New study on 'neutral' Switzerland and Hitler's Germany

By Felix Ruhl

Basle - Between 1933 and 1945, Switzerland kept its ideological distance from Nazi Germany, but it did put business before ethical considerations, says a Swiss expert commission headed by historian Jean-Francois Bergier.

After the affair in connection with Holocaust victims' dormant Swiss bank accounts, a controversy occurred in the late 1990s about the role that Switzerland played in World War II. The Swiss seem not to have behaved quite so neutrally toward Nazi Germany as they make themselves out to have done.

Headed by historian Bergier, a commission went on to take a serious look at subjects such as Swiss policy on refugees, the employment of slave labourers by Swiss companies' subsidiaries in Germany and the country's handling of trophy art. The first eight of a planned 25 volumes have now been published.

The findings tend to bear out some accusations levelled at wartime Switzerland and to relativise others. The commission concludes that Swiss ideological support for National Socialism was very slight, apart from that lent by a number of Swiss cantons.

But many Swiss firms were found to have put economic interest before ethical considerations. The findings show that German subsidiaries of Swiss companies employed 11,000 forced labourers.

Basle-based chemicals companies are said to have maintained lucrative business relationships with Germany's Nazi Party. Geigy AG, today's Novartis, supplied dyes for Nazi and SS uniforms. German subsidiaries of Swiss firms are said either to have dismissed Jewish employees or sent them to Switzerland.

No evidence was found, however, to support allegations that "slave trains" of forced labourers from Italy passed through Switzerland, and shipments of Jews from France to their deaths in German concentration camps do not seem to have passed through Switzerland either.

In the current legal dispute with IG Farben, the German chemicals combine that ceased trading in 1945 but still exists as a corporate shell in the process of being wound up, the Swiss Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) feels that the Bergier Commission's findings support its case.

The case concerns a Swiss company, IG Chemie, that was set up in Basle, which borders on Germany, in 1928 by IG Farben. Its main purpose seems to have been to evade German tax by transferring funds to Switzerland.

The assets of IG Chemie, which later traded as Interhandel, are now held by UBS. IG Farben (the company that is being wound up) has laid claim to IG Chemie assets worth just over two billion dollars.

It argues that IG Chemie and its successor were purely German companies.

The Bergier Commission is the first institution to have been allowed to inspect IG Chemie files that have been kept under wraps since 1946. Its conclusion is that IG Chemie and its US subsidiaries contractually parted company with IG Farben in 1940 and must thus be seen as Swiss firms.

An aspect of the period that has so far gone largely unnoticed is the art trade. Switzerland was one of the turntables of trade in what the Nazis called "degenerate art" and profited from the straits of many a refugee who was forced to sell works of art.