Although the Red Cross does important work, it often got it wrong in the past, and arguably in the present, when it’s about political positions. They appear to take one side—usually the side that controls the data.
One infamous example is the visit by the International Red Cross to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1944. The Nazis orchestrated a deceptive façade, presenting the camp as a model settlement to the Red Cross inspectors, who were not allowed to speak with the inmates freely. This visit resulted in a misleading report that downplayed the true nature of the camp and the Holocaust.
An inspection was demanded by the King of Denmark, following the deportation of 466 Danish Jews to Terezin in 1943.
In February 1944, the SS embarked on a “beautification” (German: Verschönerung) campaign to prepare the ghetto for the Red Cross visit. Many “prominent” prisoners and Danish Jews were re-housed in private, superior quarters. The streets were renamed and cleaned; sham shops and a school were set up; the SS encouraged the prisoners to perform an increasing number of cultural activities, which exceeded that of an ordinary town in peacetime. As part of the preparations, 7,503 people were sent to the family camp at Auschwitz in May; the transports targeted sick, elderly, and disabled people who had no place in the ideal Jewish settlement.
Maurice Rossel was a Swiss delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who visited Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in June 1944. His report on Theresienstadt has been a subject of controversy and criticism. Rossel’s report portrayed Theresienstadt as a “model ghetto” where Jews were supposedly well-treated, with adequate housing, food, and cultural activities. However, this depiction was highly misleading and failed to capture the true horrors of the Holocaust. Rossel admitted that he gave Theresienstadt a clean bill of health and would probably have done so again and that he was also given a tour of Auschwitz, which he did not realize was a death camp despite the sullen, haunted looks he received from the inmates.
Two delegates—from the International Red Cross and one from the Danish Red Cross—visited the ghetto, accompanied by Theresienstadt commandant SS First Lieutenant Karl Rahm and one of his deputies. The facility had been “cleaned up” and rearranged as a model village. Hints that all was not well included a bruise under the eye of the “mayor” of the “town,” a part played by Paul Eppstein, the Elders’ Council member representing German Jews. Despite these hints, the International Red Cross inspectors were taken in. This was in part because they expected to see ghetto conditions like those in occupied Poland with people starving in the streets and armed policemen on the perimeter.
For the Red Cross visit, even the SS Scharfuhrer [squad leader] Rudolph Haindl was nice to the children for the benefit of the camera…he posed for the camera, smiling, and not insisting that he be greeted by Jews from a distance of three steps, as he had demanded just the day before.
The visitors were suitably impressed, and the reports after the visit were positive. Pleased with their success, the Nazis decided to create a “documentary-style” film about Terezín in the summer of 1944. Kurt Gerron, an inmate who had been a well-known actor and director, was put in charge of the filming of The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, but he was not allowed to edit the film or even view the developed footage.
Two weeks after the movie was completed, he and other participants were sent to Auschwitz. Gerron was gassed soon after his arrival.
On December 19, 1996, the International Committee of the Red Cross today released copies of its World War II files, some of which provided verification that it knew of the persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps but felt powerless to speak out.
The files, 25,000 microfilmed pages, were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Red Cross said its knowledge about the treatment of Jews during World War II had been written about by Jean-Claude Favez in his book ”Une Mission Impossible.” The book was published in France in 1988 and later translated into German but never appeared in English. Some American scholars and Holocaust survivors in the United States were also aware of the Red Cross’s knowledge, but generally, it was not known more widely.
The Red Cross has long acknowledged its awareness of the treatment of Jews during World War II, maintaining that if it had disclosed what it knew, it would have lost its ability to inspect prisoner-of-war camps on both sides of the front.
No one at the museum has had the opportunity to study the material, said Radu Ioanid, the museum’s specialist on Holocaust survivors. But Mr. Ioanid said documents that he had briefly seen disclosed that the Red Cross, which is supposed to maintain neutrality, had rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary and Romania and had assisted Jews at a concentration camp in Ravensbruck, Germany.
For the most part, however, the Red Cross’s assistance came late in the war and beneficiaries were relatively few compared with the millions of people who died in the camps.
”The International Committee of the Red Cross has shared responsibility for the silence of the world community,” Georges Willemin, the organization’s archivist, said today. ”Could we have gone further? Could we have done more? I don’t know.”
The documents are in two groups, one dealing with Jewish prisoners and the other with hostages and political detainees. Mr. Willemin said both groups of files contained many first-hand accounts and reports on the persecution of Jews and political prisoners from 1939 to 1945.
Asked why it had taken more than 50 years for the organization’s information to be released, Mr. Willemin replied, ”Because it takes time to face your own history.”
Miles Lerman, chairman of the Holocaust Museum, said lives could have been saved if the Red Cross had spoken out during the war, but Mr. Lerman also cautioned against condemning the organization.
”There is no question about it,” he said. ”People, good people, decided to look the other way, including people in the Red Cross in Britain and the United States.
”Always when people speak out, lives are saved. ”I wouldn’t describe them as villains but as part of the world that found it more convenient to remain silent.”
Another scholar at the museum, Randolph L. Braham, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the City University of New York, wrote in his book, ”The Politics of Genocide” (Columbia University Press, 1994): ”The International Red Cross feared that intervention in support of the Jews might jeopardize its traditional activities on behalf of prisoners of war.”
Mr. Ioanid said, ”There is no doubt that the Red Cross let itself be used by the Nazis.”
He gave as an example the ”positive reports” that Red Cross inspectors wrote about the concentration camp at Terezin, Czechoslovakia, and said the organization had been ”clearly manipulated.”
To all outward appearances, Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt, was an unthreatening, model camp that even had its own symphony orchestra. In reality, it was a way station for Jews and other prisoners headed to the death camp at Auschwitz.
To its credit, Mr. Ioanid said, the Red Cross took 3,000 to 3,500 Jewish orphans from Romania to Palestine on ships in 1944 when the Romanians realized their German allies were going to lose the war and relaxed their anti-Jewish campaign. By then, however, half of Romania’s 760,000 Jews had already been killed.
Mr. Willemin said the Red Cross’s decision to release its wartime records ”was an important change for an organization that through its history has been inclined to protect the privacy of its records so as not to run any risk of impairing its humanitarian work and its reputation for impartiality and neutrality.”
The camp became a model city for six hours while International Red Cross delegates visited on June 23, 1944. Unfortunately, the International Red Cross seems not to have learned from the past.
Sources
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/terezin-site-deception
https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/23-june-1944-the-red-cross-visits-terezin-concentration-camp/
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-wwii-holocaust
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt-red-cross-visit
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In a 1939 letter he expressed the view ‘the primary obligation of neutral treatment as foreseen in the Geneva Convention was to the victims of war, and not to the helpers. He argued that as it was impossible to prescribe rules which were in conflict with the laws of a country, it was better to take a flexible approach than to risk the break-up of the universal Red Cross movement’.
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