Miles Lerman, chairman of the Holocaust museum, said lives could have been saved if the Red Cross had spoken out during the war, but Mr. Lerman also cautioned against condemning the organization.

''There is no question about it,'' he said. ''People, good people, decided to look the other way, including people in the Red Cross and in Britain and the United States.

''Always when people speak out, lives are saved. ''I wouldn't describe them as villains but as part of the world that found it more convenient to remain silent.''

Another scholar at the museum, Randolph L. Braham, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the City University of New York, wrote in his book, ''The Politics of Genocide'' (Columbia University Press, 1994): ''The International Red Cross feared that intervention in support of the Jews might jeopardize its traditional activities on behalf of prisoners of war.''

Mr. Ioanid said, ''There is no doubt that the Red Cross let itself be used by the Nazis.''

He gave as an example the ''positive reports'' that Red Cross inspectors wrote about the concentration camp at Terezin, Czechoslovakia, and said the organization had been ''clearly manipulated.''

To all outward appearances, Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt, was an unthreatening, model camp that even had its own symphony orchestra. In reality it was a way station for Jews and other prisoners headed to the death camp at Auschwitz.

To its credit, Mr. Ioanid said, the Red Cross took 3,000 to 3,500 Jewish orphans from Romania to Palestine on ships in 1944 when the Romanians realized their German allies were going to lose the war and relaxed their anti-Jewish campaign. By then, however, half of Romania's 760,000 Jews had already been killed.