Maurice Rossel
[a] His background was typical of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representatives at the time, as he was a young man, a Swiss Army officer, a doctor, and a Protestant.
Four of these missions were to camps in the Sudetenland, which, along with his good relationship with Dr. Roland Marti, the head of the Berlin Red Cross delegation, may have influenced his selection for the Theresienstadt visit, despite his inexperience.
[b] In an attempt to preserve its credibility and preeminence as a humanitarian organization, the ICRC requested to visit Theresienstadt concentration camp in November 1943.
[5] The visit was also part of a larger program of verification that packages sent by the ICRC to concentration camp prisoners were not being diverted by the German military.
[6][c] It is unclear to what extent the ICRC valued making an accurate report on Theresienstadt,[6] given that it had access to independent information confirming that prisoners were transported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
[15][12] The visitors were only allowed to speak with Danish Jews and selected representatives, including Paul Eppstein, head of the Judenrat.
[10] Driven in a limousine by an SS officer posing as his driver,[16] Eppstein was forced to describe Theresienstadt as "a normal country town" of which he was "mayor",[10][17] and to give the visitors fabricated statistical data on the camp.
[13][18] Signs that Theresienstadt was not what the SS wanted to make it seem included a bruise underneath Eppstein's eye from when he had been beaten by Karl Rahm, the commandant of the camp, a few days earlier.
[10][19] After the visit, the three foreigners were invited to dine with the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Karl Hermann Frank.
[3][27] Echoing Nazi propaganda which depicted a Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy, Rossel described the ghetto as a "communist society" and Eppstein as a "Little Stalin".
It is unclear what Rossel's true impressions of Theresienstadt were; he said that he was expected to file a factual report, not speculate about what the Nazis might be hiding from him.
[4][32] According to Czech historian Miroslav Kárný, the visit was on 29 September 1944, when more than 1,000 Theresienstadt prisoners were gassed and cremated at the nearby Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Written by two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, the latter report accurately described the fate of Jews deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz—most were murdered.
Kárný and Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka draw a direct connection between the report and the liquidation of the family camp in July, in which 6,500 people were murdered.
[i] The choice of the young and inexperienced Rossel for the Theresienstadt visit has been interpreted as indicative of his organization's indifference to the "Jewish problem".
[3][41] Pressed by Lanzmann, Rossel stated that he remembered the color of the Auschwitz commandant's eyes (blue) but nothing about Paul Eppstein.
[34] In 1997, Lanzmann contacted Rossel again for permission to use the interview in a documentary about the Red Cross visit, titled A Visitor from the Living [fr] (French: Un vivant qui passe).
