Resource centre

November 25th marked the beginning of a 16 days campaign of activism against sexual and gender-based violence. We’ve selected for the occasion 16 titles in our collections – mixing academic and humanitarian perspectives on sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflicts. Understanding sexual violence in wartime and its roots: multidisciplinary perspectives Conflict-related violence...

My tale of an unusual research in the Tracing Archives In the summer of 2020, Wolfgang Maass and his wife Renate received an unexpected call. An archivist in the German town of Thale, where they lived, wanted to know if Wolfgang was the son of a certain Willi Maass, born on 20 April 1913 in Quedlinburg. When he said that he was, the archivist explained that a British woman by the name of Ena...

To mark the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the ICRC Library is publishing a special issue of the IHL bibliography covering 10 years of international humanitarian law scholarship on the conflict.

The red cross emblem is much more than a mere logo. It is a symbol of such profound significance that the original relief organization founded by Henry Dunant, the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, was renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1875, to include the emblem in its name. Today, the red cross emblem is recognized worldwide and used to both...

History and photography are undeniably intertwined; historians often lament, unsurprisingly, that photography was not invented earlier.[1] Visitors to the ICRC’s online audiovisual archive soon become immersed in the organization’s history. Among the Second World War photos of prisoners of war (POWs) are some surprises. Photos of POW camps were mostly taken by delegates to document camp...

Very early on, the ICRC set up information agencies in order to restore contact between family members separated by conflict and ease the suffering of those affected by war. In August 2014, it created the International Prisoners of War Agency, which had three tracing units – one for the Central Powers, one for the Entente Powers and one for civilians. Within each unit, there were subsections...

CONTACTS General Archives publicarchives@icrc.org Agency Archives tracing.archives@icrc.org Film/video filmarchives@icrc.org Photos photolibrary@icrc.org Sound recordings audioarchives@icrc.org AV in general avarchives@icrc.org Library library@icrc.org Tel: +41 22 730 20 30

A family finds its roots When Clare Collins sent a message to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Agency Archives on 19 December 2019, it seemed like grasping at straws. Fifteen years earlier, Clare’s mother had discovered that her own biological father had been an Italian prisoner of war held in England during the Second World War. At the time, he worked on the family farm of...

To mark the 2021 International Archives Week, we wanted to celebrate the successful collaboration between the ICRC archives and library teams and other departments of the ICRC. In this Q&A, colleagues from the ICRC Legal Division Jose Serralvo Perez (Legal Adviser in the Legal Advisers to the Operations Unit), Mariya Nikolova (Legal Adviser in the Advisory Service on IHL Unit), and Yvette...

The ICRC’s archives and library collections contain millions of documents that date back as far as 1863. They form an invaluable legacy on the evolution of ICRC’s action and the development of international humanitarian law to better protect those affected by wars.