Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.

18
Switzerland Accussed

Hans Bar was not ready for my question. It was not on the list of topics faxed before our talk and, in fact, wasn't even in my mind until we were about half-way through. He wasn't angry about it -- to my relief. But he was surprised. It surprised me, too; my voice seemed to come from someone else.

"How do you feel about Switzerland and the Holocaust?"

Simple words, but that last one evokes strong emotions. Hans Bar, the head of an old and respected investment bank in Zurich, didn't know me except as a writer interested in Switzerland. It would have been understandable if he were taken aback, even offended.

At the same time, even before Bar answered, it felt right. The question of the Nazi reign of terror and the country's response to it is one that troubles the Swiss deeply. And the international grilling of Switzerland in the late 1990s was a blow to the national pride and a cause of deep hurt. Here was a man who felt all these emotions strongly and personally -- an informed man of some sensitivity. The question had to be asked.

"I feel..." Bar said, and paused. He seemed to be thinking about his feelings on this, improbable as it sounds, for the first time. "I feel very proud and very ashamed of my country. I am a Swiss, and a Jew. I am both."

"Switzerland made mistakes -- was guilty of horrible political stupidity after the war. There should have been an active effort to recompense the owners and the descendants of the dormant accounts." (Bar is speaking of accounts opened by foreign Jews in Swiss banks before the war, but which lapsed afterward. In some cases, the account holders died. In others, they simply forgot the accounts, or allowed them to sit fallow. In some cases, money was paid out.) "At the same time, Switzerland resisted the Nazis for years when she was completely surrounded." Indeed, even before the war, Switzerland was the first country to launch a significant armament program to defend against the Nazi threat.

"It is even more complicated than this, because, for example, there were elements of anti-Semitism here, too. They were not nearly as strong as in Germany or elsewhere. But there was some. We would see banners in Zurich occasionally, read newspaper articles, hear threats."

Bar's natural conflictedness was well captured when his preparatory school in the United States, the Horace Mann School, asked him to accept an award in 1998.1 Bar was flattered. He would have liked to receive the honor. "But I could not accept an award in the United States, while my country was being treated as it was by the U.S. government and in the U.S. press -- and in the very circles of people whom I would be receiving this award from. I told them, as a Swiss, I could not accept."

A year passed. The U.S. government, while not explicitly apologizing for its allegation that Swiss actions had "helped prolong" World War II, issued a second report qualifying some of the more extreme claims of the first one. Vice President Gore appeared in Davos, Switzerland, to tell the Swiss President, Mrs. Dreifuss, that his government hoped the controversy would wind down and planned no further actions designed to bring pressure or opprobrium on the Swiss. The school offered the award again. Bar accepted, using his speech as an opportunity to put the Swiss record in context -- and encourage his American audience to consider our own sins of omission in the Nazi Holocaust and other such events, before lecturing others. The crisis seemed to be defusing itself, the wounds starting to heal. "There is little doubt in my mind," Bar told the Horace Mann School, "that the declared end of the very serious bickering between the United States and Switzerland over its role during and after the Second World War, as it was solemnly declared in Davos only a couple of weeks ago, really marks the end of that episode."

Even if so, however, some painful historical questions remain -- not only for the Swiss but for other countries that, unlike Switzerland, have not begun to come to terms with their wartime and postwar banking transactions. Furthermore, it was far from clear, as Bar commented a year later, that the Davos "ceasefire" represented anything more than a temporary lull by some U.S. officials in a long and inexplicable vendetta against the Swiss.

For the Swiss democracy, regardless of U.S. attitudes, there are institutional questions raised by the Holocaust issue. These events raise questions that the Swiss will have to address. The future is bound to bring moral-political issues of this type, issues over the Swiss banking system and issues that arise out of Swiss neutrality -- a policy that is always vulnerable to misinterpretation and, at times, abuses. How will Switzerland handle them?

"The controversy," as the Swiss refer to it, was latent in the practices of Swiss banks going back to the early postwar years, and, indeed, to before the war itself. During the war and in the years afterward, some 50,000 to 100,000 accounts fell dormant, or were closed. It is doubtful that a majority of these belonged to Holocaust victims or other Jews. In fact, according to studies of the Swiss accounts, it is all but certain that a third or less were. It is equally certain, however, that some finite percentage of these accounts did belong to Jews. According to the Swiss Bankers Association, nearly 20,000 persons have registered claims for dormant accounts. (Many of these, of course, are duplicate claims from relatives of the same prospective account holder.) The Volcker Committee, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, studied the matter of dormant accounts and other unclaimed assets in Swiss banks deposited by victims of the Nazis. It concluded, in an interim report, that when interest and inflation over the years are added to the initial principal, perhaps $1 billion to $2 billion in such assets exist. This committee was established by the Swiss Bankers Association in cooperation with the World Jewish Relief Organization and the World Jewish Congress.

These matters remained closed and generally uncontroversial for several decades due to two factors. One was the renowned sacredness of Swiss banking privacy. This policy has always been somewhat misunderstood. For instance, the provisions provide no shield against domestic or international criminal prosecutions. Nevertheless, the policy did make it hard for relatives, journalists, and others both from obtaining specific account information and from compiling a broad profile of the scope and magnitude of the accounts. Often such accounts were opened under fictitious names, or using passwords or numeric codes. If the person who opened the account died, relatives might have no idea where the money was. Relatives coming back after the war, or even decades later, lacking the needed account information might ask the Swiss banks for help, but the banks declined to give out the needed information. The reputation of Swiss secrecy discouraged many from even trying.

The second factor was a certain smugness, or at the least indifference, on the part of Swiss bankers and politicians when inquiries and appeals were made. In the case of some business and political elites, in fact, more than indifference was involved. The Swiss people, in plain terms, were sometimes lied to about the activities of the government and the banks. Individual requests for access to dormant accounts by Holocaust victims were treated no worse than if they involved an account in no way linked to a Holocaust victim, but they were treated no better. Group appeals (from Jewish organizations, corporations, or governments) were politely referred to the banks. This policy might be defensible from a narrow legal standpoint, but it took little account of the special circumstances of this group of people. To keep these matters in perspective, of course, Americans and Europeans outside Switzerland must remember the indifference of some of their own financial and political institutions before, during, and after the war. Researchers have argued that Deutsche Bank, Ford Motor Company, Allianz, and General Motors all benefited from unsavory relations with the Nazi regime before or after the war. "New York State," as Bar points out, "was the beneficiary of most of the Holocaust funds transferred to the U.S. under your escheatment laws -- and never returned a penny."

What was underneath the surface became a heated debate when a group representing the families of Holocaust victims filed a class action suit against a number of Swiss banks in 1996. The suit called for the return of what the plaintiffs said was some $20 billion owed in principal and interest to the survivors and their families. The case was ultimately settled for about $1.5 billion, more than the amount estimated by the Volcker Commission as due on dormant accounts to Holocaust victims, and much less than the original suit. As the press, foreign governments, and others began to comment on the specific situation with the accounts, however, they catalyzed a discussion of several broader issues, including:

That the Swiss carried out large gold transactions with Nazi Germany can not be denied, and never was. As a neutral nation, Switzerland naturally kept up some economic and political relations with her largest trading power. A secret British report late in the war concluded that Swiss neutrality had been highly beneficial to the allies, as did such American officials as William Clayton, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles. As well, as a practical matter, Switzerland was physically surrounded for much of the war by Axis troops. Dependent on other countries for energy and food imports, Switzerland built machinery and other exports for trade, and carried out that trade in the international medium of exchange at the time: gold.

Given the volume of gold being transacted by the German central bank, it is impossible to believe that the Swiss did not purchase some amount of gold from Holocaust victims including but not limited to the particular purchases identified in recent investigations that the Swiss either conducted themselves, or cooperated with. In all, the Swiss purchased some 1.5 billion Swiss francs worth of gold from the German central bank from 1938 until 1945, most of it concentrated in the peak war years of 1941 through 1943.

The supposition that the Swiss traded significantly in the gold stolen and in some cases physically removed from Jewish victims, however, is highly doubtful. Once the issue of gold transactions became a serious issue and the Swiss were aroused to act -- too late, but not too little -- the Swiss attacked the problem. The Confederation appointed a commission to consider the gold transactions and other issues of policy during the war. Working from shattered records and moldy microfilms spread from Missouri to Moscow, the commission managed to locate at least three specific bars of gold that clearly originated in a shipment from SS Captain Bruno Melmer.

"Specifically," the commission reported, "these were bars from the seventh Melmer shipment" to the German Reichsbank on 27 November 1942, "bearing the numbers 36903, 36904, and 36905 and having a total weight of 37.5411 kfg. They were sent by the Reichsbank to the SNB [Swiss National Bank] in Bern on 5 January 1943." As well, "gold bars with the numbers 36783 and 36784," as well as "numbers 36902 and 36907," were "delivered to the Prussian Mint on 25 February 1943." These four bars were in turn re-smelted and sold to the Swiss and to German commercial banks.

There is a distinction between gold stolen from Jews when they were rounded up, and gold literally taken from their bodies in the Nazi death camps. That the latter was taking place was not known until the final days of the war. The former phenomenon -- the theft of gold from people as they were rounded up for what were presumed to be horrible work camps, but not genocide -- was understood by the Swiss from their own intelligence reports and indeed press accounts from Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. "For those who want to know," an article in the Neve Zürcher Zeitung on August 16, 1942, argued, "there can be no more illusions concerning the real situation of gold trade with Germany." The article went on to detail the looting of gold from foreign central bank's and from individuals. "It is known that assets held by private individuals were also confiscated in the occupied territories," the director of the Swiss National Bank's legal department commented on December 2, 1943. "For example, from deported Jews or from persons affected by sanctions, etc."

Nevertheless, Switzerland was not the only country to receive gold the Nazis stole from Holocaust victims, or looted from foreign central banks. From 1935 to 1945, some $20 billion flowed out of Europe to the United States. Much of it, albeit indirectly, was Nazi gold. Swiss purchases of gold from Germany, Italy, and Japan ($319 million) were barely half that from the allies ($688 million), most of it coming from the United States ($518 million). The U.S. was also the leading purchaser of gold from the Swiss, at $165 million, numbers which imply there was some victim gold involved.

The Swiss encirclement was exacerbated by the American economic embargo of the Axis powers, which was a de facto quarantine on all of Western Europe. In December, 1941, Washington froze Swiss assets in the United States, including substantial gold reserves. The ironic result was to drive Switzerland, needing gold reserves to conduct trade and defend its currency, into the arms of Germany, a needy supplier of gold and the one country that could unilaterally engage in actual transfers of the metal. Figure 18.1 shows the pattern of Swiss gold purchases from Germany, spiking in the first quarter of 1942, and returning to normal after the third quarter of 1944, when the allies opened a small transit corridor to Switzerland through France.

Especially painful to the Swiss is the accusation that their country was "neutral for Hitler." The accusation takes various forms. Some argue that the Swiss, by selling specific equipment and armaments to the Germans, or trading with them at all, were aiding the German war effort. (The Swiss, despite their position, traded nearly as much with the allies and smuggled out precision instruments vital to the allied effort in the critical air war.) Others suggest that merely by trading with Germany in any extensive way, the Swiss must have been helping the Nazis, and therefore, are culpable.

An official U.S. document, the first Eisenstadt report, argues that Swiss actions even helped "prolong the war." Still others convict the Swiss of a kind of cultural affinity. "They're basically German," as a staff aide who contributed to the Eisenstadt report commented. "You have to keep that in mind." (Report author Stuart Eisenstadt later said he regretted some of the report's conclusions, but critics noted that this retraction took place only after Eisenstadt allegedly went on the payroll of a major Swiss bank.)

These notions of an insufficient disdain for Hitler, and a kind of tacit, cultural self-Anschluss, are highly insidious -- nearly impossible to combat.

Once motives are impugned, much objective evidence becomes meaningless, even usable against itself. Any wartime action that advanced Switzerland's own interests, no matter how legitimately, can be added to the tally as another sign of shrewd Swiss venality. Selling paper clips to the Germans? There they go again, providing valuable supplies. Selling paper clips to the Americans? The Swiss are always out to make a profit at our expense. At various points in the war, both the allies and the Germans were furious with the Swiss for what they perceived as a tilt toward the other. America, in a much stronger position to chart its own course than Switzerland, continued a substantial trade with Germany even after the attack on France. We justified our policy as part of a needed effort to rebuild American production capacity for armaments. Later, in order to expedite the war against Nazism, the U.S. formed an alliance with Stalinist Russia.

Finally, the Swiss have no tradition of self-apologetics, and their system is designed against it. America has had great power for a century now, and, accordingly, attracted a long stream of insults and denunciations. The U.S. is inured to being assaulted as corrupt, aggressive, or insensitive. It has calluses for these attacks, and experience at wooing and battering world opinion against them. Switzerland, a small nation that has not threatened its neighbors militarily for centuries, has not often been engaged in defending itself from this kind of attack. The Swiss have faced and repelled armies. The international press, Western politicians, and university researchers are a different matter, and to the Swiss, in some ways more threatening.

For the Swiss, World War II, as an economic phenomenon, began a few weeks after the German leadership appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor in January, 1933. In the Swiss tradition, the political leaders in Bern, and newspaper readers around the country, had read Hitler's statements before and after coming to power. Unlike most in the West, the Swiss took them seriously. "Our people will never allow itself to be brought into line according to the German pattern," Federal Councilor Rudolf Minger, head of the military department, declared in March, 1933, justifying his proposal for increased Swiss defense preparedness. That October, as Hitler announced Germany's intention to withdraw from the League of Nations, Minger drew up a plan to increase Swiss military spending by 15 million francs in 1934, a 20 percent increase, as part of a four-year addition of 100 million francs -- a near doubling of Swiss defense spending by 1938. The Neue Ziircher Zeitung, in an October 12 editorial, approved, adding that the country not only needed such armaments, but a vigorous "spiritual defense" as well -- a term that became a Swiss rallying cry. On December 10, The New York Times published an article alleging that Germany had drawn up plans for the invasion of France through Switzerland. The account may have been spurious, but the Swiss could not assume that it was. On December 14, the federal council approved more than 80 million francs in additional defense spending. Among the items was the start of construction of a vast series of hidden mountain fortifications and guns. This fortress Switzerland program became a $15 billion project in today's dollars -- not much less than what Ronald Reagan and the United States spent on his Star Wars defense program during his entire term in office. At the same time, the Swiss decided to build a new museum to house the Bundesbrief and other documents of national independence -- exemplifying the Swiss political and sentimental separation from Austria and Germany, or what one writer later called "pan-this and pan-that." This is where Swiss policy toward Germany stood in 1933, before Hitler had spent a full year in office.

The war measures continued and expanded through Hitler's abrogation of the Versaille treaty (August, 1935), occupation of the Rhineland (March, 1936), absorption of Austria (March, 1938), the Kristallnacht assault on Jews (November, 1938), the annexation of Czechoslovakia (1939), and the invasion of Poland (April, 1940), Denmark and Norway (April, 1940), and France (May, 1941). In the spring of 1934, Nazi textbook writers drew maps of showing Switzerland as part of a conceived "Greater Germany" based on language and ethnic lines. "Quite naturally, we count you Swiss as offshoots of the German nation," Nazi historian Ewald Banse, author of one of the textbooks, commented. Swiss newspapers and officials attacked his conception. Theodore Fischer, the leader of Switzerland's tiny pro-German faction, promised the country would be liberated from its status as a "vassal state of France under Jewish control."

Federal Councillor Jean Marie Musy, the Swiss finance minister, spoke for most of the country when he promised that Switzerland would "remain a democracy or cease to be Switzerland." The "racial ideal," he said, "can never be the basis of Swiss nationality." Defense Minister Minger echoed: "Events abroad have reawoken Switzerland's ancient defiance and the feelings for justice and liberty have been renewed."

In the following twelve months the Swiss banned the wearing of uniforms by political parties; expanded the period for basic military training by twenty days; increased the defense budget by more than 30 percent; enacted additional protections for the press against German threats and complaints; expelled German agents who were trolling through Zurich and Basel hoping to identify private bank transfers made by Jews; and rejected an initiative, supported by the small national socialist group, calling for greater centralized economic planning such as enacted in Germany, Italy, and the United States.

The Swiss people signaled their support for these measures whenever tested. In some ways they were more anti-German than their leaders. In 1935, the Communist Party and others challenged the near doubling of defense expenditures in a national vote -- a "facultative" referendum. They lost, 54 percent to 46 percent. This was the height of the Great Depression in Switzerland. It was the only significant facultative referendum between 1929 and 1946 that passed. And it was the only one between 1916 and 1946 that passed while calling for significant government expenditures.

From 1933 to 1937, land cultivation in Switzerland doubled. While there were government incentive programs, a large portion of the increase was the result of appeals to the Swiss people to increase the country's food supply voluntarily. On the eve of the war, the government asked for volunteers for extra military home defense units. The council hoped to find 20,000 to 30,000 able boys and old men who could shuttle ammunition to key points, aid in communications, and perform similar duties. Within three months, more than 200,000 had volunteered.

Popular war preparations accelerated in the spring of 1938, as Hitler swallowed Austria. This made Switzerland, as The New York Times noted, "a democratic peninsula in a politically autocratic and economically autarchic league." A few days later, the Socialist Party of Basel, the city with the closest ties to Germany, collected signatures for an initiative to criminalize membership in the Nazi Party. The initiative achieved the highest number of signatures ever seen in the city. The national parliament, meanwhile, had also approved a significant revision of the penal code. Among other things, it allowed persons charged with treason and other collaboration with the enemy -- including civilians -- to be tried by military courts. This change was challenged in a facultative referendum, but the new law was approved in July, 1938, with 54 percent support.

In December, 1940, the leading Nazi group was banned and its leaders arrested. In the United States, by contrast, Nazi groups, though small, were still active. America completed its second consecutive year of more than $100 million in trade with the Nazis as Henry Luce and others tried (with little initial success) to rally popular support for aid to Britain and other Nazi foes. The Swiss, of course, faced a much greater threat than the Americans did in the 1930s, and indeed throughout the war; they had more reason to prepare for the Nazis.

Table 18.2 compares Swiss military expenditures with those of other European countries in dollars per capita for 1937. These figures understate the relative Swiss resistance to Nazism, because of the popular nature of the Swiss Army, which incorporated 400,000 members, expanding to more than 750,000 during an actual attack. The former figure meant that Switzerland, in 1938, had approximately 10 percent of the population under arms. Only Finland (8 percent) and Belgium (8 percent) compare favorably and even these are significantly below the lower Swiss figure. The Netherlands (5 percent), Norway (4 percent), Denmark (4 percent), and France (3 percent) were even lower.

The Swiss looked not only to physical measures, but also to psychological and even metaphysical ones as well. In 1937, Federal Councillor Philipp Etter published a book entitled Geistige Landesverteidung -- roughly, Spiritual Defense. The book was a Swiss best seller and reportedly was distributed widely in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and other soon-to-be "possessions of the German Reich," as Hitler termed them.

"The German people will never forget the attitude of the Swiss during this war," growled the Frankfurter Zeitung on December 2, 1940. "A nation of 80,000,000, while fighting for bare existence, finds itself almost uninterruptedly attacked, insulted, and slandered by the newspapers of a minuscule country whose government claims to be neutral."

The pages above place a lot of emphasis on Swiss actions prior to the German Blitzkrieg of France in the spring of 1940 and in the immediate months that followed. There's a good reason. We learn a lot about Swiss hopes and intentions during the period when Nazism was reaching its zenith. This was the time when Denmark, Belgium, and Austria were either giving up without a fight, or fighting but offering only a few days or weeks (France) of resistance.

On June 14, a Friday in 1940, Paris fell. The Swiss, neutral to the teeth, were already aggressively engaged in the defense of their national territory against "all potential aggressors" -- i.e., Hitler. American entry into the war was still more than 500 days away, awaiting Pearl Harbor and the gratuitous German declaration of war hours later. The following Monday, June 17, General Henri Guisan -- elected to head the Swiss war effort shortly after the German invasion of Poland -- called together the Swiss general staff to discuss preparations for the defense of Switzerland against a possible occupation by the Nazis. Late in June, as the German-French truce became effective, German Captain Otto Wilhelm von Menges submitted a plan for an attack on Switzerland to the German general staff. On July 25, Guisan and the Swiss general staff gathered in Luzern to boat down the lake to the banks of the Riitli, where they renewed the sacred oath of their ancestors from 1291 and the Bundesbrief. Author Stephen Halbrook paints the scene:

On a beautiful day, Guisan faced the senior officers of the army standing in a semicircle on the Riitli Meadow, facing the lake. Canton Uri's flag of the Battalion 87 flew above. Addressing the measures taken "for the resistance in the reduit," Guisan ordered "resistance to all aggression." He continued: "Here, soldiers of 1940, we will inspire ourselves with the lessons and spirit of the past to envisage resolution of the present and future of the country, to hear the mysterious call that pervades this meadow."

Swiss elite troops had already been on active duty for almost a year -- they were called up on August 25, 1939. "The country has one tenth of its population under arms; more than any other in the world," William Shirer diarized. "They're ready to defend their way of life."

Switzerland's orders for organization of "the entire army for resistance" promised the Germans that Switzerland as a nation would never capitulate -- even if its government did. The order was posted all over the country both to reassure the people and to warn the Germans. In the event of attack, it said, the Swiss would be notified "through poster, radio, courier, town crier, storm bells, and the dropping of leaflets from airplanes." The response would not be limited to formal military groups acting as official units. "All soldiers and those with them are to attack with ruthlessness parachutists, airborne infantry, and saboteurs. Where no officers and noncommissioned officers are present, each soldier acts under exertion of all powers of his own initiative." Bearing in mind the case of other countries which had been intimidated into surrendering because of the capitulation of the national leadership, the order continued:

If by radio, leaflets, or other media any information is transmitted doubting the will of the Federal Council or of the Army High Command to resist an attacker, this information must be regarded as lies of enemy propaganda. Our country will resist the aggression with all means in its power and to the bitter end.

In effect, the government was committing itself and the people to what Etter had called "total spiritual warfare." They deprived themselves of the ability to surrender even if they later wanted too: Swiss army units and citizens were under orders to ignore reports of such a decision and continue fighting.

All this makes it easy to understand the Swiss frustration at accusations that their country was in complicity with the Nazis during World War II. In fact, the Swiss people put up suffer resistance, against greater odds, to the Germans than those of any other country. As Walter Lippmann, responding to an article in a U.S. magazine implying Switzerland was "occupied" by the Germans, wrote in January, 1943:

The Swiss nation is entirely surrounded by Axis armies, beyond reach of any help from the democracies.... Switzerland, which cannot live without trading with the surrounding Axis countries, still is an independent democracy....

That is the remarkable thing about Switzerland. The real news is not that her factories make munitions for Germany but that the Swiss have an army which stands guard against invasion, that their frontiers are defended, that their free institutions continue to exist, and that there has been no Swiss Quisling, and no Swiss Laval. The Swiss remained true to themselves even in the darkest days of 1940 and 1941, when it seemed that nothing but the valor of the British and the blind faith of free men elsewhere stood between Hitler and the creation of a totalitarian new order in Europe.

Surely, if ever the honor of a people was put to the test, the honor of the Swiss was tested and proved then and there... .They have demonstrated that the traditions of freedom can be stronger than the ties of race and of language and economic interest.

"Switzerland stands today as an island in a Nazi ocean," The New York Times echoed in a January 28 editorial. Referring to German publications that continually described Switzerland as a country harboring, and dominated by, Jews, the Times added, "perhaps the Swiss didn't mind being called a 'medley of criminals, particularly Jews.' To be called a criminal by a Nazi is to receive a high compliment. To be called a Jew by a Nazi is to be classed with those who have suffered martyrdom for freedom's sake."

Over the nine years of Swiss vulnerability, the Germans developed more than a dozen attack plans for Switzerland which were discussed at the highest military levels. These included deliberations by Hitler himself in 1934,1936, 1938,1939,1940, 1942, 1943,1944, and 1945. Except for a respite in 1941-42 while the German army was occupied with the assault on Russia -- which ended as the Nazi retreat from Russia raised interest in grabbing Switzerland as a final redoubt -- the Swiss were under near-constant peril.

"We woke up every morning and looked over the Rhein," a Jewish woman who lived in Basel comments, "and wondered whether the Germans would be invading that day." The woman, who asked that her name be withheld, said that her family attempted several times to emigrate to the United States. This was not because they were ill-treated in Switzerland -- she lives near Davos where her husband is in a nursing home -- but because they knew that if the Nazis did invade, they would be primary targets. They were, however, turned down, as were most appeals for asylum by European Jews to the U.S. State Department.

Why didn't the Germans actually seize Switzerland? The answer does not lie in any especially beneficial economic relationship. Swiss supplies of machinery to the Germans never totaled more than 3 percent of industrial production for a month, and averaged less than 2 percent over the war. Invasion would not have jeopardized much of this total because the Germans could seize most of the factories in the flat, Northern strip of the country that is most easily occupied.

The answer lies in German estimates that concluded that it would take anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 men to subdue the country, followed by a smaller but still substantial occupation presence. Had they done this as well, the Germans were assured, the Swiss would destroy the tunnel and bridges through the Alps, depriving the Nazis of the most direct connection to their Italian allies. Such a move, in combination with German occupation of the Northern plain, would also have effectively destroyed the Swiss economy. It would have meant death for many Swiss and internees (including Jews) who lived there; the rest would have been, like other occupied populations, Nazi hostages. But the Swiss repeatedly assured the Germans that they would take this step and they mined key transportation points so as to be able to carry that threat out almost the instant Nazi troops crossed the frontier.

A retired Swiss official who was part of the economic planning team during the war told me that in regular meetings the Germans repeatedly threatened both occupation and personal violence against the Swiss officials who were standing up to the German demands. "We were never belligerent back," he said, "but we did calmly and repeatedly refer them to our government's policies for dealing with those eventualities, which were published and repeated often to make sure they understood that our government and our people intended to carry them out."

In the context of all the country's actions, the Swiss threat to commit suicide -- but pull Germany down as they went; a reciprocating Mosada -- apparently struck the Germans as credible. "The Swiss are just the people," as The New York-Times observed, "if pushed a mite too far, who would prefer to starve or die fighting rather than give in. Because they are that kind of people, they may not have to prove it in action."

Hitler seemed to sense this determination in the Swiss, and, as a result, had a loathing for them as a nation that rivaled his hatred of Winston Churchill as an individual and the Jews as a people.

At a war-planning conference with Mussolini in 1940, Hitler and the Italian dictator discussed what Hitler saw as the need to occupy Switzerland, to put an end to its "insolent defiance" of the New Europe and "collaboration with and harboring of the Jews." Later that year, Hitler learned of the delivery of precision engineering products from Switzerland to England, and flew into a tantrum. He immediately ordered his generals to draw up fresh invasion plans and described Bern -- accurately -- as the "center of international spying against Germany." Again in 1941, Hitler and the Italian dictator traded insulting characterizations of Switzerland, discussing the matter for more than half an hour. "The Fiihrer characterized Switzerland as the most despicable and wretched people," recalled an aide who attended the meeting -- the Swiss were, he later said, a "bastard" nation because of the intermingling of German blood with those of inferior races. "They frankly opposed the Reich," Hitler said, "hoping that by parting from the common destiny of the German people, they would be better off." Discussing his plans for the post-war economic order, Hitler said: "As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as hotel-keepers."

The Swiss press was a constant irritant to Hitler. It was not just what it said about him, but the very fact of its freedom. In July of 1942, Hitler encountered Swiss press reports about the military strength of Soviet Russia. "Not only in England and America," Hitler groaned, but in Switzerland, "the population believes in Jewish claptrap." The Jews, he told an aide, must have special influence with the Swiss, because they cared about little other than grain prices, cows, and clocks. That August, impatient with the estimates of his generals that the Germans would need perhaps 500,000 men to subdue Switzerland -- many times the relative troop strength used to conquer France -- the Fuhrer launched into another tirade about the Swiss.

"A state like Switzerland," Hitler told his staff, "which is nothing but a pimple on the face of Europe, cannot be allowed to continue." The wording is revealing: The Swiss state, for Hitler, must not be suffered even to continue. To the Reich, Switzerland's existence was an offense.

It was no accident that Hitler linked the Jews with the Swiss in many of his eruptions. Although many Jewish refugees were turned away at the Swiss border, thousands, particularly children and families with children, were accepted. (More by far than were welcomed by any other country in per capita terms.) The resulting Swiss ratio of rejection to acceptance was not nearly high enough to please the Fuhrer. "The Jew must get out of Europe," he exploded at a meeting a few days after the infamous Wannsee Conference, where the plan to annihilate the Jews was drawn into a grisly blueprint. "Out of Switzerland and out of Sweden, they must be driven out."

Like the Finns and the Poles, the Swiss had the special honor of confronting both the German and Russian dictators, and exciting their special contempt. At the Yalta conference in 1944, Stalin proposed the invasion and occupation of Switzerland -- ostensibly to foreclose the German option of using it to stage a final defense. The allies refused, and that night, in a conversation with Molotov, Stalin denounced the Swiss as a "contemptible little nation of bankers and farmers," and somewhere, Lenin, Bismarck, and Metternich smiled in agreement. Several months later, Churchill commented on the discussion in a memorandum to his foreign secretary:

I put this down for the record. Of all the neutrals, Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction. She has been the sole international force linking the hideously surrendered nations and ourselves. What does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial advantages we desire or has given too many to the Germans, to keep herself alive?

Swiss today, particularly those who remember the war, are proud of Hitler's special disdain. They are, accordingly, hurt and angry at accusations that their country was complicit in any way with the Nazi regime. For all the superficial similarities of race and language, one can argue that there is not a country in the world that less resembles Nazi Germany than Switzerland.

It is impossible to evaluate Switzerland's total moral position, if you will, in World War II without mentioning the country's positive contribution to the escape of thousands of Jews and other refugees from the Nazis. Table 18.2 compares the per capita number of refugees accepted by the Swiss to those taken in by the United States, Great Britain, and France.

These figures understate the contribution the Swiss made to the protection of Jews and other refugees from Hitler's destruction, as the country was economically isolated for most of the period. The relative sacrifice made by the Swiss to care for several hundred thousand total refugees, interned prisoners, and others was even larger than the graphic suggests.

Statistics, moreover, omit the human face of Switzerland's humanitarian mission. One such flesh-and-blood contribution was made by Mr. and Mrs. Carl Lutz.

Carl Lutz was born in 1895 in Appenzell, the second youngest of ten children. He emigrated to the United States at age eighteen to work in a factory in Granite City, Illinois, not far from East St. Louis. For most of the 1920s he worked in assorted Swiss diplomatic offices in the U.S. Eventually, the Swiss Foreign Office appointed Lutz as a consular official in Jaffa, Palestine, where he served from 1935 to 1939, an eyewitness to the Arab-Jewish conflicts. While there, he also helped some 2,500 Jewish emigrants from Germany to escape deportation by the British as illegal aliens.

From 1942 to 1944, Lutz worked closely with the Jewish Agency of Palestine, headed by Moshe Krausz, to document and transport an estimated 10,000 Jewish children and young adults to (what would soon become) Israel. Some were orphans, others had parents who had been deported. Most had been smuggled to Hungary from other countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, even Germany itself) by Chalutzim, Jewish pioneers. To evade the authorities, Lutz used British-approved Palestine Certificates, which he countersigned and supplemented with Swiss Schutzbriefe, protective "letters of transit."

In March of 1944, the Nazis, who had dominated the country but refrained from blatant interference, occupied all of Hungary, imposing a hand-picked government. On March 21, the Nazi regent closed the borders to all further emigration. This blocked some 8,000 Jews who should have been free to leave. Lutz demanded their immediate, unconditional release. But soon the problem was much greater than a matter of 8,000 emigrants waiting to leave. Though Lutz did not yet know it, SS Chief Adolf Eichmann, aided by the puppet government, had already made plans to deport all 762,000 Jews in Hungary to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The situation grew even more acute in October when the Arrow-Cross Party, the most extreme of the pro-German factions, came to power. The Nazis, feeling the circle closing around them, decided to slaughter as many Jews as they could through low-technology methods: the infamous death march of November 1944, when more than 70,000 Jews were scourged towards the Austrian border.

Working against the Nazis and the clock, Lutz and his wife used every legal method they could think of to bring Jews under his protection. They used many illegal methods as well. When the Germans promised to respect the protection of the 8,000 visas he had issued, but only provided he issue no more, Lutz agreed in order to gain time. In the meantime he continued to print visas, perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 -- but always numbering them between 1 and 8,000, so that if individuals were stopped and produced their papers, it might appear there had been no duplication of visas. "This idea," the Encyclopedia of the Houlocaust reports, "served as a model for various types of protective letters issued by other neutral countries and by the International Red Cross."

When the Germans caught on to this device, Lutz transferred his mission's emigration department to the now-famous Glass House on Vadasz Street, placing the building under his diplomatic immunity. He assembled several dozen leaders of the Jewish Community to act as liaisons, and collected thousands of photographs and signatures in a few days. Lutz then issued a series of "collective passports," covering some 40,000 persons in chunks of 1,000 and more apiece. Again the Nazis eventually penetrated the legal ruse, but it took time, and with the help of some of the Hungarians, Lutz had stalled the game out still further.

The Lutzes formed a circle of sympathetic diplomats from the other neutrals, such as papal nuncio Angelo Rotta, to build a network of safe houses throughout the city where Jews could be placed under his protection. He bought apartment buildings with help from sympathetic officials in the government and transferred several thousand Jews to them. When Eichmann and the SS demanded that the Jews of Budapest be concentrated in one spot to facilitate deportation, Lutz persuaded Hungarian officials to provide him with more than seventy protective houses within the ghetto, in the Szent-Istvan area of Budapest. This bought precious weeks for the more than 30,000 Schutzbrief holders that Lutz placed there. Lutz also acted as a mentor to other diplomats, such as Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, recruiting them to the cause and sharing his methods. By the end of the war these men and women formed a wide network.

At times, the task was truly grim. Several times in the fall of 1944 and winter of 1945, Lutz and his wife were hauled out late at night to the Obuda brickyard. On those occasions, the Nazis would line up Jews holding authentic and forged Schutzbriefe with identical numbers, demanding that Lutz decide which documents were legitimate and which were not. If he did not so indicate, the SS guards were under orders to simply deport all the assembled Jews. In effect, Lutz was being asked to determine which people should live and which were sentenced to death. After one such session, Lutz feared he was near a breakdown, and his wife asked if they should consider leaving the country. The next day, there was an attempt on Lutz's life, one of several apparent efforts by the SS officers on hand.

Like the border guards and Swiss families who regularly allowed Jews across the Swiss border, Lutz did not have the support of his government -- nor of the British and American governments he represented. More than one exchange between Bern and London indicates that the two states contemplated recalling Lutz -- London because it did not want so many Jews sent to Palestine, Bern because it worried Lutz's methods would compromise Swiss neutrality.

Lutz worked to make sure Western governments and eventually Western publics understood what was at stake. When two prisoners escaped from Auschwitz and related the grisly reality of what was taking place there, he immediately dispatched an urgent report to his superiors in Bern and London. When these official channels failed to act, he scurried copies of key documents to a friend who had taken an assignment as a representative of El Salvador. The news of Auschwitz broke in the Swiss press and soon produced an outcry in Paris, London, and New York. Lutz, of course, was risking his job and his life with each such maneuver.

The reward came in the frantic spring of 1945, as Russian troops closed in and the Nazis moved to slaughter as many Jews as possible before having to retreat. As the Soviet artillery neared, Lutz and his wife had to take cover in an isolated part of the city and were trapped for some weeks, out of contact with the world and unable to determine whether their efforts had even succeeded. Not long before the actual surrender of Germany, Lutz himself was liberated from his cellar in Pest.

The letters, the safe houses, the bribes, and the leaks had saved, by a conservative calculation, some 62,000 lives. It measures the magnitude of the Holocaust to consider that this total was less than 1 percent of the number put to death by Hitler's Germany. On the other hand, this was the work of one Swiss citizen.

Though Lutz was in a position to render aid on a large scale, there were many Swiss who helped save others from the Hitler death camps one victim at a time. Official Swiss policy was to turn away all would-be entrants without passports, Jewish (whose passports carried a stigmatizing "J") and otherwise. But the feelings of the Swiss people were considerably more liberal, and families, sometimes whole communities, were willing to defy their own government.

Leopold Koss, now a doctor in New York City, was a beneficiary of this quiet heroism as he sought to escape the German occupation of France in 1942:

On August 24 or 25, 1942 -- I no longer remember the exact date -- I crossed the French-Swiss border illegally on foot....The odds of being arrested in France as a Polish Jew and former soldier, and sent to a German concentration camp, were extremely high.

On the way to my destination, I heard that although the official policies of the Swiss government were against acceptance of refugees and that many (including some friends of mine) were returned to France or into the hands of the Gestapo, there was a recent swell of public opinion to open the border. In fact, a woman on the train, perhaps guessing my destination, handed me an article in the Journal de Geneve, published some days before, openly exhorting the government to open the borders to the victims of Nazi persecution. Apparently similar articles appeared in August 1942 in the German-speaking press, notably the Neue ZürcherZeitung.

I entered Switzerland without difficulty and was soon several kilometers inland, not having been molested by anyone. Rather exhausted, hungry and thirsty, I voluntarily entered the barracks of a military unit... I was fed and offered a cot. The soldiers, simple Swiss citizens, couldn't have been nicer.

The next day... I was interrogated by a police officer who promptly informed me that I was to be sent back to France as an illegal alien. However, he consented to listen to my story, told through tears, and offered to inquire of the authorities in Bern what should be done with me. I discovered shortly thereafter that there was a group of at least 30 men in the same predicament.... We were all treated with great consideration by the police and the guards. A few days later we were apparently accepted and sent to a camp for political refugees -- Belchasse. I spent several months in Belchasse, followed by several months in a labor camp in Aesch-bei-Birmensdorf, near Zurich. It was hardly luxury -- but it was safe. I only wish my parents and my sister, who stayed in Poland, could have been with me. They all perished.

In September 1943,1 was allowed to resume my studies of medicine in Bern. During the three and a half years that I spent at the University of Bern, I never had to pay any tuition.... The federal police, to whom I had to report on a weekly and then a monthly basis, were increasingly friendly.... In fact, as I was leaving Switzerland for the United States in 1947 to start a new life, they addressed their last communications to me with the title, "doctor," better than the previous "refugee."

Dr. Koss remains grateful to the Swiss -- and takes issue with the "dreary image" of wartime Switzerland presented by some Western governments and press reports. "There was another wartime Switzerland," he says -- one "very remote" from the portrait of "greed and collusion with the Nazis" that some present. Indeed, Koss writes:

The Swiss have not only saved my life and that of many thousands of other refugees, but also gave me an outstanding education that has allowed me to forge a successful scientific career in the United States. I am now 76 years old and eternally grateful to the Swiss people for what they have done for me.

The question is not whether Switzerland or countries such as Britain and the U.S. did enough to stop the Holocaust. None did. The question, rather, is whether any countries did more to liberate Jews and other potential victims of the Nazi death camps, or began a firm (and unwavering) resistance to Hitler earlier than the Swiss. If there are any, they are few.


Note

1. Like many Jews, Bar's family left Europe in 1941 because of the threat from Nazi Germany. Whole companies -- Julius Bar, Credit Suisse, Nestle, and others -- moved their headquarters overseas. Most went to the U.S., some to Latin America.