The archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are based in Geneva and were founded in 1863 at the time of the ICRC's inception. It has the dual function to manage both current records and historical archives. The general historical archives are openly accessible to the general public up to 1975.

Along with the ICRC Library, the archives are widely considered to be the greatest repository for records on International humanitarian law (IHL). They have been dubbed by the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier as "the storehouses of sorrow". They preserve the memory of many millions of victims of armed conflicts as "a legacy for mankind".

History

Early Period

The ICRC – or rather its predecessor – was founded in February 1863 at the "Ancient Casino" in the Rue de L'Evêche 3 of Geneva's Old Town by five men: businessman-turned-activist Henry Dunant, who had laid out the basic ideas in his much-acclaimed book A Memory of Solferino; lawyer and philanthropist Gustave Moynier; the medical doctors Louis Appia and Théodor Maunoir; and the General Guillaume Henri Dufour.

At the same moment, its archives came into being:"Dunant, as secretary, signed off the minutes of the first meeting of the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the precursor of the ICRC. Still unaware of what would follow but hopeful that Dunant's vision would bear fruit, the young Committee preserved this document and the ones that followed in order to account for their decisions and actions."

The actual address of the newly founded Red Cross – and thus probably of its fledgling archives – became Dunant's private residence, the third floor of his family's "Maison Diodati" in the Old Town at Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre 4. It remained there for the first few years. However, as Dunant's colonial businesses in Algeria collapsed, he declared bankruptcy in 1867 and was pushed out of the ICRC by its president Moynier in the following year. It may be assumed that Dunant's ICRC-related records were transferred to Moynier's splendid city residence in Rue de l'Athénée No. 8 at first.

In the first half of the 1870s, the ICRC moved into an apartment of a building at Rue de l'Athénée No. 3, just across the street from Moynier's private residence. While it was a very representative address, the office spaces were still rather modest with just three rooms. Likewise, the archives and the library moved into the new Bureau.

During those early years, the archives collected information from various conflicts, especially the 1864 Second Schleswig War between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire on the one hand side, and the Kingdom of Denmark on the other, followed by the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).

Subsequently, the ICRC archives took over the archival holdings of the Basel Agency with some twelve linear meters of records about prisoners of wars (POW) from the latter war and of the Trieste Agency with one linear meter of files on POW from the Great Eastern Crisis in the Balkans between the Russian and Ottoman Empires and their respective allies (1875–1878).

A main focus was the collection of information about the implementation of IHL, particularly with regard to the First Geneva Convention of 1864. However, the primary task of the archives was to record diplomatic correspondence to account for the institution's humanitarian mandate.

In the following decades the archives kept on documenting the evolution of the Red Cross movement. However, those oldest holdings covering more than half a century – the Ancien Fonds – still only amounted to rather modest eight linear meters.

World War I

Shortly after the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the ICRC under its president Gustave Ador decided to establish the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA). Its main task was to trace prisoners of war and to re-establish communications with their respective families. Already at the end of the same year, it had a staff of some 1,200 volunteers who worked in the Musée Rath of Geneva. Many of them were girls, women, and students.

Their mandate was based on resolution VI of the 9th conference of Washington in 1912 and hence limited to military personnel. However, the committee member and medical doctor Frédéric Ferrière founded a civilian section against the advice of other committee members. It soon became commonly associated with the ICRC and significantly contributed to its positive image, thus also to its first Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 (The ousted Dunant had received the first one in 1901 as an individual).

One of its early activists was the French writer Romain Rolland, who volunteered in the sub-division for missing civilians until July 1915. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1915, he donated half of the prize money to the Agency. His friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, provided a lively description of the commitment:"A rough stool, a small table of unpolished deal, the turmoil of typewriters, the bustle of human beings questioning, calling one to another, hastening to and fro – such was Romain Rolland's battlefield in this campaign against the afflictions of the war. Here, while other authors and intellectuals were doing their utmost to foster mutual hatred, he endeavored to promote reconciliation, to alleviate the torment of a fraction among the countless sufferers by such consolation as the circumstances rendered possible. He neither desired, nor occupied a leading position in the work of the Red Cross; but, like so many other nameless assistants, he devoted himself to the daily task of promoting the interchange of news. His deeds were inconspicuous, and are therefore all the more memorable. [..] Ecce homo! Ecce Poeta!"Étienne Clouzot (1881–1944) – an archivist palaeographer, who was also a columnist for the liberal daily newspaper Journal de Genève (which had published an anonymous essay by Dunant about Solferino and thus played a role in the founding of the ICRC, illustrating the networking connections of Geneva's patrician family dynasties) – became the director of one of the Entente sections and designed the classification system for the millions of index cards.

Between the World Wars

At the end of 1918, the ICRC – along with its archives and library – moved to its new headquarters at the Promenade du Pin at the edge of the Old Town. In the following year, Clouzot (see above) rose to be head of the ICRC Secretariat in 1919, and therefore took over the responsibility for the running of the archives and the library."In the 1920s, after a brief period in which many different methods of records management were used, the Secretariat arranged its archives in two main groups, one for legal, diplomatic and administrative matters, the other for operations, under the auspices of the Committee's Delegation Commission (Commission des Missions)."

The IPWA stopped operating in 1924, but the ICRC archives kept on collecting information from various armed conflicts which in many cases may be considered a continuation of WWI. Amongst them were:

the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), and after a relatively quite decade

the Chaco War (1932–1935), the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the Second Sino-Japanese War (starting in 1937).

Only in 1930 did the ICRC start to keep and store personal files on its staff, a practise which illustrated"the new tasks in the realm of coordinating humanitarian action that began to fall to the ICRC."In 1932/33, the ICRC moved its headquarters away from the Old Town to the "Villa Moynier". It had been built in 1848 for the Banker Barthélemy Paccard and was then owned by his son-in-law Gustave Moynier (1826–1910), who was the first president of the ICRC and stayed in that office for a record-term of 47 years until his death. Situated in the middle of the large Parc Moynier on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Villa had housed the League of Nations in 1926.

It was also during those two decades between the two world wars that the ICRC developed "notions of historical memory and preserving memory for the sake of all humanity in relation to the archives".

World War II

The IWPA was re-opened two weeks after the beginning of the Second World War as the Central Agency for Prisoners of War, now based on the mandate from the 1929 Geneva Convention. Once again, Étienne Clouzot played a prominent role: "in 1939, fuelled by his experience in the International Prisoners of War Agency, he helped organize the Central Prisoners of War Agency, becoming a member of its Technical Directorate"

Another key person became Suzanne Ferrière, who had assisted her uncle Frédéric at the IPWA during WWI and now instituted a new family messaging system.

Already in October 1939, IBM "provided the Agency free of charge with both staff and Watson machines. The latter, thanks to a perforated card system, made it possible to sort and classify information at high speed." Faced with a gigantic growth of personal and institutional data which was handled by some 3,000 staff, the ICRC in 1942 introduced its first filing system. Altogether, the number of index cards rose to about 45 million and the number of transmitted messages to some 120 million, reflecting the new dimensions of human suffering. The ICRC's efforts were awarded in 1944 with its second Nobel Peace Prize after 1917.

One of the last – and most important – documents from the WWII period was issued on 29 August 1945, only days before the end of the war, by Fritz Bilfinger, an ICRC delegate who reached the apocalyptic ruins of Hiroshima just some three weeks after the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped the atomic bomb "Little Boy" on the Japanese city. His telegram, kept in the archives, recorded a chilling warning of the horrors of the Atomic Age:"conditions appalling stop city wiped out, eighty percent all hospitals destroyed or seriously damaged; inspected two emergency hospitals, conditions beyond description full stop effect of bomb mysteriously serious stop many victims, apparently recovering, suddenly suffer fatal relapse due to decomposition of White blood cells and other internal injuries, now dying in great numbers stop estimated still over one hundred thousand wounded in emergency hospitals located surroundings, sadly lacking bandaging materials, medicines stop."

Decolonisation and "Cold War"

In 1946/47 the ICRC moved its headquarters from the Villa Moynier to the former Carlton Hotel, built in 1876. The neoclassical building on a hill above the Palace of Nations was provided to the organisation by the Canton of Geneva through a long-term lease. At the same time, the IHL expert Jean Pictet (1914–2002) – who hailed from a Geneva family owning Pictet & Cie bank and played a key role in drafting the 1949 Geneva Conventions for the protection of victims of war – created the Archives Division:"A general comprehensive filing plan was then adopted in 1950 – the so-called 'Pictet Plan', in reference to its creator, Jean Pictet, who was then director of the Division of General Affairs, which included the archives. The filing plan comprised both thematic and geographic referential numbering. It applied to the whole institution until 1972 and to the Archives Division until 1997."

Meanwhile, the ICRC archives grew with the increase of conflicts during decolonisation and the so-called Cold War, which was a "hot war" in many places. They included:

the French Indochina War (1946–1954); the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight; the Korean War (1950–1953); the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution (1956); the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962); the Congo Crisis (1960–1965); the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) the North Yemen Civil War (1962–1970);