61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

ments and common international laws concerning the treatment of foreigners. 67
These differences become clear in the case of Swiss Jews living in Austria:
anyone running a business in Vienna liquidated or sold it within a matter of
months; several owners of businesses found it difficult to sell their products as
a result of boycotts; the income realised from officially monitored sales was
considerably lower than the real value. On the other hand, real estate which
should have been expropriated by the state remained in Swiss hands in at least
half of the cases investigated. The case of Albert Gerngross, a businessman who
had obtained Swiss nationality in the 1920s, shows the different ways in which
assets were dealt with. Gerngross and his brother, who was Austrian, owned a
house in Vienna. While the brother’s half of the house was expropriated without
compensation, Albert Gerngross was allowed to keep his half of the property.
He was, however, forced to sell the 34,153 shares he held in A. Gerngross AG,
one of the city’s leading department stores, to the Creditanstalt. 68
What efforts did the Swiss diplomatic service make to protect the property of
its citizens abroad? The authorities’ official line was most ambiguous from both
a legal and a political point of view. After the First World War, when the focus
concentrated on Swiss citizens in the Soviet Union whose property had been
repossessed without compensation, a «minimum standard under international
law» («völkerrechtlicher Mindeststandard») had been advocated as a legal
principle, whereby certain rights, in particular property guarantees (Eigentumsgarantie),
were considered absolute. During the rule of the Nazis, however, the
Swiss authorities increasingly favoured the so-called theory of equal treatment,
i.e., that if Germany was discriminating against its own Jewish citizens it was
hardly possible to legally contest its equally harsh treatment of foreign Jews
living in Germany. After the Second World War, the lawyers attached to the
Federal administration once again advocated the «minimum standard under
international law», again in connection with events in Eastern Europe. The
Federal administration adapted its interpretation of international law, i.e., its
political interests, to the situation prevailing at the time – in this case, to the
detriment of the Jews. 69
This became clear in the debate on the «Reich Ordinance» (Reichsverordnung) of
26 April 1938 under which Jews with German citizenship had to declare their
total assets and foreign Jews living in Germany had to declare all the assets they
held in that country. 70 Federal judge Robert Fazy was mandated by the Swiss
Federation of Jewish Communities (SFJC) (Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund,
SIG) to draw up a legal report on the consequences of this order for Swiss
Jews in Germany. 71 He concluded that the order constituted an unacceptable
breach of the legal rights of Swiss Jews as guaranteed under international law.
He stated that such a breach would justify diplomatic intervention, which
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