61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

must be emphasised that this assertion is not true. Germans accused of crimes
did come to Switzerland although forbidden to do so by official guidelines.
They were protected and taken in, and were even able to calmly prepare for their
onward journey if the Allied authorities demanded their extradition for
suspected war crimes. The recorded cases are most informative, as they shed
light on the Swiss-German network of contacts during those years, and on what
motivated each side. 39 People who travelled through Switzerland using false
identities must be distinguished from those whose identity was well known but
did not appear to cause any problems.
In order to be admitted into Switzerland, one had to be useful to the country;
gratitude for past services also played a part from time to time. The deciding
criteria tended to be derived from a narrow definition of economic, military or
diplomatic usefulness. German engineers with special knowledge of the
armaments industry, travelling through on their way to Argentina, could expect
to be greeted with friendly interest by the Military Department; this was also
the case for the German armaments industrialist Bernhard Berghaus, in whose
factories forced labourers were made to suffer under an especially brutal regime.
At the same time, however, he had performed favours during the war for the
Swiss Embassy in Berlin, so he had no difficulty in obtaining favourable references.
Chemists who had once worked for IG Farben came to Switzerland in
dozens in the early post-war period, and were offered attractive professional
futures. Some were taken on by Holzverzuckerungs AG (Hovag), where their
expertise was valuable in the transition to a peacetime economy and the establishment
of a Swiss synthetic fibres industry. Many of these Germans settled
permanently in Switzerland; others stayed only for a few years, until «denazification»
was suspended and the German «economic miracle» offered them new
professional opportunities. Then they returned home and took up respected
positions in the West German economy, as in the case of former IG-Farben
employee, military-industrial leader and SS man, Ernst Rudolf Fischer, who
helped countless chemists into Switzerland during his ten year stay here. Others
moved on, as they evidently had good reason to avoid being seen in Germany
again. This applies in particular to some representatives of the Four Year Plan
Authority deserving closer attention.
The Four Year Plan Authority had been a gigantic conglomerate created by the
Nazis, with some members active in the armaments industry, some in the supply
of raw materials, and some in foreign exchange procurement. The abovementioned
E. R. Fischer and the ministry officials Friedrich Kadgien and
Ludwig Haupt, had worked for this authority and travelled to Switzerland in
mid-April 1945. During the war, they had contributed to ensuring that the
Swiss were supplied with oil and petrol. They had worked closely with a war
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