dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/red-cross-workers-suspected-german-spies-second-world-war-book-reveals/communications/article/1230569

The book, by James Crossland of Murdoch University in Australia, says US soldiers were told to have only limited interaction with the ICRC.

A predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency suspected that International Committee of the Red Cross workers in north Africa were working as German spies during the Second World War.

A new book on wartime relations between Britain and the ICRC, by James Crossland, a lecturer in history at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, says the US Office of Strategic Services was suspicious of ICRC activities.

Crossland, who as part of his doctorate studied an OSS report that was declassified in the 1990s, said OSS suspicions emanated from liaisons with the UK, where some Whitehall officials believed the ICRC or its members had pro-German sympathies.

He said the British "had come to the conclusion by 1942 that the ICRC was a very meddlesome organisation, primarily because the ICRC wanted to ship relief in unrealistically large quantities into Europe, which the British of course were hesitant to do because they knew the supplies would be taken by the Germans".

American soldiers "were told to not interact with the ICRC and, if they did, to be very limited in how they interacted", said Crossland.

But he said that, of 49 individuals named in the OSS report, only two were likely to have been acting improperly, and one of those was a thief rather than a spy.

"One of them was a thief, basically: he’d stolen gold that was taken from Hungarian Jews," said Crossland. "The other had tried to form a spy ring for the Axis alliance in Algiers: it’s not clear how extensive that spy ring was, but by all accounts it wasn’t a particularly big deal."