150 years of humanitarian aid – with a dark side

The Swiss Red Cross, Switzerland’s best-known aid organisation, celebrated its 150^th birthday with a big party in Be on April 2. However, its history includes not only great charitable deeds but also dark chapters.

The jubilee bash will take place on the square outside the capital’s parliament building and is primarily intended for the organisation’s 4,000 employees and more than 70,000 volunteers. At the same time a roadshow, “150 years of the Swiss Red Cross”, is starting outside parliament. The mobile exhibition will tour Switzerland throughout the year.

Founded in 1866, the Swiss Red Cross saw its reputation as a knight in shining armour enhanced when Switzerland accepted and inteed 85,000 cold and starving soldiers from France’s Bourbaki army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. This massive undertaking is immortalised in the 112-metre-long and ten-metre-high Bourbaki Panorama in Lucee.

Less glorious were some of its actions during the Second World War. On the one hand Swiss medical missions looked after injured soldiers from Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the German-Russian border. On the other, historians have accused the Swiss Red Cross of not delivering enough assistance to persecuted Jews and even of handing them over to the Nazis.

(Text: Renat Kuenzi, Image selection: Christoph Balsiger)

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