Between the Alps and a Hard Place (3 page)

The preface to the Eizenstat report asks, “Why the sudden surge of interest in these tragic events of four decades ago?” And it answers: “[T]he most compelling reason is the extraordinary leadership and vision of a few people who have put this issue on the world's agenda: . . . Edgar Bronfman, Israel Singer, . . . Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York, and President Bill Clinton. . . .”
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The report also leaves no doubt that these extraordinary leaders were adopting judgments that had been aired and rejected during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Rather than discovering new facts, the Eizenstat report reversed the values placed on old facts by Americans who had actually fought and defeated Nazi Germany. In presenting his report, Eizenstat said, “Our task is to complete the unfinished business of the twentieth century's most traumatic and tragic events,” while the report's principal drafter, William Slany, spoke frankly of reversing the actions of a previous generation, of “doing things now that couldn't be done then.”

According to the report, “As late as the end of 1944 Secretary of State E.R. Stettinius, Jr., and his State Department colleagues concluded that, on balance, Switzerland's neutrality had been more a positive than a negative for the Allies during the War.”
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But, the report notes, there were people in the U.S. government, primarily in Henry Morgenthau's Treasury Department and in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who did not think so well of the Swiss. Indeed there were. The report, however, does not mention that these people lost policy arguments within the U.S. government on the merits (for example, the Morgenthau Plan to pastoralize Germany) as well as because they tended to follow the Soviet line. Nor does it ever explain why the anti-Swiss views should be accorded greater credence than the pro-Swiss views. Rather, the report simply piles accusation upon accusation, and, in short, blames the presidents and secretaries of state of the time for discounting the anti-Swiss claims: “The U.S. government . . . over the objections of the Treasury Department, decided not to pursue sanctions.”
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The implication was that this decision had been incorrect, and that the U.S. government now had grounds, if not an obligation, to act otherwise.

Senator D'Amato aptly summed up the effect of this litany by faulting the “moral fortitude” of the people who ran America at the time because they “ran out on our obligation” by not treating Switzerland as a hostile power. As a result, D'Amato said he was ashamed of being an American. Strong stuff. But not serious.

Had the report and the campaign attempted to remake the image of Switzerland in America rather than provide a pretext for extortion they would have had a big job. Americans have traditionally had a most favorable image of the Swiss. On the lowest level, the Swiss were seen as Alpine yodelers who make fine chocolate, watches, and camping knives.

The bible of the middlebrow,
National Geographic
, has offered moving descriptions of how the International Committee of the
Red Cross, organized in Switzerland by the Swiss, has tempered the horrors of war and ministered to the victims of disaster.
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Europe and the world, says the
Geographic
, are lucky that the roof of the old continent is occupied by such a multiethnic, multireligious nation, dedicated to peace within itself and with its neighbors. International institutions that seek the peace of the world have made their headquarters in Switzerland, which is seen as a haven for the oppressed. Even Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), a staunch Clinton supporter and backer of the accusations, began her statement to D'Amato's committee by stating this standard view: “[M]y memory as a child is that Switzerland really acted as a haven for many Jews who escaped. I had a cousin there who [
sic
] I visited, and he and his wife actually used Switzerland as a base from which they actually got many Jews out of Germany and other parts of Europe. So it is ironic that we've run into this situation.”
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D'Amato followed suit by confessing that he too had shared the common herd's ignorance of Swiss villainy, and wondered what sort of base reasons might have led so many to hide it for so long.

The pro-Swiss, right-wing conspiracy at the highest levels of culture must have been vast indeed. Prior to 1995 hardly a harsh word about the Swiss could be found in serious literature. In 1512 Niccolò Machiavelli, from whose pen praise did not flow easily, described the Swiss as “most armed and most free”—a people who knew the fundamentals of statecraft and used them to guard their sober way of life.
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Stanford historian James Murray Luck and CUNY professor Rolf Kieser are among the many authors who spread the image of Switzerland as America's “sister republic,” a place where most issues are decided at the local level by direct popular vote, and where even national-level decisions are most often made by referendum.
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Neither federalism nor democracy could exist, never mind in such straight doses, if the population were not unusually habituated to tolerance and the practice of civic virtues. Foremost among these is universal military service.

As regards World War II, the most authoritative judgment on Switzerland came from Winston Churchill, whose personal commitment to decent government might well have surpassed even that of Bill Clinton, and whose knowledge of Nazi machinations must at least have matched that of Alfonse D'Amato. Churchill wrote:

One can only wonder whether Clinton and Eizenstat, confronting live Nazis at the height of their power rather than their discredited memory, would have dealt with them with any less deference than they showed to the Soviet Union when it had the wind in its sails.
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In fact, when Hitler was riding high only one European or American statesman ever refused a chance to pay his respects to him. That man was Winston Churchill. But if Clinton, D'Amato, and Eizenstat were correct about Switzerland, does Churchill's expression of solidarity with the Swiss mean that he was ill informed or insufficiently anti-Nazi?
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As for
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and their secretaries of state, who treated Switzerland as a friend in straitened circumstances rather than as a Nazi ally, were they dupes too?

Those actually in charge of running the economic war against the Axis powers long ago explained why the people responsible for Allied foreign policy treated Switzerland as they did. In 1946 David L. Gordon and Royden Dangerfield wrote how the U.S. government's “Blockade Division, Foreign Economic Administration,” which they had headed, had pressured neutral countries to reduce economic activity with the Axis and to contribute to the Allied war effort. Switzerland, they wrote, had been judged a special case because it was totally surrounded. Hence, Allied economic warriors allowed Switzerland to trade on the world market five times as much “enemy content” as other neutral countries were permitted. As for who was on whose side, these men wrote:

In his preface to their book
The Hidden Weapon
, Thomas K. Finletter, who served as special assistant to Secretary of State E. R. Stettinius, Jr., and was a close confidant of Franklin Roosevelt, tells readers that Gordon and Dangerfield and their Blockade Division had admirably carried out the victorious policy of the administration.

On what bases then does the Eizenstat report contradict such judgments? In fact,
the report does not even attempt to show why Churchill, Roosevelt, Stettinius, or America's economic warriors were wrong
—and therefore forfeits intellectual respectability. But when you have power and social standing, who needs respectability?

The Eizenstat report also takes up the
chevaux de bataille
that extreme leftists within Switzerland had been trying to ride ever since the war. Switzerland is a very conservative country. Women didn't get the vote in national elections until 1971. Pet proposals of intellectuals on the extreme left, such as abolition of universal military service, regularly get trounced in referenda. The Swiss Socialist Party threw out its extreme leftist minority midway through World War II. Ever since, these marginalized leftist intellectuals have tried to delegitimize their country's social order by tarring it with nothing less than guilt for collaborating with the Holocaust. The
New York Times Magazine
summed it all up with a quote from Swiss novelist and notorious extremist Adolf Muschg: “Auschwitz was also in Switzerland.”
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Perhaps to show its disregard for conventional notions of truth, the
Times
did not point out that this statement was literally false, and that literal falsehoods are to be found throughout that set of accusations. Read the magazine
Une Suisse Sans Armée
, a publication of the Swiss far left, and see with what pride, for over a half century, all the themes of the Clinton
administration's campaign have been part of extreme leftist propaganda: Switzerland's sociopolitical system shares responsibility for the murder of Europe's Jews.
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Nevertheless all this was sufficient for the Clinton administration.

According to the Clinton administration, then, people like Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, nearly all historians, the flood of journalists and ordinary people who have dealt with Switzerland over the past half century—all are dupes at best and at worst soft on Nazism.

Now, to take reality seriously, what insights into the logic of international affairs did the successes and shortcomings of the Swiss in World War II provide?

Prior to 1940 the Swiss military publicly relied on its well-advertised capacity to muster in arms over 10 percent of the population in well-prepared border positions, to defend its internationally guaranteed neutrality against all comers. But in reality, since the rise of nation-states the military safety of tiny Switzerland has depended on the willingness of a neighboring power to rush its army into Switzerland to help block another neighboring power from using Switzerland for its own ends. Thus in World War I the Swiss held off the Germans by the prospect that they would call in the French, and held off the French by the prospect that they would call in the Germans. When World War II began, the Swiss feared Germany exclusively. But they hoped that France, and even Italy, would know enough and be potent enough to help safeguard their own Swiss flanks. When France fell and Italy joined Germany, Switzerland was quite unexpectedly thrown back on its own military resources.

At most these military resources could make Germany's price of conquest too heavy to pay. And that depended on the extent to which Switzerland could maximize the value of its three military assets: Alpine terrain, the Gotthard and Simplon tunnels, and the Swiss soldier's historic bloody-mindedness. But exploiting Alpine terrain to the maximum essentially meant sacrificing half the country and more than two-thirds of the population. Holding hostage the tunnels and the country's infrastructure meant destroying the Swiss people's livelihood. Making the most of the Swiss soldier's penchant to fight to the death meant firing up the population's martial spirit, which many influential Swiss believed was already provoking Germany.

On various occasions Germany's
Wehrmacht
estimated that defeating the Swiss army would take three to six days—about as long as it had taken to defeat the Belgian army—and require nine to twelve divisions, including four armored.
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The reason for this confidence was that the Swiss army had not changed since World War I. A modern force could easily negate its trenches and machine guns spread out along the northern plateau. But the German High Command added one qualification: The Swiss army must not be allowed to retreat in good order southward into the Alps. Once ensconced in the mountain valleys, the Swiss would be nearly impossible to dig out.

For its part, the Swiss army reached the same conclusions, which led it to withdraw the bulk of its forces from the northern plateau into the southern Alpine valleys. While the military logic of this national redoubt was self-evident, its political logic was much less so. After all, redeploying meant abandoning at least two-thirds of the population, including the families of the soldiers, to Nazi occupation. On the other hand, if the army
remained deployed on the plateau it would be defeated anyway, and the whole country occupied. But while no Swiss wanted to leave the country's major cities open to occupation, no German wanted to see the Swiss army holed up in the Alps, cutting off the vital Simplon and Gotthard tunnels to the Mediterranean and threatening guerrilla warfare. Thus the Swiss adopted a military strategy that threatened to accept grievous losses in order to deter the enemy. But of course most deterrence strategies aim to avoid being put to the ultimate test. Military deterrence is usually a shield for and an adjunct to other policies that mean to avoid war. This was the case in Switzerland.