Harwood could make this claim only by ignoring key sections of the ICRC report. The Red Cross was absolutely specific about the Jews’ fate. It made reference to the Nazi attempt to annihilate them, observing that under Nazi rule Jews had been transformed into “outcasts condemned by rigid racial legislation to suffer tyranny, persecution and systematic extermination.”{52} The ICRC, which was empowered to exercise supervision over other prisoners and POWs, admitted it could not do this for the Jews. “No kind of protection shielded them; being neither POW nor civilian internees, they formed a separate category without the benefit of any Convention.” Most important, the ICRC specifically delineated how systematic annihilation was carried out: “They were penned into concentration camps and ghettos, recruited for forced labour, subjected to grave brutalities and sent to death camps without anyone being allowed to intervene in those matters.”{53} These were not the ICRC’s only references to death camps or systematic annihilation. Among the other references were the following:
During the period in September 1940, when the “Iron Guard” [Romania] supported by the Gestapo and the German SS had seized power, the Jews had been subjected to persecution and deportation to death camps.{54}
In Germany and her satellite countries, the lot of the civilians belonging to this group was by far the worst. Subjected as they were to a discriminatory regime, which aimed more or less openly at their extermination, they were unable to procure the necessities of life.{55}
Harwood contended that the report made “nonsense” of the allegation that there were “gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities.” He substantiated this assertion by quoting a passage from the report that depicted how ICRC officials inspected baths and showers in the camps. When they found problems they acted swiftly “to have fixtures made less primitive and to have them repaired or enlarged.”{56} This, Harwood argued, demonstrated conclusively that showers functioned as showers, however primitive, and not as killing apparatus. The problem with Harwood’s choice of this citation, which he quoted correctly, is that the passage had nothing to do with German concentration camps: It referred to Allied camps for civilian internees in Egypt.{57}
Harwood repeatedly asserted that from August 1942 the ICRC was allowed to visit and distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany, and that from February 1943 this privilege was extended to all other camps and prisons.{58} Harwood claimed that this information was to be found on page 78 of the report’s third volume. The page did refer to “major concentration camps” in Germany but indicated that they included only Dachau and Oranienburg. The concession that was extended in 1943 included all other camps and prisons in Germany.{59} This meant that numerous camps outside Germany were not included. Moreover, the Red Cross acknowledged that it was limited to giving parcels only to deported aliens for whom it had addresses, and that many inmates, among them the vast majority of Jews, were not allowed to receive food parcels at all.
In yet another attempt to misrepresent the ICRC’s findings, Harwood contended that the relief organization had documented the fact that a significant proportion of European Jews had not been interned in camps “but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population.” This, he declared, conflicted directly with Jewish claims that the “extermination programme” was conducted with great “thoroughness.” In this instance Harwood neglected to quote the opening paragraph of the chapter on which he based these assertions. It completely contradicted his claims regarding the Jews’ fate:
No other section of the population endured such humiliation, privation and suffering. Deprived of all treaty protection, persecuted in accordance with National Socialist doctrine and threatened with extermination, the Jews were… generally deported in the most inhuman manner, shut up in concentration camps, subjected to forced labour or put to death.{60}
Harwood’s misuse of the ICRC report is a reflection of how deniers, fairly certain that few people will be able to check the original material, twist information and findings. Rather than misquote, as with other sources, Harwood simply omits those numerous sections of the report which contradict his claims.
Harwood even used other sources to try to misrepresent the ICRC’s findings. He claimed that a Swiss paper, Die Tat, had surveyed all World War II casualties and concluded, based on ICRC statistics, that the number of victims of political, racial, or religious persecution who died in prisons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 amounted to “300,000, not all of whom were Jews.” Harwood argued that this figure was the most accurate assessment of the number of victims.{61} The Swiss paper did cite the 300,000 figure, but only in reference to “Germans and German Jews,” not nationals of other countries.{62} It did not conduct a survey of all World War II casualities and made no reference to Red Cross figures.
The ICRC, inundated with correspondence about these assertions, has repeatedly attempted to refute the deniers’ claims. In 1978 the official ICRC Bulletin protested that the rescue agency “has never published or even compiled statistics” of the kind that were being attributed to it. The work of the ICRC was to “help war victims not to count them.” Even if it had wished to count victims, it could not have done so because its representatives were permitted to enter only a few concentration camps and “only in the final days of the war.”{63} This was not the first time the ICRC tried to refute Harwood’s charges. In 1975, after Harwood’s pamphlet appeared in England and increasing numbers of right-wing groups began to reiterate the claims about the record of the humanitarian organization, the central office of the ICRC wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London regarding Harwood’s citations: “The figures cited by the author of the booklet are based upon statistics falsely attributed to us, evidently for the purpose of giving them credibility, despite the fact that we never publish information of this kind.”{64}
Despite the various attempts by the ICRC to set the historical record straight, the deniers have continued to rely on this disinformation. In 1985 at the trial of Ernst Zundel, a German immigrant who was accused by the Canadian government of publishing and distributing Holocaust denial materials, including Did Six Million Really Die?, these false claims regarding the ICRC were introduced by the defense as a means of demonstrating that the relief agency thought the Holocaust was a myth.{65}