Neutrality and Duplicity

Dimensions:
A Journal of Holocaust Studies

Volume 11, Number 1

Once again, contemporary scholars and pundits are exhuming, with considerable fanfare, a story from the Holocaust: the disturbing concealment by Swiss financial institutions of the assets of Holocaust victims. The revelations so far, though far from complete, are raising disquieting questions about Switzerland's - and other countries' - alleged neutral status during World War II.

What is truly startling about the current controversy, however, is that this news story isn’t really new. As early as 1944 the Allies warned neutral governments about their economic cooperation with Nazi Germany and a year later, along with Jewish organizations, the Allied powers began the process of identifying and (sometimes) repatriating Jewish assets plundered by the Nazis that were held by the neutrals. Why is an old story suddenly attracting widespread attention again? At the very least, we might say that the debates over Switzerland’s wartime and postwar behavior suggest that the public’s interest in the Holocaust era is increasing, not (as we might expect) leveling off or decreasing.

David Cesarani explores the complex postwar conduct of Swiss financial institutions. A prolific writer, and Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library in London, Cesarani characterizes the current scrutiny of unclaimed assets in Switzerland as a “massive detective operation.” He observes that although the Swiss government and the Swiss Bank Association agreed, in the immediate postwar years, to repatriate the “heirless assets” of Holocaust victims, these institutions subsequently embraced deliberate policies of inattention or obstruction. Moreover, Switzerland’s dilatory tactics were abetted by the bad faith and negligence of many Western nations.

Paul B. Miller’s article discusses the issues surrounding monetary gold (gold owned by Europe’s central state banks) that was plundered by the Nazis, as well as gold stolen from individual victims of the Holocaust. Miller points out that Switzerland and Sweden compromised their neutrality during the war in order to traffic in gold with the Third Reich. After the war, both the Allies and Switzerland were determined to reach a settlement as quickly as possible on matters pertaining to Switzerland’s wartime gold transactions with Nazi Germany. The sense of urgency was prompted by the Cold War and by the desire to restore West European economic stability. But the settlements that were reached triggered dilemmas that were, in Miller’s words, “bound to resurface.”

The concept of neutrality has served — and still serves — to deflect attention from the behavior of several nations that cooperated during the war, in a variety of ways, with the Reich. So suggests Jonathan Petropoulos, a professor of history at Loyola College (Maryland). Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain — “neutrals” all — had economic ties to Nazi Germany, ties that sometimes significantly contributed to the German war effort. Indeed, these neutral countries’ economies became, in effect, part of the Greater German Reich. And yet, to the present day, neither the populace nor the governments of any of these four nations has shown much of an inclination to scrutinize, let alone acknowledge, the problematic nature of neutrality during the Second World War.

From his vantage point as a former New York Times columnist, Tom Wicker sees the explosive Swiss bank affair as an example of a significant news story that went unheeded for a period of time and then burst into the public’s consciousness. “When a subject has so much resonance among so many people and in so many nations, it’s almost bound, sooner or later, by some event or agency, to break into world headlines.”

In this issue, we also present an adaptation of a 1996 speech by Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from 1942 to 1944. The speech is a moving recollection of Anne, and a plea for people to help endangered individuals.

Four book reviews by leading critics examine recent interpretations and research as well as a memoir by a man whose seminal work has deeply influenced scholarship about the Holocaust era. Because of the intense controversy surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, we have decided to publish two essays exploring the work and the issues it raises. The reviews are by two eminent historians: Tony Judt, Director of New York University’s Remarque Institute, and Robert E. Herzstein, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. In his review of Klaus Kreimeier’s The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, the Yale University historian Peter Gay examines “a dream factory that colluded in making a nightmare.” Claudia Koonz, a historian at Duke University, explores the extraordinary scholarship of Raul Hilberg in her probing review of Hilberg’s latest book, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.