Switzerland Decries Report on Its WWII Treatment of Jews

Switzerland on Tuesday said a U.S. historian’s report accusing it of having discriminated against wartime Jewish refugees by locking them up in labor camps and subjecting them to a special tax was insulting, simplistic and laced with errors.

“Any former refugees who were in Swiss camps today express gratitude toward Switzerland for the fact that they survived the war because they were accepted in Switzerland,” said Linda Shepard, an official spokeswoman in Bern, the Swiss capital.

On Tuesday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles released a historical monograph that accused Switzerland of confining more than 20,000 Jews fleeing Nazi tyranny in forced labor camps where conditions were so rigorous that some died.

The author of the report, Alan Morris Schom--a veteran American historian who is also the author of a recent biography of Napoleon Bonaparte--asserted that the Swiss facilities, whose existence has long been known, were in truth “slave labor camps.”

Shepard, giving the Swiss government’s initial reply to Schom’s conclusions, said such a description was “insulting and dishonest.”

She rejected his central thesis--that the Swiss treated Jews differently from other refugees. “In the refugee camps, there were not only Jews,” she said. “And the majority of the Jewish refugees were not housed in the refugee camps.”

Schom also asserted that the Swiss exacted a special tax from the wealthiest of the Jewish arrivals. Shepard, whose agency, the Swiss Federal Task Force, was founded to deal with accusations of wartime misdeeds by Switzerland, called that claim “completely erroneous.”

“In 1941, a tax on refugees was in fact introduced as a sign of solidarity” with Switzerland, she said in a telephone interview. “All refugees had to pay this tax. There was no differentiation between Jewish and non-Jewish refugees.”

An independent commission of historians chaired by Jean-Francois Bergier, a professor at the Zurich Polytechnic, is expected to publish its own report later this year on the issue.

To present its side, the Swiss government has put together a special Web page at https://www.switzerland.taskforce.ch