61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

economic and military power». 10 In the Safehaven Programme, launched by the
US from 1944 onwards, Switzerland figured as a potential centre for massive
capital transactions with which – it was hypothesised – the Third Reich, now
heading towards military defeat, intended to create a capital and operations base
for a further war. The attitude of the two Western Allies as expressed in these
passages was based on what happened in the period after the First World War,
when large amounts of German capital had flowed into Switzerland.
The polarised projections give two different, but equally effective versions, one
highlighting the economic and financial involvement of Switzerland as a highly
developed industrial country with the Axis powers, the other stressing the
common will of the people to defend themselves and the social and cultural
independence of the «small neutral state». If these aspects are separated, they
can serve as the basis for two stereotypical but diametrically opposed images. In
one, Switzerland is a bastion of moneymaking immorality; in the other, it is
presented as a shining example of a dauntless strategy for survival.
«Adaptation» or «resistance» was for decades, and in particular in Switzerland,
the crucial question and it is not surprising that the manifestations of resistance
and the image of Switzerland as a sanctuary – as depicted for example in the
film «Die letzte Chance» (The Last Chance) (1945) – predominated in the
cultural memory of the nation, although throughout the whole of the post-war
period a few eminent persons protested at the prevailing suppression of other
aspects of this same past.
The blind spot in the writing of history
Switzerland’s self-image has been the subject of an increasingly heated debate
since the 1970s. Historians and experienced publicists have published a whole
series of economic, social and political histories of various aspects of the period
from 1939 to 1945. For all its fierce criticism of authoritarian trends, the
readiness to adapt to the Nazi regime and economic cooperation with the Axis
powers, this critical historiography did not as a rule raise the issue of returning
the property of the Nazi regime’s victims or the scale of the injustice
committed. The argument that Switzerland had above all been a «victim of
developments in world politics», 11 was increasingly confronted with the
counter-argument that this country had aided the perpetrators in important –
mainly economic – areas. This critique virtually turned the tables, bringing
important, previously forgotten, suppressed, but also previously unknown
aspects to light. It too, however, persisted in depicting this issue as a national
problem and continued to concentrate on the conduct of the decision-making
elite. Apart from a few exceptions, critical historical studies aimed to demolish
the icons of national resistance and directed their analytical spotlight on the
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