61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

4.12 German Camouflage and Relocation Operations
in Switzerland
Shortly after the end of the war, in 1945/46, the Swiss Clearing Office (Schweizerische
Verrechnungsstelle, SVSt) conducted a wide-range investigation into
German assets in Switzerland in response to pressure from the Allies. 1 Up to
that point, very little systematic information about foreign money deposited in
Switzerland had existed, so this enquiry broke new ground. 2 Despite all its
shortcomings, the results were highly informative. The assets recorded were
considerable, worth more than one billion francs and well in excess of pre-war
estimates. 3 Perhaps the most important individual finding, however, was the
fact that around two-thirds of the German assets discovered had not been
brought to Switzerland until after the outbreak of war. So this was not, for the
most part, a portfolio of old assets and investments possibly dating back to the
days of the Weimar Republic, as was widely assumed in Switzerland at the time.
In contravention of all the German rules which rigorously restricted such transactions,
large amounts of money had been brought into Switzerland during the
war. This could have raised the question of how these transfers of assets were
related to the German economy of the period which was based on looting and
plundering. However, no in-depth investigations took place, given the international
political changes which occurred from 1946 onwards. The beginning of
the Cold War took up all the energies of the Western Allies and turned attention
away from Switzerland; moreover, the Washington Agreement signed in May
1946 seemed to present a practicable approach to the handling of German assets
in Switzerland.
Research problems
How and when these German assets reached Switzerland was unimportant in
the view of the Swiss authorities of the immediate post-war period; all that
mattered was whether they had been there on the cut-off date of 16 February
1945 when German assets invested in Switzerland were frozen. Representatives
of the Swiss financial sector already believed that the enquiries carried out had
gone much too far. In the circumstances, the Clearing Office’s remarkable
findings fell into a void; they were withheld from the Allies and the Swiss
public, and have received little coverage in research literature to date. 4 For
domestic political reasons, and as a result of dealing with the demands and
claims made by the Allies, an attitude of defensiveness and trivialisation became
widespread after the war. The inadequate explanation of events left the Swiss
with a clear conscience, set against the totally unrelated, blanket suspicions
which cropped up from time to time.
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