The International Red Cross Report
After World War 2 a report was produced by the International Red Cross on the conditions of Germany’s concentration camps which the Red Cross visited from 1941 onwards.
Here is some details of the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948. The Red Cross Report states the legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees, the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds (in German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the occupation forces". Don’t forget America put 100,000 Japanese into concentration camps after Pearl harbour because they were enemy aliens the same as Germany did to the Jews who declared war on Germany in 1933 as mentioned earlier.
By 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from August 1942, and from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps and prisons.
The Red Cross Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück, Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83).
Would the Red Cross deliver parcels to Jews if they were just gassed on entering the camps?
One of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps toward the end of the war. The Report states: "In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims”.
The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against “the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies”. By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable.
The three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report does not even mention such a thing as a gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities, suffered rigours and hardships, but its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample evidence that the gassing of the Six Million did not happen.
The Report points out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the eastern front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps.
Charles Biedermann was appointed a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1981 and appointed Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in 1985. He gave the evidence from the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the Ernst Zundel trial in 1988 when he was called as a witness by Ernst Zundel. The ICRC had official camp records of executions in the camps by hanging or shooting. These documents were not marked secret. It was suggested at the trial to Biedermann that if exterminations were going on of unregistered inmates in the camps the ICRC had many contacts in Europe to find out about it. Biedermann replied that they had always tried to do so but had never received any confirmations at the time. He agreed there was never any indication by the Red Cross from all its reports that gas chambers were being used during the war.
Biedermann agreed (under oath) that at an international conference held by the International Committee of the Camps in Vienna in 1977, the then director of the International Tracing Service, Albert de Cocatrix, gave a speech which stated that as of December 31, 1976 a total of 357,190 names of persons who died in concentration camps had been registered at the Special Registry Office. Later, Biedermann confirmed that these numbers actually came from the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross (ITS).
So according to the Red Cross, as of December 31, 1976, it was in possession of the names of 357,190 individuals who died (of all causes) in the German concentration camp system. Biedermann was also shown a large, two volume work entitled Gedenkbuch (prepared by the Federal Archive in Koblenz and published in 1962 as a gift from the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel). The book records the names of those Jews known to have died in the German concentration camp system. It contains some 129,000 names.
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