61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

however, issuing the refugees permanent residence permits. Thus over 100,000
Jewish refugees reached Spain during the war and most of them continued from
there to a third country. 174 During the same period Portugal became not only
one of the most important transit countries; Lisbon also proved to have adopted
all in all a remarkably flexible policy by tolerating the stay of refugees for longer
or shorter periods.
Sweden, which is often used for comparisons with Switzerland, was a special
case. Until the autumn of 1942, Sweden’s policy towards Jewish refugees was –
similar to that pursued by Switzerland – one of the most restrictive, although
owing to its geographic situation, far fewer refugees fled to Sweden. After the
end of 1942, however, there was a fundamental change in the Swedish attitude
due to the impact of the deportation of Jews from Norway. More than half the
Jews living in Norway were admitted into Sweden and a large majority of the
Jews in Denmark were saved from deportation in the autumn of 1943 through
a covert evacuation plan. 175 Sweden pursued its active rescue policy until the end
of the war although, apart from the protective passports issued by Raoul
Wallenberg in Budapest, with limited success.
In the debate surrounding Swiss refugee policy, a popular comparison is that
with U.S. immigration policy which, from the 1920s on, became very
restrictive and, despite dramatic peaks in immigration reached in the 1930s and
during the war, remained so. President Roosevelt was reproached for having
called the Evian Conference as an empty gesture to conceal the fact that even a
slight increase in immigration quotas would be refused by Congress. The quota
laid down for immigrants from Germany and Austria being used to the full
immediately before the outbreak of the war in order to admit Jewish refugees
from these two countries, but any increase above the figures set was categorically
refused. The Wagner-Rogers bill, which called for the admission of 20,000
Jewish children, was rejected by Congress at the beginning of 1939, and a few
months later the unfortunate passengers of the «St. Louis» were refused
permission to land, despite appeals to the Congress and the President himself.
Once the war had started, and in particular after the German victories on the
western front, the issuing of visas for Jewish refugees stranded in Europe became
even more restrictive: after over 30,000 visas had been issued in 1939, the
number dropped to around 4,000 in 1941. These draconian and, for those
seeking asylum, drastic reductions do not appear to have been due to a sudden
rise in anti-Semitism, but seem rather the result of a general fear of infiltration
by foreign agents. This quite unjustified fear was also shared by those in
Roosevelt’s immediate entourage. Later, when detailed information on the
«final solution» emerged, the USA took rather half-hearted rescue measures
such as the conference organised in Bermuda in April 1943 which could not be
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