61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

significantly bogged down after 1946 in matters concerning German assets, by
way of a bilateral agreement with the FRG. At that time, following the
conclusion of the Nuremberg war trials from 1945–1950, the victorious powers
were also much less interested in the crimes of the past.
2.5 The Crimes of National Socialism
The rule of National Socialism was not only based on the ambition to reign over
a boundless geographical area; it was primarily founded on an inherent
inhumanity which was justified ideologically and efficiently put into practice
bureaucratically. The Jews were the first to experience this and in the most
terrible way. The policy of destruction was also directed against other
«categories» of people: against gypsies, the sick, and the disabled. Further
groups also fell victim to systematic persecution: homosexuals, «asocial
persons», groups of certain persuasions such as communists, dissident
Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as entire population groups, or «alien
races» of certain states: Poles, Ukrainians, White Russians, Russians – in short,
all those who could be brushed off as «Slavic».
The issue of how much was known at the time about the «Final Solution» and,
in particular, how this knowledge was assessed, is an important issue for
Switzerland, too, and is examined in more detail in the next chapter. There is
no doubt that the systematic policy of destruction of the later years was not
evident in the first anti-Semitic boycotts and laws of the spring of 1933.
However, what did the introduction of the Nuremberg laws of 1935 mean?
What did the rioting directed against the Jews in the «Reichskristallnacht» of
9 November 1938 signify? How serious was Hitler’s 30 January 1939 threat
before the Reichstag: «If the international Jewish financiers in and outside
Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then
the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of
Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe». 134 The spirit of
destruction increased with the conflict growing into a World War and with the
military brutality of the eastern campaign in 1941/42 when the systematic
extermination of the Jews commenced. These murders were preceded by the
mass slaughter of disabled persons. The deportation of Jews, Roma and Sinti
from the Reich to the East began in the late autumn of 1941, and on 20 January
1942 at the Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich co-ordinated the Extermination
already in progress. Those deported were either kept prisoner in
ghettos or camps, or murdered directly after their arrival. Deportations also
commenced in Western Europe in 1942, and by the end of the war around six
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