International Committee of the Red Cross

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Committee of the Red Cross began with one man staring at a battlefield and making an unexpected choice. In June 1859, a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino intending to meet French emperor Napoleon III about business difficulties in Algeria. What he found instead changed the shape of modern warfare. About 40,000 soldiers on both sides had died or been left wounded in a single day, the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. There was almost no medical attendance and almost no basic care. Dunant abandoned his original purpose entirely and spent days helping organize relief, persuading local people to assist the wounded without discrimination. Back in Geneva, he turned that experience into a book, A Memory of Solferino, published with his own money in 1862. He sent copies to leading political and military figures across Europe, and from those pages grew the most widely recognized humanitarian organization in the world. How a private Swiss committee became the guardian of the rules of war, how it earned three Nobel Peace Prizes and also committed what it calls its greatest failure in history, and how it navigated the impossible tension between neutrality and conscience are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Committee Is Born

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  On the 9th of February 1863, the Geneva Society for Public Welfare met to take Dunant's proposals seriously. Five members were appointed to form a subcommittee, charged with preparing a memorandum for submission to a welfare congress in Berlin that September. The group included Gustave Moynier, a lawyer who chaired the society; Louis Appia, a physician with field surgery experience; Appia's colleague Theodore Maunoir from the Geneva Hygiene and Health Commission; and General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a celebrated Swiss Army commander. Eight days later, the five men resolved to declare themselves a permanent international committee. By October of that year they had organized a conference in Geneva, drawing eighteen official government delegates from fourteen states and kingdoms, including Prussia, France, Britain, Austria, Russia, and the Italian kingdom, along with delegates from other non-governmental organizations. The resolutions adopted on the 29th of October 1863 proposed the founding of national relief societies, the neutrality and protection of wounded soldiers, and, crucially, a common symbol for medical personnel in the field: a white armlet bearing a red cross, honoring Switzerland by reversing the colors of its own flag. Less than a year later, on the 22nd of August 1864, representatives of twelve states signed the First Geneva Convention, establishing for the first time legally binding rules guaranteeing protection for wounded soldiers and field medical personnel. The first national Red Cross societies were founded in Belgium, Denmark, France, Prussia, Spain, and several other states directly after that signing. In 1876, the growing committee formally adopted the name International Committee of the Red Cross.

• 3. Henry Dunant's Fall and Rehabilitation

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  Henry Dunant did not witness the movement's early momentum from a position of honor. In 1867, business failures in Algeria, compounded by years of neglected commercial interests during his tireless humanitarian work, forced him to declare bankruptcy. A warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy. An ongoing conflict with Gustave Moynier, combined with negative public opinion about his business dealings, led to his expulsion from the committee he had helped create. He left Geneva and never returned. For decades he lived in obscurity. When the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave it jointly to Dunant and leading pacifist Frederic Passy, a recognition that served as an overdue rehabilitation. The official congratulation from the International Committee marked the organization's formal tribute to the man whose book had started everything. Dunant died nine years after receiving that prize, in the small Swiss health resort of Heiden. Two months before him, his long-standing adversary Gustave Moynier had also died, leaving behind a remarkable record as the committee's longest-serving President ever.

• 4. World War I and the Prisoner Agency

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  On the 15th of October 1914, just weeks after the First World War began, the ICRC established its International Prisoners-of-War Agency. By the end of 1914 the Agency had roughly 1,200 mostly volunteer staff members. Over the course of the war it transferred about 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels, and around 18 million Swiss francs in monetary donations to prisoners on all sides of the conflict. Approximately 200,000 prisoners were exchanged between warring parties as a result of the Agency's intervention. The organizational card index accumulated about 7 million records from 1914 to 1923, each card representing an individual prisoner or missing person; from it, roughly 2 million POWs were identified and their families contacted. The complete index remains on loan from the ICRC to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, and access is still restricted solely to the ICRC. ICRC delegates visited a total of 524 camps throughout Europe by the war's end, monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions. When chemical weapons were used for the first time in history during this conflict, the ICRC vigorously protested. Between 1916 and 1918, the committee published postcards showing prisoners in everyday camp activities, aiming to give anxious families some hope about their loved ones' fates. The ICRC received the 1917 Nobel Peace Prize for this wartime work; it was the only Nobel Peace Prize awarded in the entire period from 1914 to 1918.

• 5. World War II: Failure and Reckoning

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  By the end of World War II, 179 ICRC delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to prisoner-of-war camps across 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War employed a staff of 3,000 and maintained a card index of 45 million records; 120 million messages were exchanged through the Agency. Those numbers tell one part of the story. The other part is harder to describe. The Nazi-controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes, including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews and the mass murders in concentration camps. The Soviet Union and Japan were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow them. The ICRC failed to secure an agreement with Nazi Germany about treatment in the concentration camps and eventually stopped pressing the matter to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. A proposed 1942 appeal on the conduct of hostilities was abandoned. Swiss historian Jean-Claude Favez, following an eight-year review of Red Cross records, found that even though the Red Cross knew by November 1942 about the Nazi plans for the extermination of Jews, it did nothing to inform the public. In October 1942, the Swiss government and the Red Cross board vetoed a proposal by committee members to publicly condemn Nazi persecution of civilians. After November 1943, the ICRC did obtain permission to send parcels to concentration camp detainees with known names and locations; the receipts, often signed by other inmates, led to the registration of about 105,000 detainee identities, and roughly 1.1 million parcels were delivered, primarily to Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. On the 12th of March 1945, ICRC President Jacob Burckhardt received a message from SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner accepting the demand to allow delegates into the camps. Ten delegates accepted the assignment under the condition that they would remain in the camps until the war ended. One of them, Louis Haefliger, prevented the forced evacuation or destruction of Mauthausen-Gusen by alerting American troops, saving roughly 60,000 inmates. The ICRC condemned Haefliger's actions at the time as an unauthorized breach of neutrality. Only in 1990 did ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga formally rehabilitate his reputation. In an official statement on the 27th of January 2005, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the ICRC stated plainly that Auschwitz represents the greatest failure in its history, aggravated by its lack of decisiveness in aiding the victims of Nazi persecution.

• 6. Neutrality, Structure, and Independence

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  The ICRC's original motto, Inter Arma Caritas, meaning "Amidst War, Charity," dates to its founding and has remained unchanged while other Red Cross organizations adopted new ones. The committee's Assembly can have no more than twenty-five members, all of whom must be Swiss citizens and speak French, the house language. Members are co-opted rather than elected by an outside body, and there is no limit on terms served, though re-election after a third term requires a three-quarters majority vote. In the early years, every member was Genevan, Protestant, white, and male. The first woman, historian and legal scholar Renee-Marguerite Cramer, was co-opted in 1918 and resigned in 1922. She was followed by nurse and suffragette Pauline Chaponniere-Chaix and then music educator Suzanne Ferriere in 1925. Non-Genevan Swiss citizens were not admitted until 1923. The Assembly's mono-national character is deliberate: Swiss permanent neutrality means that conflicting parties can be assured no one from "the enemy" is setting policy in Geneva, a lesson reinforced by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, when national Red Cross societies proved unable to sustain neutral humanitarianism. On the 19th of March 1993, a formal agreement with the Swiss government codified the long-standing policy of ICRC independence, protecting the sanctity of all ICRC property and archives, granting legal immunity to members and staff, exempting the committee from all taxes and fees, and providing communication privileges equivalent to those of a foreign embassy. The UN General Assembly granted the ICRC observer status on the 16th of October 1990, the first time such status had been given to a private organization; the resolution was jointly proposed by 138 member states. On the 1st of October 2022, Mirjana Spoljaric Egger took office as President, becoming the first woman to hold that position.

• 7. Funding Fragility and Global Reach

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  The ICRC's 2023 budget stood at 2.5 billion Swiss francs, almost double the 1.18 billion Swiss francs it operated on in 2012. All payments are voluntary donations. In 2021, the United States was by far the largest single donor at 544 million Swiss francs, followed by Germany at 247 million and Switzerland at 156 million; in the same year, Russia contributed 1 million, China contributed 710,000, South Africa contributed 225,106, and Brazil made no contribution. In March 2023, the ICRC announced cuts of 430 million Swiss francs across 2023 and 2024, with a layoff of 1,800 staff at headquarters and in delegations worldwide. Director Robert Mardini attributed the shortfall to the Russian invasion of Ukraine drawing donor attention away from crises elsewhere. The Canton of Geneva stepped in with an emergency pledge of 40 million Swiss francs in May 2023. The organization operates in over 80 countries with roughly 18,000 employed people worldwide; about 1,000 of them work at Geneva headquarters and around 2,000 expatriate professionals serve in the field, backed by approximately 15,000 national employees hired locally. In 2024, Ukraine was the single largest humanitarian operation, with 196 million Swiss francs allocated, of which 167 million targeted operations inside Ukraine directly. The ICRC has never operated under a funding guarantee, and its capacity to respond depends entirely on the willingness of governments, national societies, and international organizations to keep giving, a dependency the organization itself has described as increasingly fragile.