Aid Group Failed Wartime Jews

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

This coming Sunday, May 1, is Holocaust Memorial Day, set aside to remember the millions of victims murdered in Hitler’s death camps in the Second World War.

On Prince Edward Island, it has been observed since 1999. This year, the ceremony will be held on Monday, May 2, at Memorial Hall, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, from 6:30 to 9 p.m.

Leo Adler, past director of National Affairs for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Toronto, and the son of Holocaust survivors, will be the speaker.

Many governments failed in their duty to rescue Jews, Roma, and others from death at the hands of the Nazis. But international non-governmental organizations, too, were found wanting.

The failure of the Red Cross to help Jews during the Holocaust is the most shameful episode in its history.

Founded in 1863 to provide aid to military casualties and prisoners of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), headquartered in neutral Geneva, Switzerland, by the 20th century faced a new challenge: how to deal with unprotected civilians targeted by totalitarian regimes such as Hitler’s Germany.

In the Second World War, having failed to extend Geneva Convention protections to these new victims of war, it retreated into becoming a cautious and ineffectual organization.

The ICRC opted for a strategy of not addressing the question of Jews directly.

It made only general approaches concerning the victims of mass arrests or deportation, and then it made no reference to their religious affiliation or racial origins, although it was clear that the people in question were, for the most part, Jews.

On April 29, 1942, the German Red Cross informed the ICRC that it would not communicate any information on “non-Aryan” detainees, and asked it to refrain from asking questions about them.

This was accepted by the Geneva headquarters.

Information about the persecution of Jews did, however, filter out of Germany and the German-occupied countries and reached the Allied governments. Some of this information also became known to the ICRC.

Therefore, in the summer of 1942, the ICRC debated whether to launch a general appeal on violations of international humanitarian law.

It prepared a draft, but decided in the end not to issue the appeal, believing that it would not achieve the desired results.

As reports of extermination camps began to spread in 1944, a Swiss ICRC delegate, Dr. Maurice Rossel, visited the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia at the invitation of the Nazis. His June 23 visit was carefully orchestrated.

He walked through the ghetto under the escort of SS officers, but he did not have the opportunity to talk with the Jewish prisoners there.

The Nazis had cleaned up the ghetto by lessening overcrowded conditions by sending prisoners to Auschwitz and adding a bank, shops and schools.

The ruse worked. Dr. Rossel signed a report approving of the treatment of the Theresienstadt Jews.

On Sept. 27, 1944, Dr. Rossel went to Auschwitz. There he spoke to the commander of the camp, but he was not authorized to go inside it. Again, there was no protest.

In her memoir “The Art of Darkness,” published in 2002, Charlotte Opfermann wrote: “Why was the International Red Cross Commission duped during their so-called inspection of the (Theresienstadt) camp in June 1944? The commission wanted to be misled.”

Ruth Schwertfeger’s 1989 book “Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp” contains the following comment made by the survivor Klara Caro:

“It was never clear to me to what extent the so-called commission was in league with the Nazi criminals. If it had been a serious commission who really wanted to investigate our living conditions, then they would have examined more than the façade built for the purpose and would have gone independently into the stables and attics. They on the other hand only saw what the Nazis showed and presented them.”

In his book “The Red Cross and the Holocaust,” published in French in 1988, with an English translation in 1999, Swiss academic Jean-Claude Favez noted that the ICRC’s desire to maintain balance, borne out of its neutral, Swiss orientation, and the habit of reticence among most of its leaders, was no match for the Nazis.

The ICRC in 1996 released copies of its Second World War files, some of which provided verification that it knew of the persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps but felt powerless to speak out.

The files, 25,000 microfilmed pages, were turned over to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Red Cross has long acknowledged its awareness of the treatment of Jews during the Second World War, maintaining that if it had disclosed what it knew, it would have lost its ability to inspect prisoner of war camps on both sides of the front.

This is nothing but rationalization.

The Red Cross stood by while millions of Jews, and others, were murdered in gigantic factories of death.