Abstract
In the years after the First World War, the ICRC was beset by a number of challenges, both internal and external, that greatly shaped the character and composition of the organization that would attempt to bring humanity to the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflict. The first such challenge came in 1919 from within the Red Cross family itself, when a rival body — the League of Red Cross Societies — emerged to claim leadership of the movement and in doing so question the past record and future effectiveness of the ICRC. The seeds of this split had been sown decades earlier by the Committee’s founders. Although Dunant’s talk in the 1860s of the need for ‘societies in each country’1 had been fulfilled in the years after the signing of the First Geneva Convention, the process by which these National Red Cross Societies were created and their relationship to the ICRC were never clearly defined. It was not until 1876 that the notion of the ICRC having to officially recognize and endorse new National Societies became systematic. By that time, however, the independent character of and distance between the first National Societies and the ICRC had become deeply entrenched and the former was bound to the latter by little more than a ‘community of principles’ well into the first decades of the twentieth century.2 In some cases this estrangement grew to open schism.
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Notes
Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1986), p. 117.
Hans Haug, Humanity for All: The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (Berne: Henry Dunant Institute, 1993), pp. 645, 421–3.
John F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 239–40;
G. Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 141.
H. Jones, ‘International of Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the First World War’, European Review of History 16.5 (2009), pp. 697–713 (698–9).
Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp. 285–93; Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 59.
Andr Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), pp. 151–9;
Daphne A. Reid and Patrick F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict: The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–1994 (Geneva: IFRC, 1997), p. 80.
Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp. 261–2.
David P. Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 203–4;
John F. Hutchinson, ‘“Custodians of the Sacred Fire”: The ICRC and the Postwar Reorganisation of the International Red Cross’, in Paul Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 17–35.
Yves Sandoz, ‘Max Huber and the Red Cross’, European Journal of International Law 18.1 (2007), pp. 171–97 (173–6);
Dietrich Schindler, ‘Max Huber – His Life’, European Journal of International Law 18.1 (2007), pp. 81–95.
On the growing ‘war psychosis’ in Britain from the mid-1930s see Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 314–18; Sandoz, ‘Huber and the Red Cross’, p. 185.
Rainer Baudendistel, Between Bombs and Good Intentions: The Red Cross and the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 (New York: Berghan, 2006), pp. 116–18;
Davide Rodogno, ‘Fascism and War’, in Richard J. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 239–58 (246).
Richard Bessel, ‘The First World War as Totality’, in Richard J. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 52–69 (58–9).
Grawitz went on to supervise the experimentation programme on concentration camp inmates. He committed suicide in Berlin in April 1945 – Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer SS (London: MacMillan, 1990), pp. 333, 461; for the coordination of welfare and humanitarian organizations with the Nazi regime in the 1930s
see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), pp. 219–21.
Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima, pp. 285–7; Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 351–2; Eugene Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them, 1st rev. edn (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006), p. 34.
Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust, eds and trans John Fletcher and Beryl Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 18–21.
Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 298–9; Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 101.
Richard Deeming, Heroes of the Red Cross (Geneva: ICRC, 1969), pp. 59–79. For a more critical assessment of Junod’s willingness to excuse Italian atrocities during the Italo-Ethiopian war see Baudendistel, Between Bombs and Good Intentions, pp. 306–7.
Marcel Junod, Warrior without Weapons, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1951), pp. 94, 141;
François Bugnion, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Richmond: MacMillan, 2003), pp. 171–2; Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, hereafter ACICR:PV — Minutes of Committee meeting, 2 September 1939.
Assessments of British POW policy in the war’s early years can be found in Arieh J. Kochavi, Confronting Captivity: Britain and the United States and Their POWs in Nazi Germany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 10–11;
David Rolf, ‘Blind Bureaucracy: The British Government and POWs in German Captivity, 1939–1945’, in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), pp. 47–97 (48–9);
Neville Wylie, Barbed Wire Diplomacy: Britain, Germany and the Politics of Prisoners of War, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 65–8.
Wylie, Barbed Wire Diplomacy, pp. 66–7; Harold Satow and M. J. Se, The Work of the Prisoners of War Department during the Second World War (London: Foreign Office, 1950), pp. 5–6; on interrogation preparations see generally TNA:KV 4/302, particularly ‘Places Suitable for the Interrogation of Prisoners’ memorandum, 1 March 1939; for POW labour planning see
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 (119).
ICRC Report, vol. 2, pp. 144–5; Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, Collar the Lot!: How Britain Interned and Expelled Its Wartime Refugees (London: Quartet, 1980), p. 64;
Bob Moore, ‘Axis Prisoners in Britain during the Second World War: A Comparative Survey’, in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), pp. 19–46 (19).
Pierre Bossier, The History of the International Committee of the Red Cross: From Solferino to Tsushima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), pp. 93–100;
Brigette Troyon and Daniel Palmieri, ‘The ICRC Delegate: An Exceptional Humanitarian Player?’, International Review of the Red Cross 89.865 (2007), pp. 97–111 (98); ACICR:BG 3/003/001 – Note on Haccius Instructions, 10 October 1939.
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© 2014 James Crossland
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Crossland, J. (2014). Grandeur, Tribulation, Apocalypse, 1919–40. In: Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399571_3
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