Stefan Schäfer

This book by a German historian comprises a survey of two topics related to Switzerland's WWII history. The first topic deals with the German military invasion threat, which although well done mostly channels Klaus Urner's earlier work about this topic. While the general threat of an invasion was never totally lifted, only from the conclusion of the battle of France to the battle of Britain (mid-1940) did a German army stand ready to invade Switzerland. During this period of time, the 12th German army with nine divisions (assisted by the SS divisions Totenkopf and Leibstandarte) were prepared to invade Switzerland. The trigger to this invasion lay in French hands: Any breach of the French surrender would have resulted in the conquest of Southern France via the Swiss territory. Unlike Belgium, which served a similar purpose in the battle of France, Switzerland was spared. With the mountain divisions occupied in Greece and then Russia, the military threat diminished and was surpassed by economic warfare.

This economic warfare is the second topic of the book and may be divided into two extortion events of big countries playing power politics. The first extortion happened during WWII when Nazi Germany forced Swiss economic cooperation by threatening economic strangulation. The second extortion is a recent event which must have triggered the author's interest in this matter.

The US economic extortion campaign against Swiss banking and Switzerland regarding the Nazi gold. This campaign was fought both in US courts and in the global media. Similar to the events that led to the invasion of Iraq, US business interests and media developed a narrative which drifted far from the truth (and many times did not even care to distinguish between Sweden and Switzerland). The Swiss banks as well as the Swiss governments were both outplayed. They never expected to have to fight against an avalanche of truthiness, moral grandstanding and hypocrisy. The 1998 publication date of this book allows the author only to present the intermediate results of the campaign. He missed the giant settlements the Swiss banks were forced to pay, mostly not due to actual WWII events but to continue business activities in the United States. The author could also not foresee that many of the main US protagonists who loved to appeal to moral arguments would later end up being charged with crimes ranging from fraud to cavorting with child prostitutes. Most of the money set aside found no justified claimants and ended up in an undignified haggling between poor Eastern Europeans and rich US lawyers.

While the Swiss taxpayers ultimatively bore most of the financial cost, Swiss reputation took the deepest hit and has only partially recovered. It is a sad fact that Switzerland was only one among many/most nations that behaved less than stellar during WWII. Singling out Swiss behavior and neglecting to mention the behavior of most others means misrepresenting history, e.g. the Washington Holocaust Museum accuses Switzerland of only accepting 40,000 Jewish refugees (Switzerland should have accepted more). The museum, however, does not mention that the US, during the same period, accepted even fewer Jewish refugees (a phenomenon mirrored by the recent US reluctance to accept Iraqi refugees).

Overall, the military part is well done, the economic part suffers from treating an ongoing event, of writing before the fat lady sings. Now, with a distance of a decade, a Joe D'Amato's War similar to Joe Wilson's War might be in order to do full justice to this sorry affair,… (mais)