61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Solothurn, which became a joint stock company in December 1941. Four-fifths
of the shares were held by Fritz Mandl, who had been deprived of his Germany
citizenship by the Nazis on the basis of the Nuremberg laws. After the annexation
of Austria, Mandl sold half of his shares in the Waffenfabrik Solothurn to
Rheinmetall.
German fuse production rings in Switzerland
Tavaro started exporting large numbers of detonators to Germany in autumn
1940. The two Jewish manufacturers Isaac and Maurice Schwob had resigned –
at least pro forma – from the Board of Directors in October 1940 in order to
enable the firm gain a faster foothold in the German market. After Major
Seybold of the German Armaments Agency (Heereswaffenamt) visited Geneva,
they were convinced «that under the present circumstances, their continued
presence on the company’s Board of Directors might be disadvantageous to the
company». 29 They received a handsome reward for resigning. 30 Furthermore,
the Schwob brothers supplied Tavaro, through the Tavannes Watch Co., with
the movements it needed for manufacturing detonators for the German
market. 31 At the same time, the Geneva Company stopped supplying the UK.
Tavaro rejected British requests to smuggle fuses and fuse-manufacturing
machinery to the UK through Italy, and the Swiss authorities refused to issue a
permit for fuses to be supplied to the UK via unoccupied France. This constituted
a further breach of the neutrality laws which forbade unilateral restrictions
on the export of war material in times of war. 32 On 1 November 1940,
Tavaro received its first order from Germany for 800,000 S/30 time fuses, which
was followed in March 1941 by a further order for 1.2 million pieces. In a
similarly rapid way, once the probable outcome of the war had changed, Tavaro,
which had started manufacturing Elna sewing machines in spring 1940 and
hoped to export them to the USA among other countries, started discussions
with the Allies. It was one of the first companies to stop exporting fuses to
Germany. It took this step in November 1943, by which time it had supplied
around 1.7 million fuses. Between 1939 and 1945, Tavaro produced war
material valued at around 176 million francs, of which 73 million francs
comprised fuses for Germany. Apart from the Tavannes Watch Co, Tavaro’s
suppliers included Appareillage Gardy, Cuénod, Ed. Dubied, and Hispano-
Suiza (Switzerland) in Geneva, and many others such as the Eidgenössische
Munitionsfabrik in Thun, Deltavis in Solothurn, and Metallwerke Dornach.
The German forces’ procurement agencies referred to the organisation of fuse
manufacturers in Switzerland as «production rings». This clearly implied that
mechanical fuses based on watch movements were produced by a series of small
companies but that the «rings» had a hierarchical structure. The most
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