Alliance, which meant disregarding Polish claims to eastern Poland against the Soviet assertion of the Curzon Line and 1939-41 borders. The post-Katyn breaking off of Soviet-Polish relations really did not help, either. This is one possible reason why various reports received in 1943 were not given the same publicity as the late 1942 reports, not because they were as such disbelieved, but because they were arriving in an awkward time.

But this did not stop a general groundswell of publicised reports, which in turn became known to the RSHA and German Foreign Office. In 1943-44 the Welt-Dienst was translating articles from the New York Yiddish newspaper Forwerts, whose contents are usually recognisable as Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports or ones that had reached Sweden, Switzerland or the Balkans then Palestine from fugitives. This was the hidden flood of reporting that grew in 1943-45. The Jewish Agency circulated bulletins reproducing such accounts and these also show a publicising of other known fugitive reports.