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.”
Freedom of the Press
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.
Since regimes that live by fraud cannot stand honest reporting, much less counterargument, the Nazi regime controlled Germany’s own press. As a result, the German people’s demand for Swiss German-language newspapers rose. In the first few months of the regime, most of these were not editorially hostile to Hitler. Markus Feldmann’s Neue Berner Zeitung, later strongly anti-Nazi, even carried a few compliments. The major Radical and Liberal papers such as the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and the Basler Nachrichten held their fire because they assumed, like other European conservatives, that Hitler would be tamed by German traditionalists. By 1934, after the Swiss German-language press as a whole had decried the Nazi regime’s first mass murders (the Rohm purge), the Third Reich banned it at the border, began harassing its reporters, and lodged demands in Bern that it be curbed.
The Reich demanded that Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria enter into reciprocal agreements to keep their newspapers friendly—a kind of journalistic nonaggression pact among German-speakers. Only Switzerland said no. Foreign Minister Giuseppe Motta argued that the government could make no commitments regarding the press because the press was not an instrument of government.
Alas, the Federal Council did not leave it at that. On March 26, 1934, yielding to an anti-Swiss campaign in Germany’s press as well as to diplomatic pressure, the council issued a decree authorizing itself to warn, sanction, or seize any newspaper that endangered good relations with other countries. There were to be no “violent terms,” nor expressions “truly offensive to foreign [leaders], states, and peoples.” The decree reassured the press that the council had no intention of interfering with normal reporting or even editorializing—only to curb flagrant abuses, to protect neutrality, and to avoid provoking war. Although everyone realized that the difference between normal journalism and abuse is subjective, no major journalist objected, perhaps because of faith in the country’s leadership. When Motta explained in 1938 that “neutrality is a doctrine of states and not of individuals, nevertheless measure and reflection are incumbent on individuals,” few doubted he meant to impose anything more than the rule of reason.
Three problems, however, bedeviled government policy. First, accurately describing the Nazi regime required harsh words. Second, the notion of “offensive” language gave the “offended” party the right to define the bounds of propriety and ban any expression whatever. The Nazis used this pretense to try imposing on Switzerland what they called a “cultural Anschluss.” Third, the order contradicted, prima facie, freedom of the press. Whenever government controls any kind of expression, it implicitly approves what it does not penalize.11 Nevertheless, the Swiss government did assert Switzerland’s freedom of the press for anti-Nazi Jewish emigrés. In 1935 the French-based emigré journalist Berthold Jacob Salomon was kidnapped by German agents in Basel and taken to Germany for trial. Swiss police caught one of the kidnappers, and Switzerland pushed the matter so vehemently that Hitler ended up freeing Salomon.
Prior to the war, politicians and bureaucrats limited themselves to informal admonitions to the press to take it easy on Hitler and Mussolini. These were uniformly ignored. In 1938, when the entire press raged against the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia, the Swiss government slapped the wrist of one (foreign-financed) paper. At war’s outbreak, however, the Federal Council directed the army’s Division of Press and Radio to monitor the media, distribute guidance, hand out warnings, and impose sanctions, including suspension of the right to publish.
Editors chose between fighting the censors, approving bland commentaries, or simply quoting from the press releases of the Axis and the Allies.12 For example, on the morning of May 10, 1940, when Germany attacked France, the Division of Press and Radio allowed the Swiss media to report noises that sounded like shooting as well as troop movement north of Basel. How to characterize what happened to Norway? An attack. It was important to point out that a small country’s borders had been violated by a great power. But value judgments were judged imprudent. What about Belgium? Here the division allowed the word “aggression.” After all, Belgium enjoyed the same status in international law as Switzerland, and to have said less would have shown undue lack of concern for Switzerland’s own status. The point was to walk a fine line between telling the truth and angering Germany. The army soon realized that curbing the press meant morally disarming the country—so much so that it felt it necessary to set up its own capillary system of information for civilians. In mid-1940 the army began to beg the Federal Council to take censorship off its shoulders. It became a government function on January 1, 1942.
The division was headed by high-quality people. The first chief was a federal judge on army duty; an advisory committee of prominent journalists acted as a watchdog on the censors. The division also had strict orders not to interfere on debates of domestic issues. But the bureaucracy contained the usual quota of low-level, ham-handed functionaries. Also, during the war there were few if any purely domestic matters. The domestic question par excellence was whether the country should adapt itself to the New European Order or resist.
Germany’s direct approach backfired. In 1937 and 1938 the Reich had expelled the correspondents of the leading Swiss German dailies, hoping to ruin their careers and make their successors more pliant. Instead they had become heroes. On June 14, 1940, German press attaché Georg Trump informed his contact in the Swiss Foreign Ministry that the editors of these newspapers were obstacles to good relations and demanded that they be replaced. Here is the memorandum of conversation: Mr. Trump told me that after the separate peace with France certain Swiss newspapers will cease to exist in their current form. He gave the example of the National Zeitung. Others will have to change their editorial management. Thus the Bund will have to dispense with the services of Mr. Schurch. I asked him how the changes would be brought about. The answer is very simple, he said: From that moment, Europe will only have two press agencies: the DNB [Deutsches Nachrichten Büro] and the Stefani [Italian agency]. The newspapers who do not stay in rank will no longer receive the services of these agencies and thus will no longer be able to exist.13
Trump then took his demand to fire Schurch to the owner of Der Bund, Fritz Pochon, and mentioned that Germany would be making similar demands on the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the Basler Nachrichten, and the Swiss wire service. Far from throwing the German diplomat out of his office, Pochon seriously considered complying. He talked things over with other owners and editors as well as with the Swiss Foreign Ministry. Nearly a month later, he wrote to Foreign Minister Pilet Golaz that he and the press would resist. Thenceforth, the Swiss press rejected direct German pressure.
What about the government’s role in this? If government has any role, it is to stand between its own citizens and foreign governments. Pilet Golaz should have admonished Herr Trump after his first demarche, and expelled him after the second. Upon receipt of Pochon’s first call, President Pilet Golaz should have
asked him to cease all communication with German officials, because their request was the business of the state. Instead, the Swiss state countenanced the possibility that some of its own citizens would determine the employment of others based on the demands of a foreign government. Thus the Swiss state let the Swiss press stand alone before the power of triumphant Germany.
Note that Germany’s demand to fire editors and close newspapers came also from Nazi sympathizers in Switzerland. It was included on the list of demands the pro-Nazi National Frontists presented to Pilet Golaz on September 10, 1940; it was part of a petition that 173 people, some of them prominent personalities, presented to the Federal Council; and it was one of the main points in the complaint Colonel Gustav Daniker filed in May 1941.
Still, the only newspapers the Swiss government ever closed down were those of Nazi supporters. Nor will it do to allege that the final banning of Die Front and Der Grenzbote in 1943 (despite the violent objections of Herr Trump) was due to the turning tide of war. The Federal Council had also banned the soft-on-Nazism Neue Basler Zeitung in 1939 and lesser frontist publications even in the grim year of 1940. But never did the government close down a patriotic anti-Nazi paper, regardless of Germany’s threats. The Federal Council was clearly afraid of Germany, but it also feared the wrath of anti-Nazi Swiss.
Perhaps the strongest challenge from the anti-Nazi side came from the same quarter as the challenge on refugee policy: Christian activists. The mechanism for controlling the press, like the one for implementing refugee policy, relied heavily on the cooperation of private organizations appointed to serve on the advisory board. This is how modern big government works everywhere: Private organizations exchange their cooperation with government policy for a voice in the formulation of policy and above all for a certain indulgence in the application of policy in their own regard. One of the private organizations that the government thought it necessary to appoint to its “liaison service for press questions” was the Evangelischer Pressdienst (Protestant press service). On October 28, 1941, the service’s director, Roger Frey, resigned from the board, charging that the government was forbidding Christians from doing their duty of calling things by their name. Nazism was evil, and the government was trying to force Christians into silent complicity with it. The Protestant churches had already circumvented the government by printing and distributing Karl Barth’s famous lecture, and they could do it again. The government could not afford to have substantial numbers of respected, mainstream citizens withdraw their cooperation. What if the big papers, which also chafed under censorship, followed suit? How many journalists could the government afford to arrest? Consequently, press guidelines eased. So in the end, the boundaries of the press control system were set by civil society itself.
Between the Alps and a Hard Place Page 11
