61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

options: either the «Generalgouvernement» (occupied but not annexed part of the
country, including Warsaw) would fall to the Soviets (which did in fact happen,
although who could foresee that in May 1940?); or the Third Reich would
finally lose the war and Poland be restored; or it would win the war and Poland
would become a long-term German dependency. Delachaux himself favoured
the second option. He foresaw that the Polish state would be restored and
therefore recommended maintaining the subsidiary in its pre-war form. Like
Thommen in Lodz, he did his best to keep Nazi agents out of the company,
protected the Polish factory workers, and even allowed the names of young
Warsawers who were under threat of deportation (but were not really employed
by the firm) to appear on the payroll. Thommen was aware of the situation of
the large Jewish population of Lodz and informed Basel accordingly; nothing
could be done, however, except to note the loss of several clients and a number
of employees. Thommen was replaced in 1942. The senior management of PCI
remained Swiss but fell under the influence of the prevailing German
environment. They did, however, resist IG Farben’s attempts to eliminate its
Polish rival. The firm could not avoid Polish employees being excluded from
its pension fund, without any compensation nor repayment of contributions.
The examples given above illustrate the complexity of circumstances and the
difficulty of overcoming the obstacles, with each firm seeking and finding its
own solutions, always on the basis of its long-term – and more rarely its shortterm
– interests. It can also be seen that the same parent company – as in the
case of Ciba or Roche – adopted different behavioural patterns with regard to
its subsidiaries according to their location, the more or less positive stance of
Nazi authorities, the personnel in place, and the changing contact networks.
Some anticipated developments and kept to their policies at the cost of making
concessions, while others showed neither the same intuition nor resolve. This
confirms that, beyond all economic and political constraints which included the
desire – sometimes expressed in our source material – to help maintain
Switzerland’s integrity and food supplies, Swiss companies nevertheless enjoyed
a degree of manoeuvring leeway greater than we had initially been given to
believe.
The outcome: for the German war effort ...
It remains for us to assess the company strategies, i.e., to evaluate the way in
which they contributed to the Third Reich’s war effort, what profits they made,
and what became of them once the war was over. A global assessment is difficult
to make, however. On the one hand, there is too much information missing
despite our extensive research; on the other, the elements that we have been able
to extract are not suitable for comparison and definitely not for a summary.
306