Switzerland’s wartime record on Jewish refugees is the most uncomfortable of the European neutrals. Around 28,000 Jews reached safety in Switzerland during the war. Tens of thousands more were turned back at the border, some directly into the hands of the German police, in operations the Swiss authorities knew amounted to a death sentence. The Swiss policy was driven partly by genuine economic pressure on a small landlocked country surrounded by Axis powers, partly by Swiss antisemitism, and partly by a calculation that Swiss neutrality required keeping the country’s Jewish population small. The post-war Swiss reckoning with this record has been long and incomplete.
The geographical position
Switzerland in 1940 was surrounded on all sides by Axis-controlled territory: Germany to the north, Austria (annexed by Germany) to the east, Italy to the south, and Vichy France to the west. The country had no port, no friendly border, and no realistic possibility of military resistance to a German invasion. Swiss neutrality depended on the country being too economically valuable to invade and on a posture of strict neutrality that gave neither side a reason to act. The Swiss army was mobilised throughout the war and a redoubt strategy was prepared in the high Alps in case of invasion.
The refugee policy
Swiss refugee policy was set by the head of the federal police, Heinrich Rothmund, who was personally antisemitic and who pushed throughout the war for restrictive border policies. The famous Rothmund Memorandum of August 1942 instructed Swiss border guards to turn back refugees on racial grounds, including Jews fleeing France, on the grounds that race-based persecution was not a legitimate ground for asylum under Swiss law. The directive remained in force, in various modified forms, for most of the war.
The Swiss J stamp is a particular artefact of Swiss-German cooperation on the Jewish question. In 1938 the Swiss government, faced with rising numbers of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, asked the German authorities to mark the passports of German Jews with a J so that Swiss border guards could identify them and refuse them entry. The German government complied. The J stamp was used for the rest of the German Jewish community’s pre-war emigration. The Swiss request was the proximate cause of the marking. The case is one of the most concrete examples of pre-war international cooperation between a Western democracy and the Nazi state on the persecution of Jews.
The refugees who got in
Around 28,000 Jewish refugees reached Switzerland during the war and were admitted. They were held in Swiss internment camps in conditions that varied from acceptable to severe, with some refugees confined for years and required to perform forced labour. The Swiss state recovered the cost of holding the refugees by charging them or their organisations: the Swiss Jewish community, through the Verband Schweizerischer Israelitischer Fluchtlingshilfen (the SIG, Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities), bore most of the financial burden of supporting the refugees. The Swiss state itself contributed comparatively little.
The refugees who got in survived. The conditions of their internment were far better than what they had escaped, and most settled in Switzerland or emigrated after the war.
The refugees who were turned back
The other half of the record is the refugees who were turned back at the Swiss border. Estimates of how many Jewish refugees were refused entry vary; the most-cited figure is around 25,000 to 30,000 over the course of the war. Some were turned back to Vichy France, where the French authorities arrested them and handed them to the Germans. Others were turned back into the Italian zone of occupied France, where the Italian authorities tended to be more lenient. After 1943, when the German army occupied formerly Italian territory, refugees turned back at the Swiss border faced direct German arrest.
The Swiss border guards who turned refugees back were following orders. Some refused. The Swiss border police captain Paul Grueninger, in charge of the border at St Gallen, falsified entry documents to allow Jewish refugees to enter Switzerland against orders. He saved around 3,600 lives. He was tried by the Swiss federal authorities, dismissed from the police, stripped of his pension, and convicted of forgery. His name was rehabilitated by the Swiss state only in 1995, eighteen years after his death in poverty. He was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1971.
The bank deposits
The other long-running Swiss issue is the question of dormant bank accounts. Many European Jews, anticipating trouble in the 1930s, had deposited money in Swiss banks. After the war, surviving relatives or heirs trying to access these accounts were frequently obstructed by the Swiss banks, which demanded death certificates that were not available because the original depositors had been gassed at Auschwitz. The Swiss banks held billions of Swiss francs in dormant Jewish accounts for decades. The issue came to public attention in the 1990s through the work of the World Jewish Congress and Senator Alfonse D’Amato in the United States. After lengthy negotiation, the Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to a settlement of around 1.25 billion US dollars, paid into a fund for Holocaust survivors and their heirs.
The post-war record
Switzerland’s post-war attitude to its wartime conduct was for decades defensive. The Bergier Commission, established by the Swiss federal government in 1996 and reporting in 2002, was the first formal Swiss state acknowledgement that the wartime refugee policy had been morally wrong. The commission found that Swiss policy had directly cost Jewish lives, that the country had been more economically intertwined with Nazi Germany than the post-war narrative had suggested, and that the bank settlement was an inadequate but appropriate first step. The commission’s findings produced a substantial Swiss public reckoning that is still continuing.
See also
Sources
- Bergier Commission, Final Report of the Independent Commission of Experts: Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War, Pendo, 2002
- Stephen Halbrook, Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II, Da Capo Press, 1998
- Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, Schocken, 2001
- USHMM: Switzerland