Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Switzerland's harsh treatment of Jewish refugees during the 1930s and World War II has long been a contentious issue, particularly in light of the nation's historic tradition of granting asylum to political refugees. In 1954, the Swiss Federal Council commissioned Carl Ludwig to investigate the question, and his publication (Die Flüchtlingspolitik den Schweiz in der Jahren 1933 bis 1955: Bericht an den Bundesrat zuhanden der eidgenössischen Räte [1957]) remains the authoritative text on the subject. While Ludwig focused primarily on government policy, wider research into the role of Swiss public opinion more generally inspired publications such as Alfred A. Häsler's Das Boot ist voll: Die Schweiz and die Flüchtlinge 1933–1945 (1967), which film director Markus Imhoof subsequently turned into an award-winning film in 1980. In 1996, this issue assumed international significance when the Swiss parliament commissioned a team of independent historians, which was presided over by Jean-François Bergier and included among others Sybil Milton, Saul Friedländer, Harold James, and Georg Kries, to examine Switzerland's financial dealings with Nazi Germany. The commission's first task was to examine the question of whether Switzerland had served as a haven for Nazi gold during the war; this resulted in the publication La Suisse et les transactions sur l'or pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (1998). Its members were also charged with investigating Swiss treatment of refugees from the 1930s to the post-World War II period. The result of their research is a major new synthesis, based on a wealth of new archival research and an extensive reading of the press, which will serve as the foundation for all further research on this topic.

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Like its predecessors, this study devotes considerable attention to the two most controversial aspects of Swiss refugee policy: the complicity of the Swiss administration in the fall of 1938 with a Nazi decision to stamp the passports of all Jews with a "J," and the closing of the Swiss borders in August 1942 at the very moment when the Nazis were embarking on the mass deportations of Jews from France. The issue of the "J" stamp has long been controversial, and some scholars have even contended that the Swiss, and especially Heinrich Rothmund, chief of the Federal Department of Justice and Police and principal architect of Swiss refugee policy throughout this period, were the first to suggest the use of this discriminatory insignia. Although the authors here acknowledge that there is no conclusive evidence to support this claim, aside from circumstantial evidence that Swiss police were already using a similar symbol to mark the naturalization dossiers of Jewish immigrants from 1936 on, they nevertheless point out that Swiss diplomats, in the wake of the Anschluss of March 1938 which brought an additional 5,500 to 6,500 refugees to Switzerland, began a desperate search for ways to keep further waves of Jewish refugees out, especially since these refugees were no longer being allowed to return to Germany or Austria. The Swiss now had two options: they could either have imposed a general visa requirement on all Germans, a move that would have obstructed bilateral trade and tourism and would have provoked German retaliation, or they could have tried to persuade the Germans to designate the passports of Jews in some special way, a move that did not threaten trade or tourism to the same degree but that risked making the Swiss complicit in the enforcement of Nazi racial legislation. Although Swiss officials, including Rothmund himself, initially expressed concern over the legal implications of accepting such a discriminatory policy, especially since it entailed discrimination against Swiss Jewish nationals living in Germany as well, the Swiss ultimately agreed to the German proposition to stamp all Jewish passports with a "J," and they simultaneously elicited Nazi assurances that German police would henceforth steer all bearers of these passports away from the Swiss frontier. This policy, which was implemented just weeks prior to Kristallnacht, meant that from now on only bearers of Swiss entry visas, which were now being doled out in an extremely parsimonious fashion, would be allowed to enter Switzerland legally. As for illegal refugees, a federal decree of October 17, 1939, mandated that they were to be mercilessly repelled at the border by Swiss police.

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