61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

with Switzerland and other countries, as well as the size and political, social and
religious composition of their membership. Many organisations had been set up
immediately after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. Since it
was members and sympathisers of the left-wing parties and Jews who were
persecuted at first, the left-wing parties and the Jewish communities in
Switzerland set up new structures for their aid to refugees. In March 1933, the
Swiss Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz, SPS) and
the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions (Schweizerischer Gewerkschaftsbund) founded
the Swiss Refugee Relief (Schweizerische Flüchtlingshilfe, SFH), an organisation
aimed at providing support for German Social Democrats and trade union
members. The same year the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, SFJC
(Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund, SIG) appointed a committee for
Jewish German refugees. In 1934, the Association of Swiss Jewish Poor Relief
(Verband Schweizerischer Israelitischer Armenpflegen, VSIA) – (later to become the
Association of Swiss Jewish Welfare and Refugee Relief (Verband Schweizerischer
Jüdischer Fürsorgen/Flüchtlingshilfen, VSJF) 116 – took over total responsibility for
organising aid for Jewish refugees and was subsequently to bear the greater
burden of private refugee relief. Aid to refugees was based on the principle of
solidarity groups, i.e., each relief organisation supported the refugees closely
associated with it. This principle was applied so rigidly that for example the
Swiss Social Democratic Party and the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions argued
the question of whether the Party should also support persecuted union
members (and vice versa), or even whether the individual trade unions within
the Federation (e.g., the Railway Employees Union) should also help needy
union members from other branches. 117 Several relief organisations concentrated
on helping children.
In June 1936, the main relief organisations merged to form the Swiss Central
Office for Refugee Relief (Schweizerische Zentralstelle für Flüchtlingshilfe, SZF)
(later to be known as Swiss Refugee Relief) in order to pool their energies and
co-ordinate their stand vis-à-vis the authorities. In November 1936, after tough
negotiations with Rothmund, they signed an agreement which defined their
collaboration with the police. They undertook to register each new arrival and
to inform the refugees that they had neither the right to seek employment nor
to stay in Switzerland in the long term. In exchange, the Confederation was
prepared to contribute 20,000 francs per year towards the refugees’ onward
journey. In 1936 this agreement seemed feasible. In the wake of the more radical
persecution and extermination policy adopted by the Nazis, the relief organisations
came increasingly into conflict with the authorities, a situation which
reached its climax in August 1942 when the government decided to close the
Swiss borders.
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