FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - History
1930-1939
-1930, Belgium: Discussed during revisions of the Geneva Convention the previous year, a new code on prisoners of war and war wounded is adopted at the Fourteenth International Conference of the Red Cross in Brussels in 1930. But it fails to include the protection of civilians of enemy nationality in occupied territories or warring states.
-1931-1946, Italy: Following requests by the Swiss, French and Italian Leagues for Human Rights, the ICRC calls on the CRI (Croce Rossa Italiana) to assist anti-fascist opponents who have been placed under house arrest and left to fend for themselves on Ponza and Lipari Islands. The Geneva Committee also manages to ensure interviews between the Red Cross and prisoners are not supervised by the detaining authorities. However, it is unable to preserve the CRI’s independence: controlled by Benito Mussolini’s regime, the organisation is led by Filippo Cremonesi, a senator and Fascist sympathiser who replaces Giovanni Ciraolo since 1925. The situation worsens on 10 June 1940 when Italy joins the war, choosing to fight alongside Nazi Germany. Filippo Cremonesi resigns, and is replaced on 1 May 1941 by Giuseppe Mormino, a state councillor who is also Head of Cabinet for the Ministry of the Interior. The CRI finds itself assisting victims of Allied bombings and negotiating the release of Italian prisoners of war held on the Russian and Libyan fronts. As the first anti-Semite measures are introduced in Italy in 1940, the ICRC is given permission to visit Jews held in camps di concentratamento. In September 1943, however, the Nazis invade northern Italy and interventions in favour of deportees can only recommence in April 1945, during the last days of the war, as part of a swap involving German prisoners held by the Allies. While southern Italy now fights alongside American troops, the Geneva Committee is not allowed to assist Italian military detainees in the north, as they are not recognised as prisoners of war by German authorities. Only after the Allied victory and Nazi defeat does the ICRC gain access to all victims of the conflict, its delegation in Rome being active until June 1950. As for the CRI, it is reorganised under the auspices of Doctor Umberto Zanotti Bianco in August 1944. Purged of its Fascist elements until a general amnesty is declared in June 1946, it is not fully operational before the 1960s, when the organisation is led by Doctor Giuseppe Potenza.
-August 1932-October 1935, Bolivia, Paraguay: When border skirmishes break out in the Gran Chaco area, the ICRC sends as delegate Emmanuel Galland, a secretary of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) in Buenos Aires. He is given permission to visit prisoners of war on both sides in May and July 1933. But the conflict worsens in November 1934 and the Committee has to provide relief to 18,000 detainees in Paraguay and 2,500 in Bolivia despite the fact that none of these countries has signed the 1929 Code dealing with the treatment of war wounded and prisoners of war. Focused on the aftermath of World War Two in Europe, however, the ICRC is not able to assist the victims of political unrest in Paraguay from March 1947 onwards. In a final analysis, explains Daniel Palmieri, it appears that the Geneva Committee was “amateurish” and “dilettante” in a Latin American country it had little knowledge of. Lacking resources and motivation, the ICRC took a year to intervene in the Gran Chaco region, and another year to return there. Its visits to prisoners camps were looked upon unfavourably by national Red Crosses: given advance warning, the authorities had time to present the situation in the best light. In November 1934, ICRC delegate Lucien Cramer thus spoke of “satisfactory” detention conditions, even though he had no access to frontlines, where warring parties killed wounded soldiers and subjected prisoners to corporal punishment, executions and forced labour, depriving them of food, clothing and medical care. Worse still, the Geneva Committee was guilty of social and racial discrimination, as it favoured White officers over Indian soldiers. Treated as canon fodder, and overrepresented in groups of mistreated prisoners, the latter were considered “primitive”, inferior, uncultivated and prone to “exaggerating their complaints and even inventing fictive ones”, according to the ICRC’s reports at the time.
-1933-1945, Germany: Adolf Hitler’s rise to power poses one of the greatest challenges ever faced by the ICRC. Following an agreement signed in November 1933 that remains in place until May 1941, the Geneva Committee initially requests the German Red Cross, the DRK (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz), to handle all requests for individual information about civilians imprisoned in concentration camps. Keen not to go against the authorities and to compromise its work, the Committee is careful not to insist too forcefully on particular cases, such as the German pastor Martin Niemoller, arrested in July 1937 for protesting against Nazi policies. The case of the Czech journalist Carl Von Ossietzky, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, is also closed shortly before his death as a result of ill treatment in May 1938. Through sheer tenacity, the ICRC (represented by Carl-Jacob Burckhardt) is granted permission by Heinrich Himmler (the head of the SS, or Schutzstaffel) to visit concentration camps of its own choice, rather than those selected by the Nazi authorities. Threatening to end its mission at a time when Adolf Hitler’s government is still seeking to assuage public opinion in Western Europe, the Geneva Committee also negotiates for the right to speak to prisoners without supervision. In 1935-1936, Carl-Jacob Burckhardt is allowed to visit the concentration camps of Esterwegen (near the Dutch border), Lichtenberg (in Torgau) and Dachau (near Munich). But his inspections fail to improve the conditions of detention, while his successors are consistently rebutted by the Nazis, who refuse to grant access to other camps. Nothing new emerges from the visit to Dachau of another ICRC delegate, Colonel Guillaume Favre, on 19 August 1938. The camp is described by his assistant, Georges Chessex (who had undergone military training in Germany), as “a model in terms of facilities and administration”. According to his report, prisoners are well treated and in good health, and plans are being made to build big “showers”! The activities of the ICRC then change significantly when Britain and France declare war on Adolf Hitler in September 1939. The focus of the Committee is redirected to traditional activities aimed at assisting prisoners of war. Geneva makes a recommendation to the effect that the treatment of detained civilians in enemy territory should comply with the 1934 Tokyo project: with the consent of Adolf Hitler’s government, Anglo-American Israelites are therefore protected from deportation to concentration camps. However, except for a delegation in Berlin in 1940, the ICRC is not granted permission to open offices in most of the Nazi-occupied countries, including Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Bohemia-Moravia. The delegates based in Berlin are required to deal only with prisoners of war detained within Germany. They have immediately to calm things down and quell rumours when, in June 1940, the Nazis threaten to execute ten French prisoners of war for every German prisoner of war supposedly killed by the enemy. In addition, even though the Geneva Conventions protect approximately ten thousand Jewish Allied prisoners of war, the ICRC delegates fail to save the Spanish Republicans who had enrolled in the French army in 1939 and who were deported to Mauthausen: out of 8,000 detainees, 5,000 die before their liberation in 1945. After the German attack against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Committee is also unable to help German and Soviet prisoners of war, with both sides justifying their refusal of Geneva’s assistance on the grounds of reciprocity. It is estimated that out of five million Russian prisoners held by the Nazis, between two and three million disappear or die, including 85,000 prisoners of war exterminated because they are Jewish. The situation is deteriorating among the Allies too. In a landing attempt in Dieppe in August 1942, Canadian commandos capture and handcuff a number of German soldiers. The Nazis retaliate immediately by subjecting British prisoners of war to ill treatment. Moreover, the Allies fail to reach an agreement with the Nazis to repatriate military detainees, unlike during World War One, when the French and the Germans agreed in April 1918 to send officers imprisoned for more than eighteen months and aged over 48 to Switzerland. In World War Two, the only prisoner exchanges are carried out in October 1943, then in July-August 1944 when a small number of injured soldiers and civilians transit via Lisbon (Portugal) before reaching Gothenburg (Sweden) in September 1944. Uninjured and older soldiers remain in detention, partly because the British Admiralty is keen not to release trained German officers urgently needed by their Navy. Amid ever-increasing reprisals, the ICRC fears that the belligerents might reject the Geneva Convention. Following the failed landing attempt in Dieppe in August 1942, the crisis is such that in order to avoid worsening the situation, the members of the Committee opt not to resume negotiations with the Nazis over the treatment of civilians. During a meeting held in Geneva on 14 October 1942, the ICRC decides to remain silent about the concentration camps, the genocide of the Jews and the extermination of the Roma. Quoted by Mitchell Bard, a head of the Committee’s information department, Roger Du Pasquier, justifies this position by claiming that any denunciation of the Nazis would have been pointless and might have compromised the actions taken to defend prisoners of war. Moreover, attempts to protect civilian detainees would not have saved a significant number of lives: it is estimated that of the 5,100,000 Jews killed by the Nazis, 4,300,000 are executed in the hours following their arrival in camps or their arrest near the Russian front. But it is not altogether certain that the Germans would have rejected the Geneva Conventions, especially after 1943, when the military setbacks suffered by the Nazis mean that an ever-increasing number of their own soldiers are imprisoned by the enemy. The wish of ICRC members to preserve their neutrality, to pursue relief operations and to maintain a dialogue with the regime of Adolf Hitler looks more like a pretext. Described by the historian Walter Laqueur as an act of “complicity”, their guilty silence actually serves the interests of the Swiss government, which funds half of the budget of the ICRC and, fearing a German invasion, closes its borders to Jewish refugees in August 1942. In a documentary by Christine Rütten entitled “The Red Cross under the Third Reich” broadcast on the Franco-German television channel Arte on 26 September 2007, Carl-Jacob Burckhardt is even accused of being an anti-Semitic Germanophile: he destroys compromising archives and refuses to provide Jewish organizations with information about concentration camps despite the fact that the Allies denounce the final solution on 17 December 1942. Invoking its official mandate, the ICRC argues that civilians are not within its province and, on 23 August 1943, it only summons the belligerents to comply with the 1929 Convention on prisoners of war. Worse still, the DRK stipulates that requests for individual information must make reference to the Aryan character of civilian detainees. The ICRC complies, thereby divesting itself of its right to inquire about the fate of Jewish deportees. The Geneva Committee also fails to use the Nazi propaganda on the ‘military necessity’ of imprisoning Jews as an argument that might have helped to circumvent national sovereignties and to assimilate suspects to foreigners in order to claim the same right of access as for civilians from an enemy state. Likewise, in order to be able to continue providing assistance to Allied prisoners of war, the ICRC opts out of underground rescue operations and plans to dismiss one of its nurses who had helped to smuggle Jewish children out of France into Switzerland. Finally, the Committee refuses to violate its humanitarian principles and to force the Nazis to grant access to concentration camps by threatening to stop all aid to German prisoners of war. All of the actions taken in defence of Jews remain fruitless. As a result, Geneva decides to refocus its activities on supplying concentration camps. Because of the low number of identified and located prisoners, the level of aid provided by the Committee is significantly reduced since only named parcels are authorized. The Allies impose a ban on collective consignments until June 1944, fearing that the supplies would be diverted by the Nazis without the presence of ICRC delegates. Regarding their own soldiers held by the Germans, permissions (the so-called navicert) are granted on a case by case basis, and only when representatives of the Committee are able to interview prisoners freely. Jewish detainees held in concentration camps become even less of a priority because the Allies are keen to limit the level of humanitarian aid in order to suffocate the war economy of the Third Reich. London is particularly vigilant in supervising the blockade, though not without some contradictions: from August 1940, the British send collective relief to their soldiers held by the Germans, and from June 1942, they agree to ship supplies to the victims of the famine in Nazi-occupied Greece, with a total tonnage in excess of the support provided to Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. For the latter, the ICRC has to buy food in Switzerland because the Allies do not issue the certificates required to re-export goods imported from the free world. The reluctance of the British is not altogether unfounded since the Nazis prevent the Committee from monitoring the distribution of parcels in concentration camps. The ICRC must therefore settle for acknowledgements of receipts signed… by the SS themselves, or by several detainees, in which case it helps to identify deportees. In Mauthausen, all of the parcels are misappropriated, forcing the Committee to suspend the operation. Generally speaking, the level of return of receipts never rises above 15% and only increases at the end of the war, reaching 38% in Hambourg-Neuengamme in September 1944, 45% in Buchenwald and a maximum of 80% in Dachau and Ravensbrück. According to the World Jewish Congress and its representative Gerhart Riegner, the majority of the prisoners identified by name did in fact receive their parcel. But the operations serve the interests of Nazi propaganda. For example, on 23 June 1944 in Theresienstadt, a model Jewish ghetto, and again on 29 September in Auschwitz, the Germans stage the visits of an ICRC delegate, Maurice Rossel, who is prevented from meeting prisoners and from leaving the offices of the Kommandantur to access the camp itself. Broadcast on Nazi radios, the event is used as a means of denying all allegations of ill treatment. The Committee therefore decides not to communicate its report to the Germans and the Allies. It is not until 2 October 1944 that the president of the ICRC, Max Huber, officially demands an improvement of the treatment of Jewish detainees in a note sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. His initiative results in a meeting with the SS in charge of concentration camps, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, on an Alberg road on 12 March 1945. The ICRC proposes that its trucks supplying the inhabitants of Berlin under aerial attack from the Americans should not return to Switzerland empty but with civilian detainees. A handful of Jewish prisoners are thus freed in exchange for Germans caught by the Allies in Europe. Later on, the ICRC delegates are the first to enter Nazi concentration camps to provide first-aid to survivors, including those held at Mauthausen, Dachau and the fortress of Theresienstadt just days before the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945. According to the historian Jean-Claude Favez, several reasons may account for the passivity of the Committee in dealing with the final solution: a sense of impotence; the fear that belligerents would denounce the Geneva Conventions if pressed to improve the treatment of civilian detainees; and the reluctance of the Allies to grant visas to Israelite asylum seekers. For Marc-André Charguéraud, the blame lies primarily with Western powers, who refuse to support the ICRC, to sign the Tokyo project of 1934, to relax the blockade of Germany, to accommodate significant numbers of Jewish refugees and to fund operations that do not target their own prisoners of war. We might add the bureaucratic inertia of the Geneva Committee: to avoid compromising its neutrality, the institution fails to condemn the DRK, which was entirely Nazified in the name of “restructuring” (gleichschaltung), and it reprimands the personal initiatives of its delegates when they try to save Jews. In March 1944, Jean de Bavier is therefore relieved of his duties in Budapest for denouncing the final solution. Louis Haefliger is accused of abusing his position and forced to resign in August 1945 for taking part in an American military operation to disarm guards and liberate the camp of Mauthausen on 5 May 1945. The ICRC, which had publicly criticized the use of chemical weapons during World War One, remains completely silent about the Nazi gas chambers. It is only at the very last minute, when it is already too late, that the new president of the Committee, Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, attempts to force the hands of the Nazis by threatening to disclose the truth about the concentration camps in a letter sent to Ernst Kaltenbrunner on May 1945.
-1934-1945, Japan: a number of measures to protect civilian populations in the event of war are outlined at the fifteenth international Red Cross conference held in Tokyo in October 1934. In a display of remarkable complacency, however, the delegates choose not to question the Japanese authorities over the military occupation of China, the bombing of urban centres and the massacres of civilian populations. The conference is therefore a relative diplomatic success for a country that had withdrawn from the League of Nations after invading Manchuria in September 1931. Despite having signed up to the 1929 Geneva Convention over the war-injured, though not the prisoners of war, Tokyo remains intransigent and ultra militarized. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour and the United States in December 1941, Japan officially agrees to the appointment of just three ICRC delegates in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In May and November 1943, the Committee is granted supervised access to a handful of Allied prisoners of war in the “Japanese zone” in Korea, Manchuria and Formosa. But it is not given permission to provide supplies and to meet detainees freely. Despite his knowledge of Japanese and the trust of the government, the ICRC delegate in Tokyo, Dr Fritz Paravicini, is forced to write laudatory reports after conducting visits closely supervised by the authorities in the prefectures of Osaka, Hyogo, Hiroshima and Fukuoka in March 1943. His assistant, Max Pestalozzi, fares no better when he inspects the camps of Kiraoka in the region of Nagano in August 1943, Hakodate on the Island of Hokkaido and Ishinomaki near the city of Sendai in August 1943, and Zentsuji on the Island of Shikoku in December 1943. Chaired by Prince Kuniyuki Tokugawa, the JCRS (Japan Red Cross Society) proves to be of no use whatsoever. With a total membership of 15,210,000 in 1945, as opposed to 5,840,000 in 1942, 4,010,000 in 1940, 2,930,000 in 1937 and 2,700,000 in 1934, it is entirely militarized and approves the authorities’ disregard for the 1929 Convention on prisoners of war. Negotiations initiated in April 1942 are hindered by the ill will of the Japanese and the reluctance of the British, who are keen to ensure that the ICRC is allowed to oversee the distribution of aid. For the Allied prisoners of war held by Japan, Tokyo ships two boats and a limited quantity of supplies from Lourenço Marques (Mozambique) in September 1942 and Marmagoa in the Portuguese enclave of Goa (India) in October 1943. But the process is suspended after the American aerial bombing of a Japanese hospital ship, the Buenos Aires, on 27 November 1943. Blocked for a year in Nakhodka near Vladivostok, the Hakusan Maru is only given the authorization to unload its supplies in Kobe in October 1944. The torpedoing of a second Japanese ship, the Awa Maru, by the American Navy off the coast of Singapore in April 1945 puts an end to all attempts to provide relief to Allied prisoners of war. Elsewhere within the Japanese sphere of influence, the actions taken by the ICRC are even more limited, particularly in Southern China, and are banned altogether in the occupied territories of South-East Asia, where the army imposes unfavourable exchange rates and diverts ICRC supplies. In order to continue sending parcels that are regularly searched and stolen by jailers, Geneva is forced to censor its reports on British prisoners of war held in Hong Kong, which are read by the occupying authorities and fail to provide an accurate account of the situation. In the same vein, the ICRC delegate appointed to Singapore after the fall of the city to the Japanese in February 1942 is prevented from supplying aid to the British prisoners of war held in Changi prison and exposed to ill treatment, torture and executions. In the Philippines, declared independent by the Japanese in November 1943, the Committee is not allowed to monitor the distribution of its supplies to Allied prisoners of war and the operation is suspended after October 1944. Worse still, the occupying forces in Indonesia decapitate on 20 December 1943 the ICRC delegate in Borneo, Dr Matthaeus Vischer, and his wife, both accused of espionage. To incite Tokyo to comply with the Geneva Conventions and to stop hard labour for prisoners of war, the reciprocity argument holds little sway since Japanese soldiers often choose suicide over surrender. In the event of imprisonment, they give false names to protect their families from the humiliation of capitulation. Fearing indoctrination and re-education by the Chinese communists, the military command also encourages troops to fight to death and to reject the Christian, Western and ‘anti-Asian’ values upon which the Geneva Conventions are founded. In October 1944, the Allies hold just 6,400 Japanese prisoners of war, as opposed to 103,000 Western soldiers in the hands of the Japanese. The authorities are eventually forced to negotiate as a result of the advance of the American Army. Shortly before the capitulation of Japan on 15 August 1945, the new ICRC delegate Marcel Junod, who officially replaced Dr Harry Angst in March 1944, is able to visit Allied prisoners of war in Mouken, a Manchurian mining town now called Shenyang. With the American Army, the Committee then proceeds to distribute aid to victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and takes part in the evacuation of 34,000 prisoners of war in 103 camps in Japan. After 1945, it will also handle the repatriation of Japanese soldiers held by the Allies.
-1935-1936, Ethiopia: while Benito Mussolini’s soldiers invade Ethiopia and begin to march on Addis-Ababa in October 1935, the Fascists turn down the assistance offered by the ICRC and their own national Red Cross society. Geneva is therefore unable to gain access to prisoners of war held by the Italians, and is restricted to supplying aid to the Ethiopian side only. The first intervention of the ICRC in Sub-Saharan Africa is further hindered by issues of logistics, security and funding, as the institution is forced to tap into reserves spared since World War One. For instance, a European expatriate, Robert Hokman, dies while trying to remove the primer from an Italian bomb in December 1935, while an Egyptian doctor, Mohamed Al Saoui Gomaah, succumbs to illness in Jijiga in March 1936. In January 1936, again, a British Major in charge of logistics, Gerald Achilles Burgoyne, is found dead, killed by Fascist planes or by Oromo tribes during the retreat of Ras Igazu Mulugeta, somewhere between Maychew and Lake Ashenge. Finally, on 3 May 1936, an Ethiopian of unsound mind assassinates the head of the British Ambulance, André John Mesnard Melly; just days later, six expatriates are injured and a nurse, Elfrida Stadim, is killed during the sack of Addis-Ababa. Meanwhile, the ICRC is forced to give up transporting supplies by road because of the distances involved: the mountain dirt tracks are too steep and dangerous, causing accidents that result in the death of a Greek truck driver between Addis-Ababa and Dessie at the beginning of 1936. Consequently, the Committee decides to send relief on the small plane of a Swedish Count, Carl Gustav von Rosen, who will later work for the British secret services to assist the last remaining pockets of resistance in Western Ethiopia in 1936, then to set up the Air Force of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1946 (in addition to dropping aerial supplies over the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw in 1944, he also fights for the Fins against the Russians in Karelia in 1940 and the Biafra secessionists against the Nigerians in 1968, before being killed during the Ogaden War in 1977). For the ICRC, another problem is that the Italians fail to comply with international humanitarian law and bomb hospitals indiscriminately in Dessie on 6 December 1935, Degeh Bur on 4 January 1936, Amba Aradam on 16 January and Korem on 17 March. For example, to avenge a pilot killed by Somali bandits after his plane crashed near the border, Fascist aviators retaliate, injuring approximately fifty people and killing twenty-eight Ethiopians and a Swedish nurse, Gunnar Lundstroem, at Melka Dida in the region of Sidamo along Ganale River on 30 December 1935. Subsequent aerial attacks destroy a British hospital in Korem on 4 March 1936, killing five patients and injuring a further four. As for the headquarters of the Ethiopian Red Cross, it is looted during the sack of Addis-Ababa in May 1936. Despite ratifying the 1925 protocol banning the use of chemical weapons in 1928, the Italian authorities also drop lethal gases on the grounds that their enemy is executing prisoners of war. In order not to compromise its political neutrality or to undermine its relations with the Fascists, the ICRC refuses to release any information and to take part in an inquiry conducted by the League of Nations. Instead, it chooses not to issue a public condemnation of Benito Mussolini and merely voices a discreet opposition through the Italian Red Cross and standard diplomatic channels. A victim of blackmail for his presumed homosexuality, the ICRC delegate in Addis-Ababa, Sydney Brown, is even prevented from reporting on the atrocities committed by the Italians. After his return to Geneva, he is forced to resign, accused of siding with the Negus, refusing to investigate on Ethiopian abuses, leaking confidential reports and signing a protest by the local Red Cross. In fact, as explained by Rainer Baudendistel, the ICRC is not impartial. Its members believe in the Fascist mission in Africa and do not trust the natives, who are seen as savages. Furthermore, they are keen to preserve good relations with Italy, since Switzerland has no economic interests in Abyssinia. As a result, they place so much trust in the Fascists that they fail to warn Red Cross staff to use gas masks. Biased, the ICRC only relays the requests of the Italians on prisoners of war detained by the Ethiopians, and not vice-versa despite the numerous demands by Addis-Ababa. Likewise, the Committee does not challenge the Fascists, who claim that the bombing of hospitals is a collateral damage due to bad weather or the abuse of the Red Cross emblem by the natives. Several arguments seem to prove this point. First, the Italian Air Force accidently bombs one of its own hospitals during an attack that causes 18 deaths and 81 casualties. In addition, the Ethiopian government refuses to follow the rules of European Red Cross societies and to announce in advance the location of its hospitals, fearing the enemy would be informed of its military positions. The Fascists therefore argue that they do not even know where the Red Cross clinics are located. This is in all likelihood a lie since they have no reason to attack places where there are no military objectives; on the contrary, the bombings of Melka Dida on 30 December 1935 and Korem on 4 March 1936 are retaliatory measures after, respectively, the killing of an Italian pilot and firing from a hill nearby. The Fascists continue nevertheless to argue that the Ethiopians abuse the emblem and conceal weapons within the premises of their hospitals. Indeed, the governor of Harar, Dajjazmach Nasibu Zamanuel, plants a Red Cross flag on the roof of a hospital containing a military radio in September 1935. Moreover, the Italians discover ammunitions in a Swedish Red Cross truck left in the forest of Wadara during the retreat of Ras Desta Damtew in January 1936. But these abuses are not systematic, precisely because the emblem fails to provide any protection against Fascist bombing. They are only highlighted in a propaganda war against the cruelty of the Abyssinians, who are accused of shooting Italian nurses on 20 January 1936 and of killing three people during an attack on a small clinic near Maychew on 31 March. Humanitarian personnel and mercenaries who left the Negus Army testify about the execution, emasculation or torture of prisoners of war at the hands of the Ethiopians. However the Italians may have paid bribes to secure these accounts, especially amongst the staff of the Egyptian Red Cross in the Somali region of Ogaden. As a matter of fact, the Fascists intimidate those who witnessed bombings and, in order to force them to withdraw their statements, they threaten to execute two Polish employees of the Ethiopian Red Cross captured at Amba Aradam on 16 February 1936. In the same vein, they violate the Geneva Conventions by treating the expatriates of the Ethiopian Red Cross who fall into their hands in April 1936 as prisoners of war: a Greek doctor, Georges Dassios, at Weldiya, and a French nurse, Albert Gingold Duprey, at Dessie. In this context, the silence of the ICRC raises several issues. First, it compromises the movement because the Red Cross societies that dispatched ambulances on the field inform the international community against Italian abuses. Secondly, it serves the interests of Benito Mussolini, who tries to avoid an official condemnation and a vote on economic sanctions at the League of Nations. To circumvent the Italian Red Cross, the ICRC communicates directly with the Duce and asks for an official investigation after the bombing of the Swedish ambulance in Melka Dika in December 1935. But its proposition helps the Fascists to gain time and to avoid an intervention of the League of Nations. Benito Mussolini orders his troops to spare the Red Cross hospitals for a while and delays the investigation until the defeat of the Negus. The ICRC White Book on the issue merely reflects Italian propagan da. According to John Spencer, at the time an American consultant for the Ethiopian Foreign Office, the president of the Geneva Committee, Max Huber, literally “prostituted his own reputation and that of international law to the call of political convenience”. Likewise, he subsequently changes the agenda of the international Red Cross conference of 1938 to ensure that the delegates will not challenge the use of gas against the troops of the Negus. The paradox is that the Italian Red Cross nevertheless asks the ICRC to apply international humanitarian law and to condemn the Spanish Republicans who bombed and killed one of the drivers of its medical teams on the Francoist side in Sigüenza in 1937.
-1936-1941, Spain: active since July 1936 in the conflict opposing the Republicans and the Francoists, the ICRC creates a legal precedent to justify its humanitarian interventions during civil wars and not merely international wars. Contrary to a commonly-held view, this is not the first time that the Committee becomes involved in an internal conflict, since it had already intervened during the Carlist war of 1872-1876 in Spain. In his Chronological Textbook for a General History of the Red Cross, Gustave Moynier lists 11 interventions by the ICRC in internal conflicts between 1863 and 1899, against 14 in international wars and 11 in colonial expeditions. However, the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939 remains a significant landmark in the history of the Red Cross. Having failed to reach a general agreement with the belligerents, the Committee struggles to visit prisoners, to evacuate civilians in besieged towns, to ensure that separated families are able to remain in touch, and to negotiate for exchanges of military and civilian detainees. For instance, on 20 May 1937, an ICRC delegate, Marcel Junod, obtains the release of the famous Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler in exchange for the wife of a Francoist commander, Carlos Haya. But the CRE (Cruz Roja Española) is unable to provide any useful help as a result of splitting in two after the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic. Following a decree of 20 April 1931, the organisation had been demilitarized and placed under the authority of the General Health Directorate at the Home Office, instead of the Ministry of War. Yet the CRE was still chaired since 1933 by Ricardo Burguette, a conservative general who led the army in Africa and repressed miners’ strikes in the Asturias in 1917. Forced to resign after the coup d’état of Francisco Franco, the president of the Spanish Red Cross is replaced on 29 July 1936 by Dr Aurelio Romeo Lozano, a member of the small National Republican Party. The other components of the People’s Front in power in Madrid are also represented within the CRE, including the communists, the socialists, the Republican left and the anarchists of the National Labour Confederation. The Francoists therefore establish their own Red Cross in Burgos, chaired by Fernandez Suarez de Tangil y Angulo, Count Vallelano: a former lawyer and mayor of Madrid during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Close to Antonio Maura, a conservative politician, and to General Emilio Mola, one of the brains behind the military rebellion, the president of the nationalist branch of the CRE reluctantly authorizes the ICRC to monitor prisoner exchanges two weeks after a similar agreement is reached with Dr Aurelio Romeo on 1 September 1936. Yet both camps fail to comply with humanitarian law. The Republicans use vehicles bearing the Red Cross emblem to launch an offensive. The Nationalists bomb civilians at Guernica in the Basque Country on 26 April 1937 and Granollers in Catalonia on 1 June 1938. Both sides take hostages, carry out reprisals, execute prisoners, kill medical personnel and attack hospitals. Once the Republican defeat appears inevitable in February 1939, the French Red Cross eventually accommodates approximately 400,000 Spanish refugees. It also sends trucks carrying supplies to Madrid, fallen to the Francoists. The Republican Red Cross is disbanded, giving way to its Nationalist counterpart, and Count Vallelano is replaced, first in December 1940 by a paediatrician who dies shortly thereafter, then in June 1941 by a doctor of law from the University of Madrid, Dr Manuel Martinez de Tena.
-1937-1950: Czechoslovakia: in the conflict between Berlin and Prague over the German-speaking region of the Sudetes, the ICRC is not initially asked to intervene and is only able to maintain contact with the Czechoslovakian Red Cross. Founded in 1919, this organization is chaired since its inception by Dr Alice Masarykova, a Member of Parliament and the daughter of President Tomás Masaryk. But after the German annexation of the Sudetes in 1938, it is unable to resist the proclamation of an independent Slovakian state and the establishment of a protectorate in Bohemia-Moravia in 1939. Purged of its Jewish members, it is de facto dissolved while its director, Dr Vladimir Haering, dies in captivity. In Bohemia-Moravia, it is replaced by a Nazi Red Cross; in Slovakia, by a national society set up in May 1940 and approved by the government of Josef Tiso. However, after a first anti-Semitic law on 15 May 1942, the latter attempts to assist the Jews deported to Germany, for instance to Sered on 20 November 1944, or who remain in the city of Bratislava in hideouts known as ‘bunkers’. The problem is that the Slovakian Red Cross is not supported by the ICRC despite numerous requests since July 1944 to help Jewish prisoners held in camps throughout the country. It is only in October 1944 that Geneva dispatches a representative to Bratislava, Georges Dunand, whose appointment is criticized by the exiled Czechoslovakian government in London because it facilitates the international recognition of Josef Tiso’s regime. Nevertheless, the new ICRC delegate offers shelter to Israelites and provides them with letters of protection. In the same vein, he distributes funds from a Jewish diaspora organization in the United States, the Joint, for which he plays the role of an exchange agent since it is not officially possible to sell foreign currencies to the state bank. In February 1945, he also sends relief to Slovakian guerrillas imprisoned by the Germans because they fight with the Russians. A month later, he assists in the evacuation of several Jewish prisoners ‘sold’ by the Gestapo to Switzerland, just as the supply routes are cut off and the Red Army approaches Bratislava along the Danube. The situation is significantly different in the German protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. Prevented from intervening, the ICRC is forced to wait until April 1945 before being granted the right to send a delegate to Prague, Paul Dunant, in order to carry out a political rather than a humanitarian mission. Indeed, the institution intends to relay to the Allies a message from the gauleiter of Bohemia-Moravia, who proposes to counter the Soviets by helping the Americans to occupy Czechie without engaging in open combat. While the Geneva Committee finally refuses to act as an intermediary in a controversial military negotiation, it gains access to prisoner of war camps in December 1945, after the German defeat and the restoration of a unified Czechoslovakian Republic. Keen to facilitate the repatriation of inmates, it hesitates to lend its support to the forced transfer of the Sudetes under a decree of 2 August 1945 expelling all German minorities in the country. Unlike Slovakia, where it has permanent access to all prisons and where a first visit is conducted in June 1945 in Patronka near Bratislava, the ICRC is not given formal permission to assist civilians detained in Bohemia and Moravia. In Prague, its delegates Walter Menzel and Otto Lehner, who succeed Georges Dunand in August 1945 and August 1946 respectively, are forced to negotiate to provide assistance on a case by case basis. While they are able to supervise and ensure that 10% of their supplies are handed out to German minorities, they are soon forced to reduce their activities. The communists, who come to power in February 1948, eventually shut down the offices of the ICRC in Prague in June 1950. Behind the Iron Curtain, Geneva is no longer able to hand over its assets to the Czechoslovakian Red Cross, restructured under the aegis of Alice Masarykova in 1946 and taken over by the Soviets.
-1938-1947, Great Britain: attended by 54 national societies and held in London in July 1938, the sixteenth international Red Cross conference focuses on the aerial bombing of civilians, particularly in Spain. However, the delegates fail to respond to Japanese abuses in China or the Nazi atrocities in Germany, officially because of a lack of information. Since the Nuremberg laws deprived German Jews of their civic rights in 1935, the ICRC argues that it has no legal mandate to intervene. The other components of the Red Cross movement remain equally passive. At the LRC, a democrat close to the American president Franklin Roosevelt, Norman Davis, is appointed chair of the Council of Governors despite being discharged of ministerial responsibilities and accused by the Supreme Court of fraud because of dubious business activities in Cuba. As for the BRCS (British Red Cross Society), it prepares for war under the authority of the Ministry of Defence and of a diplomat, Arthur Stanley, who joined the organization in 1905 and who heads until 1943 the civilian defence of London against German aerial attacks. As in August 1914 during World War One, the British Red Cross has to merge with the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem at the outbreak of hostilities against the Nazis in September 1939. Initiated in 1935 under the aegis of the Home Office to prepare the civilian defence of the country, this amalgamation, which lasts until May 1947, enables the BRCS to bear a new name and to assist British forces in Egypt without competing officially with the local Red Cross, created in 1912 and recognized by the ICRC in 1924. Another benefit for the BRCS is the strengthening of its operational capacity. Pushed by the patriotism of the population, which donates the equivalent of three million pounds in 1940, the British Red Cross gives up all semblance of neutrality and becomes militarized at a time when the war is widely regarded as the lesser of two evils. According to Dermot Morrah, the organization thus benefits from the unconditional support of the authorities, which no longer find it necessary to open and check the parcels sent to prisoners of war in Germany. Abroad, it therefore becomes an instrument of the government. After its retreat from France in June 1940, it supplies the Russian ally and follows the British and American reconquest of Europe via Syracuse in Sicily and Taranto and Bari on the Italian peninsula from August 1943. Grouped in auxiliary teams known as VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment), the nurses of the BRCS wear a khaki uniform and are almost integrated in the army in June 1943. Ill prepared and not always qualified to deal with war injuries, they contribute significantly to the militarization of the nursing profession by providing priority care to soldiers rather than civilians. According to Penny Starns, women play a key role in this regard. In England and Wales alone, 28,000 of the 37,000 BRCS volunteers involved in anti-aircraft defence in late 1940 are women…
-1939-1949, Poland: following the Nazi invasion of September 1939, the Geneva Committee is invited by Berlin to witness first-hand the assassinations of German civilians committed during the retreat of the Polish troops. Despite being used for the purposes of military propaganda, the ICRC delegate in Warsaw, Marcel Junod, is thus able to meet a small number of soldiers imprisoned alongside civilians. However, the ICRC is soon denied access to the 500,000 Polish prisoners of war, who are no longer protected by neutral Sweden and their own state, annexed by the Nazis. Reduced to mere administrative detainees, 65,000 of them are exterminated because they are Jewish. The Soviets, who share the country with the Germans and have not signed up to the 1929 Convention on prisoners of war, also refuse to comply with international humanitarian law and force 25,000 captured soldiers to build a road between Lvov and Novograd. Worse still, in March 1940, the Red Army is ordered by Josef Stalin to execute Polish officers. Asked by the Germans to exhume their bodies in the forest of Katyn near Smolensk in February 1943, the Geneva Committee chooses not to conduct an inquiry that would serve the interests of Nazi propaganda and be opposed by the Soviets. As for the Polish Red Cross, now based in London with its government in exile, it warns the international community about the growing number of concentration camps, particularly in a detailed report released on 8 March 1943. In France, it is no longer able to work in the Northern zone, occupied by the Germans since June 1940, and is forced to hand over its relief operations aimed at Polish prisoners of war to a local department created in 1921, the Service social d’aide aux émigrants. In the Southern zone governed by the Vichy regime, the Polish Red Cross is dissolved on 1 November 1941 and replaced by an agency affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Groupement d’aide et d’assistance aux Polonais en France. Meanwhile in Poland, the organisation remains active thanks to its treasurer, Waclaw Lachert, who remained in Warsaw and who seeks to resist the attempts at integration made by the German Red Cross, the DRK (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz). Refusing to take part in Nazi propaganda and to benefit from the sale of a book of photographs of the Katyn massacre, the Polish Red Cross distributes identity cards to first-aid workers to help them avoid deportation to labour camps. However, Waclaw Lachert is unable to prevent the imprisonment of some workers, such as Eugeniusz Sztomberek, arrested by the Gestapo in February 1944, accused of collaborating with the resistance and almost killed in Buchenwald. In July 1944, the Warsaw insurrection puts an end to any possibility of compromise when the headquarters of the Polish Red Cross are burned down by the Germans. Henceforth managed, administered and represented by the DRK, the organization is placed under the authority of a central aid committee, the RGO (Rada Glowna Opiekuncza). In August 1945, the defeat of the Nazis and the Soviet victory change the course of history. The ICRC is able to return to Poland, to open a delegation in Warsaw in April 1946 and to visit prisoners of war left by the Red Army. Allowed in January 1947 to handle the evacuation of German minorities, it continues these activities until its offices are shut down by the communists in October 1949. In the meantime, it also encourages the exiles of the Polish Red Cross in London to close their offices in Geneva in June 1946 and in Paris in March 1947 to join the organization re-formed in Warsaw by the Soviets in January 1945.
-1939-1945, Switzerland: after the declaration of war on Germany by France in September 1939, the LRC is forced to leave its Paris offices and withdraw to Geneva under the leadership of Jean de Muralt, the head of the Swiss Red Cross forced by circumstances to act as interim president of the League. As for the ICRC, it defers the official recognition of the new Red Cross organizations created during the war with which it maintains de facto rather than de jure relations. Many national societies follow their government in exile in London, such as Norway on 20 May 1940, the Netherlands on 29 May 1940, Poland on 31 October 1940 and Czechoslovakia on 14 November 1940. Others simply disappear, such as the Red Cross of the Free Town of Danzig, established in 1938 and dissolved a year later after the German invasion of Poland. In the Nazi-occupied territories, the ICRC is therefore forced to deal with puppet societies. In Belgium, for instance, the Red Cross maintains a fictitious independence after 1940: all correspondence is required to transit via the DRK (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz) and its general director, Edmond Dronsart (1892-1965), is arrested briefly in 1942 and definitively removed in 1943 after 37 years of service. The war takes a heavy toll on national societies. The CRF (Croix Rouge Française) suffers 414 deaths, including 242 nurses killed as a result of air raids. The CRI (Croce Rossa Italiana) records 275 fatalities, with 3 nurses drowning as a result of an aerial attack on the Pô hospital ship on 14 March 1941. The ICRC itself looses thirty-seven people: twelve delegates (including two shipping agents) and twenty-five members of the crews in charge of transporting supplies. On land, Ernest Baer dies as a result of a sunstroke during a visit to a prisoner-of-war camp in India; Charles Hubert, of a car accident in Germany; Johann Jovanovitz, of the misconduct of a French gendarme during the Liberation; Matthaeus Vischer and his wife, of decapitation by the Japanese in Indonesia; Georges Morel, William Schmid-Koechlin and Robert Brunel, of health problems in Australia, Belgium and Greece respectively. At sea, Richard Heider and Marcel Reuter disappear in shipwrecks. Indeed, the maritime transport of supplies involves high-risk operations. Of the 43 Red Cross ships listed by Philippe Eberlin during the six years of war, six are sunk and/or gunned down: the Stureborg and the Kurtulus in 1942, the Padua in 1943, the Embla and the Cristina in 1944 and the Zurich in 1946. On 27 October 1943, for instance, the Portuguese ship Padua is destroyed by a German mine off the coast of Cape Faraman near Marseilles, losing six crew members: Manuel Francisco dos Santos, Manuel Soares Canelas, Jose dos Reis, Agostino Pereira, Antonio Feliciano Oliveria and Manuel Francisco Carrapichano. Air raids claim even more lives. While the Stureborg is sunk by Italian planes off Cyprus, killing twenty people on 9 June 1942, the Swedish Embla and the Spanish Cristina are attacked by the British Royal Air Force along the French coastline, the former near Port-Vendres on 6 April 1944, the latter in Sète on 6 May 1944, resulting in the death of a mechanic, Feliz Maranon. The emblem of the Red Cross provides little protection to first-aid workers despite unsuccessful appeals by the ICRC which, on 12 March and 12 May 1940, insists that the belligerents should end air raids on towns to spare the lives of civilian populations. From the outset of the conflict, however, Geneva had reactivated its Central Tracing Agency, a body in charge of the identification prisoners of war in 1914-1918. With its relief committee founded during the Spanish civil war, the ICRC also distributes supplies throughout occupied Europe and takes over the handling of the operations, to the great displeasure of the American Red Cross. In total, the joint commission set up with the LRC in November 1940 dispatches 470,000 tons of food and medical supplies, carries 24 million parcels, transmits 120 million messages and forwards 9 million letters to prisoners of war for the entire duration of the hostilities. On 15 April 1942 and for the first time ever, the ICRC thus establishes a ‘Red Cross Foundation for Transport’ to charter Swedish or Portuguese cargos and hospital ships that bear the Swiss flag and that are theoretically protected by the 1907 Hague Convention. The system enables the institution to use steamboats that are more powerful than the Spanish and Portuguese yachts provided by the British Red Cross in November 1940 to supply Marseille and assist prisoners of war in France. In addition to the Lugano, the Calanda and the Zurich, which are owned by the Swiss government, the Committee hires a number of ships in Stockholm, including the Sven Salen and the Rosa Smith. In the same vein, it charters boats blocked by the fighting and which are no longer used by their owners, to whom they will subsequently be returned after the war: two steamboats (one Belgian, the other American), the Frédéric and the Oriente, respectively renamed Caritas I and Henri Dunant; the Swedish diesel ships Mangalore, Saivo and Travancore; and a Danish cargo, the Frédéric, seized by the Americans, renamed Spokane and used by the ICRC as Caritas II. In parallel, the ICRC staff increases from 57 in 1939 to 1,454 in Geneva, 814 in the rest of Switzerland and 179 abroad in 1945. In recognition of its work, the institution is finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 1944. As for the LRC, it opts to remain in Geneva and does not return to Paris, where the French government had offered to accommodate the organization in the Palais Royal in premises that were to be renovated in March 1947, until the project was definitely abandoned in April 1949.
