OPINION:
HUMANITARIANS AT WAR: THE RED CROSS IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST
By Gerald Steinacher
Oxford University Press, $32.95, 330 pages
The subtitle of this passionate, well-intentioned book is key to why it makes me uneasy. One of the commonest errors a historian can make is to judge an institution or actions in the light of hindsight, which is bound to be distorting or even blinding. For better or for worse, things and people have to be understood in the context of their time. This does not mean that you have to approve of what they did or did not do, but you need to understand the zeitgeist in which they operated.
Gerald Steinacher, who is a professor of Judaic Studies and history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, sees the Red Cross refracted in the light of today’s painful awareness of the Nazi murder of 6 million European Jews. He writes at a time when the words Holocaust and Shoah are so well-known that even children are familiar with them. But not only were these words not in common parlance for many decades following the dastardly deeds, they were unknown at the time the events they refer to actually occurred.
Indeed, even the term genocide was coined when Hitler’s final solution had been under way for some time. So one can understand why the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) failed to respond adequately to a situation so improbable-seeming that when eyewitness evidence of the Nazi extermination camps came to the attention of the highest government officials in London and Washington they at first refused to believe it.
So it bothers me to read this: “It was only in the 1990s that the ICRC publicly admitted that its silence on the Shoah was a ’moral defeat.’ In the words of Peter Maurer, ICRC president since 2012: ’[The ICRC] failed as a humanitarian organization because it had lost its moral compass.’ ” It is a prime example of judging the past in today’s terms.
Also of failing to realize that making gestures that make one feel good are less important than focusing on the larger picture.
So when this book appears to echo condemning the ICRC’s failing at its meeting on Oct. 14, 1942 “to direct a public appeal throughout the world on the question of Jews and hostages” because “(1) it would serve no purpose, rendering the situation even more difficult and (2) would jeopardize all the work undertaken for the prisoners of war and civilian internees [excluded in this category were most political prisoners and deportees] — the real task of the Red Cross,” as its ’most shameful moment in the Second World War,’ ” it just isn’t getting it.
Can anyone seriously believe that such an appeal would have had the slightest effect in stopping the slaughter? Or deny that the food parcels provided to POWs and prisoner exchanges, which were indeed “the real task of the Red Cross,” could have happened had the organization compromised its iron rule of neutrality?
Yet in a kind of logical jujitsu, Mr. Steinacher appears to believe that in adhering to the very notion of independence and neutrality in the service of its credibility, ICRC lost the authority it was seeking. But where is the evidence that its unwillingness to help Jews and political victims hindered in any way its sterling work for POWs and other detainees?
And as for the admirable efforts undertaken on behalf of saving Hungarian Jews by the Swedes Count Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg under the auspices of the Red Cross, it is at the very least arguable that they would not have had the access and capability they enjoyed had it not been for the narrow view of its mission adopted by the ICRC so roundly condemned in these pages.
I have no quarrel with the central thesis of “Humanitarians at War” that the Red Cross’ postwar mission and image — both self and to others — were both informed and formed by the posthumous judgment of its inadequacy in confronting and still less ameliorating the genocide which was such an important part of Nazi policy in World War II. What I do object to is a facile and unsympathetic view of the very real dilemma the ICRC faced during that conflict.
My wise European history teacher, Edna Jackson (a cousin of Sen. Edward Brooke,) at the District’s own Woodrow Wilson High School had a saying she was fond of telling her students when they glibly condemned past actions or the conduct of the Vietnam War, which was taking place then. “It’s easy to sit in comfortable chairs and criticize.”
By which she meant, it was a lot tougher to make difficult decisions and choices than to be an armchair quarterback. A little more understanding and a lot less self-righteous moralizing and breast-beating would make this a less superheated — albeit understandably so — and in the end more enlightening study.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, California.
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