Swiss Counter U.S. Report Critical of WWII Actions

PARIS — Switzerland on Thursday replied with firm thoroughness to its U.S. critics, acknowledging that it entered into “questionable deals” with wartime Germany but denying that it served as the “Nazis’ banker” and thus prolonged World War II.

Swiss government leaders also said they see no reason to reopen a treaty with the United States and other Allies on the return of gold looted by the Third Reich.

The declaration from the Federal Council, which is the national Cabinet, was the most detailed Swiss reply yet to a blistering 200-page U.S. government report issued May 7 by U.S. Commerce Undersecretary Stuart E. Eizenstat that accused the small, neutral country of cynically profiting from the war.

In trading with the Third Reich, Switzerland--a landlocked and officially neutral nation surrounded for much of the war by Axis powers--was “seeing to its own interests,” Swiss leaders countered.

Such activities were necessary to save the Swiss from deportation and extermination by the Nazis, the Federal Council maintained. It was the sole way for Switzerland to remain a refuge for tens of thousands of refugees and “an oasis of democracy and freedom in a totalitarian Europe,” it contended.

Though the government admitted that mistakes were made during the war, its mea culpas were far outweighed by its arguments in defense of Switzerland’s actions.

“All in all, neutrality led to a difficult tightrope walk between adaptation and resistance. Today we know that this also led to mistakes. The faint-hearted refugee policy for Jews was inexcusable,” the Cabinet said, referring to the decision by the federal government in Bern to turn back tens of thousands of European Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

Swiss leaders said Switzerland also engaged in “questionable deals” that “did not affect the survival of Switzerland,” but they said it was difficult to determine whether their nation could have ceased to do business with Germany in 1943 or 1944 without provoking an Axis invasion.

“The Federal Council regards the representation of Switzerland as the banker to the Nazis as a one-sided, broad-brush judgment,” the leaders said, citing their country’s simultaneous dealings with the Allies and its history of links to Germany in its pre-Nazi days.

The Swiss also struck at the Achilles’ heel of the U.S. report by noting that it contained little historical evidence to back up its explosive allegation that but for commerce with the Swiss and other European neutrals such as Sweden, Spain and Portugal, Germany might have been forced to capitulate earlier than May 1945.

“It is suggested in the foreword [to Eizenstat’s report] that the neutral countries may have prolonged the Third Reich’s ability to wage war by trading with it. This comment must be referred to as unsupported, at least based on the report’s contents,” the Cabinet said.

The Federal Council also rejected current U.S. criticism of Switzerland’s conduct in talks after World War II about returning gold it bought from Germany, much of which the Nazis had looted from occupied countries, some even from the teeth of Holocaust victims.

Switzerland agreed with the Allies in 1946 to pay 250 million Swiss francs in gold (then worth $58 million) as a voluntary contribution to European reconstruction in return for the Allies dropping all claims related to the gold deals.

“At the conclusion of the Washington Agreement in 1946 the parties to the signing realized all the essential facts. Thanks to their intelligence sources, the Allies even had precise knowledge of the Swiss negotiating position,” the Cabinet said.

The Swiss emphasized the recent steps taken by their country to discover the truth about their past and their efforts at redressing old wrongs.

The Swiss earlier this year set up a fund with nearly $190 million in donations from banks and businesses to aid victims of the Holocaust and their families, and officials proposed selling off billions of dollars worth of gold reserves to launch a humanitarian aid to help Holocaust victims, the poor and the disaster-stricken in Switzerland and abroad.

That latter measure could be subject to a national referendum.