The president of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), Alexander Hay, charged here that neo-Nazi elements are misusing and misquoting the ICRC in an attempt to show that the figure of six million Jews killed in concentration camps during World War II was a gross exaggeration by the victious Allied powers.
He said neo-Nazi elements active in West Germany and Britain are trying to discredit the charges of genocide against the Nazi regime. Their object “is to whitewash the National Socialist system in wartime Germany,” he said, and their “machination initiated years ago has gone so far that the ICRC is now entangled in its mesh.”
According to Hay, these propagandists utilize “statistics wrongly attributed to the ‘International Red Cross’ and quotations, distorted or truncated, from the report of the ICRC activities during the Second World War.”
CITES SPECIOUS PAMPHLETS
Hay cited several “specious pamphlets” in circulation today with such titles as “The Myth of the Six Million” and “Did Six Million Really Die?” He said “this propaganda is having some effect. More and more readers of these pamphlets write the ICRC, most of them in the hope that they will receive confirmation of their opinion that after the war Germany was the victim of a smear campaign.”
Hay said the ICRC wanted to make it clear that it has never published or compiled statistics of the kind falsely attributed to it. He explained that ICRC delegates were given access to only a few concentration camps and then only in the final days of the war and therefore could not have obtained data for such statistics. “The work of the ICRC is to help war victims, not to count them,” he said.
Hay urged the news media to give extensive coverage to his denial of the neo-Nazis’ claims. “There is a real danger that the false figure of 350,000 victims of the Holocaust will be spread all over Germany and taught in schools as the historical truth,” he said.
Hay said the neo-Nazis were also misusing deaths recorded by the International Trading Service (ITS) on the basis of documents found when the concentration camps were closed. He noted that those records bear no relation to the total deaths in concentration camps because a great quantity of documentary material was destroyed before the Nazis left and because many deaths that occurred in the extermination camps were not recorded. (By Tamar Levy)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
