Swiss blame greed for WW2 sins.
( Looks like my darkest thoughts on the Swiss during this period have been confirmed.Neutrality my @$$ )
Vast and damning study: Country's companies 'saw a chance to make a profit'
Isabel Vincent
National Post
A lengthy study of Switzerland's policies during the Second World War has shattered the picture of a tiny haven seeking peace through neutrality, portraying instead a country that saw the war as a prime opportunity to make a quick profit.
The study was commissioned by the Swiss government in hopes of countering damaging claims by Jewish groups. But it backfired, finding instead that Switzerland committed "quite egregious failures" during the war, including sending thousands of refugees to their deaths in Nazi Germany and using its neutrality to reap huge profits from Germany and Italy.
The authors of the exhaustive five-year study note the Swiss were not motivated by pro-Nazi sympathies, but mainly by greed.
Released yesterday in Bern, the report strongly condemned the country's wartime refugee policy. It accused Switzerland of "excessive" co-operation with the Nazis and criticized its failure to return assets to their rightful owners after the war.
Researched and written by nine historians, lawyers and economists, the report explodes long-held myths about the country that is the birthplace of the Red Cross and is liked around the world for its chocolate and its cuckoo clocks.
Its work supports allegations, made mostly by Jewish groups during the past decade, that Switzerland and its banks took advantage of the country's neutrality and banking secrecy laws to reap enormous profits amid wartime destruction and human misery.
The bitter debate between Swiss officials and Jewish groups over unclaimed Jewish assets held in Swiss bank vaults resulted in the country's biggest banks paying US$1.25-billion in 1998 to settle all Holocaust-era claims.
"The conclusions of the report are not a surprise to us," said Sergio Karas, a Toronto lawyer who represented 50 families trying to recoup their wartime assets from "dormant" accounts in Swiss banks.
Under a restitution program for these accounts, Swiss authorities are still processing 9,000 claims against the banks.
After combing public and private archives across Switzerland, the Independent Commission of Experts concluded Swiss border guards refused entry to an unspecified number of refugees, most of them Jewish, despite knowing they would be headed for concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
"A large number of persons whose lives were in danger were turned away needlessly," said Swiss historian Jean-François Bergier, who chaired the commission, which included experts from the United States, Israel, Poland and Britain. "The refugee policy of our authorities contributed to the most atrocious of Nazi objectives, the Holocaust."
Mr. Bergier disproved Swiss claims that a more magnanimous attitude to the refugees would have meant diminished living standards for others in the country immediately before and during the war. He also criticized border officials for asking the Germans in 1938 to stamp passports of German Jews with a "J" so the Swiss would know not to let them in.
Although Switzerland did offer refuge to 60,000 civilians, less than half of them Jewish, it turned away 20,000 other asylum seekers and rejected applications from 14,500 more.
In 1994, the Swiss President apologized for his country's wartime refugee policy, although the full story was not known until recently.
One of the main themes running through the commission's report is that Switzerland's co-operation with Nazi Germany was not based on ideological motives, but had everything to do with profits.
The Swiss, said Mr. Bergier, were not generally pro-Nazi, but their elected officials and business leaders were interested in making money. Swiss businesses "saw a chance to make a profit; others, like the federal state itself, viewed their actions as a condition for survival."
Although the report found Switzerland needed to make concessions to Nazi Germany in order to survive, it said that aid to Germany from the Swiss government and Swiss private businesses often went too far, violating the country's laws of neutrality. For instance, in 1941 Switzerland gave an a 850-million Swiss franc credit limit to the Nazis, helping "to bankroll the German war effort," said Mr. Bergier.
The country also made huge purchases of looted gold from Nazi Germany. The Swiss continued to accept the gold even when it became obvious it had been stolen from countries occupied by the Nazis.
Moreover, major Swiss weapons makers, who sold most of their wares to the Allies, paid commissions and bribes to break into the German market during the war.
On the restitution front, Mr. Bergier concluded the failure to return property stashed in Switzerland during the war was not done out of malice or a desire to profit. It was, he said, simply negligence by Swiss officials who were confronted by hundreds of Jews after the war, searching for the assets they had put in Swiss banks for safekeeping.
ivincent@nationalpost.com |
