61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Loire) 150 km away stretched the bounds of what was possible. The electricity
which benefited Germany was thus supplied to southern Germany and, from
1940, to Alsace-Lorraine. While these supplies covered only a tiny proportion
of Germany’s massive electricity consumption, they were important for its war
economy: in particular, they were the basis for the southern German aluminium
industry which covered a major share of Germany’s needs and was especially
important for the aircraft industry.
It is impossible to precisely reconstruct how Swiss electricity was used because
the electricity was supplied to regional companies which then distributed it to
the customers. However, a significant share was supplied directly to several
electrochemical companies, most of which were Swiss-owned: they included
Lonza in Waldshut, which purchased 340 million kWh in 1940 and
490 million kWh in 1944 for carbide production. AIAG (Aluminium-Industrie
AG) in Rheinfelden (Baden), which – as already noted – produced 10% of
German aluminium, was an even larger «Stromfresser» («devourer» of
electricity), requiring 445 million kWh in 1940 and 500 million kWh in 1941.
According to Florian Lusser in early 1943, the major share of the energy
exported to Germany was absorbed by the Swiss subsidiaries. 5 The rest – apart
from limited civilian consumption – was supplied to other strategically significant
regional companies, IG Farben, Degussa etc., so that although the
amounts supplied were relatively small, they were still important for Germany’s
wartime industries.
This is also the reason why German negotiators attached such importance to
electricity in all the trade negotiations; conversely, their Swiss partners never
missed an opportunity to play this trump card in order to obtain valuable coal
in exchange. In addition to the credit of 150 million francs, the electricity
supplies were important as payment for the coal supplied under the trade
agreement of 9 August 1940, which totalled 870,000 tons (140,000 tons more
than originally offered).
Electricity and coal formed a material unit; there was no difficulty in converting
amounts of coal to amounts of electricity for calculation purposes and
demanding that corresponding amounts of the relevant product be supplied in
exchange. An obvious option would thus have been to halt the supplies of
electricity if the coal was not delivered on schedule. Although this was
threatened on repeated occasions in 1942/43, these threats had little real
impact; indeed, the representatives of the electric power industry made sure that
they were not carried out. Nonetheless, in this area, the principle of give and
take based on equal value was repeatedly raised as an issue, although this –
astonishingly – was not the case in the area of transit, where a material unit also
existed between coal transit and coal supplies. Unlike the other services
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