Another reason why I support the Salvation Army, a Christian organization, rather than this organization. Printed from aish which has it from historical files. Collusion of the Red Cross Finally, the issuance of new IDs would have been useless without travel documents that the Swiss based International Red Cross issued to stateless refugees in Europe after World War II. “The majority of people who approached the Red Cross were legitimate refugees,” Steinacher described to Aish. “They were ethnic Germans who were expelled (from Poland, the Soviet Union, and other countries) and lost everything. But because the Red Cross didn’t do checks – no checks at all, basically, a number of Nazi criminals and their collaborators from all over Europe were able to fraudulently obtain the documents as well. “ The number of stateless people in Europe following World War II approached 30 million. Clearly, given the chaos and confusion of that time, it was difficult to verify the claims of each “stateless” applicant. The Red Cross archives in Geneva were closed until the 1990s, when Steinacher was one of the first researchers to examine them. What he learned shocked him. “Anti-Semitism was very widespread at the time,” he explains. “With the end of World War II it did not just appear overnight. I was nonetheless surprised by the amount of religious anti-Semitism inside the Catholic Church,” Steinacher recalls, and “also among heads of humanitarian organizations,” such as Carl Jacob Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross. “Burckhardt did not only identify the German people as victims in 1945, but also seemed to have blamed Jews for their suffering.” In the six years after the end of World War II, the Red Cross issued 120,000 travel documents, with only the most rudimentary background checks, or at times, no checks at all. In many cases, Vatican officials told the Red Cross whom to furnish with travel documents. Red Cross documents also circulated on the black market, available to anyone who was able to pay for passage out of Europe. How many Nazis were issued travel documents during this period? Steinacher says it’s impossible to say, but guesses the numbers are in the tens of thousands. •In 1946, the Red Cross issued travel documents to an entire division of Ukrainian Waffen-SS: 11,000 men and women, some of whom had served as concentration camp guards – and their families. Ukrainian Archbishop Ivan Buchko petitioned the Pope to help this group escape; after receiving a Papal blessing, Buchko petitioned the Red Cross for 9,000 travel documents. The Red Cross issued the documents, and the Ukrainians left Europe, most destined for Canada.7 •Another example of Red Cross travel documents is seen in the case of Hermann Duxneuner, a provisional administrator from Innsbruck, who took on himself the “de-Judaization” of Tyrol, providing lists of Jews for murder and deportation. He asked for and received a Red Cross travel document good for travel to Holland or Brazil in 1946, but he couldn’t use it. He was actively pursued by Allied forces as a war criminal, and remained in hiding. Nevertheless, in 1948, the Red Cross issued this wanted war criminal a new document, this time allowing him to travel to Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium” – any port which would take him in. Duxneuener eventually moved to Argentina.8 Steinacher wants readers to know the enormity of the Red Cross’ collusion. “In my research,” he says, “I show this isn’t an oversight – this wasn’t a bureaucratic error. Most of these people (wanted Nazis) travelled on their real names, with their real birthdates. The only thing that wasn’t real was their nationality – which said they were stateless because the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) would only give travel documents to stateless people.”
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:49:10 +0000
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