I thought I could not possibly loathe the ICRC any more than I already do.
I was really wrong.
I’m sure the apologists will say that Eichmann just “slipped through” somehow.
That’s not good enough.
The passport used by high-ranking Nazi Aldolf Eichmann as he escaped to Argentina after World War II has been turned over to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires after a judge stumbled upon it in a musty court file.
Eichmann, a leader of a campaign of mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during the war, fled to Argentina in 1950 under the alias “Ricardo Klement.”
I’m really not fond of Argentina, either. It astonishes me that even now, so many nations protect their Nazis, using the excuse that the survivors are now old and infirm. Yeah. They weren’t old and infirm when they were murdering Jews, though.
When people try to use that excuse with me, I point out that the Nazis did not allow their victims even the chance to grow old and infirm.
As for those who were already old and infirm when the Nazis were in power — well, we know how the Nazis treated them.
Actually, one can say that one is preventing them from suffering the emotional pain caused by the fear of being caught. That’s right, it is for their own best interest to cut short the suffering that they must undergo as fugitives. And we are helping their associates avoid the punishment that they will have to undergo for assisting the murderers.
See, the death penalty is for everyone’s benefit.
Goebbels was a cripple, I recall. Didn’t stop him from facilitating the Holocaust.
There should be no statute of limitations on genocide, let alone a statute of disability.
Wow.
To be fair, in recent years the Red Cross has been re-examining their doctrine of absolute neutrality in all cases. They were some of the first ones to alerted the world to the Rwanda genocide, and they refused to hand over Tutsis under there care to Hutu gangs. I would hope the Eichmann incident would not be repeated today.
The Red Cross is no friend of ours.
John, the ICRC refused to let Magen David Adom in until they agreed to put their Star of David in a diamond-shaped box. This, even though the Red Crescent of Muslim countries has been a member for years, and has no such restriction on the red crescent symbol–which is a symbol of Islam.
The ICRC has not changed when it comes to Jews. I think they’d hide Eichmann all over again, given the chance.
I would never donate money to the ICRC. Magen David Adom, yes…ICRC, a bunch of hypocrites no better than Amnesty International!
“I think they’d hide Eichmann all over again, given the chance.”
And they’d justify it by saying, “We’re not anti-semitic, just anti-Zionist.” Just as their ancestors proudly declared, “We’re not Jew haters, just anti-semitic.”
Actually I think Eichmann used false identity papers and lied about who he was to the Red Cross. Should the question not be why the Argentinians and other governments did nothing about it when the true identities were revealed? The Red Cross helped my family to travel to safety when all our papers had been destroyed, using the same type of document, and we had no proof of who we were … let us hope that the action for people like Eichmann had its origins in good intentions and that the Red Cross was genuinely deceived.
The ICRC position on this issue is available on http://www.icrc.org/eng with links to other documents relating to WWII and the Holocaust:
The ICRC travel document recently exhibited in Argentina had never been publicly displayed before, though its existence was known and indeed had been publicized in 1999 by the ICRC itself in a press release. It is not a full-fledged identity document or passport but rather a temporary “laisser-passer” intended for refugees, displaced and stateless people and others who have no travel documents and are therefore unable to go either to their country of origin or residence or to another country willing to receive them.
These documents were created in 1945 to help tens of thousands of concentration camp survivors, former prisoners of war, deportees, forced labourers and other stranded civilians who had no valid travel documents. Many of them approached the ICRC for help in securing the papers they needed. Since then, ICRC travel documents have helped more than half a million people reach new homes. ICRC records show that more than 9,000 travel documents were issued between February 1945 and early 1946 alone. Almost all of them were for people caught up in the maelstrom of the immediate post-war period in Europe, without legal documents or proof of nationality and often desperate to start a new life elsewhere. The “laisser-passer” system exists to this day. In 2006, the ICRC issued more than 5,800 travel documents.
The ICRC has previously deplored the fact that Eichmann and other Nazi criminals misused its travel documents to cover their tracks. Writing in the International Herald Tribune on 10 March 1992, the then director of the organization’s Department of Principles and Law, Yves Sandoz, wrote: “These men [Barbie, Eichmann and Mengele] and their secret supporters took shameless advantage of a humanitarian service which benefited half a million people, mostly survivors of concentration camps and refugees from Eastern Europe.â€
The document that has now appeared in Argentina is authentic. Adolf Eichmann obtained it after submitting a request to the ICRC in which he used a false name and a forged identity card. Neither during the immediate post-war period nor today does the ICRC have the means to verify the identity of applicants for travel documents. Such identity checks can be carried out only by the authorities of the countries to which they are travelling and which have accepted the ICRC’s travel documents.
The ICRC continues to open its archives to researchers interested in the organization’s work during the Second World War and its aftermath. While the ICRC has not archived copies of the travel documents themselves, it has retained records of the requests for them.