Context: The Red Cross

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World War I Red Cross poster. (Library of Congress)

 

The Red Cross was born of the Treaty of Geneva in 1864, and the idea of neutral international aide entities was still new in 1914. More commonly known as the Geneva Conventions, the Treaty and later amendments maintained several important points.  Among the are:

• Medical personal could provide for the relief of wounded, regardless of nationality.
• Medical personal and medical units would be considered neutral.
• Neutral medical units would signify themselves with a red cross on a white background.

The Conventions also declared that any neutral medical agency, caught behind the military lines of any nation at war with their own must be released. Though the Conventions were in place during World War I, the Red Cross and its symbol were not yet fully recognized as neutral care-givers and there was no standard spelled out for the operation of relief agencies behind enemy lines when the war prohibits their release. World War I presented the first large-scale test of the Geneva Conventions; aid workers and combatants alike were unsure as to how  and when to uphold the regulations. The fluid nature of the implementation of the Conventions left relief workers, and those in their care in precarious positions throughout the war, as was certainly the case in Serbia in 1915, when the international typhus hospital, and its staff were seized by invading Bulgarian forces

The Balkans                                                                                                                                                                         Typhus