The Auschwitz visit, 29 September 1944

Auschwitz, like other camps except Therezienstadt, was off-limits to the ICRC. In november 1942, Roland Marti had been denied the authorisation to visit it. On 23 June 1944, the very day when Rossel was being shown an idyllic Theresienstadt, Schwarzenberg was discussing the Vrba-Wetzler report, a major eyewitness account of the Auschwitz camp, with representatives of Jewish organizations. There are hints that plans were made for an official ICRC visit in Auschwitz but nothing precise is known.

However, Maurice Rossel did visit Auschwitz on 29 September 1944, and most what is known about this comes from Rossel's report of this visit and from his interview by Claude Lanzmann. The title of the movie, Un vivant qui passe, is taken from a line by Rossel describing himself during his brief stay in Auschwitz, a living person passing among dying ones.

In the interview, Rossel claims that he and other delegates had a received the unofficial and "totally illegal" mission from the ICRC to go to concentration camp Kommandanturs and collect information about the situation there. Rossels insists that the word "extermination" was never mentioned to him. Late June 1944, Rossel had been visiting (officially) a POW camp in Cieszyn (Silesia) and decided to pay a visit to Auschwitz, about 60 km away. The Wehrmacht officer who accompanied him was forced to leave at a SS checkpoint. Rossel, after showing his ICRC credentials, was allowed to drive up to the camp entrance of Auschwitz I (not Auschwitz II - Birkenau), where he asked to see the camp's commander, claiming that he came to discuss supplies for the internees. He was received in the Kommandantur and had a 30-45 minutes and amicable chat with the commander, who served him coffee and told him about doing bobsleigh in the Alps. Rossel was denied a visit to the infirmary, and the commander and him did not discuss anything important, though the commander accepted that parcels would be sent to the camp. Rossel acknowledged seeing nothing in the camp, except wooden barracks and lines of 400-500 "living skeletons" who looked at him with "intense eyes". He did not smell anything either.

Rossel visited other Kommandaturs in the same period, and was able to collect small but important tidbits of information. Favez:

On the same trip Rossel went to Oranienburg and Ravensbrück too where, as at Auschwitz, though he never got beyond the offices of the Kommandantur, he did manage to bring back a number of details about the organisation, detainee population, daily routine and corporal punishment in the camps. He also brought back information about the Auschwitz gas chambers which shows how widely news spread within the concentration camp system: at Teschen [Cieszyn] a British officer asked if Rossel was aware of the rumours about an ultramodern ‘shower room’ in which detainees where gassed in batches, and at Ravensbrück Jewish women who had been lucky enough to have been allowed to leave Auschwitz (which they described as a ‘90 per cent extermination camp’) reported that prisoners there, nearly all of whom were Jews, had their number tattooed in blue on their arm, and that many — the sick, the old, and children in particular — were left in a special block to starve before being taken away in groups to be gassed. One of Rossel’s Ravensbrück informants spoke of Jewish children being sterilised, but there was no clear proof of this; Marti on the other hand had as early as June drawn attention in confidence to operations carried out on Polish women, and in November Mme Frick [Marguerite Frick-Cramer, a long-time ICRC officer] was so upset about medical experiments upon prisoners that she wrote ‘if nothing can be done, the wretched victims should be sent the means of committing suicide; this would perhaps be more humane than giving them food’.

Rossel's report on his Auschwitz visit does not contain meaningful information. He repeats the rumour that was told to him in Cieszyn about possible gas chambers. He concluded:

Once again, as we left Auschwitz, we had the impression that the mystery was still well guarded. However, we were certain that shipments would have to be made, as many as possible and as quickly as possible.

Like his Theresienbadt report, Rossel's Auschwitz report was not disseminated, and it was barely acknowledged. In internal ICRC documents, the visit was called a "visit" (with quotes) or an "aborted visit". The letter of Schwartzenberg of 22 November 1944 to Rosswell McClelland, of the War Refugee Board, alludes to Rossel's visit, telling McClelland that the delegate did not see "trace of installations for exterminating civilian prisoners", which, according to Schwartzenberg, corroborated other sources claiming that "for several months past there had been no further exterminations at Auschwitz." (the mass murder by gas actually ended early November). To some extent, this contradicted Rossel's own findings in the other camps, though he had only heard about the gas chambers.

A paper published in 1992 by two Holocaust survivors, Maurice Cling and Charles Baron, raised an alternative hypothesis. The authors found several testimonies alleging that ICRC representatives were actually seen in the camp - not just in the Kommandatur. This visit would have been longer than the one reported by Rossel, and kept secret because of the unbearable weight of the discoveries. According to some of these testimonies, it would have been impossible for the ICRC not to notice the smoke from the crematorium, unless they refused to do so. This would also explain Schwartzenberg's letter above about the absence of exterminating facilities, since Rossel was not in position to make such claim (though he actually did in his report). Basically, the story was that ICRC delegates visited the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, saw the crematorium or other extermination facilities, and that the ICRC killed their report. Cahen does not find Cling and Baron's theory convincing though. He attributes the testimonies, all collected decades after the fact, to a phenomenon of cross-contamination of memories, noting the similarities between the narratives set in Auschwitz and other set in other camps where ICRC delegates never set foot. Also, some details given in those testimonies could have simpler explanations.

For Cahen, what is notable is that the ICRC absolutely wanted to avoid to make public the idea that it was allowed to visit the camps. Rossel's visit had consisted in a brief and inconsequential chat with a SS officer. He seems to have been able to approach detainees during his other visits at the Ravensbrück and Orianenburg Kommandanturs, but those visits were not comparable to those made by the ICRC in POW camps, where delegates were able to actually go into camp facilities to see if they respected the Geneva Conventions. The Nazis, of course, would have never allowed a proper inspection in the concentration camps and death camps, and the only one they authorized, in Theresienstadt, was completely staged. Once again, the ICRC leadership feared jeopardizing their humanitarian activities - making sure that millions of POWs were treated properly - if it became known that were sending their delegates on "illegal" information gathering missions.

To return to the original question, it is true that ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel visited stayed in Auschwitz in September 1944. However, it was not an official visit meant to examine the situation in the camp like those done routinely by the ICRC in POW camps. Rossel chatted with the commander for less than an hour and did not tour the camp itself. He was denied the possibility to see the infirmary. There is no reason to believe that he saw anything else than lines of starving prisoners going to work.

The question of the response the ICRC to the massacres of Jews and other populations during the war remains open. In 2007, the ICRC Assembly recognized officially the failure of the organization:

The ICRC did not do everything in its power to put an end to the persecutions and help the victims. The organization remained a prisoner of its traditional procedures and of the overly narrow legal framework in which it operated. Having abandoned the idea of public condemnation – convinced as it was that this would not change the course of events, fearing that it would jeopardize the activities it was carrying out for other victims, especially prisoners of war, and not wishing to exacerbate Switzerland's relations with the belligerent States – the ICRC essentially relied on its delegates to make confidential representations to the authorities of the Reich or its satellites. However, these delegates had no access to the corridors of power. Only towards the end of the war did the ICRC's leaders make high-level representations to certain leaders of the Reich and its satellites. [...]

Having confined itself to two options – that of the very limited aid operation it was carrying out for the victims of Nazi persecution, with derisory results in regard to the situation of the victims and no impact on the genocide, and that of public condemnation, an ultimate weapon that the ICRC felt it could not use, the organization was unable – until the last months of the war – to make determined, sustained, high-level diplomatic representations to the leaders of the Reich or to those of its allies or satellites, not all of whom shared the destructive fanaticism of Nazi dignitaries.