61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

einforce the protection of property rights – in such a way that the legitimate
property rights of the Nazi victims could be confiscated and the restitution of
assets blocked.
Responsibility and restitution
It had become apparent long before 1945 that the years of plundering and of
war would have devastating consequences for all those who lived within the
sphere of power of the Third Reich. At the same time, no one was able to
imagine the true scale of this devastation. This made it seem all the more urgent
to implement in practice the measures repeatedly announced by the Allies
during the war, whereby asset transactions carried out by force were to be
declared void after the war was over. It was therefore no surprise that the Allies
turned to the neutral countries and asked them to do their part. In fact, negotiations
in this regard had been started even before the war ended, but the return
of the assets was ultimately neither prompt nor complete.
How could that be the case, given that the war was over? Switzerland was no
longer threatened and «encircled». Its institutions were intact, its economy
permitted it to participate in a significant way in the reconstruction of
Europe, and not without drawing some benefit: the loans issued by the
Federal Government and the banks to France (after March 1945), Great
Britain, and numerous other countries allowed them to purchase the
manufacturing goods they needed, such as machine tools, from Switzerland.
Within a short time the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc
drove the problems which had emerged from the pre-war and war era into the
background. The claims about Switzerland voiced earlier by the victorious
powers – and repeated in February 1945 by the Currie Mission – lost their
urgency and acuteness. The Washington Agreement of May 1946, which had
a very positive outcome for Switzerland, not least because the Swiss Confederation
was not charged with misconduct of any kind, seemed to clear up
all claims at intergovernmental level. In these circumstances, those in
positions of responsibility in both public and private domains in Switzerland
maintained their silence – some unconcernedly, some with a heavy conscience
– about the weighty burden of the war legacy. The general public also
lost interest in the subject. Attention was increasingly focussed on the threat
of Stalinism, whilst the threat of Nazism, which had scarcely come to an end,
was forgotten. It was time to revert to the business of the day.
The most obvious and specific form in which a sense of responsibility for the
past could and should have manifested itself after the war was the restitution to
their rightful owners of the assets stored in Switzerland where they had been
deposited by the victims of persecution or by plunderers.
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