Maurice Rossel ( – after 1997) was a Swiss doctor and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) official during the Holocaust. He is best known for visiting Theresienstadt concentration camp on 23 June 1944; he erroneously reported that Theresienstadt was the final destination for Jewish deportees and that their lives were "almost normal". His report, which is considered "emblematic of the failure of the ICRC" during the Holocaust, undermined the credibility of the more accurate Vrba-Wetzler Report and misled the ICRC about the Final Solution. Rossel later visited Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1979, he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann; based on this footage, the 1997 film A Visitor from the Living (fr) was produced.
Early life
Information on Rossel's biography is limited. He was born in . He was born in Tramelan, a village in the French speaking part of the Canton of Bern. Until his retirement in the early 1980 decade he was a very appreciated generalist in his home village. 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. He later said that his main motivation to join the Red Cross was to avoid a posting to the Swiss border guard.
ICRC career
Between 12 April 1944 and 1 January 1945, Rossel was based in Berlin, a posting he obtained because of his fluent German. During this period, Rossel participated in seventeen missions, each time visiting several prisoner of war camps. 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. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, his visits to camps in Upper Silesia put him into contact with prisoners who were aware of the gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, but Rossel later said that he had no knowledge of that.
Theresienstadt visit
In 1943, the ICRC came under increasing pressure from Jewish organizations and the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to intervene in favor of Jews, in light of accumulating reports of the extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime. In an attempt to preserve its credibility and preeminence as a humanitarian organization, the ICRC requested to visit Theresienstadt concentration camp in November 1943. 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. It is unclear to what extent the ICRC valued making an accurate report on Theresienstadt, given that it had access to independent information confirming that prisoners were transported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The Danish government also pressured the Nazis to allow a visit, because of the Danish Jews who had been deported there in late 1943. Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto, was used as a temporary holding camp for Jews whose final destination was extermination camps, especially Auschwitz. During the camp's existence, 33,000 prisoners died of starvation and illness. The camp had been prepared for the visit by deporting 7,500 of its inhabitants to Auschwitz in order to ease overcrowding. Other prisoners had been forced to work on construction projects to superficially "beautify" the ghetto, including changing all the street names and building a fake school and other sham institutions that never operated. On the day of the visit, war veterans and other disabled Jews were forbidden from going out onto the streets.