"World Red Cross Day 2024 is on Wednesday, May 8, 2024: american red cross during WW2?

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 is "World Red Cross Day 2024. Red Cross® Official Site Make A Difference In The Lives Of Others. Please Donate Today.

Second World War and Korean War veterans remember the American Red Cross charging troops token fees for "comfort items" such as toothpaste, coffee, donuts, and cigarettes and for off-base food and lodging. The fee suggestion had been made in a letter dated March 1942 from the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to Norman H. Davis, the chairman of the American Red Cross. The thought was that allied soldiers were being charged so Americans should be charged too so as not to bring down allied morale. The Red Cross subsequently adopted the Secretary's suggestion as policy. Some[who?] veterans and their families have resented the Red Cross since because of the policy.

To make amends, the American Red Cross issued an apology during Veteran's Day 2007 celebrations,stating "Thank you for your service to our country. And thank you for your support of the American Red Cross. And, now and forever, the coffee and doughnuts are on us." The Red Cross also set up a tent near the World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. and gave away coupons for coffee and doughnuts as they solicited donations for the organization. yeah yeah.

what was a red cross camp during world war 2?

The ICRC and World War II

Red Cross message from Łódź, Poland, 1940.Enlarge picture

Red Cross message from Łódź, Poland, 1940.

The legal basis of the work of the ICRC during World War II were the Geneva Conventions in their 1929 revision. The activities of the Committee were similar to those during World War I: visiting and monitoring POW camps, organizing relief assistance for civilian populations, and administering the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War (Zentralauskunftsstelle für Kriegsgefangene) had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards, and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency. One major obstacle was that the Nazi-controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews from Germany and the mass murders conducted in the concentration camps run by the German government. Moreover, two other main parties to the conflict, the Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow the rules of the conventions.

During the war, the ICRC failed to obtain an agreement with Nazi Germany about the treatment of detainees in concentration camps, and it eventually abandoned applying pressure in order to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. The ICRC also failed to develop a response to reliable information about the extermination camps and the mass killing of European Jews. This is still considered the greatest failure of the ICRC in its history. After November 1943, the ICRC achieved permission to send parcels to concentration camp detainees with known names and locations. Because the notices of receipt for these parcels were often signed by other inmates, the ICRC managed to register the identities of about 105,000 detainees in the concentration camps and delivered about 1.1 million parcels, primarily to the camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen.

After the war the Red Cross set up camps for the displaced, the sick, the hungry etc. Fed, clothed, healed their bodies, mind & soul or at least tried. It also became a place where you can find your relatives or other people..... still very much the same camps they set up these days when there are disasters in other countries.