The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead

Preface

Many of Switzerland’s so-called world-war generation are still alive. My father belonged to it, and so did my mother. Hundreds of thousands of armed men guarded our frontiers for years, ready to give their lives in battle against the Nazi barbarians. Hundreds of thousands of women assisted them by performing their arduous daily tasks in the home, on the land, and in the auxiliary services.

All of them steadfastly believed that Hitler refrained from invading Switzerland only because he stood in fear of its army’s strength and fortitude. The German General Staff had, they believed, been deterred by General Henri Guisan’s avowed intention of blowing up the Alpine tunnels. Many members of the wartime generation continue to cherish this misapprehension.

The somber, threatening years 1939 – 45 live on in my memory. I seldom saw my father in the early days of the war because he was an artillery officer and, like many other Swiss of his age, stationed on the frontier. I recall a Sunday in June 1940. As ever when my father came home on furlough, my mother, my sister, and I went to meet him at the railroad station. He always alighted from the last car, the splendid red epaulets and brass buttons on his officer’s uniform glittering in the sunlight. We generally ran [x] to meet him before he got down on the platform, but on this particular day an invisible shadow seemed to hold us back. He came toward us with heavy tread, then halted a few feet away. Making no attempt to embrace us in the usual way, he looked at each of us in turn and said, “Paris has fallen.” I detected tears in his eyes. From his tone of voice, he might have been announcing the end of the world.

Still in first grade, I naturally didn’t know where Paris was or what role it had played in the history of human liberty. I did, however, grasp that a disaster of unimaginable proportions must have occurred.

Curiously enough, this catastrophe gave me back my father, whom I saw far more often in the future. Switzerland was now completely encircled. On July 25, 1940, the Bundesrat and our mild-mannered, melancholy commander in chief, General Guisan, resolved to pull back our troops from the frontier and establish an impregnable “redoubt” in the Alps.

This was a somewhat brutal decision, because it amounted to leaving two thirds of our territory and almost the whole of our population at the mercy of the Nazi hordes, while planning to defend the Alpine snowfields, glaciers, and crags to the last man.

Since Thun, my birthplace, lay at the foot of the Alps and, thus, at the entrance to the redoubt, my father was often able to come home. By a fortunate coincidence, he commanded the fortress of Beatenberg, an artillery base concealed in some granite mountains overlooking the eastern shores of the Lake of Thun. This fortress was designed to deny the enemy access to the northern route into the redoubt.

My father, whose gentle, expressive eyes contrasted with his powerful physique, was a man of great intellectual ability. He did not feel particularly at home in the society into which he had been born. He loved his family, his books, and his study on the second floor of our home. He seldom went out except to visit the castle, which housed the premises of the district court over which he presided, or to go off on one of his long, solitary mountain [xi] treks. He believed in the Swiss Confederation, its army, and the constitution.

Like all his generation, he was disgracefully misled by the rulers of his country.

My book is not an investigative report. When the governments of great powers have failed for fifty years, a lone individual can accomplish nothing. My book is not a wholesale indictment of Swiss bankers, either. To repeat : ours is a land devoid of raw materials, yet we’re now the world’s second wealthiest country in terms of per capita income. Our raw material is money – foreign money, whatever its source. As a Swiss citizen, I myself benefit from a high standard of living, from the crumbs that fall from the table of the mighty. I have no wish to be ungrateful.

I avow myself a member of the nation of guilty innocents and innocent guilty. I belong to that nation, but the story of the Nazis’ looted gold and the proceeds of the Holocaust have tainted it to a degree that I can no longer stomach.

Any theory of collective guilt is profoundly repugnant to me. Collective guilt exists as little in Switzerland as it does in Germany or Austria. Not every gnome acted as a fence for the Nazi executioners, just as not all Swiss industrialists were partners of the SS and not all Swiss border guards accomplices of the Gestapo. Nevertheless, certain Swiss were responsible for what our country did during the period 1939-45 – or in the case of Jewish refugees, omitted to do – and I propose to name them.

Let no one come to me and claim that it’s easy to criticize with hindsight – that later generations are incapable of understanding or judging their precursors. “Ziegler was still a young child when the war was raging in Europe. What can he know of the fears that haunted Swiss ministers whose job it was to govern a small country encircled by Fascist armies ? Doesn’t he realize that we would all have starved if the gentlemen in Berlin hadn’t kindly allowed us to import wheat from Argentina via the port of Genoa ? Does this rabid sociologist have any conception of the Wehrmacht’s positively traumatic superiority ? Of the cynicism of [xii] its high command, which had designs on the Alpine tunnels ? Given that Europe was dominated by a madman, how could we have preserved our courage and integrity ?”

Unlike my sociological works, this book is clearly subjective, expressive of my great love for my country, the anger and fascination with which I view the aberrations of its mighty, and my hopes for a better Switzerland created by our children. I have no desire to hurt anyone, and that includes the families of those whom I criticize in these pages. My book is an essai d’intervention in Sartre’s sense : a weapon, a trial intervention.

The gold looted by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, much of which is still in Switzerland, does not differ in essence from the blood money held by major Swiss banks in the private accounts of the Zairean ex-dictator Joseph Desire Mobutu. Millions of men, women, and children were driven to their deaths by Hitler’s licensed thieves. Hundreds of thousands of children die annually of disease and malnutrition in what was Zaire and elsewhere in Africa, in Asia and Latin America, merely because Mobutu and his fellow tyrants despoiled their countries with the aid of Swiss financial sharks.

I do not wish my grandchildren to feel the same horror, fifty years hence, when they discover that the vast wealth of their native land is being nourished by drug barons’ capital and blood money deposited there by rapacious Third World dictators.

This book is intended as a weapon against the inherent guiltlessness of the Swiss and their inability to rue the past. Its purpose is to stimulate awareness and help consciences to rise in revolt : in short, to enlighten.