Maurice Rossel's ICRC visit to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz

This film features Claude Lanzmann's interview with Maurice Rossel, conducted in 1979 for Lanzmann's epic film "Shoah". Rossel was the Swiss delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Berlin. The central task of the delegates was to visit camps to control the observance of the Geneva Convention and the delivery of aid packages. In an official capacity, Rossel was asked to inspect Theresienstadt, a ghetto where Nazis housed wealthy and socially prominent Jews who were being temporarily spared from execution, in June 1944. Rossel admits that he gave Theresienstadt a clean bill of health and would probably do so again today, and that he was also given a tour of Auschwitz, which he did not realize was a death camp despite the sullen, haunted looks he received from the inmates. Lanzmann's questioning raises the issues of to what degree Rossel and others like him were manipulated by the Nazis and to what degree they were willing to be manipulated as a consequence of their own politics and prejudices. Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in the Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed a 1960 antiwar petition. From 1952 to 1959 he lived with Simone de Beauvoir. In 1963 he married French actress Judith Magre. Later, he married Angelika Schrobsdorff, a German-Jewish writer, and then Dominique Petithory in 1995. He is the father of Angélique Lanzmann, born in 1950, and Félix Lanzmann (1993-2017). Lanzmann's most renowned work, Shoah, is widely regarded as the seminal film on the subject of the Holocaust. He began interviewing survivors, historians, witnesses, and perpetrators in 1973 and finished editing the film in 1985. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title "Le lièvre de Patagonie" (The Patagonian Hare). He was chief editor of the journal "Les Temps Modernes," which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, until his death on July 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/claude-lanzmann-changed-the-history-of-filmmaking-with-shoah