Expert Analysis
By Eduardo Kohn, B’nai B’rith Director of Latin American Affairs
When we open the website of the Red Cross, we find three words that make up the definition of its mission: neutral, impartial and independent.
When we ask ourselves where the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was during the Shoah, the answer is that the organization was not neutral, nor impartial and far from independent. This is because the ICRC did nothing to help Jews during the Holocaust and remained silent when it became aware of Hitler’s decision to exterminate all Jews. Before, during and after the war, the ICRC was indifferent to the suffering of the Jewish people. The organization, at times, became an accomplice, contributing to Nazi propaganda and sympathizing with the Nazis during and after the war.
In 2015, Peter Maurer, president of the ICRC, speaking in Geneva to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps, stated that the organization “failed to protect civilians and, most notably, Jews persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime. We failed as a humanitarian organization because it lost its moral compass.”
During the 1930s, Red Cross leaders viewed German Nazism as a pillar of civilization in the fight against communism. Carl Jacob Burckhardt, vice president of the organization, demonstrated an affinity with Hitler’s government. In 1936 he attended the Olympic Games in Berlin. The following year, Burckhardt was invited to the Nazi Party’s annual rally in Nuremberg. His anti-Semitic statements continued after the end of the war. In 1959, in a preliminary version of his memoirs, he claimed that the Jews had declared a fight to the death against fascism and therefore it was them, the Jews, who were behind the second World War.
On Aug.19, 1938, the ICRC inspected the Dachau concentration camp. Burckhardt inspected it personally. The ICRC’s mission was to reassure public opinion about the living conditions and treatment of people held in the camps. In an official statement, the ICRC said: “We must recognise, in all objectivity, that the Dachau camp is a model of its kind in terms of the way it is built and managed”. Shameful propaganda indeed. When the victims were Jewish and action was demanded from the Red Cross, the organization responded with silence or referred the issue to other organizations. The Red Cross justified its actions by stating that the ICRC’s work was based on the Geneva Convention and that the 1929 convention was designed for prisoners of war, so the ICRC had no authority in cases of “civilian” prisoners in concentration camps. They claimed that the mass incarceration of Jews was an internal German matter.
After examining Red Cross documents, historians concluded that the organization had known about the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” since the spring of 1942. Yet it failed to alert the world and help and protect millions of victims. The International Committee of the Red Cross did nothing to intervene, did not publicly condemn the existence of the death camps or the decision to exterminate all Jews, nor did it ask the German government to respect the human rights that the ICRC supposedly defended.
The ICRC justified itself, saying it remained silent because publicizing the death camps would not change anything. One of the worst and most immoral actions of the ICRC was the so-called visit to the camp in Terezín where the Nazis prepared a very well-known farce. Nevertheless, one of the ICRC delegates in Theresienstadt, Maurice Rossel, continued to defend his views many decades later. In 1979, Rossel was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for his documentary Shoah, where he again stated that he had confirmed the excellent conditions on the field and would probably do so again. After his visit to Theresienstadt, Rossel visited Auschwitz and said, believe it or not, he did not realize it was a killing center.
The anti-Semitic bias and moral failure of the Red Cross continued after the war. The organization that was supposed to be the guardian of humanity had failed the Jews and the world. One example of this occurred in 2007 when Argentina handed over to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires the travel document used by Adolf Eichmann—one of the main architects of the “Final Solution”—to flee Europe and enter Argentina, after World War II. A judge found the document in a dusty court file. The document had been issued by the ICRC. The Red Cross lies one more time when it claims that the documents were inadvertently provided to the Nazis among the tens of thousands of people who received travel documents from the organization. However, internal correspondence between Red Cross delegations in Genoa, Rome and Geneva shows that the organization was well aware that the Nazis were taking advantage of these documents.
On the day of the Oct. 7 pogrom, after Hamas invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, kidnapped more than 250 people, including women, children, the elderly, and a baby, raped and mutilated women, beheaded people and burned babies, the ICRC issued a press release calling on “all parties to respect their legal obligations under international law. Civilians and healthcare professionals must be respected and protected at all times.” That was the shameful statement made by the Red Cross about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The statement also included the unacceptable words “all parties” even before Israel could respond to the attacks. The ICRC failed, again, to condemn a terrorist group that systematically violates the Geneva Convention and the principles of international humanitarian law and that has established in writing and declarations that its main goal is the extermination of the Jewish people and to wipe Israel off of the map.
The International Red Cross has adopted an extremely biased approach to the war in Gaza. From Oct. 7th to Nov. 28th, 2023, of the 187 tweets published by the Red Cross’s social media accounts, twenty-nine tweets (16%) criticized both sides and only 7% of those tweets criticized Hamas. The posts talk about the suffering of Palestinians, but do not mention the suffering of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th or after. There are no posts, images, graphics or videos highlighting the damage suffered by Israel on Oct.7, nor are there posts about the tens of thousands of rockets fired toward Israel. There were some references to hostage taking. The bias in this content encourages and gives support to anti-Semitism all over the world.
The ICRC has completely failed in its mission. Medications were not given to the hostages in these 16 months of torture and crime in the Gaza tunnels. Inaction continued even after reports of torture, sexual abuse, lack of food and medical care were known. In December 2023, ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric went so far as to blame Israel, telling Channel 12 that “both” Hamas and Israel were responsible for the ICRC’s failure to gain access to the hostages. The indecency of the Red Cross has gone so deep as to cross all red lines when hostages have been released under a brutal show made by Hamas with the complicity of the ICRC letting the hostages be beaten, spitted, and insulted before they could get into the ICRC vans.
The Red Cross should change its website. Instead of boasting they are neutral, impartial and independent, they should be at last more honest and sincere, and accept they have never been neutral (above all towards the Jewish people and the State of Israel), they are partial when they put an independent State in the same level with an Islamic terrorist group, and they have never been, and it is likely they will never be, independent. Showing permanent anti-Semitic conduct for more than a century has no link with independence but with illegal behavior.
Eduardo Kohn, Ph.D., has been the B’nai B’rith International Director of Latin American Affairs since 1984. Before joining B’nai B’rith, he worked for the Israeli embassy in Uruguay, the Israel-Uruguay Chamber of Commerce and Hebrew College in Montevideo. He is a published author of “Zionism, 100 years of Theodor Herzl,” and writes op-eds for publications throughout Latin America. He graduated from the State University of Uruguay with a doctorate in diplomacy and international affairs. To view some of his additional content, click here.