"International Red Cross raised no objections after visit to camp"

Holocaust deniers often cite an International Red Cross visit as evidence that no mass murder was taking place in Auschwitz. They claim that the lack of this organisation’s objections to the camp supposedly proves the absence of gas chambers and genocidal activities.

The facts:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) never visited any death camps (including Auschwitz II-Birkenau). The only visitation of this sort was to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the second half of June 1944. One of the members of the delegation was an employee of the Berlin branch of the ICRC, Maurice Rossel. He failed to recognise the reality of the situation in the ghetto and his report in no way reflected the living conditions and sufferings of the Theresienstadt inmates.

On 27th September 1944, Rossel also travelled to Auschwitz. However, he was not allowed into the camp. Instead, he was received by the commandant (or a staff officer – Maurice Rossel was not sure which one of them). As he noted in his report: ‘From the talks with the commandant, conducted in the presence of ’ polite but taciturn’ officers, it could be concluded that parcels addressed to individual prisoners were delivered to them in their entirety and that trustees were assigned to each national group, including a ’Judenältester’, who could receive and freely distribute collective parcels among the prisoners, whereas any cases of trickery were severely punished.’ Rossel did not visit the part of the camp where the prisoners were, let alone Birkenau, where the gas chambers were, and therefore he had no knowledge of the living conditions for prisoners or the mass murder of people in Auschwitz.

Maurice Rossel. Source: International Committee of the Red Cross Archives.

Another example of civilian officials visiting Auschwitz was a delegation from the Reich Ministry of Justice, which visited the camp on 28th June 1944. The delegation included Director Karl Engert, Councillor Müller and Councillor Otto Gündner, as well as Kurt Giese from the Führer’s Chancery.

In addition to some facts about the size and functioning of the camp, the delegation’s protocol includes the following statements: ‘The way back led past the crematorium, next to which – it seems – corpses were also burned on pyres […] Generally, it cannot be denied that the guides tried to limit as much as possible insight into how the camp really functioned and instead strove to present to the visitors the ancillary and peripheral facilities of the camp.’