31 people joined the committee at the conference: eighteen official delegates from national governments, six delegates from other non-governmental organisations, and seven non-official foreign delegates. The official delegates came from:
The conference wanted:
Only one year later, the Swiss government invited the governments of all European countries, as well as the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, to attend an official diplomatic conference. Sixteen countries sent a total of twenty-six delegates to Geneva. On 22 August 1864, the conference adopted the first Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field". Representatives of 12 states and kingdoms signed the convention: Baden, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hesse, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Switzerland, Spain, and Württemberg. The convention contained ten articles, establishing for the first time legally binding rules guaranteeing neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers, field medical personnel, and specific humanitarian institutions in an armed conflict.
Also, the convention had two requirements before a national relief society would be recognised by the International Committee:
The first national societies were founded in Belgium, Denmark, France, Oldenburg, Prussia, Spain, and Württemberg. Also in 1864, Louis Appia and Charles van de Velde, a captain of the Dutch Army, became the first independent and neutral delegates to work under the symbol of the Red Cross in an armed conflict. Three years later in 1867, the first International Conference of National Aid Societies for the Nursing of the War Wounded was convened.
Dunant left the committee in 1867 after arguing with other members. In 1876, the committee changed its name to the"International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC), which is still its official name today. Five years later, the American Red Cross was founded through the efforts of Clara Barton. More and more countries signed the Geneva Convention and began to respect it in practice during armed conflicts. The Red Cross quickly became an internationally respected movement, and the national societies became increasingly popular as a venue for volunteer work.
When the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, the Norwegian Nobel Committee opted to give it to Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy, a leading campaigner against war. The International Committee of the Red Cross officially congratulated Dunant and was a tribute to his key role in the formation of the Red Cross. Dunant died nine years later in the small Swiss health resort of Heiden. Only two months earlier his former friend and committee member Gustave Moynier had also died.
By the start of the First World War in 1914, there were 45 national relief societies throughout the world. The movement had grown beyond Europe and North America to Central and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Uruguay, Venezuela), Asia (the Republic of China, Japan, Korea, Siam), and Africa (Republic of South Africa). The Geneva Convention had been changed to include fighting at sea as well as on land.
In World War I Red Cross nurses came from around the world, including the United States and Japan, came to help the medical services of the armed forces of the countries involved in the war in Europe.
On 15 October 1914, immediately after the start of the war, the ICRC set up its International Prisoners-of-War (POW) Agency. By the end of the war, the Agency had sent about 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels, and about 18 million Swiss francs to POWs of all affected countries. The Agency also arranged for about 200,000 prisoners to be released and returned to their home country. The Agency collected about 7 million records from 1914 to 1923 about prisoners or missing people. The card index helped to identify about 2 million POWs and to contact their families. The complete index of 7 million cards is on loan from the ICRC to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva. But only ICRC can search the index.
The ICRC got the only Nobel Peace Prize of the war years, in 1917, for its outstanding wartime work.
In 1923, the Committee changed its membership rules. Until then, only citizens of the city of Geneva could serve in the Committee. This was changed to include all citizens of Switzerland by birth. This is still the rule today, and is designed to show that the ICRC is neutral, and that committee members and workers have never been citizens of a country that might be involved in a war. Only in 1993 were non-Swiss-born people allowed to work for the committee.
In 1934 the ICRC tried to get extra protection for civilians during war. Unfortunately most governments were not interested in adopting the extra rules before the start of World War II.
The Geneva Conventions, as amended in 1929, governed what the ICRC did. revision . The activities of the Committee were similar to those during World War I:
By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War ("Zentralauskunftsstelle für Kriegsgefangene") had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards (more than 6 times as many as world war 1), and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency.
The German Red Cross was controlled by the Nazis, and would not uphold the Geneva conventions which may have helped stop the deportation of Jews from Germany and the mass murders conducted in the concentration camps run by the German government.
Two other main countries in the war, the Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow the rules of the conventions. Thus, other countries were not bound to follow the Conventions regarding their prisoners in return.
The ICRC had to stop complaining about the treatment of detainees in concentration camps in case the ICRC was stopped from working for POWs.
After November 1943, the ICRC could send parcels to concentration camp detainees with known names and locations. Because the notices of receipt for these parcels were often signed by other inmates, the ICRC managed to register the identities of about 105,000 detainees in the concentration camps and delivered about 1.1 million parcels, mostly to the camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen.
On 12 March 1945, ICRC president Jacob Burckhardt was told by SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner that the ICRC's delegates could visit the concentration camps, but the delegates would have to stay in the camps until the end of the war. Ten delegates, among them Louis Haefliger (Camp Mauthausen), Paul Dunant (Camp Theresienstadt) and Victor Maurer (Camp Dachau), visited the camps.
Louis Haefliger told American troops about the forceful eviction or blasting of Mauthausen-Gusen and saved the lives of about 60,000 inmates. His actions were condemned by the ICRC because they were deemed as acting unduly on his own authority and risking the ICRC's neutrality. Only in 1990, his reputation was finally rehabilitated by ICRC president Cornelio Sommaruga.
Another example of great humanitarian spirit was Friedrich Born (1903-1963), an ICRC delegate in Budapest who saved the lives of about 11,000 to 15,000 Jewish people in Hungary. Marcel Junod (1904-1961), a doctor from Geneva, was another famous delegate during the Second World War. He was one of the first foreigners to visit Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and wrote his thoughts in his book "Warrior without Weapons".
In 1944, the ICRC got its third Nobel Peace Prize.