Making Amends for ‘Neutrality’

Switzerland’s President Arnold Koller is winning deserved international praise for his proposal to establish a multibillion humanitarian fund to aid victims of the Holocaust and other genocides, as well as those who have suffered from natural catastrophes and human rights abuses. What remains to be seen is whether the Parliament and Swiss voters, in a referendum that will be required to set up the fund, are prepared to support the president.

Nationalistic resentment over the critical global attention lately given to Switzerland’s World War II relations with Nazi Germany could work against Koller’s proposal. That resentment may well deepen when a study commissioned by the Clinton administration is released later this month. Advance word is that the study will find that after World War II, Switzerland returned only a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars in looted gold it bought from Nazi Germany. Stolen from Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries occupied by Germany, that gold hoard was separate from the possibly billions of dollars in cash, jewelry and artwork that was deposited in Swiss banks in the 1930s by European Jews, most of whom did not survive the Holocaust. The value and fate of those deposits have yet to be accurately revealed.

In presenting his proposal, Koller called on his countrymen to look back with “merciless truthfulness” on Switzerland’s equivocal role in World War II. Many Swiss argue now, as then, that preserving their country’s neutrality in the face of the Nazi juggernaut necessitated a degree of cooperation with Germany. Left largely unexplored until now has been how extensive that cooperation was, how Swiss banks and others profited from it and the moral issues these actions raise. Most Swiss living today have no memories of the war years. This generation and those that follow it can only gain from an honest accounting of what happened in their country half a century ago.