State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.