Abstract
Europe in the spring of 1945 was a desperate place — short of food, lacking infrastructure, awash with the displaced, the wounded, the homeless and the starving. As this state of troubled peace emerged from the maelstrom of the war, Max Huber — newly returned to the post of ICRC president following Burckhardt’s acceptance of the position of Swiss Foreign Minister to Paris — took to his pen, as he had in September 1939, to sketch out the tasks that awaited the ICRC in its next epoch.1 Huber was very mindful of the fact that, fraught though it had been, the ICRC’s war had engendered the greatest expansion in the organization’s history and increased its capabilities and resources such that it could lay claim to being the humanitarian agent par excellence of the post-war world. Fortified by this belief in April 1945 he made an impassioned call to arms to the Red Cross faithful, in which he both pressed the need for the ICRC to sustain its relief effort following the cessation of hostilities and sought to remind his audience of the uniqueness and value of ICRC delegates at a time when a host of relief agencies representing all manner of outside interests was converging on Europe:
as long as there are prisoners of war and occupied territories there will be circumstances in which an institution independent of both victors and vanquished, acting only for humanitarian purposes and hampered by no political ties, can be of service.
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Notes
Italics author’s emphasis — Andr Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), pp. 634–7, citing Max Huber, undated circular to International Red Cross, April 1945.
Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 382; Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima, pp. 624–5.
Durand, Sarajevo to Hiroshima, pp. 631–2; Marcel Junod, Warrior without Weapons, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1951), pp. 252–71; ACICR:BG 003/51–6 – Notes on Junod talk to WO, 21 June 1946.
Britain’s largest wartime annual contribution to the ICRC (SFR1,183,162.20) came in 1944 – ICRC Report, vol. 1 Annex 1; François Bugnion, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Richmond: MacMillan, 2003), pp. 172–4;
Catherine Rey-Schyrr, De Yalta à Dien Bien Phu: Historie du Comit International de la Croix-Rouge 1945–1955 (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 2007), pp. 37–9.
Gerard Daniel Cohen, ‘Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarianism in Occupied Germany, 1945–46’, Journal of Contemporary History 43.3 (2008), pp. 437–49;
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 109–11;
Ben Shepherd, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2011), pp. 50–3.
Sharif Gemie, Laure Humbert and Fiona Reid, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936–48 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 143–4;
Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St. Mary’s, 2012), p. 108; Shepherd, Long Road Home, pp. 54–9.
Hugh Dalton, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton: 1940–1945, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 25 November 1942, p. 525.
George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), vol. 2, p. 508.
Of particular significance was UNRRA’s success in averting Europe-wide epidemics — Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–51 (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1989), pp. 46–52.
John Nichol and Tony Rennell, The Last Escape: The Untold Story of Allied Prisoners of War in Germany, 1944–45 (London: Penguin, 2003), ch. 14;
S. P. MacKenzie, The Colditz Myth: British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 384–90;
Adrian Gilbert, POW: Allied Prisoners of War in Europe 1939–1945 (London: John Murray, 2006), pp. 315–17; ICRC Report, vol. 3, pp. 96–7.
TNA:FO 371/51096 – Sub-Committee Report on UNRRA Activities, 5 July 1945; Wyman, DP, pp. 46–52; Woodbridge, UNRRA History, vol. 2, pp. 3–5, 535; David Stafford, Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation (London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 373–4.
Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 514–18; and Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 2.
Bob Moore, ‘Turning Liabilities into Assets: British Government Policy towards German and Italian Prisoners of War during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 32.1 (1997), pp. 117–36 (134);
Jon Sutherland and Diane Sutherland, British Prisoner of War Camps during the Second World War (Newhaven: Golden Guides, 2012), pp. 24–7.
James F. Trent, ‘Food Shortages in Germany and Europe, 1945–48’, in Stephen Ambrose and Günter Bischof (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1992), pp. 95–112;
Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 467–9.
See James Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and the Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989). For a comprehensive rebuttal of Bacque’s argument that Eisenhower deliberately starved to death hundreds of thousands of German POWs
see Stephen Ambrose and Günter Bischof (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1992).
The Americans used the term ‘Disarmed Enemy Forces’ (DEFs) – ICRC Report, vol. 1, pp. 539–41; Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift (London: John Murray, 2007), pp. 392–3.
Sutherland and Sutherland, British Prisoner of War Camps, pp. 20–3; for discussion of mortality rates in the Rheinwiesenlager see Rüdiger Overmans, ‘German Historiography, the War Losses, and the Prisoners of War’, in Ambrose and Bischof (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs, pp. 127–69;
Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and De-Nazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 173–7; Lowe, Savage Continent, pp. 114–15; MacDonogh, After the Reich, p. 399.
ICRC Report, vol. 1, p. 539–40; Brian Loring Villa, ‘The Diplomatic and Political Context of the POW Camps Tragedy’, in Ambrose and Bischof (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs, pp. 52–77.
TNA:FO 1049/246 – Strang to Troutbeck, 5 November 1945; for Soviet view of the ICRC see David P. Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 52–3.
The Soviets complained that the ICRC had failed to speak out about Nazi atrocities, had sold medical supplies on the black market in Hungary and Romania and, with absurd hypocrisy, that it had displayed an ‘unfriendly attitude’ towards Moscow throughout the war — ICRC Report, vol. 1, p. 436; Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 549–50; Dominique D. Junod, The Imperilled Red Cross and the Palestine-Eretz-Yisrael Conflict, 1925–1952 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), pp. 14–16; ACICR:BG 003/30–09 — Marguerite Frick-Cramer, Note sur mes entretiens à Londres, October 1945.
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Crossland, J. (2014). Relief and Redundancy, 1945–6. In: Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399571_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399571_9
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