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Collection « Les sciences sociales contemporaines »

Jean ZIEGLER, The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. (1998)
Introduction


Une édition électronique réalisée à partir de livre de Jean ZIEGLER, The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. Traduit de l'Allemand par John Brownjohn. New York - London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998, 322 pp. Titre original en Allemand: Die Schweiz, das Gold und die Toten [Verlag: Bertelsmann.] Une édition numérique réalisée par Roger Gravel, bénévole, Québec. [L'auteur nous a accordé le 29 janvier 2018 son autorisation de diffuser en libre accès à tous ces huit livres ci-dessous dans Les Classiques des sciences sociales.]

[1]

The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead

Introduction

Take note : there are heinous
deeds over which no grass grows.

Johann Peter Hebel

[2]
[3]

1. Swiss Amnesia

lake geneva is bathed in glorious fall sunlight. The trees are a glowing patchwork of red, yellow, and orange, the sky is clear as crystal, the peaks of the Savoy Alps beyond the southern shore glitter in the sun. The foothills of the Mont Blanc massif have acquired a dusting of fresh snow during the night.

It’s Monday, September 30, 1996, and I’m sitting in the Geneva-Bern express as it speeds through the vineyards of Lavaux, high above the lake’s northern shore. The vines are gilded with sunlight.

I’ve spent the weekend preparing my parliamentary speech, answering innumerable phone calls from concerned fellow citizens, and polishing my documentation with two friends from a private bank in Geneva. I’m now endeavoring to marshal my notes, continually distracted by the magnificent scenery.

A big Swiss flag, white cross on a red background, is flying over the Bundeshaus in Bern : the parliament of the Swiss Confederation is in session. The major debate about “dormant Jewish bank accounts” and Nazi gold held in Swiss bank vaults is scheduled to begin at 2 :30 p.m.

[4]

The atmosphere is unusually agitated – I can see that as soon as I enter the lobby. My parliamentary colleagues are standing around in clusters, whispering together. Of the journalists present, some are talking heatedly into their cellular phones, others protesting loudly, others simply shaking their heads in disbelief. Thomas Reimer, the German TV correspondent in Switzerland, is looking utterly disconcerted. “It can’t be true !” I hear him mutter.

The parliamentary usher, Herr Bigler, resplendent in his green uniform and gold chain, comes over to me. Bigler and I are on friendly terms. “I’m sorry,” he says sheepishly, “you won’t be speaking today. The debate is off.”

I can’t believe my ears : over the weekend, with the support of the party whips, the speaker has decided to bar a general debate. The only authorized participants will be Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti and one picked spokesman from each parliamentary group. The elected representatives of the people must hold their peace. I go storming up to the rostrum and lodge a vehement protest.

Speaker Jean-Francois Leuba, a Lausanne lawyer, seems puzzled by my indignation. His rosy face registers profound surprise, his response strikes a reproachful note : “You surely don’t want us to make an exhibition of ourselves in front of all these foreigners ?”

Yes, there they are, our enemies : foreign journalists.

The Bundeshaus, a palatial edifice dating from the turn of the century, houses a huge, paneled debating chamber built like an amphitheater. The lower tiers are occupied by parliamentary representatives, vote counters, interpreters, secretaries, ushers, and members of the government. Situated high above, and separated from them by protective balustrades, are the seats reserved for the public, the press, and the diplomatic corps.

The two press stands are thronged with American, British, French, and German journalists. High up in the spectators’ stand, foreign television companies have set up batteries of cameras, microphones, [5] and lighting equipment directly opposite the speaker’s chair.

Seated top right in the diplomats’ stand, surrounded by their advisers, are the Israeli and U.S. ambassadors, Gabriel Padon and Madeleine Kunin. Born into a Jewish family from Zürich, Kunin emigrated to the United States after the war.

Jean-Francois Leuba resembles a cardinal of the Roman Curia as painted by Tiepolo. A roly-poly figure, he moves with a mixture of agility and gravitas. His wrinkled face is illumined by a pair of cheerful, lively eyes. He radiates composure and dignity, believes in the purity of the pure in heart. Doubt is alien to him. Leuba hails from the “Pays de Vaud,” the canton that remained under Bernese sovereignty from the middle of the sixteenth century until invaded by Napoleon’s troops in 1798. Obedience runs in his blood.

Swiss members of parliament are not subject to any law relating to conflicts of interest. Many of my fellow parliamentarians earn hundreds of thousands of francs a year in their capacity as board members of major banks and the firms dependent on them.

They’re looking quietly confident. No criticism will be voiced today ; it seldom is.

Speaker Leuba’s censorship was fully justified. The journalists themselves were to blame for squelching the debate. Their articles in recent weeks had made anything but pleasant reading.

Der Spiegel of Hamburg (no. 38, 1996) : “Hitler’s willing fences : in exchange for stolen gold, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank for International Settlements financed the Nazis’ wars of aggression.”

“Switzerland, the Thieves’ Den… ” Thus the title of an anal ysis of Swiss complicity in Nazi war crimes published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on September 26, 1996. The same newspaper a week earlier, this time ironically : “When reality [6] surpasses any detective story…” As for Die Zeit, it stated on September 13, 1996, that Switzerland had finally been overtaken by “the long shadow of the Holocaust.”

The same edition of Die Zeit also disclosed, with relish, that Hitler had kept his personal account at the Bern branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, and that his royalties from Mein Kampf, administered on his behalf by SS Lieutenant Colonel Max Amann, had flowed there from 1926 until the end of the war.

American and British newspapers were behaving even worse. The New York Times had written of the “Swiss Neutrality Lie,” and the London Evening Standard of September 13, 1996, trumpeted, “Swiss neutrality : just an excuse to get rich.” A Labour member of parliament had risen in the lower house and branded the Swiss Confederation “the pariah of Europe.” The Financial Times of September 9, 1996, derisively stated that the Swiss government’s previous attempts at self-justification were merely a feverish but futile exercise in “damage control.”

Even our own press adopted an unwontedly critical stance. L’Hebdo, French-speaking Switzerland’s leading weekly, stated : “But for Switzerland’s assistance, Germany would have been defeated by October 1944… Switzerland actively assisted Nazi Germany by keeping the Nazis’ north-south lines of communication open via the Gotthard [Tunnel], supplying them with large quantities of precision material, optical instruments, etc., and laundering their stolen assets, in particular by changing looted gold into useful foreign exchange.”

Indignant voices were also raised in Zürich, the country’s financial metropolis. Die Weltwoche (no. 40, 1996) : “Why the banks are failing to cope with the past : lemmings on the brink of the abyss.” The same edition presented another analysis devoted to looted gold and “dormant assets” entitled, “How unique was the gnomes’ rapacity ?”

Cash (nos. 39 and 40, 1996), Switzerland’s foremost financial organ, commented : “Greed knew no bounds. As late as March 1945 the Swiss National Bank was procuring looted gold from [7] Germany. With the aid of bribery.” And again : “The Bundesrat [the government] lied about… Holocaust funds : [they] deceived Parliament, kowtowed to the banks.” Another Cash headline story : “Helvetia’s war profiteers : But for Switzerland’s gold turntable, the war in Europe would have ended much sooner.”

Sonntags-Blick, which belongs to the Ringier media group, is Switzerland’s biggest newspaper by far. Here is Frank A. Meyer, Ringier’s chief executive and star columnist, writing with characteristic trenchancy on September 22, 1996 : “Switzerland turned back Jews fleeing from the Nazis at the border, thereby sending them to their deaths. She readily accepted and laundered the gold the Nazis extracted from dead Jews’ teeth.”

Who is promoting this international flood of revelations ? Fanatical anti-Swiss ? Veteran ex-Communists with an unbridled hatred of Swiss banks ? Young, muddleheaded, left-wing extremists stubbornly entrenched in their opposition to capitalism ?

No, the almost exclusive fountainhead of this documentation, which has been gushing continuously ever since the early summer of 1996, is the U.S. government. Investigators working for the Senate Banking Committee, as well as the World Jewish Congress, have unearthed, and continue to unearth, vast amounts of incriminating documentary evidence from Washington’s war records, and they are feeding it to the world’s press with great regularity.

New York is home not only to the biggest Jewish community in the world but also to many intellectuals of critical disposition and varied origins. These people had long been calling for a full investigation of Nazi crimes, and economic crimes in particular. Foremost among those who espoused this cause were two U.S. legislators from New York, Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato (chairman of the Senate Banking Committee) and Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of the 14th District, Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nothing in the American political system is more effective than a “bipartisan plea,” or resolution supported by both the major parties.

[8]

On January 3, 1996, the House of Representatives and the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution calling for full disclosure of war crimes. I cite the following extracts :

(1) During the 104th Congress, Americans commemorated the 50th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War and the end of the Holocaust, one of the worst tragedies in history ;

(2) it is important to learn all that we can about this terrible era so that we can prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again ;

(3) the cold war is over ;

(4) numerous nations, including those of the former Soviet Union, are making public their files on Nazi war criminals as well as crimes committed by agencies of their own governments ;

[…]

(7) this year marks the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Freedom of Information Act ;

(8) agencies of the United States Government possess information on individuals who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in Nazi war crimes ;

(9) some agencies have routinely denied Freedom of Information Act requests for information about individuals who committed Nazi war crimes ;

[…]

(11) it is legitimate not to disclose certain material in Government files if the disclosure would seriously and demonstrably harm current or future national defense, intelligence, or foreign relations activities of the United States, and if protection of these matters from disclosure outweighs the public interest of disclosure ;

(12) the disclosure of most Nazi war crimes information should not harm United States national interests.
[…]
It is the sense of Congress that United States Government agencies in possession of records about individuals who are alleged [9] to have committed Nazi war crimes should make these records public.

Under concerted Republican and Democratic pressure, President Bill Clinton signed the War Crimes Disclosure Act. This piece of legislation not only opened up the last secret archives of World War II, but also created an efficient investigative machine, authorized the setting up of agencies, and approved a budget. In short, it provided that hitherto unpublished documents relating to Nazi war criminals and their (willing or unwilling) accomplices could be subject to expert examination and also noted by the public at large.

Peter Bichsel adduces in Die Zeit an important and plausible explanation for Clinton’s signature on the War Crimes Disclosure Act : “President Clinton is probably the first President of the United States not to have a Zürich bank account.” [1]

Where the investigation of Switzerland’s gold-laundering and its commercial and financial assistance to Nazi Germany are concerned, paramount importance attaches to two American secret service authorities.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was the real driving force behind the worldwide economic blockade against Hitler, which he organized together with Churchill (and London’s Ministry of Economic Warfare). It was Morgenthau who set up the Board for Economic Warfare and the Treasury Department’s own secret service. In 1943 he organized the Safehaven Program, an intelligence campaign against German commercial “fronts,” German businessmen operating abroad, and foreign – mainly Swiss – corporation lawyers, trustees, and bankers in the Nazis’ service.

The second source of the American intelligence documents that are now supplying information about the ways and means whereby Switzerland financed Hitler’s wars of aggression is the so-called Dulles network.

Notes are on pages 291-303.

[10]

In 1942, Allen Welsh Dulles, a wealthy and politically experienced Wall Street lawyer, was assigned to set up an espionage station in Switzerland by William J. Donovan, head of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), America’s foreign intelligence service.

At dawn on November 8, 1942, after an adventurous journey by way of the Bahamas, the Azores, Lisbon, Madrid, Perpignan, and Marseilles, Dulles alighted from a French local train at Annemasse, on the French-Swiss border. It was the day of the Allied landing in North Africa, and Hitler’s response was to occupy the South of France. Aside from some bomber pilots shot down and on the run from the Germans, Dulles was the last American to reach Switzerland overland through enemy territory. [2]

The French police and customs officers at the railroad station were already sharing their hut with members of the Gestapo, but a customs officer who belonged to the Resistance helped Dulles to cross the frontier to Geneva.

Dulles established his OSS base at 23 Herrengasse, high above the river Aare in the old quarter of Bern. Officially designated “special assistant” to the U.S. ambassador in Switzerland, he was an unusual kind of spy – one who sought popularity rather than anonymity. His personal contacts with Donovan and President Roosevelt were soon the talk of the town.

Dulles met with all and sundry in the bar of the Hôtel Belle-vue, the Du Théâtre restaurant, and his office in Dufourstrasse. A Wall Street lawyer of international repute, he maintained excellent relations with the presidents of the major Swiss banks, the international businessmen who purchased raw materials for Hitler, and the Bern, Basel, and Zürich corporation lawyers who served as straw men for the Nazis worldwide. Inside information was regularly deposited at Herrengasse by numerous Swiss bank employees who disapproved of their bosses’ business methods.

The secret OSS network, by contrast, was run by Gerry Mayer, Dulles’s senior assistant. A sophisticated code that was [11] never cracked, by either the Gestapo or Germany’s military intelligence, known as the Abwehr, enabled Dulles to conduct almost nightly telephone conversations with OSS headquarters in Washington.

An important role in the clandestine network was played by two exceptional women, both of whom became (in succession) Dulles’s lovers. Mary Bancroft, a Massachusetts intellectual who divided her time between Zürich and Ascona and had studied for her doctorate under the Zürich psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, handled the couriers from the French Resistance organizations. Wally Toscanini, Countess Castelbarco, daughter of the anti-Fascist conductor Arturo Toscanini, supervised communications with, and payments and supplies to, the partisans of northern Italy. Both were women of charm, intelligence, and courage.

Thanks to the two networks – the system of public, social contacts and the secret espionage organization – Dulles very soon obtained extremely accurate and detailed information about almost all the financial, commercial, and arms deals transacted between Switzerland and the Third Reich.

Of the many hundreds of people who served Dulles as informants, one was of special importance : Hans Bernd Gisevius, Abwehr agent and German vice-consul in Zürich. Having been assigned by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to build up the Abwehr’s base in Switzerland, Gisevius possessed highly detailed information about nearly every Swiss banker, lawyer, arms dealer, manufacturer, exporter, trustee, and others in the Nazis’ service.

A lanky Prussian, Gisevius was elitist and conservative, snobbish and reactionary, but he was also an efficient spy. Furthermore, he despised Hitler and his cronies, whom he regarded as uncouth, uncivilized boors intent on Germany’s destruction.

Gisevius turned up at Herrengasse one night, unannounced but bearing a message from the head of German military intelligence : Canaris requested Dulles to help negotiate a separate peace between the Allies and the German Resistance movement. [12] Although Roosevelt rejected this proposal, Gisevius continued to supply Dulles with invaluable information until the war ended.

When Dulles transferred his affections from Mary Bancroft to Countess Castelbarco, the former became an intimate friend of his Prussian informant – but continued to work for Dulles. She died in New York on January 19, 1997, at the age of ninety-three.

Thanks to the Clinton Administration’s War Crimes Disclosure Act and the congressional resolution, the most secret documents preserved in the archives of the U.S. Treasury Department and the OSS will now be published.

Speaker Leuba perpetrated his act of censorship on September 30, 1996, not only because the public gallery in the Bundeshaus was occupied by “hostile foreigners,” but also for another, deeper reason : suppressing the past is a tradition in Switzerland. Free speech, or even mild criticism, has always been taboo, especially when someone threatens to raise the subject of Switzerland’s abetment of Nazi war crimes. Here are a few examples from the past :

In April 1946 the U.S. Secret Service published a list of thirty-four Zürich lawyers alleged to have administered and later misappropriated assets and bank accounts stolen from Holocaust victims by the Nazis. Zürich’s legislature, the Cantonal Council, appointed a fact-finding committee. This convened in secret under the chairmanship of Hans Pestalozzi, a liberal (Free Democrat). He himself was a corporation lawyer on the American list.

In June 1949, Walther Böckli, a Social Democratic cantonal councilor, called for a public debate on the committee’s report and the underhanded dealings of “treasonous, Frontist, and National Socialist lawyers.” The Zürich government opposed this and imposed strict censorship : the parliamentary debate was prohibited, and no word of it reached the public, either in Zürich or abroad.

By order of Zürich’s Cantonal Court, the Bar Association examined nine cases (out of thirty-four) for possible breaches of [13] “trust and integrity.” Three lawyers were disbarred, but this inquiry, too, was held sub rosa.

Early in the 1980s, stories about Swiss financial skullduggery during World War II began to appear in the international press, and the board of the National Bank was compelled to respond. Its archivist, Robert Urs Vogler, drafted a report innocuously entitled, “Gold Transactions Between the Swiss National Bank and the German Reichsbank, 1939-1945.” The report was couched in extremely cautious language. The introduction reads as follows : “Between 1939 and 1945 the National Bank acquired billions in gold from the German Reichsbank. These transactions attracted critical crossfire – especially from the Allies – less on account of their magnitude than because there was a suspicion, even during the war, that the German gold came partly from German-occupied territories, and that the Reichsbank had requisitioned it in gross contravention of international law.” [3]

Robert Urs Vogler is a respected scholar. His report was technically a matter of public record, yet all public discussion of it, whether in the press or in parliament, was stifled. The board of the National Bank censored it, and Vogler resigned his post as archivist.

A final example of officially prescribed amnesia : Hans Ulrich Jost, who teaches modern history in the philosophico-historical faculty at Lausanne University, has pioneered critical research into the history of Switzerland during the period 1933-45. “Intimidation and Withdrawal 1914-1945” was the innocuous-sounding title of his contribution to a collection of essays published in 1983. [4] This piece, almost a hundred pages long, contained two pages of political dynamite. Jost wrote them after a friend of his, who worked at the Federal Archive, had come across some surprising documents and brought them to his attention. They embodied the following information.

Switzerland was now [in 1940] integrated de facto into the Reichsdeutsch economic area… It is estimated that, in the years [14] 1941-42, 60 percent of the Swiss munitions industry, 50 percent of the optical industry, and 40 percent of the engineering industry were working for the Reich…

Swiss industrial exports to the Reich were not fully offset by German deliveries : the Swiss Confederation granted Berlin loans, or so-called compensating credits… By the war’s end these credits amounted to 1,119 billion Swiss francs…

Where the Reich was concerned, Switzerland fulfilled an important function in the gold market. Germany needed foreign currency in order to purchase strategic raw materials, even from allies like Romania. Most countries, including neutrals such as Sweden and Portugal, declined to accept German gold, so the Reich’s gold and foreign exchange transactions could be effected with Switzerland alone.

In 1943, gold reserves to the value of 529 million Swiss francs were exchanged for freely disposable foreign currency. All this took place under the supervision of the National Bank and with the express consent of the Bundesrat… A substantial proportion of German gold was looted gold ; in particular, gold that had been seized from the victims of the concentration camps. The Swiss authorities were aware of the problem posed by this stolen gold… They took refuge behind the ludicrous argument of Swiss neutrality. They thought themselves obliged to accept this gold without demur. This kind of service was surely a trump card that would guarantee Switzerland’s continued existence… Let us leave it an open question whether the preservation of independence – which was much diminished in any case – may be justified by means of actions that are morally so questionable.

Jost was subjected to a hail of abuse, police inquiries, and bureaucratic chicanery. The then federal minister of finance, Georges-Andre Chevallaz, himself a historian of repute, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung – in short, everyone in Switzerland possessed of status, prestige, and influence – cried bloody murder. Jost was branded a shameless, un-Swiss heretic.

[15]

His consternation lingers to this day. In October 1996 Jost was interviewed by the editors of Die Zeit, the Hamburg weekly, about the ostracism he had endured almost thirteen years earlier. He testified that, although he was a university professor and an air force lieutenant with 2,600 flying hours to his credit, the federal police had kept him under surveillance, tapped his phone, and suspected him of subversion. [5]

And now, in September 1996, the parliamentary debate on Swiss complicity with Hitler had been officially stifled – authoritatively stifled on the ground that our national past could not be discussed in front of foreigners.

2. The Defensive Alliance

why this incapacity for remorse ? Why this steadfast, persistent rejection of self-criticism in a fascinating land where four great cultures have coexisted for centuries, where free speech is revered and morality, tolerance, and fidelity to the truth are cherished ?

Do all Swiss hate foreigners ? Is the entire nation hostile toward outsiders ? Are they xenophobic – racist even ? Of course not. In Switzerland as elsewhere, there exist a few demented individuals who daub swastikas on cemetery walls and hurl firebombs into buildings occupied by political refugees, but they are a matter for psychiatrists and the police, not a political problem.

For centuries now, one Alemannic and three Romance cultures have coexisted on Switzerland’s 16,000 square miles of territory. Their relationship is that of more or less friendly neighbors – so why do the Swiss fear foreigners ? Why, in referendums, have they so often reaffirmed their desire for isolation ? In 1986 the citizens and cantons of Switzerland rejected UN membership. In 1992 they voted simply on whether to join the European Economic Zone. They refused the European Union. The Swiss want no institutional relations with this European superpower dominated by German Catholics.

[16]

Denis de Rougemont states in his Mémoires d’un Européen : “Switzerland is not a country – it is a defensive alliance.” [6] He is right. Historically, the Swiss Confederation came into being through the slow, gradual, organic amalgamation of regions, valleys, free imperial towns, former subject territories, and insurgent communes. The Swiss tree began to sprout at the end of the twelfth century. It attained its full height six centuries later, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Swiss have resisted change at every stage in their history. They have always done the diametrical opposite of the nations around them. The great feudal monarchies of Europe arose at the end of the eleventh century and experienced their heyday in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Swiss, by contrast, threw out their indigenous or foreign feudal overlords and set up cooperative, self-governing communities – more precisely, peasant states. These grew up first in the Gotthard massif and then in the valleys to the north, east, and west. Later the rebellious communes of the so-called free imperial towns and cities formed an alliance with the regions in the Mittelland. The internal organization of these social formations was often wholly diverse : the peasant states of central Switzerland were governed by the direct democracy of the rural community, whereas the towns were dominated by guilds or patriciates. For six long centuries, the sole purpose of the Confederation has been cooperation against outsiders, reciprocal military assistance against attacks by the powerful feudal monarchies beyond the Jura and the Rhine, and joint defense of local rights and freedoms.

Swiss asynchronism persisted during the nineteenth century, when sovereign, centrally governed nation-states were consolidating themselves all over Europe. Once again, the Swiss did the exact opposite : they created a federal state that is primarily a federation and hardly a state. The constitution of 1848, which is still in force today, leaves important sovereign rights with the cantons : taxation, education, jurisdiction, police powers, and others. The Confederation exercises only those functions explicitly [17] assigned to it by the cantons under the constitution. Each canton has its own elected government and parliament. I know colleagues who decline to stand for the federal parliament. They prefer to remain cantonal councilors because, as they see it, genuine policymaking is carried on at canton level only.

The preamble to the Swiss federal constitution reads thus : “In the name of Almighty God, the Confederation, being desirous of reinforcing the alliance between the confederates and of preserving and promoting the unity, strength, and honor of the Swiss nation, has adopted the following constitution…”

Thus the Swiss nation is an alliance between largely autonomous peoples, each of which possesses its own language and culture, religion and history. It is a confederation whose unity is dependent solely on outside pressure – an association formed for joint self-defense.

A European myth suggests that the Swiss Confederation subsists on its multiculturalism. This multiculturalism is a fiction, however. It does not exist. Although the great Romansh, French, Alemannic, and Italian cultures coexist within a very small area, light-years separate a winegrower on the shores of the Lake of Geneva from a shepherd in Uri, a Luganese corporation lawyer from a monk in Sankt Gallen, a hunter in the Bernina Alps from a Basel chemical worker or a Zürich bank clerk.

Switzerland is a defensive association, not a nation-state in the usual sense. We need foreigners, who alone prevent the Confederation from breaking up. But we demonize them in order to reinforce our alliance from within. In Bern, my native canton, the word “foreigner” is never used without an attributive adjective : di cheibe Usländer (“damned foreigners”).

To the Swiss, xenophobia is not only historically logical ; it is an inherent necessity.

[18]

3. Hubris

switzerland escaped world war ii by virtue of shrewd, active, organized complicity with the Third Reich. From 1940 to 1945 the Swiss economy was largely integrated into the Greater German economic area. The gnomes of Zürich, Basel, and Bern were Hitler’s fences and creditors. What exactly are gnomes ? The dictionary definition : “A race of diminutive spirits reputed to inhabit the interior of the earth and to be the guardians of its treasures.” The last five words are peculiarly apt.

In 1943, when the Allies began their terrible saturation bombing of German cities and industrial and mining centers, Switzerland remained Hitler’s only unscathed industrial area : one in which, without prejudice to the Third Reich, munitions, precision equipment, optical instruments, and many other items of military importance continued to be manufactured. The Bührle-Oerlikon armaments firm delivered its last consignment of rapid-fire guns to the Wehrmacht in April 1945.

Why this complicity ? The customary, semiofficial answer : because the Swiss had no alternative. They had been hemmed in by the Fascists since 1940. Hitler’s pressure on Switzerland was irresistible.

Were the gnomes of Zürich victims of Nazi extortion ? The records tell a different story. The overwhelming majority of senior bank officials, whether salaried under public law (at the National Bank) or privately remunerated (by the major banks), were willing accomplices and eager henchmen.

Hubris was at work – unbridled, soul-destroying greed and the (well-founded) hope of raking in exceptional profits in an exceptional situation. Many economic historians attribute the worldwide and impressive financial strength of the big Swiss banks to their wartime profiteering.

While Europe was subsiding into rubble and ashes, the Swiss National Bank’s gold and foreign exchange reserves were mounting in a gratifying manner.

[19]

Throughout their history there have always been those who warned the Swiss against presumption. At the end of the fifteenth century, in a cave near Ranft on the Flüeli, high above the Lake of Lucerne, there lived a wise man, St. Nikolaus von der Flüh. He cautioned the Swiss, who had become embroiled in European (especially Lombardic) power politics, against rampant hubris and counseled humility and discernment. He urgently advised them “not to plant the fence too far away.”

The Swiss ignored their prophet and plunged into a war of conquest. They allied themselves with the French king, the German emperor, and the pope, and dreamed of annexing Lombardy. Disaster overtook them in 1515, twenty-eight years after Nikolaus von der Flüh’s death, when their dreams of great-power status were drowned in blood at the battle of Marignano.

In 1939 Switzerland’s financial oligarchs were gripped by the same hubris that had set the Swiss authorities on the road to disaster at the end of the fifteenth century. Lured by the prospect of exorbitant profits, the banks could not resist the Nazis’ offers.

“Nothing costs people more dearly,” wrote Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “than a cheap freedom.” [7] Hitler presented the Swiss with a cheap freedom. Today, half a century later, they are paying a high price for it.

The hubris that gripped Swiss bankers in 1939 has never let go of them. The bank vaults of Zürich, Basel, Bern, and Lugano have become a kind of sewage system into which flow streams of filthy lucre from all over the world. The major Swiss banks are internationally powerful. They continue to rake in astronomical profits from looted gold, flights of capital, and “fencing” transactions. No longer called Hitler or Himmler, Göring or Ribbentrop, their clients have names like Mobutu, Ceauçescu, Hassan II, Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal, Duvalier, Noriega, Traore, Suharto, Eyadéma, Campaore, Marcos, and Karadžić. Thanks to the funds flowing in from these and other murky sources, Switzerland – though devoid of indigenous raw materials – is now the second richest country in the world. The World Bank [20] measures wealth by per capita income. On its list of world rankings, Switzerland runs the United Arab Emirates a close second.

As early as the beginning of the 1950s, Friedrich Dürrenmatt indignantly complained that “Switzerland wanted to emerge guiltless from the war.” He was angered by the discrepancy between the image of a small country under outside pressure and the (self-concocted) myth of “a history inflated to heroic dimensions.” [8] Dürrenmatt likened Switzerland to a girl who works in a brothel but wants to remain a virgin. Having played whore to the Nazis in World War II, Switzerland is now trying to persuade us that it remained chaste – a tall order.

A parson’s son from Konolfingen in Emmenthal, Dürrenmatt knew the location of the roots of Switzerland’s living lie and the identity of its spiritual fathers : Jean Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli. Calvin, the Picard theologian who founded Europe’s first theocratic republic at Geneva in 1536, published the Institutes of the Christian Religion. “All is grace,” declared Calvin. Predestination governs the life of nations and individuals. Affluence is a mark of divine approval. Human beings cannot be guilty vis-a-vis other human beings, only before God, and then only when they oppose providence and reject predestination.

The Swiss are a friendly, peace-loving nation dominated by one particular desire : to slough off their guilt.

That British foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind – what was he really after ? What does President Clinton want ? What are they getting at, all these American journalists, these British members of parliament, these representatives of the World Jewish Congress ? Why should we be guilty ? Just because we escaped the war ? Just because Hitler – divine predestination be praised ! – was an Austrian who ran amok in Germany, not Switzerland ?

In the stage adaptation of Dürrenmatt’s The Trial, the play opens with the finale. Traps is dead, and the love-crazed prostitute Justine and Judge Wucht are seated on his coffin. Traps eventually emerges from the coffin, and the comedy begins at the beginning. [21] He is both acquitted and convicted by the same court. Everything is in a state of flux. Judge Wucht holds forth as follows : “In a world of guilty innocents and innocent guilty, fate has quit the stage and chance has taken its place.” In other words, predestination.

No one has ever bettered Dürrenmatt’s shrewd and accurate portrayal of the subconscious of Switzerland’s great and good, their hubris and abysmal hypocrisy. Now, in 1997, disaster has finally struck : the foreigners have opened Pandora’s box.

Well, it’s out now : we’re ensnared. Arrogant shrugs won’t do any good, far less flat denials, because the Americans are in possession of intelligence reports filed by Allen Dulles, who lived and spied in Bern for a time during the war. The World Jewish Congress, too, with the backing of former British Foreign Secretary Rifkind and the Senate Banking Committee, has since the summer of 1996 been publishing almost weekly reports about the Jewish refugees who were shunted across the Swiss border, straight into the hands of SS murderers, and about the looted paintings and tons of jewelry that were sold off on behalf of Heydrich, Göring, and Himmler by Swiss art galleries in Lucerne, Basel, and Ascona.

Are our sins catching up with us ? Not yet. After all, investigations are still at an early stage. The game isn’t up.

The financial sharks are already closing ranks. Swiss bankers remain dangerous, even on the brink of the abyss. The spokesman of the Swiss Bankers Association, Heinrich Schneider, affected to be unconcerned. Writing in the Handelsblatt (September 13-14, 1996), he referred to the British Foreign Office’s “so-called disclosures” and declared that the documents emanating from Washington and London appeared to be “diversionary maneuvers.” As a rival financial center, he blustered darkly, Switzerland was being subjected to a vindictive campaign by the major U.S. banks…

Robert Studer is president of the Union Bank of Switzerland, our country’s most powerful private bank. When confronted by foreign journalists with secret U.S. documents attesting the presence in Swiss bank vaults of “dormant” Jewish-owned [22] assets worth millions, Studer contemptuously retorted that they amounted to “peanuts” and were unworthy of discussion.

The bank bosses have every right to feel confident. Major Swiss banks operate in a highly professional manner. The profits from Nazi gold are not simply lying around in their vaults ; they have been invested and reinvested, laundered and relaundered by way of financial establishments in Liechtenstein, “mailbox firms” in the Caymans, and dummy corporations in Luxembourg. The vanished Holocaust funds have long ago been converted into real estate and portfolios under new names. They have been sold, reinvested, and resold as the state of the market prescribed.

Who, after half a century, would be capable of tracing the tortuous routes taken by these vast, vanished fortunes ? Many of them have long been incorporated in the undisclosed reserves of public and private Swiss banks, insurance companies, trust companies, and financial institutions, or in the personal estates of corporation lawyers. At all events, Heinrich Schneider wishes the sleuths of the World Jewish Congress the best of luck.

Six separate investigations were in progress at the beginning of 1997 :

1. Pursuant to a “Memorandum of Understanding” dated May 2, 1996 (see Appendix, p. 282), the Swiss Bankers Association and the World Jewish Congress have jointly established a “Committee of Eminent Persons” under the chairmanship of Paul J. Volcker, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board. Performed with the aid of international auditors, its task is to unearth the so-called ownerless Jewish assets (securities, foreign exchange accounts, shares in real estate, precious metals, art treasures, jewelry, and so on) held by Swiss banks. The World Jewish Congress is acting in an official function : in 1992 the state of Israel entrusted it with the worldwide search for all the missing assets belonging to Jewish victims of the Nazis. The chairman of

[23]

the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, estimates that “ownerless” assets worth around ten billion dollars are slumbering in Swiss bank vaults.

2. A Federal Act (see Appendix, p. 284) has provided for the appointment of a historians’ committee charged with investigating the whereabouts of German-looted gold and moneys belonging to Holocaust victims held in Swiss bank vaults. Their work is funded by a budget of five million Swiss francs. Bank secrecy is annulled with respect to the period 1933 – 45 and of both categories of as sets. The historians’ committee is to remain in operation for five years.

The federal resolution is peculiarly Swiss in character : only government-selected historians are granted access to all the archives. These handpicked individuals can investigate, technically speaking, but the authorities are to decide what documents they publish.

This triggered a heated debate in historical circles, and rightly so. Professor Jorg Fisch (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 8, 1996) called for absolute freedom of research and publication and accused parliament and government of having “a dubious conception of the truth.” It would, he said, be proper to open up the records completely and entrust supervision of the results to the public, not the state. The government stood firm, however : it alone would determine who should investigate and what names and documents should be disclosed to the public.

3. Speaking on behalf of the U.S. State Department, Nicholas Burns announced on October 4, 1996, that his superiors proposed to set up without delay a historians’ committee of their own. On President Clinton’s instructions, this would first comb the State Department’s records for 1933-45 f°r information relating to the commercial relations between Swiss banks and the Third Reich, and then trace the whereabouts of missing assets deposited in Switzerland by Holocaust victims and others murdered by the Nazis.

4. October 18, 1996 : documents unearthed in Washington [24] proved that Switzerland had concluded a secret agreement with Communist Poland in 1949. Under this agreement Switzerland assigned the Polish Communists Swiss bank accounts belonging to Polish Jews murdered by the Germans – and Poland returned the money to indemnify the Swiss banks and businesses in Warsaw, Krakow, and other cities, that had been expropriated by the new Communist regime.

Franz Egle, press officer of the Swiss foreign ministry in Bern, published a vehement protest the next day. The usual story : Washington’s charges were unfounded. They constituted yet another intolerable attack on Switzerland concocted by the Senate Banking Committee and the World Jewish Congress. Twenty-four hours later the international news agencies received, from an American source, the text of the secret correspondence between the head of the Swiss delegation, Ambassador Max Troendle, and his Polish opposite number. Not for the first time, honest Franz Egle had been too quick to issue a denial.

October 23, 1996 : Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti appointed a special board of inquiry. Its task : to examine all agreements between Switzerland and Communist, Eastern European countries concerning the use of murdered Jews’ Swiss bank accounts to offset the expropriation of Swiss private property.

Denial is not, perhaps, the right word. The Bern authorities’ technique is subtler and more complex. They want – honestly, truly, and in all good faith – to admit the truth, but they cannot do so under outside pressure. They would lose face in front of “all these foreigners,” so they start by disputing the facts and defer their acknowledgment of the truth until later.

Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress puts it this way : “The Swiss are fighting us every centimeter of the way.” [9]

5. Gizella Weisshaus is a sixty-six-year-old New Yorker of the Jewish faith. A Romanian-born survivor of Nazi genocide, she lost her parents and her six brothers and sisters in Auschwitz. On October 3, 1996, Mrs. Weisshaus filed a suit against Swiss banks in a New York court. Her attorney, Edward Fagan, is directing a [25] so-called class action suit against three major Swiss banks, the SBG (Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, or Union Bank of Switzerland), SKA (Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, or Crédit Suisse), and SBV (Schweizerischer Bankverein, or Swiss Bank Corporation). Fagan is demanding twenty billion dollars’ compensation for their complicity with the Third Reich. A class action suit is open to all concerned, and Fagan is presently mobilizing the creditors of the major Swiss banks. A second class action, in which several hundred creditors are participating, has also been launched against them by Michael Hausfeld, and Hausfeld isn’t just any old attorney. A star lawyer in the class action field, he won millions in settlements from several multinational companies.

It is highly probable that a whole avalanche of similar demands for compensation will descend on the Swiss gnomes in the next few years, and that the competent courts – wherever they may be – will institute thorough inquiries. In October 1996, for example, President Carlos Menem of Argentina announced that all his country’s archives and bank records will be accessible to such investigations. It is anybody’s guess what offenses will come to light in the course of all these hearings.

6. In the fall of 1996 the chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee threatened to reopen the bilateral negotiations between Switzerland and the Allies that led in May 1946 to the so-called Washington Accord. At that time the U.S., British, and French governments compelled Switzerland to hand over German assets as “war reparations” and pay compensation for looted gold.

Senator Alfonse D’Amato asserted that the Swiss had lied in 1946 and that the sum remitted bore no relation to the assets they actually held. Under international law, therefore, the Washington Accord was invalid.

The Swiss government indignantly rejected any form of renegotiation, but D’Amato isn’t any Tom, Dick, or Harry of a politician. He happens to be chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and an influential member of the Finance [26] Committee – and committee chairmen wield considerable influence within the U.S. political system.

Swiss banks administer forty percent of all private funds deposited abroad, a considerable proportion of which derives from U.S. pension funds. Billions of dollars of their assets are annually invested – thanks to the competence of Swiss financial administrators – in Geneva, Zürich, Bern, and Basel. The Senate committee could legally prohibit these transactions at any time.

The course of 1998 will reveal whether Switzerland possesses the political, public relations, and economic muscle to resist the American demand (and any retaliatory measures arising from it). The official attitude is equivocal. On the one hand, there is a strong desire to get at the truth. Flavio Cotti and his six fellow ministers are hopeful that the historians’ committee appointed by parliament will shed light on Swiss bank vaults in the next five years. Headed by Thomas Borer, a thirty-nine-year-old senior diplomat with experience of America, a task force is busy fending off attacks from abroad and combating unjustified international criticism. Ironically enough, the task force was initially based at 18 Bundesgasse in Bern, once the home of the consular protection service, whose principal function is to repatriate the corpses of Swiss who have died abroad.

On the other hand, Bern is spending taxpayers’ money on vastly expensive American public relations firms and corporation lawyers. It is their task to try to win over the U.S. public, press, and Congress, and to prepare the members of the task force for congressional interrogation.

The Swiss government is also striving to combat foreign pressure, especially from the World Jewish Congress, by other, more discreet means : it is buying military equipment in Israel. In December 1966, for example, the defense ministry signed a contract worth 153 million Swiss francs with Elta Electronics, an affiliate of Israel Aircraft Industries, for some of the latest monitoring equipment developed by Israel to counter enemy radio communications. [10] [27] The accounts held in Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse are shrouded in secrecy. Only the gnomes themselves know what skeletons are buried in their vaults and what ghosts haunt the corridors of Crédit Suisse, the Swiss Bank Corporation, and the Union Bank of Switzerland.

At the time of this writing, we have no precise knowledge of the facts that will be unearthed by the international committees of inquiry, the national historians’ committee, and the U.S. Senate’s investigators. We cannot tell, either, what political battles waged during court hearings or behind the scenes will emerge into the glare of publicity. Light will be shed on every last corner, but no one yet knows exactly what it will reveal.

One glorious day in the late fall of 1996, I was invited to lunch by the Swiss ambassador to one of our larger neighbors. The trees in the embassy grounds resembled bursts of flame in the warm sunlight, and heavy-laden barges were gliding down the nearby river.

The ambassador, a shrewd and independent-minded but worried man, had spent the morning with his aides : fresh attacks on Switzerland had just appeared in the press of his host country. We discussed possible reactions.

“The thing is,” the ambassador said suddenly, “we Swiss are innkeepers…” Noticing my surprise, he went on, “It’s true. The Swiss – and by that I always mean the German Swiss – make excellent innkeepers. They run their establishments admirably, welcome and wait on anyone who can pay. The service is excellent. And when the meal is over and the guests sit back and start philosophizing over coffee and brandy, the host discreetly retires to the back room, where he quietly and self-effacingly counts his francs.”

Everything in this picture fits : the excellent service, the ecumenical hospitality (all are admitted, provided they can pay), the self-effacement, the discretion, and the lack of interest in any form of philosophical, ideological, or even theoretical debate. The [28] counting of francs and love of bookkeeping, too, are right. Every aspect of the picture is right save one : many such innkeepers are very unpleasant customers – regular bandits, in fact.

To revert to the aforesaid Polish bank accounts and the bilateral compensation treaty between Bern and Warsaw in 1949 : the Polish Communists had just nationalized or expropriated Swiss-owned businesses, bank accounts, property, agricultural enterprises, and other assets worth approximately fifty-three million Swiss francs. Being anxious to maintain good financial relations with Zürich (and obtain development and other loans), the Poles were prepared to indemnify Swiss companies and private individuals. But war-ravaged Poland had no foreign exchange.

For that reason, a secret protocol was added to the official, bilateral agreement. The Swiss government undertook to get the Swiss banks to liquidate the “dormant” accounts of Polish, mainly Jewish, citizens, and to transfer these assets – which consisted of convertible foreign exchange – to Poland.

The secret protocol prescribed that the Swiss francs and gold bars, securities, and other assets held in Polish accounts be remitted to Warsaw’s central bank. It further prescribed that these assets be passed on to the descendants of the account-holders.

The Poles, for their part, undertook in the same protocol (strictly speaking, an exchange of secret letters between the two delegations) to indemnify the dispossessed Swiss in foreign exchange.

In concrete terms, the Poles paid these compensatory sums into an account, designated the “N” account, which the Swiss National Bank had opened at the headquarters of the Polish National Bank in Warsaw.

Switzerland liquidated its “dormant” Jewish accounts and remitted the funds to Warsaw – but omitted to enclose a list of the account-holders’ names. This made it quite impossible to pay out these repatriated moneys to descendants of the victims of Nazi mass murder. It goes without saying that Switzerland did enclose a scrupulously accurate list of all the Swiss who had been dispossessed [29] by the Warsaw regime and were thus in line for compensation. Everything went like clockwork. It was a strictly secret, highly efficient operation.

On the instructions of our federal government, Swiss banks quite illegally liquidated the Polish (Jewish) accounts – whereupon the Communist authorities in Warsaw promptly sent the money back (plus deliveries in kind) so as to indemnify the dispossessed Swiss. [11]

What can Ambassador Troendle, who headed the Swiss delegation in 1949, have thought when signing this secret protocol ? Innkeeper Troendle probably told himself : “The Polish Jews are long dead, and so are their children. They aren’t going to turn up in Zürich and ask to draw on their accounts. Besides, my protocol is secret.”

But Innkeeper Troendle reckoned without the World Jewish Congress and the U.S. Secret Service.

[30]



[1] Peter Bichsel, Die Zeit (Hamburg), October 11, 1996.

[2] Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy : The Life of Allen Dulles (London, 1994). p. 148 ff.

[3] Robert Urs Vogler, Die Wirtscbaftsverhandlungen zwischen der Schweiz und Deutscbland 1940-1941, Swiss National Bank (Zürich, 1983).

[4] Hans Ulrich Jost, “Menace et repliement,” in Nouvelle histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses, vol. III (Lausanne, 1983), p. 90 ff.

[5] Jost, quoted in “Dossier : Die Mythen im Schliessfach Schweiz,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), October 11, 1996.

[6] See also Denis de Rougemont, Écrits sur l’Europe, vol. II (Paris, 1994).

[7] Daniel Keel, ed., Herkules und Atlas, Lobreden und andere Versucbe über Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Zürich, 1990), p. 14.

[8] Heinrich Gotz, Dürrenmatt (Reinbek, 1993), p. 24.

[9] Edgar Bronfman in Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 25, 1996.

[10] Revue Juive (Geneva), January 24, 1997 ; see also he Nouveau Quotidien (Lausanne), January 9, 1997.

[11] For a detailed account see International Herald Tribune, October 10, 1996 ; The Times (London), October 23, 1996 ; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung October 24, 1996.



Retour au texte de l'auteur: Jean-Marc Fontan, sociologue, UQAM Dernière mise à jour de cette page le mardi 6 novembre 2018 6:35
Par Jean-Marie Tremblay, sociologue
professeur associé, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
 



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