Maurice Rossel
Swiss physician (d. 1997)
Maurice Rossel (1917–2008) 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; as part of Nazi propaganda, 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. Later on September 1944 Rossel visited Auschwitz concentration camp and spoke to the commandant of Auschwitz I. In 1979, he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann; based on this footage, the 1997 film A Visitor from the Living was produced.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maurice Rossel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.