One of the sorry backstories of World War II is found in what the Red Cross did — or, more precisely, failed to do — during the Holocaust.
The pointed question was asked aloud by one survivor in May 1945 — “Where, above all, was the International Red Cross Committee?” — and now it is answered with authority and in compelling detail in “Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust” by Gerald Steinacher (Oxford University Press).
Steinacher is the Hymen Rosenberg Professor of Judaic Studies at the Lincoln campus of the University of Nebraska. One of his previous books, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice,” was honored with a National Jewish Book Award by the Jewish Book Council in 2011.
In his new book, Steinacher reminds us that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as the Swiss-based organization was formally titled, deferred to the German Red Cross throughout the 1930s, when Hitler’s concentration camp system was first put into operation. Already “deeply Nazified,” the German Red Cross assured the ICRC that “the living standard in the camps [was] higher than most of the inmates were generally used [to].” Steinacher writes: “The German Red Cross had for all practical purposes … turned into a National Socialist medical service unit supporting Hitler’s Wehrmacht.”
Even after the outbreak of World War II, the ICRC did little or nothing to assist the victims of Nazi terror. Steinacher describes how the ICRC managed to send a few food parcels to Germany in 1943, including 882 packages that reached Dutch and Norwegian inmates, and 31 packages that reached Jewish inmates. But when the ICRC proposed to send food parcels to Auschwitz, the German Red Cross “claimed that the Jews were employed exclusively in labour camps in the East and that food and medication there [were] reportedly abundant,” Steinacher writes. In a message tainted with bitter irony, a representative of the German Red Cross wrote to the ICRC that “shipments of supplies to these camps were in principle not necessary.”
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