International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
World War II

The Red Cross' response to the Holocaust has been the subject of significant controversy and criticism. As early as May 1944, the ICRC was criticized for its indifference to Jewish suffering and death—criticism that intensified after the end of the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust became undeniable.

One defense to these allegations is that the Red Cross was trying to preserve its reputation as a neutral and impartial organization by not interfering with what was viewed as a German internal matter. The Red Cross also considered its primary focus to be prisoners of war whose countries had signed the Geneva Convention.

The Geneva Conventions in their 1929 revision formed the legal basis of the work of the ICRC during World War II. The activities of the committee were similar to those during World War I: visiting and monitoring POW camps, organizing relief assistance for civilian populations, and administering the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War (Agence centrale des prisonniers de guerre) had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards, and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency. One major obstacle was that the Nazi -controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes, including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews from Germany, and the mass murders conducted in the Nazi concentration camps.

Two other main parties to the conflict, the Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow the rules of the conventions.

During the war, the ICRC was unable to obtain an agreement with Nazi Germany about the treatment of detainees in concentration camps, and the ICRC eventually abandoned applying pressure, saying later it did so in order to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. The ICRC was also unable to obtain a response to reliable information about the extermination camps and the mass killing of European Jews, Roma, et al. After November 1943, the ICRC achieved permission to send parcels to concentration camp detainees with known names and locations. Because the notices of receipt for these parcels were often signed by other inmates, the ICRC managed to register the identities of about 105,000 detainees in the concentration camps and delivered about 1.1 million parcels, primarily to the concentration camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen.

Maurice Rossel was sent to Berlin as a delegate of the International Red Cross; he visited Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1944. The choice of the inexperienced Rossel for this mission has been interpreted as indicative of his organization's indifference to the "Jewish problem", while his report has been described as "emblematic of the failure of the ICRC" to advocate for Jews during the Holocaust. Rossel's report was noted for its uncritical acceptance of Nazi propaganda. He erroneously stated that Jews were not deported from Theresienstadt. Claude Lanzmann recorded his experiences in 1979, producing a documentary entitled A Visitor from the Living.

On 12 March 1945, ICRC president Jacob Burckhardt received a message from SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner allowing ICRC delegates to visit the concentration camps. This agreement was bound by the condition that these delegates would have to stay in the camps until the end of the war. Ten delegates, among them Louis Haefliger (Mauthausen-Gusen), Paul Dunant (Theresienstadt), and Victor Maurer (Dachau) accepted the assignment and visited the camps. Louis Haefliger prevented the forceful eviction or blasting of Mauthausen-Gusen by alerting American troops.

Friedrich Born (1903–1963), an ICRC delegate in Budapest who saved the lives of about 11,000 to 15,000 Jewish people in Hungary. Marcel Junod (1904–1961), a physician from Geneva was one of the first foreigners to visit Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped.

In 1944, the ICRC received its second Nobel Peace Prize. As in World War I, it received the only Peace Prize awarded during the main period of war, 1939 to 1945. At the end of the war, the ICRC worked with national Red Cross societies to organize relief assistance to those countries most severely affected. In 1948, the Committee published a report reviewing its war-era activities from 1 September 1939 to 30 June 1947. The ICRC opened its archives from World War II in 1996.
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