Between the Alps and a Hard Place (14 page)

The bigger challenge to the bureaucratic policy came from the combination of the refugees' desperation and the humanity of the Swiss people. As soon as legal access to the border was shut off, the illegal border crossings began. Many of those caught were forced to sneak back into Germany as best they could. Others were handed directly to the German authorities as Swiss border residents watched in horror. Others were allowed in by guards who risked their jobs. These refugees were registered with some local authority or lived clandestinely with Swiss families. During the war, veritable underground railroads developed, which brought refugees directly to the families that would hide them. And hide them they must, because the Foreigners' Police alternated between amnesties and expulsions. Still, the Foreigners'
Police did not burst into Swiss citizens' homes to take away refugees at gunpoint. Not until August 13, 1942, did the Foreigners' Police order categorically that
all
illegal refugees must be expelled. And as we will see, that order proved to be the beginning of the end of the exclusionary policy.

Official Swiss ambivalence about the refugees was long-standing. In 1938 Rothmund reported to his department head that no refugee would be turned back if he feared for his life: “After all I have heard to this point about the inhuman, cruelly devised treatment to which the Jews of Austria are subjected, I have not been able to bring myself to take on the responsibility of delivering them to their executioners.”
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Still, Rothmund's own policy was one of increasing restriction. Yet Rothmund's occasional leniency was the moral norm for most ordinary Swiss. This caused clashes between border residents and the obedient border guards, and between citizens allied with local officials against the Foreigners' Police. The conflicts increased after Germany's conquest of Europe left Switzerland the only nearby island of safety (Spain and Portugal were willing and even safer, but far away) and as evidence mounted that the incredible, the Holocaust, was actually happening.

One politically virulent sentiment added force to all the factors that are about to be described. By failing to aid the Nazis' victims, the criticism went, the Swiss government was giving aid and comfort to the Nazis, and indeed Nazifying Switzerland. On January 22, 1941, the prestigious daily
Die Nation
printed the following editorial:

That is, the bureaucracy's behavior brought upon the Federal Council the worst insult that any Swiss could give another: that he was somehow abetting the Nazis.

In any Christian country, the most subversive of words are St. Peter's statement to the Sanhedrin: “We must obey God rather than men.” This is precisely what three hundred Protestant clergymen wrote to the Federal Council on November 19, 1941. They threatened civil disobedience and protested against state interference with the distribution of pro-refugee materials, including Karl Barth's June 1941 lecture “In the name of God, the Almighty.” In it, Barth had charged that the Swiss government was intentionally “punishing” the Jews, who, he said, are “opponents and victims of a system whose victory Switzerland must resist to the end with all her strength. . . .”
⁷
Despite the government's ban on its publication, 16,000 copies were printed privately; available in every kiosk, they sold out in days. Every politically active Swiss knew about it. In late 1939 Rothmund had been able to parry clergymen's criticism by repeating the mantra that the Jews were not in mortal danger and that the clergy had an obligation to civic obedience. But by 1941 the first statement had become incredible. Everyone had heard stories of innocents turned over to the Germans by Swiss authorities and killed. Consequently, the government's claim to loyalty on the basis of an immoral untruth was undermining its own legitimacy. A resistance
movement was springing up, and to a growing number of Swiss citizens that movement was the hero while the government was the villain.

From the very first, the Swiss German press had taken literally Himmler's and Hitler's threats to annihilate the Jews (November 1938 and January 1939, respectively). Beginning in 1941 the press began to publish accounts of cattle cars stuffed with Jews heading for death camps in Poland. By early 1942 Swiss observers were privately circulating reports of death transports from occupied Western countries.

In 1941, however, the World Jewish Congress in Geneva discarded the first reports of the Holocaust as incredible. In January 1942 a German Jewish historian who stayed in Germany and survived the Holocaust wrote that the mass killing of Jews had become merely “a very credible rumor.” Although he had by March concluded that a “concentration camp is now identical with a death sentence,” in January 1943 he still wrote that hard information on the fate of the Jews was difficult to obtain because “the worst measures are concealed from the Aryans.”
⁸

But in the summer of 1942, when the transports began moving out of France, the Swiss body politic was struck irreversibly. It was then that countless refugees, Jews and Frenchmen fleeing compulsory labor service in the East, physically and undeniably brought the news of the Holocaust. They also brought themselves, which precipitated the crisis.

Swiss authorities redoubled their efforts of 1938 to convince the Allied powers to take the bulk of Jewish refugees who managed to get to Swiss borders. But at the Bermuda conference of 1943, even more than at the Evian conference of 1938, the United States and Britain refused to do anything to mitigate the plight of the Jews, even to bomb railway lines leading to the
death camps, going so far as to refrain from mentioning that the Jews were the Nazis' principal victims. (After the conference, Britain allowed—if the Swiss-based Red Cross could arrange it—4,500 Jewish children and five hundred adult guardians to immigrate to Palestine.) By far the greatest number of European Jews—about 350,000, some of whom had first escaped through Switzerland—found haven in Spain and Portugal.

In late July 1942 Heinrich Rothmund wrote to his boss, Justice and Police Minister Eduard von Steiger: “What are we to do? We admit deserters as well as escaped prisoners of war as long as the number of those who cannot proceed further does not rise too high. Political fugitives . . . within the Federal Council's 1933 definition are also given asylum. But this 1933 ordinance has virtually become a farce today because every refugee is already in danger of death. . . . Shall we send back only the Jews? This seems to be almost forced upon us.”
⁹
To avoid singling out the Jews, Rothmund, acting on the Federal Council's behalf, issued his August 13 order closing the borders to all refugees and deporting illegals. By August 30, when von Steiger explained that decision in a speech to several hundred young people near Zurich using the metaphor of Switzerland as a lifeboat that was already full, public opinion had already begun to turn him around. Rothmund had already been “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind” for six days, and the lifeboat had begun taking more passengers than ever.

This is what happened. On August 20 Rothmund explained his decision to the leaders of the Swiss Jewish community. The last bit of ambiguity and hope gone, that community withdrew its cooperation. It enlisted Albert Oeri, Liberal member of parliament and eminent publisher of the
Basler Nachrichten
, who telegraphed von Steiger at his vacation home and demanded an
immediate hearing. On August 22 Oeri and prominent refugee activist Dr. Gertrude Kurz told von Steiger that the press would link the gruesome details of the Jews' fate with the government's exclusion policy. Unless the government wanted to share responsibility for the fate of the Jews, it had better back off. Von Steiger asked for time. Two day days later, on the 24th, when Rothmund explained government policy to the refugee relief organizations, they threatened to stop all cooperation with the government and to go underground. As the meeting was threatening to end in mutual declarations of enmity, Rothmund was called to the phone. It was von Steiger, explaining that henceforth exceptions would be made, effectively disavowing his faithful bureaucrat.
¹⁰
So, von Steiger's “lifeboat” speech was more an effort to minimize and cover his retreat than it was a tightening of policy.

The Federal Council tried to keep the breach small. On September 23 von Steiger explained the toned-down version of government policy to the (powerless) parliament in traditional terms: Our hearts pull us to let in a flood of refugees. The government regrets the instances of innocents' being delivered to their deaths. But if we really use our heads about the country's true interests we will realize that our resources are limited and our capacity to employ these people is even less. Besides, many of the refugees are ungrateful. The government's policy will balance the demands of heart and head.

Support from the three government parties was nuanced. But criticism was withering from Albert Rittmayer, a Radical who proclaimed the government's regrets insincere. While everyone knew the Jews were in danger of death, the council was doing nothing to prevent recurrences of exclusions and expulsions. Swiss resources for refugees, Rittmayer said, were nowhere near
the breaking point. The government's policy was unworthy of the Swiss people, and the people would repudiate it.

The opposition piled on, especially the Socialists, and the press shamed the government. With elections scheduled for the following spring, the politicians scrambled for public favor on the side of the refugees.

Although the order to expel illegal immigrants had been rescinded and the government sought to avoid embarrassing incidents, public pressure mounted. In September 1942 dozens of French Jews who had been herded into Paris's Velodrome d'Hiver committed suicide rather than await transport to the Nazi death camps. Swiss headlines screamed, “Death Transports to the East.” Official policy could no longer be defended publicly. By 1943 few if any illegal Jewish refugees were being expelled, and more were being accepted legally. In January, 460 Jewish refugees registered in Switzerland; in February, 857; in March, 818; in each of the months of April, May, and June, some 600; in July, more than 700; in August, 900; and in September, more than a thousand. Above these numbers were uncounted illegal entrants. The Swiss lifeboat was turning into a transport ship. Decent, generous officials were no longer penalized. But neither were zealous ones discouraged enough. Not until July 12, 1944, long after the people, “the sovereign,” had punished the governing parties in parliamentary elections, did the government officially replace the ludicrous distinction between political, economic, and racial refugees with the reasonable criterion that a refugee is someone who flees in fear of physical persecution.

In the climate of late 1944, as Allied victory loomed, refugee policy turned proactive. The Federal Council was eager to show its goodwill to all refugees, especially Jews. It delegated the serviceable
Rothmund to negotiate with Nazi officials to bring to Switzerland some 1,300 Hungarian Jews who had not yet been shipped to the death camps. By this time, Nazi officials were willing to make such deals.

Ultimately, the Federal Council's refugee policy could not have survived an open, running debate in the Swiss parliament. As it was, faulty premises had to be exposed by bloody news. Even that was not enough. The council was finally moved only by civil disobedience and prospects of more, as well as by the erosion of the political base of the councilors' parent political parties. The Federal Council would have been better off without “full powers.”

A second set of policies that shifted Swiss public opinion against the Federal Council involved the freedom of the press. The struggle over freedom of the press took place under direct German pressure, but it was a domestic political struggle as well. Those who favored making the press inoffensive to Germany argued that modest censorship was a small price to pay to avoid the risk of enormous harm. The champions of freedom of the press argued that Germany's invasion plans weren't determined by press attacks, and that the Czech and Austrian newspapers' complaisance had not forestalled German invasions of their counties. It was a struggle about the meaning of prudence and true patriotism, and about the role of the Swiss government regarding the press. Nazi Germany was putting all its weight on one side. But the Swiss government did not take the lead on the other side.

The genesis of the problem again dates to World War I, when the army monitored the press to safeguard military secrets, and
advocated doing so again in any future European conflict. No one suggested that the government should become responsible for what newspapers said, or that it should dictate content. The idea was to keep irresponsible newspapers from bringing other countries' quarrels onto Swiss heads in wartime. Pressure for censorship, however, began not with any military event but with Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. Almost immediately, the Nazis demanded that the Swiss government direct its press to say certain things and not others. This made nonsense of the Swiss government's fear that the press might create monsters abroad; rather, the problem was that foreign monsters wanted to command the Swiss press. Had the government followed the consequences of its own views it should have thought not about censoring the press, but rather about shielding it from Nazi influence. Instead, it sought ways of making the press less offensive to Germany. This only led to stronger German demands. It took the army until the summer of 1940 to figure out that a free press was essential to maintaining the country's commitment to independence. The Federal Council never quite did discover this. Nevertheless, Swiss civil society proved strong enough to lead the government to shield the press enough for it to play its proper role—though just barely.