The Wound That Never Heals

In 1944, with the battle for Europe still raging and the Final Solution at its height, the International Committee of the Red Cross was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the second of the three times in the Geneva-based committee’s history that it would receive the honor. Unfortunately, on this occasion at least, the prize was misaddressed. For all the good work the ICRC had done in trying to look after the welfare of the prisoners of war who were its principal responsibility under the Geneva Conventions as they then stood, the way in which the organization had conducted itself with regard to Nazi Germany should have brought it international opprobrium, not the highest honor the great and the good of this world can bestow. For what the ICRC had in fact done, quite deliberately and after both careful thought on the part of its leadership and wide-ranging internal discussions within the organization, was to refuse to go public with the information it had in its possession, which included critical eyewitness information it had acquired from its delegates in Nazi-occupied Europe--knowledge that, unspeakably, was otherwise restricted to the Germans and their victims.

And as Jean-Claude Favez’s authoritative account demonstrates in heart-rending detail, despite the fact that World War II ushered in the era of “Total War,” at least between developed countries (in colonial wars, it is well to recall, the imperial powers never thought it their obligation to honor either the laws of war or common-sense morality), the Germans accorded the ICRC a significant degree of access not just to British and American POWs but even to concentration camps where political internees were held. This meant that, almost throughout the entire war, ICRC delegates were the only outsiders to visit the camps. Between the spring of 1943 and the spring of 1944, for example, Dr. Roland Marti, a seasoned ICRC delegate who had, at least in the ICRC’s opinion, distinguished himself on the organization’s behalf during the Spanish Civil War, visited the concentration camps of Ravensbruck, Orianenburg, Dachau, Natzweiler and Buchenwald. During the same period, Marti’s colleagues visited Auschwitz. And, of course, circulating fairly freely as they did in the territory of the General-Gouvernement (the official name for Nazi-occupied Poland), ICRC delegates were entirely familiar both with the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto and with the mass murder being carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and German special police battalions in the Polish countryside.

And yet for the most part, ICRC delegates in German-occupied Europe tended if not quite to sympathize then at least not to think all that badly of the German officials with whom they interacted. In fairness, the Germans did everything they could to stage-manage things in the concentration camps on the occasions when ICRC delegates came visiting. When Dr. Maurice Rossel, a member of the ICRC’s Berlin delegation went to Theresienstadt on June 23, 1944, he found the camp full of flower beds. According to Favez, there is some question about whether Rossel was taken in by what he saw. But that in fact seems unlikely. As Caroline Moorehead shows in her largely favorable account of the ICRC, “Dunant’s Dream,” Rossel, who bowed to German requests to keep what he saw private, had in fact been favorably impressed. “In the Ghetto [Theresienstadt],” he noted in his report to his superiors in Geneva, “it is even possible to get hold of things almost unfindable in Prague.” As for the camp’s inmates, Rossel insisted that they were well-fed and housed in clean surroundings.

Where blindness ended--ICRC delegates were not, after all, the first foreign visitors to be taken in by the Potemkin villages erected by totalitarian states, nor have they been the last--and knavery began is hard to say. Favez inclines to the view that it was the ICRC’s tradition of strict neutrality and its limited mandate, which, from a strictly legal point of view, probably did not include Jewish civilians either in Germany or Nazi-occupied Europe, that determined its actions, although he both documents at great length the internal debate on these questions within the organization and speculates convincingly about the ways in which the Swiss political and cultural context influenced the response of an ICRC that, at the time, was largely an appendage of the Swiss establishment.

It is clear from Favez’s book that though the ICRC sought to influence governments, it was also influenced by them. And, as Favez puts it rather primly, the organization “reacted variously to the pressures exerted upon it.” There is no doubt that the Swiss, terrified of offending the Germans and thus provoking an invasion, bent over backwards to avoid doing anything that would offend Berlin. In retrospect, it seems clear that such fears were exaggerated. A neutral Switzerland served Nazi Germany’s interests, just as an ICRC that remained present served those interests, as Favez’s book demonstrates. Still, it would be oversimplifying things to claim that either the strategic anxieties of the Swiss state or the institutional preoccupations of the ICRC can be dismissed out of hand. Doubtless, they were real enough, but even in the early 1940s they were only part of the story.

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In his preface to the English-language edition, which, though well-translated by John and Beryl Fletcher, is unfortunately an abridgement of the French original, Favez alludes to many of the recent revelations about Switzerland’s conduct during World War II. By this, of course, he means more than just the country’s low history of collaboration with and money laundering for the Nazis, its policy of turning back Jewish refugees (something the United States and Britain were also guilty of), and recent revelations about Swiss banks’ profiteering from the plight of Jewish refugees. On its own, Favez’s decision not to revise his book in the light of these revelations is questionable, particularly in light of the fact that one of the most important Swiss firms in Germany that was proven by American investigators to have used slave labor was in fact among the family holdings of Dr. Max Huber, the ICRC’s chairman during World War II and a man Favez treats with great respect throughout the book.

More serious still is the fact that, for all its virtues, Favez’s book so sedulously eschews moral judgments. This is not to say that “The Red Cross and the Holocaust” is a bad book. On the contrary, it is an essential one--a brilliant work of scholarly synthesis and archival research. For three decades after the end of World War II, the story of the ICRC’s collaboration with the Nazis festered in secret. Then, to the institution’s everlasting credit, the usually secretive ICRC (it refused to cooperate with the Canadian scholar, J.F. Hutchinson in what it knew would be a critical look at its early history) threw open its archives of the period to Favez. Nonetheless, there is something deeply and worryingly equivocal about Favez’s book. His original title is revealing. In French, it is called “An Impossible Mission?”

The question mark is revealing. For in the end, for all the ways in which the ICRC as an institution feels profoundly guilty for its conduct during the Holocaust and has admirably refused simply to attribute the failure to the anti-Semitic views of some ICRC delegates and the anti-Semitic ambience of the times, the official line at the ICRC--a line supported by Favez’s book--is that what the organization faced in Nazi-occupied Europe was a tragedy in the Hegelian sense of the conflict of two rights. Favez largely endorses this perspective. The ICRC mandate dictated one course of action, higher morality another, and Favez is reluctant to do more than underscore that paradox. Presumably, he endorses the view expressed by John Fletcher in his translator’s introduction that “of all the forms of wisdom, hindsight is by general consent the least merciful, the most unforgiving.”

And yet surely the implication of that line, and of Favez’s conclusions generally, is wrong. Favez’s book demonstrates that the ICRC was in a better position than practically any other group of outsiders to find out the truth, and, because Switzerland was neutral and the ICRC was Swiss, its testimony would have counted for far more than the fragmentary reports being circulated by Jewish groups in Britain, the United States and what was then Mandatory Palestine. That alone conferred a special, morally inescapable onus of responsibility upon the organization. And no amount of extenuating circumstances, special pleading about mandates and institutional imperatives or historical contextualizing can change that. Indeed, the moral claims made by the ICRC for itself make comparing its response to those of states, which are fundamentally amoral entities, almost obscene. The ICRC had a moral duty and it betrayed it: That, however much there is a need for understanding, is the bottom line.

To insist upon the point is not to deny the obvious danger in focusing too obsessively on the ICRC. Like the question of why Churchill and Roosevelt did not allow in more Jewish immigrants or, after the war had begun, chose not to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, these sins should not occlude the fact that the real murderers were the Germans and their accomplices, just as in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide it is important not to mistake the blame that rests with U.N. and U.S. officials--real though it is--with that of the genocidaires themselves. Nonetheless, the story of what the ICRC did, and, still more important, failed to do, is relevant both to the past and to the present.

Understandably, Favez is concerned only with understanding what took place during World War II. But in reality the relevance of his book derives almost as much from the fact that the problem he examines is the one that faces the ICRC today in extremis as from the necessity of coming to terms with what role the ICRC played in the Holocaust. Indeed, to consign what the ICRC did to the realm of history is to assume that not just the Nazi era but the ethical dilemmas of that time are something we have put behind us. And the Rwandan genocide of 1994 should have put paid to that consoling fiction.

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To insist upon the point is not to detract from the unique horror of the Shoah or, for that matter, on the particular historical and ideological context in which the ICRC’s response took place. But to pin the blame on the times, let alone on individual delegates, is to have learned nothing from what took place. In truth, the same dilemmas that confronted the ICRC in the early 1940s confront it today, though on a lesser scale. The fervor with which the ICRC hewed to its concept of neutrality, and resisted anything that might be seen by the Nazis as overstepping its mandate, finds its echo today in the organization’s extreme reluctance to publicly condemn any belligerent. Some things have changed. Under the organization’s current president, Cornelio Sommaruga, the ICRC has taken what, for it, have been bold public stands. But they are bold only in the context of the ICRC’s own history. By any other standard, such steps away from neutrality have been halting, timid and morally unsatisfactory.

In the end, the problem may be that the tension between law and morality, and between the imperatives of a mandate and the imperatives of the truth, can never be fully reconciled. In the case of the Holocaust, it seems clear that truth should have prevailed, although the position of legal scholar Kenneth Anderson, who has argued that for the ICRC to have gone public with what it knew would not have saved a single Jewish life and would have put the welfare of the POWs the ICRC looked after more at risk, needs to be taken seriously. But there are times, as one of Anderson’s colleagues, international lawyer and expert on genocide Diane Orentlicher has put it, when “the lawyers have to leave the room.” What she meant by this, of course, is that there are times when the lawyer’s response is not the moral one. Over and over in the aftermath of the Cold War, we have seen decent people taking refuge in the idea that they were trapped by their mandate. If this is not quite the “I was just following orders defense,” it is a cousin to it. The Holocaust was one of those times. In my view, Bosnia was another.

The problem, of course, is that there are many other times when the intransigent hewing to mandates favored by the ICRC is exactly the right and most humane thing to do. Realistically, knowing the difference is difficult at best, for if there was even a case to be made for what the ICRC did between 1939 and 1945, a case, as Favez suggests, for respecting the “impossibility” of the ICRC’s task, there is a far stronger case in many of the myriad conflicts throughout the contemporary world where the ICRC is active and where its presence saves lives. Perhaps all that can be done is to treat the assumptions of all institutions, even one as distinguished and well-intended as the ICRC, with skepticism and, hard though it may be in this value-free, relativist age, not to be afraid of making moral judgments--even when they are harsh; even when one does not know what one would have done if the choice had been one’s own to make; and even when those one is criticizing have the best of intentions and are, at most, unwilling accomplices to horror.