Red Cross failed to help Dutch Jews during Holocaust
The Dutch branch of the Red Cross did “little or nothing” to help Jews persecuted by the Nazis in the Netherlands during the Holocaust or those transported to camps elsewhere in Europe, a historian said Wednesday.
The conclusions come in a book by Regina Grueter of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies following a four-year investigation commissioned by the Red Cross.
“The central board of the Red Cross in The Hague, bluntly put — but this is blunt — abandoned the Jewish population,” Grueter said at a book launch in Amsterdam. “On the one hand it has, clearly unwillingly, carried out anti-Jewish measures of the occupiers. On the other hand, it did little or nothing to help Jews.”