Theresienstadt Was a Model Camp

Theresienstadt was a deception, run with full deliberate knowledge by the SS as a propaganda exercise to mislead the Red Cross and through them the wider world. The cultural life, the schools, the Jewish self-administration and the Red Cross visit were real in the sense that they happened; they were not real in the sense the deniers want them to be. The camp was a way-station to Auschwitz. Approximately 141,000 Jews passed through Theresienstadt; approximately 88,000 were deported onwards, the vast majority to be killed at Auschwitz; approximately 33,000 died at Theresienstadt itself, mostly of disease and starvation; approximately 17,000 were liberated alive in May 1945. The “model camp” was a stage set, prepared by the SS and the deceived Jewish leadership, to convince visitors that the regime was treating Jews humanely while the killing operation continued elsewhere.

What Theresienstadt actually was

Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech) was a former Habsburg garrison town in occupied Czechoslovakia that the SS converted into a Jewish ghetto in November 1941. Its initial purpose was to hold elderly German and Austrian Jews who could not plausibly be passed off as being “resettled in the East” for labour, prominent Jews whose disappearance might be noticed (particularly those decorated for service in the First World War, plus various titled families and famous figures), and Czech Jews from the Protectorate. The SS allowed a Jewish self-administration (the Ältestenrat or Council of Elders) to run the day-to-day affairs of the camp under SS oversight. The Jewish self-administration ran kitchens, schools, hospitals, cultural events, religious services and a complex internal economy of exchanged services and rationed goods. The cultural life included regular concerts, theatrical performances (including the children’s opera Brundibár, performed many times), lectures, exhibitions and a flourishing literary culture.

None of this contradicted the killing function of the camp. The cultural life happened in barracks of severe overcrowding, on starvation rations, in conditions where typhus and other diseases were endemic, and in the constant knowledge that periodic transports east meant death. Approximately one-third of the people who arrived died at Theresienstadt itself; another two-thirds were deported, almost all to Auschwitz. The cultural production of the camp is among the most remarkable bodies of art created in extreme conditions in modern history; it is also unambiguously the cultural production of a community that knew it was being processed for killing.

The Red Cross visit of 23 June 1944

The Red Cross visit was the centrepiece of the deception. In late 1943 the Danish Red Cross had requested permission to inspect the conditions of the Danish Jews who had been deported to Theresienstadt in October 1943 (the small number of Danish Jews not rescued in the Bornholm boat lift). The SS, after considerable internal debate, agreed to allow an inspection but used the lead time to “beautify” (verschönern) the camp. The beautification programme, run from December 1943 to June 1944, included: painting the buildings, planting flower beds, building a children’s playground and a sports ground, cleaning the streets, opening a bank, a café, shops and a music pavilion, and rehearsing the inhabitants in scripted answers to expected questions. The SS deported approximately 7,500 Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in the four weeks before the visit specifically to reduce the visible overcrowding.

The Red Cross delegation that arrived on 23 June 1944 consisted of three people: Dr Maurice Rossel of the International Committee of the Red Cross and two representatives of the Danish Red Cross (Dr Frants Hvass and Eigil Juel Henningsen). They were taken on a guided tour along a pre-planned route, met with pre-selected residents, and saw the beautified camp. They did not visit the barracks where the actual conditions remained. Rossel filed a report (the so-called Rossel Report, 23 June 1944) that broadly confirmed the camp’s conditions as adequate. The report was a humiliating success for the SS deception. Rossel later acknowledged, in interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, that he had been deceived; that the conditions he had been shown were not the conditions of the camp; and that he should have insisted on visiting the unstaged areas. The deception worked because the visitors had no power to deviate from the prepared tour.

The propaganda film

The SS commissioned a propaganda film immediately after the Red Cross visit. Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area), often called The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, was filmed in August and September 1944 by the German director Kurt Gerron, himself a Jewish prisoner at the camp. The film showed the same beautified camp the Red Cross had seen, with shots of cultural events, schools, sporting activities and apparently contented inhabitants. Gerron and almost all of the film’s Jewish participants were deported to Auschwitz on 28 October 1944, immediately after filming was complete; almost all were killed on arrival. The film was finished without them, was screened to selected Red Cross officials in early 1945, and was largely not released for general propaganda purposes because the war was clearly being lost. Surviving fragments of the film exist and are held at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and at Yad Vashem.

The deniers cite the film as evidence that the camp was as it appeared. The SS director, the Jewish prisoners forced to participate, and the Red Cross officials shown the film all knew the film was a deception. Gerron’s deportation immediately after filming, on a transport that took most of the cast to their deaths, is the single most concise refutation of the denier reading. The film’s existence proves the SS’s determination to maintain the deception; it does not prove the deception’s contents.

What was happening in parallel

While the beautification was being prepared, while the Red Cross was visiting, while the film was being shot, the killing at Auschwitz was at its operational peak. The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 brought approximately 437,000 people to Auschwitz; the vast majority were killed on arrival. In the period of the Theresienstadt deception, between roughly January and October 1944, approximately one million people were killed at Auschwitz alone, with thousands more across the other operating killing facilities. The SS was running the deception at Theresienstadt to mask the killing at Auschwitz, while continuing to deport the Theresienstadt residents themselves to Auschwitz in regular transports. The two operations were the same operation seen from different sides.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it takes the deception the SS designed and presents it as if it were the truth the deception was designed to obscure. Theresienstadt was operated as a propaganda showpiece in order to convince visitors of exactly the proposition the deniers wish to advance: that the camps were not what they were. The Red Cross was deceived; some of its officials later acknowledged the deception openly. The film was a fabrication staged with prisoners who were killed immediately afterwards. The cultural life the deniers cite was real, was extraordinary, and was the work of people who knew they were going to die and produced art and music in the time they had left. To accept the denier reading is to accept the SS deception eighty years after the fact, having had eighty years of documentary evidence that the deception was a deception.

What did the Red Cross delegation actually see? Where can the prepared tour route be read? What happened to the cast of the propaganda film?

See also

• The Red Cross Reported Only 300000 Deaths
• The First World War Connection
• The Hungarian Deportations 1944
• Yad Vashem Jerusalem

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Sources

• H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941 to 1945: The Face of a Coerced Community, Cambridge University Press, 2017 (English edition; original German 1955), the standard scholarly history by a survivor
• Maurice Rossel, “Visite au Ghetto-Camp de Terezin”, report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 23 June 1944, ICRC Archives, Geneva
• Maurice Rossel, recorded interview in Claude Lanzmann’s A Visitor from the Living (Un Vivant qui Passe), 1997, in which Rossel discusses the deception
• Kurt Gerron (director), Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, fragments held at Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin, and Yad Vashem
• Karel Margry, “Theresienstadt (1944 to 1945): The Nazi Propaganda Film Depicting the Concentration Camp as Paradise”, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12:2, 1992
• Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, Oxford University Press, 2020
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007, on the Theresienstadt deception in the wider operational context
• Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust, English edition translated by John and Beryl Fletcher, Cambridge University Press, 1999, on the Red Cross’s wartime engagement with Theresienstadt and its post-war acknowledgement of the deception
• Vojtěch Blodig, Terezín in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question 1941 to 1945, Oswald, 2003
• Yad Vashem, “Theresienstadt”, https://www.yadvashem.org
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Theresienstadt” and “Theresienstadt: Red Cross Visit”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org