As someone who lived through the wartime period of Swiss-American relations, I can attest that the times were much more complicated than people now realize. I’m one of the few surviving members of the Swiss team that negotiated the “Washington Agreement,” the 1946 treaty between the Swiss and the Allies that dealt with war reparations and Nazi loot. I know that what you read in the papers these days is not the full story.
The Swiss legislation in Washington was a fascinating place for a young diplomat like me, starting out on my career in 1942, just after America entered the war. In the hopelessly overcrowded U.S. capital, I was assigned an isolated room in the deserted Italian Embassy on 16th Street. While the United States was at war with Mussolini, Italy’s embassy was placed under Swiss protection-along with those of Germany, France and Belgium. We were responsible, as a neutral nation, for representing the interests in those countries in the United States-and the U.S. interests in those enemy countries. We were also resposible for passing messages between the United States and its enemies, including one ordinary cable sent via Western Union, that turned out to contain the formal Japanese surrender. We had to decode and transnit that message in a great rush; the hurried messanger was arrested for making a U-turn on Pennsylvania Avenue.
When the war ended, I was the youngest member of the Swiss team negotiating with the Allied over Nazi assets. The two sides had a common understanding from the outset: Germany should be deprived of the financial means to start a third world war. But Switzerland argued that, as a neutral country, we were not at war with the “enemies” and therfore did not recognize the notion of “enemy loot,” which the Allies wanted us to hand over. We did transfer some of it. And in gratitude for having been spared in the war, our side offered 250 million Swiss francs, then about $65 million, toward what became the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe. The Americans felt that wasn’t enough, and negotiations broke down.
They assumed again after two weeks, but only recently have American and British historians revealed why. Retaliation against the Germans ceased to be the Americans’ main motive; keeping communinsts at bay in Europe began to take priority. Switzerland had to be a bulwark of that strategy-indeed, we had already assisted U.S. intelligence during the war. (When I got back to Switzerland, I moved into a house in Bern that had been used by Allen Dulles as the Europian headquarters of the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. “Switzerland is the most incorruptible neutral nation in existenc,” Dulles cabled Washington in 1994.)
Our team was led by an enormously able man named Walter Stucki, now wrongly being described as a Nazi sympathizer. Stucki had stood up for Swiss interests in talks with the Nazis throughout the 1930s, and he had learned to be even tougher than they. As the Swiss ambassador to the French government in Vichy after the Germans invaded in 1940, Stucki had been responsible for protecting U.S. property there after the Americans pulled out. He once prevented an armed German officer from occupying the American Embassy by brandishing his Swiss Army knife.
In retrospect, it’s being argued that Swiss neutrality was simply a trick, a ploy to get rich off the war. But we were:certainly not richer after the war than before. Our new trality was an armed one, and we spent 8 billion Swiss francs (about $2billion at the time) to defend our 4.2 million inhabitants and more than 100,000 re,gees, against the expansionist p!ans of our neighbors. I still remember the maps of the German Reich on which the German-speaking parts of Switzerland were already incorporated! Fortifying the Alps as an invincible retreat depended on trade: we sold watch parts to be used as triggers, precision instruments and antiaircraft guns in exchange for food, seeds and oils, as well as raw materials such as steel and coal. After the fall of France, Swiss territory could be reached only through two blockades surrounding the country: the inner ring of the Nazis, along our borders, and the outer ring of the Allies, surrounding German-occupied Europe. Landlocked Switzerland had to get permission from both sides to cross these obstacles for all foreign trade.
Some Americans are now saying that the Swiss were Nazi sympathizers all along. But Switzerland was never fertile ground for Nazi mentalities. We were the very opposite-the oldest direct democracy in the world. It would have been impossible for the government to renounce the fundamental rights of our ethnic and religious minorities, or to curb the free expression of opinion (except direct personal attacks). Indeed, the only independent theater in the German language at that time was in Zurich.
In retrospect, Switzerland made some obvious mistakes, as did many countries. These included the restrictive immigration policies toward the Jews, and most of all, the failure to recognize the moral dimension of the Holocaust. The Washington Agreement might have offered a chance to establish a common legal framework for dealing with the victims’ assets. But new international developments quickly diminished the sense of urgency to deal with this issue. In order to come to terms with this dire aspect of our past, Switzerland is now taking concrete action: more than $100 million has already been set aside to recompense depositors and their survivors. I appeal to those waging a campaign against Switzerland not to allow this issue to damage the friendly relations between our two countries.
