61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

the export of foreign currency and to prevent that through the paying of
ransoms – also called the «smuggling of emigrants» – additional refugees
might enter the country. Both the cantonal and Federal authorities investigated
those they suspected of being involved. Swiss foreign policy and refugee policy
dealt only indirectly with the German authorities’ ransom demands. As a
protecting power for Germany, Great Britain and the United States,
Switzerland negotiated between the warring parties and organised the exchange
of civilian prisoners. This involved citizens of the Allied countries who were in
German controlled territories as well as inhabitants of the British mandated
territory of Palestine, who were exchanged for German citizens interned by the
Allies. In many cases the people exchanged were Jews who had been detained
in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and who had earlier been forced by
the Germans to hand over foreign currency. There was therefore a close link
between the ransom demands and the inclusion of Dutch Jews in the exchange
of civilian prisoners between the Germans and the Allies.
The ICE examined 400 individual cases of extortion in the Netherlands which
involved a total of at least 35 million francs in demands. Half of the cases
revealed a connection to Switzerland, in that either Swiss people acted as
middlemen or that the Swiss authorities or banks were involved. In about 40
cases negotiations proved successful insofar as the victims in question – at least
154 people – escaped their persecutors by paying the ransom. By the middle of
1943, some 20 people had thus entered Switzerland. In 1945 about the same
number of people, who had been deported to either Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt,
reached Switzerland as a result of exchanges or ransom negotiations.
The fact that a larger number of Jews did not escape was due first and foremost
to the behaviour of the Nazi authorities, who gave priority to exterminating
Jews rather than «selling» them.
While the ransom operations mentioned here concerned individual cases, most
of which were unsuccessful, two larger groups were bought free towards the end
of the war and stayed in Switzerland temporarily. The first ransom campaign
concerned around 1,700 Hungarian Jews who were first transferred to Bergen-
Belsen and then allowed to enter Switzerland in August and December 1944.
The negotiations were carried out by Saly Mayer and Ross McClelland on the
one side, and SS Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher and the hostage Reszoe
Kasztner, who represented the Hungarian Jewish community, on the other.
Following the second campaign around 1,200 German, Dutch and Czechoslovakian
Jews were allowed to leave Theresienstadt for Switzerland in February
1945. This deal was negotiated by ex-Federal Councillor Jean-Marie Musy,
relatives and friends of the orthodox Jewish Sternbuch family and, in part, SS
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. 162 There were certain parallels between the two
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