The International Committee of the Red Cross today released copies of its World War II files, some of which provided verification that it knew of the persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps but felt powerless to speak out.
The files, 25,000 microfilmed pages, were turned over to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Red Cross said its knowledge about the treatment of Jews during World War II had been written about by Jean-Claude Favez in his book ''Une Mission Impossible.'' The book was published in France in 1988 and later translated into German but never appeared in English. Some American scholars and Holocaust survivors in the United States were also aware of the Red Cross's knowledge, but generally it was not known more widely.
The Red Cross has long acknowledged its awareness of the treatment of Jews during World War II, maintaining that if it had disclosed what it knew, it would have lost its ability to inspect prisoner of war camps on both sides of the front.
No one at the museum has had an opportunity to study the material, said Radu Ioanid, the museum's specialist on Holocaust survivors. But Mr. Ioanid said documents that he had briefly seen disclosed that the Red Cross, which is supposed to maintain neutrality, had rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary and Romania and had assisted Jews at a concentration camp in Ravensbruck, Germany.
For the most part, however, the Red Cross's assistance came late in the war and beneficiaries were relatively few compared with the millions of people who died in the camps.
''The International Committee of the Red Cross has shared responsibility for the silence of the world community,'' Georges Willemin, the organization's archivist, said today. ''Could we have gone further? Could we have done more? I don't know.''
The documents are in two groups, one dealing with Jewish prisoners and the other with hostages and political detainees. Mr. Willemin said both groups of files contained many first-hand accounts and reports on the persecution of Jews and political prisoners from 1939 to 1945.
Asked why it had taken more than 50 years for the organization's information to be released, Mr. Willemin replied, ''Because it takes time to face your own history.''
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.
Mr. Willemin said the Red Cross's decision to release its wartime records ''was an important change for an organization that through its history has been inclined to protect the privacy of its records so as not to run any risk of impairing its humanitarian work and its reputation for impartiality and neutrality.''
Just a day earlier, six Red Cross workers were shot and killed in their sleep in the Russian republic of Chechnya. The Red Cross's presence there was possible because its neutrality, which it would not break even in the face of the horrors of World War II, has enabled it to treat people on both sides of a war.
At the Holocaust museum ceremonies today, Mr. Lerman expressed his institution's sorrow for the Red Cross workers' deaths in Chechnya.
Photo: Georges Willemin, Red Cross archivist, left, and Walter Reich, director of the United States Holocaust museum, sign a cooperative agreement. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)