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Humanitarians at war : the Red Cross in the shadow of the Holocaust

Purpose of this Study The State of Research Sources and Methods The Birth of an Idea The Founding of the Red Cross Zeitgeist of Humanitarianism Geneva Conventions First Experiences with Wars in Europe Expansion and Nationalization of the Movement Towards the First World War Interwar Period The League of Red Cross Societies The Geneva Convention of 1929 Testing the Limits of the ICRC Leading up to the Second World War The Silence on the Holocaust The Power of Personality A Delicate Balance: The ICRC between Switzerland and the Third Reich Inside Nazi Germany Not Speaking Out: The ICRC’s ‘Most Shameful Moment’Intervention and Opportunism Rescue Efforts for Camp Prisoners Turning Point: 1944 The Neutrals Change Course Hungary: A Humanitarian Proving Ground for Civilian Aid Competing Humanitarians Inter Arma Caritas The Red Cross in Crisis The Second World War and Its Challenge to Humanitarian Ideals The Guardians of Humanity Had Failed Infighting in the Red Cross Sweden and the League Charge Ahead The Soviets and the Left Join the Fray Ship without a Captain Financial Insolvency Between Nuremberg and Geneva Burckhardt’s ‘Diplomacy’The Humanitarians and Allied Justice The ICRC and Nuremberg The ICRC: Discretion and Direct Testimony at Nuremberg The Fallout from Nuremberg The ICRC and Aid Politics in Ruins Helping German Civilians The ICRC and the Expulsion of Ethnic Germans Burckhardt and Germans as Victims The Allies and Forced Repatriation The ICRC’s Stance on Forced Repatriation ICRC Policies in the Shadow of the Cold War The Humanitarians and the Nazis IRO Travel Documents for Victims The ICRC’s Travel Document for All The Positive Consequences of Success: Recognition of the ICRC’s Travel Papers and Aid to Refugees The Drawbacks of Success: ICRC Travel Documents as Aid to Criminals and Collaborators A Window of Opportunity Washington and Geneva Geneva 1947: The Diplomats Meet Bringing the Soviets to the Table Distractions from Reform Protecting the Protectors Towards the Geneva Conventions Preparations for Stockholm Showdown in Stockholm Final Complications The 1949 Grand Finale In the Aftermath of Geneva Crisis of Humanitarianism Long Shadows of History Acknowledgements Selected Bibliography

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Opportunities to Engage: The Red Cross and Australian Women’s Global War Work
Melanie Oppenheimer We feel rather sorry for you people here [in Australia] who did not go through the war years as we did in London and France... You have missed a lot, and in spite of everything I think we have had the best of it.1 So stated sisters Peggy and Mary Murdoch in a newspaper interview...
(Australians and the First World War : Local-Global Connections and Contexts)
The Founding of the Red Cross
The idea of the Red Cross was conceived on the battlefields of Europe. In 1859 Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman from Geneva, witnessed the fierce battle between Austrian and Sardinian-French troops near the town of Solferino, just south of Lake Garda in northern Italy. When the slaughter ended, soldiers...
(Humanitarians at war : the Red Cross in the shadow of the Holocaust)
The League of Red Cross Societies
The ICRC’s respected international standing after the First World War drew attention and sparked competition from the USA. During the war, the USA experienced a humanitarian awakening of its own and its national Red Cross society began to pursue the ambitious goal of ‘making the world safe’20 by...
(Humanitarians at war : the Red Cross in the shadow of the Holocaust)
The Red Cross in Crisis
In 1945 there was a big question—would the humanitarianism of the nineteenth century still have a place in the postwar world? Would the ‘moral conscience’ of the world have a future after Auschwitz? If the humanitarian idea was to survive, who should now carry the torch passed on by Henry Dunant,...
(Humanitarians at war : the Red Cross in the shadow of the Holocaust)
Infighting in the Red Cross
The ICRC faced an even greater possible consequence—its potential dissolution at the hands of its own Red Cross family. In 1946 during the conference of the League Board of Governors in Oxford, some of the participants proposed that the ICRC be closed down and simply replaced by the League of Red Cross...
(Humanitarians at war : the Red Cross in the shadow of the Holocaust)
Irish Red Cross Volunteer Inmates Programme
The Irish Red Cross established a Health and First Aid prison volunteer scheme in one prison in Ireland in 2009 (Betts-Symonds, 2012), which was subsequently rolled out across all 14 prisons in Ireland by 2014. The scheme utilises groups of prisoners as peer-to-peer educators to promote health, hygiene,...
(The Voluntary Sector in Prisons: Encouraging Personal and Institutional Change)
of a Global Community: Australian Red Cross and Volunteer Work at Home
Through international organisations such as the Red Cross, Australian women were able to create an imperial community that offered them a space to feel more actively and effectively involved in the war. Elsewhere, I have focused on some of the leading female viceregal protagonists in Australia at the...
(Australians and the First World War : Local-Global Connections and Contexts)
International Opportunities: Australian Women and Red Cross Work Overseas
This framework also helps explain the motivations and rationale for the experiences of Australian women who answered the call to actively participate in war work outside of Australia. They could do this within the imagined community of the Red Cross Movement and soon were on active service, whether in...
(Australians and the First World War : Local-Global Connections and Contexts)
The private Red Cross initiative
During the nineteenth century, public opinion mattered and the conference system was open to private initiative. The invention and spread of the telegraph, combined with modern printing presses, resulted in fast news services. When Florence Nightingale, who had gained experience in hospital administration,...
(International Secretariats: Two Centuries of International Civil Servants and Secretariats)
The International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross expanded its activities, as, apart from providing medical aid to the war wounded, it began detention visits and reported on prisoners of war, both publicly and discreetly. It tried to stop reprisals against them and to ensure some types of relief. During the...
(International Secretariats: Two Centuries of International Civil Servants and Secretariats)