During World War II, the Theresienstadt concentration camp was used by the Nazi SS () as a "model ghetto" for fooling Red Cross representatives about the ongoing Holocaust and the Nazi plan to murder all Jews. The Nazified German Red Cross visited the ghetto in 1943 and filed the only accurate report on the ghetto, describing overcrowding and undernourishment. In 1944, the ghetto was "beautified" in preparation for a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Danish government. The delegation visited on 23 June; ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel wrote a favorable report on the ghetto and claimed that no one was deported from Theresienstadt. In April 1945, another ICRC delegation was allowed to visit the ghetto; despite the contemporaneous liberation of other concentration camps, it continued to repeat Rossel's erroneous findings. The SS turned over the ghetto to the ICRC on 2 May, several days before the end of the war.
Background
Red Cross
During the Holocaust, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was based in neutral Switzerland. Its policy was to maintain strict neutrality and avoid interfering with Nazi racial persecution, which was viewed as a German internal matter. As early as 1933, the ICRC had received pleas to intervene in favor of concentration camp prisoners, but it was hesitant to accept German invitations to visit concentration camps. Carl Jacob Burckhardt, an ICRC official who made most of the key decisions regarding Nazi Germany, stated in a September 1935 meeting that it was "dangerous to occupy oneself" with the concentration camps; he was certain that such visits would be exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Burckhardt did eventually visit Dachau concentration camp; his main complaint was that political prisoners and criminals were not kept separate. The ICRC considered its primary focus to be prisoners of war whose countries had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, which did not cover civilians. However, as Huber emphasized in a press conference with German reporters in 1940, the ICRC's bylaws did not restrict the organization's mission to detainees covered by the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC took small scale action to help civilians from the beginning of the war in 1939, although the ICRC's leverage against the German government was limited by these detainees' lack of protection under international law.
After Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, the German Red Cross (DRK) elected to conform to the Nazi regime () rather than disband. Schutzstaffel (SS) general Ernst-Robert Grawitz became the head of the DRK in 1937; American historian Gerald Steinacher describes him as a "fanatical Nazi" and "close follower of SS leader Heinrich Himmler". Grawitz was closely involved in Aktion T4 (the murder of disabled people) and Nazi human experimentation. According to Steinacher, the appointment of Grawitz signified that the DRK "had for all practical purposes [...] turned into a National Socialist medical service unit" supporting the German war effort. Questioned by ICRC officials in the early 1930s, the DRK claimed that it had free access to concentration camps, where the inmates were treated well and enjoyed better conditions than the general civilian population. The ICRC had access to independent information describing murders in the camps. On several occasions, the DRK hindered the efforts by the ICRC to help the victims of Nazi persecution. Although , the delegate to the ICRC, has often been praised as one of the only humanitarians in the Nazified DRK, he had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1933.
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt was a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto established by the SS in November 1941 in the fortress town Terezín, located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German-occupied Czech lands). It was simultaneously a waystation to the extermination camps, and a "retirement settlement" for elderly and prominent Jews to mislead their communities about the Final Solution. The harsh conditions were deliberately engineered to cause the death of prisoners. Of the approximately 155,000 people sent to Theresienstadt before the end of the war, 35,000 died at the ghetto from hunger and disease and 83,000 perished after deportation to various ghettos, extermination camps, and other killing sites. The ghetto was run by the Council of Elders headed by the "Jewish elder", which was responsible for implementing Nazi orders.