The Swiss - A Cheese with too Many Holes in it?
In a recent article we found ourselves, amongst other things, trying to clarify the behavior of the Swiss during WW2.
See:
Feld & Davidiy: Fables and Facts.
Holocaust Lessons by Avraham Feld with Brit-Am Commentary.
https://hebrewnations.com/articles/guest/feld/feldanddavidiy.html
We have left what we wrote as it was but are hereby adding some notes of clarification.
The Swiss, contrary to numerous reports (that we also relied upon), did not request the Germans to stamp the passports of German Jews seeking to enter Switzerland with a "J."
The Swiss official who in the past was accused of it actually protested against it.
The Swiss population numbered ca. 4 million. We should remember this. They were a traditionally neutral country surrounded by German territory.
To some degree they were forced to bend with the wind. Some of them appear to have been pleased to do so and made money out of it. Others disliked it.
cf.
Deuteronomy (CJV) 22:
25 BUT IF A MAN FINDS THE BETROTHED GIRL IN THE FIELD, AND THE MAN OVERPOWERS HER AND LIES WITH HER, THEN ONLY THE MAN WHO LAY WITH HER SHALL DIE.
26 WHEREAS TO THE GIRL, YOU SHALL DO NOTHING THE GIRL DID NOT COMMIT A SIN DESERVING OF DEATH, FOR JUST AS A MAN RISES UP AGAINST HIS FELLOW AND MURDERS HIM, SO IS THIS CASE.
27 BECAUSE HE FOUND HER IN THE FIELD. THE BETROTHED GIRL HAD CRIED OUT, BUT THERE WAS NO ONE TO SAVE HER.
About 2/3 of the Swiss are German-speaking BUT the overwhelming majority of them were against associating with Germany.
They mobilized ca. 400,000 trained soldiers, built extensive fortifications, and prepared for war.
Hitler and others very much wished to invade Switzerland and incorporate it into the Reich just as they had done with Austria.
Most Swiss were against this. They were prepared to fight. Their intention was to make any invasion by Germany quite costly to the invading side and therefore not advisable.
Their official attitude was death rather than slavery.
The Germans felt the Swiss determination not to give in and the Swiss potential to put up a serious fight. They deferred their invasive intentions.
The Swiss were prepared to cooperate with Germany on financial and other matters in order, among other motivations, to make their continued existence of value to Germany, i.e. the Carrot and the Stick approach.
Both Allied and German planes invaded Swiss air-space.
Swiss anti-aircraft guns fired at both German and allied aircraft. German aircraft appear to have suffered much more.
German and Italian supply trains were allowed to pass through Swiss territory for a fee.
BY 1945 115,000 refugees were in camps in Switzerland. Altogether ca. 300,000 refugees had been allowed into Switzerland. The Swiss were in effect protewcting them from German persecution.
The mother of a friend of mine was a Jewish refugee in Switzerland. She was kept in a kind of facility and was once jailed for kissing her son without permission.
The attitude of the Swiss was demeaning and hurtful but not physically harmful.
Swiss companies bought formerly Jewish companies in Germany on the cheap after they had been Aryanised by Germany.
The Swiss accepted Nazi gold including that taken out of the teeth of Jewish dead.
They also gave loans to German companies using slave labor and helping the German war effort.
Some Swiss companies and even Government institutions co-operated with the Nazis in their Aryanization policies.
Swiss banks and companies exploited the vulnerability of Jews to misappropriate their money.
I met a woman from Switzerland who worked in a Swiss bank. She said that some of the mis-allocations and failure to repay Jewish deposits were inevitable BUT (she noted) outright avarice was also a factor.
The impression is that the Swiss on the whole were not Nazis. Many were pro-German but many others were not. Even the pro-German element was usually against the Nazis though there were exceptions.
On the other hand the Swiss were reserved about the Jews though here too, there were exceptions.
27,000 Jews were accepted and its is often said that 22,000 refused entry. This figure has since been disputed and it is now claimed to have been round 3,000. Before the War there had been only 18,000 to 28, 000 Jews in Switzerland. One of them may have been a great-grandmother of Yair Davidiy through his mother.
# In 1999 an international panel of historians declared that Switzerland was "guilty of acting as an accomplice to the Holocaust when it refused to accept many thousands of fleeing Jews, and instead sent them back to almost certain annihilation at the hands of the Nazis".. #
Some Sources:
WW2 From the Swiss Perspective | Animated History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6cVcEQD3dk
Switzerland: Neutral or Nazi Ally? - WW2 Special
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6cVcEQD3dk
How the Swiss Protected Hitler's Gold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQxhf-18Dcc
Switzerland during the World Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_during_the_World_Wars
Addenda:
In 1934 the Swiss Banking Act was passed. This allowed for anonymous numbered bank accounts, in part to allow Germans (including Jews) to hide or protect their assets from seizure by the newly established Third Reich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission
In 1941 when the Nazi government stripped German Jews of their citizenship, the Swiss authorities applied the law to German Jews living in Switzerland by declaring them stateless;
Later, in February 1945 Swiss authorities blocked German Bank accounts held in Switzerland. They then declared that the German Jews were no longer stateless, but were once again German and blocked their Swiss bank accounts as well.
{"Stateless Jews" in Switzerland could legally access their bank accounts held in Switzerland but "German Jews" could not.}
Comparativley speaking, then as now, the Swiss were well-off. They did not need the relative pittance they gained by cheating the Jews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission
Serge Klarsfeld, the French-Jewish historian, activist and Nazi Hunter claimed in 2013 that the Swiss authorities rejected fewer WWII Jewish refugees than believed. He claimed that the number of entry denials was closer to 3000, significantly lower than the 24,500 mentioned by the Bergier Commission's Final Report. Klarsfeld's estimate for the number of Jews admitted was 30,000. [60] Klarsfeld believes a 'maximum' of 1,500 Jews were rejected at the Swiss-French border, 300 Jews were turned away at the southern Swiss border with then-fascist Italy and that 1,200 people were rejected in the North and East at the borders with Germany and Austria.[61]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_during_the_World_Wars
In Letters to Suzanne (French: Lettres to Suzanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1949), the Swiss journalist Leon Savary retrospectively denounced in this sense "the occult influence of Hitlerism on the Swiss people during the Second World War, which they were not conscious of being under".[17]
Concessions reached their zenith after a crucial rail link through Vichy France was severed in 1942, leaving Switzerland completely surrounded by the Axis. Switzerland relied on trade for half of its food and essentially all of its fuel; however, the Swiss controlled vital trans-alpine rail tunnels between Germany and Italy and possessed considerable electrical generating capacity that was relatively safe from air attack.
Switzerland on numerous occasions shot down German planes intruding on Swiss air space. Hitler would turn livid and several times demanded that Switzerland be invaded. His underlings however always succeeded in stalling such actions. This shows that often when the Germans wanted to they knew how to avoid doing what Hitler wanted.