000			02525 a2200169 4500
999			_c26193 _d26193
020			_a9780198704935
082			_a361.77209 _bSTE-H
100			_aSteinacher, Gerald
245			_aHumanitarians at War _b: The Red Cross in The Shadow of the Holocaust
260			_bOxford University Press _c2017 _aUnited Kingdom
300			_axiii,330p
504			_aInclude Bibliography and Index
520			_aThis book has described the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is one of the world's oldest, most prominent, and revered aid organizations. But at the end of World War II things could not have looked more different. Under fire for its failure to speak out against the Holocaust or to extend substantial assistance to Jews trapped in Nazi camps across Europe, the ICRC desperately needed to salvage its reputation in order to remain relevant in the post-war world. Indeed, the whole future of Switzerland's humanitarian flagship looked to hang in the balance at this time. Torn between defending Swiss neutrality and battling Communist critics in the early Cold War, the Red Cross leadership in Geneva emerged from the world war with a new commitment to protecting civilians caught in the crossfire of conflict. Yet they did so while interfering with Allied de-nazification efforts in Germany and elsewhere, and coming to the defense of former Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. Not least, they provided the tools for many of Hitler's former henchmen, notorious figures such as Joseph Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, to slip out of Europe and escape prosecution-behavior which did little to silence those critics in the Allied powers who unfavorably compared the 'shabby' neutrality of the Swiss with the 'good neutrality' of the Swedes, their eager rivals for leadership in international humanitarian initiatives. However, in spite of all this, by the end of the decade, the ICRC had emerged intact from its moment of existential crisis, navigating the new global order to reaffirm its leadership in world humanitarian affairs against the challenge of the Swedes, and playing a formative role in rewriting the rules of war in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. This uncompromising new history tells the remarkable and intriguing story of how the ICRC achieved this - trying to escape the shadow of its ambiguous wartime record to forge a new role and a new identity in the post-1945 world
546			_a
650			_aHistory--War _vHolocaust, Jewish _vHumanitarianism _vWar work--Red Cross
942			_2ddc _cBK