Red Cross parcel
During the Second World War these packages augmented the often-meagre and deficient diets in the prisoner-of-war camps, contributing greatly to prisoner survival and an increase in morale.
More recent catastrophes involving delivery of Red Cross parcels include events in Georgia, Thailand and Great Britain.
[5] Indigent French POWs could receive parcels with lower-quality food for free, from the "Vetement du Prisonnier" which liaised actively with the Croix-Rouge française.
Each parcel contained meat, fish, vegetable, bread and fruit items, together with eighty cigarettes or other tobacco products.
[10] Toward the end of the war, German camp guards and other personnel would sometimes steal the contents of these packages, often leaving only bread for the helpless prisoner.
[12] Red Cross food parcels during the Second World War were mostly provided from the United Kingdom, Canada and America (after 1941).
This was because all such packages were sent from their country of origin to central collection points, where they were subsequently distributed to Axis POW camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The Red Cross ship SS Padua was damaged by British bombing in Genoa in 1942 and then sunk by a mine outside Marseilles in October 1943.
[24] The Canadian Red Cross reported assembling and shipping nearly 16,500,000 food parcels during the Second World War, at a cost of $47,529,000.
[13] The New Zealand Red Cross Society provided 1,139,624 parcels during the war period, packed by 1,500 volunteers.
A Swedish vessel, the MS Gripsholm delivered 20,000 Red Cross parcels from Canada, America and South Africa and in addition a consignment of 1,000,000 cigarettes.
Red Cross parcels intended for Allied POWs in Japan were accordingly stockpiled in Vladivostok, Soviet Union, and a single ship was ultimately permitted to transport some of these to Japan in November 1944, which, in turn were carried by the Japanese vessel Awa Maru, carrying Red Cross markings, in March, 1945, to Singapore.
How many of these actually reached the POWs is not known, and the sinking of the Awa Maru on the return trip by a US submarine prevented any future shipments from being made.
About 1,112,000 parcels containing 4,500 tons of food were ultimately sent to the camps,[31] including those at Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.
[33] In the spring of 1946, the International Red Cross was finally allowed to provide limited amounts of food aid to prisoners of war in the U.S. occupation zone.
Soldiers were asked to state their preferences with regard to specific contents of the parcels: the most popular item turned out to be the biscuits, with butter a close second, followed (in order) by meat, milk (powdered and other), chocolate, cigarettes, tea, jam, cereals, cheese and coffee.
[25] With regard to especially disliked foods, the Canadian respondents (over 4,200 of the interviewed POWs) expressed the greatest distaste for the vegetables and fish enclosed in the food parcels (about fifteen per cent of the total number of respondents), followed (in order) by condiments, egg powder, cereals, fat, cheese, desserts, sweets, beverages, jams, biscuits and milk.
The new kits contained: In addition, German and Italian authorities sometimes permitted British prisoner hospitals to procure equipment from England via the Red Cross, including microscopes, sterilisers, material for manufacturing artificial limbs, medical instruments, vaccines, drugs and even games and other recreational materials.
The Red Cross, with the financial support of the German government, assisted approximately 500,000 of these mostly elderly people with food parcels over a seven-year period during the 1990s.
