61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

war the Soviet Union seized massive amounts of material and took it into its
safekeeping, and this is now available to historical research. On the Swiss side
too, some revealing documentation was provided – in particular by the Clearing
Office, various Federal offices dealing with the wartime economy, and a whole
series of Federal departments – precisely on those cases which had caused difficulty.
In addition, there is source material which stems from case law or investigations
by intelligence services. If a company whose trail could be identified
in a variety of different private and public archives no longer had any records in
its possession, the ICE did not consider this fact as cause for discontinuing the
historical research. Moreover, the ICE did not concentrate primarily on evidence
of individual cases and individual accounts but on analysing structural conditions,
system-dependent mechanisms, business routines and typical behavioural
patterns. Companies that were able to provide comprehensive source material
for this work were thereby documenting the seriousness with which they took
their own interest in carrying out a historical probe of the past. This attitude is
duly appreciated by the researchers of the ICE.
The ICE’s research is based first and foremost on the written sources as
described, but it also made use of oral history. Contemporary witnesses were
involved on three levels: first, Commission staff had to do some fact-finding. In
order to obtain pertinent information and further evidence on subjects not
covered by paper documents, people were interviewed who had been employed
in relevant occupations or who could have been assumed to have specific
knowledge. Bank and insurance company staff, auditors, trustees, art dealers
and gallery owners were questioned in some 50 interviews, the majority of
which were prepared for and conducted by the individual work teams. Second,
ICE staff conducted half a dozen longer interviews with surviving victims of the
Nazi regime living in Switzerland, in which they recounted memories from
their life history. These oral history interviews were less about specific information
than about people’s fate and the relating of biographical details. Third,
the ICE issued an appeal to the Swiss people in 1997, calling upon contemporary
witnesses to inform the Commission of occurrences and events of
relevance to our investigation mandate. For three months ICE staff in Bern
received telephone calls in three of Switzerland’s national languages. Some 400
reports were received in this way, plus 120 letters provided by the «Loeb
campaign» («Aktion Loeb»). 40 Contemporary witnesses who could be expected
to provide important evidence to aid the ICE’s work were then interviewed.
These interviews provided supporting material; we lacked the resources to make
further efforts which would have enabled us to break new ground in terms of
historical attitudes and daily life at the time. The ICE therefore renounced
designing a study with this aim. 41
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