I have just read a interesting article from a woman who was a prisoner at Sachsenhausen as a child and who was looking for other people who might have been there as children as well.
I am looking for children-survivors, boys and girls, who were in Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg, between December 1944 and April 1945, when the camp was liberated by the Russians. We, a group of around 20 children, were living in what was called “the Revier” barracks where sick inmates where taken (possibly only women in the barrack I was staying ). Only nurses and doctors took care of us, and some people in street clothing, SS -men guarded us
Here is the part that surprised me.
The Red Cross inspected the building at least twice. We children were told to be very quiet or we would die. Another time, we were sent to a fenced-in yard—the only time we were allowed to play—while watched over by SS-men. Some of the boys found ammunition shells that were at least as long as an adult arm. I was later told by my uncle that only one area produced and used such shells, nearby Oranienburg.
When you search for information about the Red Cross inspection of the camps you will usually find information on Theresienstadt, and how it was a "model concentration camp". But here we are talking about Sachsenhausen. And it's 44-45! So Sachsenhausen already has a gas chamber at this point, in a big building with crematorium smokestacks coming out of it next to a big execution shooting pit. There is a hard labor "extermination camp" brickyard. There had already been mass executions of 10 000 Soviet POWs, experimentation, etc etc. This is a main camp at the height of the war, and here the Red Cross are visiting it multiple times and walking around inside.
I find it hard to think that the camp could be "cleaned up" and everything hidden from view. And the Red Cross investigators were being thorough with their jobs, right? I mean ... what were they doing? It must have been more than just being shown a few rooms and then saying "Let's call this a day".
I found an article that said the Red Cross didn't want to speak out about things (usually referencing the Holocaust), for fear of being denied access. But .. surely .. the whole point of having access is to see if atrocities and inhumane treatment were happening, correct?
If you actually see that .. then why remain silent in order to have the chance to see if there is any more? And if you can't find evidence of this stuff while walking around Sachsenhausen in 1945..? Well.. I just don't get it.
So ... at this point was the Red Cross aware of the reality of the concentration camps?
Ok, the first thing is that a couple of things seem off to me about this story: I skimmed through the literature that was available to me right (Benz and Distel: Der Ort des Terrors, Nicholaus Wachsmann: KL, and Dan Stone: The Liberation of the Camps) and I could find absolutely nothing about the two alleged Red Cross inspections of Sachsenhausen.
Edited: It seems Jean-Claude Favez in his book "The Red Cross and the Holocaust" does mention that the ICRC did indeed try to inspect Sachsenhausen but according to page 42 did not make it past the Kommandantur.
The Red Cross is mentioned in connected to Sachsenhausen for three reasons: Firstly, the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian Red Cross sections did send food parcels to mainly Nordic prisoners in the Sachsenhausen Camp. This is a topic that comes up a lot in prisoners' recollections of their imprisonment there since it meant that they were very well fed and for example the Soviet prisoners in the camp went to them to beg for food.
Secondly, the Swedish Red Cross did initiate the so-called White Bus action in March of 1945 during which 15.000 primarily Norwegian and Danish concentration camp prisoners were rescued from the camps, including Sachsenhausen, and transported to Sweden. This was part of Himmler's late stage plan to get in the good graces of the Western Allies in order to give himself and the SS a chance in the post-war order. Basically, the SS and the Red Cross negotiate the release of several thousand prisoners, which Himmler thought of as a gesture of good will.
Thirdly, during the evacuation of the camp and the subsequent Death March in late April 1945, workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross did distribute food and milk to the prisoners on the Death March in order to save them from starving, which in many cases it did.
In none of these cases the agents of the Red Cross did inspect the Sachsenhausen camp. It maybe be possible that they entered the Revier (sick barracks) during the White Bus Action but this was not an inspection.
When considering what the Red Cross knew and when, and how they acted, it is important to distinguish between different sections of the Red Cross. The German Red Cross (DRK) was thoroughly Nazified during the Nazi regime. From 1937 on its vice-president was Ernst-Robert Grawitz, SS member, who was later heavily involved in the Euthanasia program and human experimentation in the Concentration Camps. Another important member of the German Red Cross was Oswald Pohl, head of the WVHA (Economic and Administration Main Office of the SS) and thereby overall responsible for all Concentration Camps. Thus the German Red Cross was as an institution heavily involved in and aware of the Nazi crimes.
As for the International Committee of the Red Cross, we know they were aware of the Holocaust and what was happening at the Camps from the summer 1942 onward. We know this because in autumn 1942, the vice-president of the ICRC, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, informed the US consul in Geneva, Paul Squire about the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Aktion Reinhard camps.
The ICRC did chose to maintain a policy of what they termed "strict neutrality", not speaking out publicly against what was happening for fear of losing access to the POWs held in Germany and because they wanted to maintain a base of negotiations with the Nazi government, as Max Huber, president of the ICRC decided during the war. Especially in the later stages of the war, in December 1944 and early 1945, several rescue actions were initiated by the ICRC and various national detachments, especially the Swedes, in order to rescue Jews and others from Theresienstadt and other camps. This was possible especially because the Nazi government realized that the war was lost and Himmler was ready to negotiate with the belief he'd be able to save himself.
So, generally, it can be said that the Red Cross knew about the crimes of the Nazis but decided not to publicize them out of various institutional concerns. In that, they weren't fooled by their inspections of the camps but rather, knew well what was going on.
Sources:
Persson Sune (2000), Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses, J. Holocaust Education, Vol 9, Iss 2-3, 2000, 237-268. Also published in David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine (eds.), Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation Routledge, 2002.
Christiane Rütten: Das Rote Kreuz im Dritten Reich. Vom Versagen der Hilfe.
Gerald Steinacher: Hakenkreuz und Rotes Kreuz.
as well as the literature about the camps mentioned above.