Commission for Relief in Belgium
organization
The Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB, or simply Belgian Relief) was an international, predominantly American, organization that arranged for the supply of food to German-occupied Belgium and northern France during the First World War.
Its leading figure was chairman, and future President of the United States, Herbert Hoover.
Origins
When the Great War broke out, Hoover was a mining engineer and financier living in London. When hostilities erupted, he found himself surrounded by tens of thousands of American tourists trying to get home. Their paper securities and travelers' checks were not being recognized and very few of them had enough hard currency to buy passage home, even if any ships had been sailing; most voyages had been canceled. Hoover set up and organized an "American committee" to "get the busted Yankee home," making loans and cashing checks as needed. By October 1914 the American Committee had sent some 120,000 Americans home, and in the end lost just $300 in unpaid debt. This episode brought Hoover and his organizational talents to the attention of the American ambassador, Walter Hines Page, and several other key people in London, who came to him in late October with a request for his help with a much larger problem:
In 1914, after being invaded by Germany, Belgium suffered a food shortage. The tiny nation, at the time among the most urbanized countries in Europe, only grew enough food to meet 20–25% of its needs. Nonetheless, the German occupiers were requisitioning what was there to help feed their army.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Commission for Relief in Belgium” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Commission, Relief and Belgium, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1780279. VIAF identifies the subject as 312592461. The Library of Congress control number is n88222385. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commission for Relief in Belgium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.