Swiss Slowed Jews’ Escape, Report Says

Switzerland’s justice minister met clandestinely during World War II with leaders of a Swiss anti-Semitic group, promising to stop most Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering the country but warning that the policy had to be kept secret, according to documents contained in a report to be released today.

The report, by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, contains copies of minutes of meetings between Justice Minister Eduard von Steiger, who was also minister of police, and leaders of the Swiss Fatherland Assn., an anti-Semitic and anti-immigration group founded in 1918. The minutes, obtained from the Swiss national archives, indicate that the Fatherland Assn. cooperated closely with the Swiss government throughout the war.

In a meeting on Oct. 17, 1942, for instance, Steiger is quoted as telling group leaders that the government had decided on “a fundamental slowing” of Jewish immigration, although he said a few Jews would have to be allowed to enter the country to show the Swiss public how difficult it is to live with “foreign Jews.”

“The greatest concern is the negative diplomatic effect, which means that we must not discuss this issue publicly,” Steiger said.

The Swiss Embassy in Washington denounced the report. Embassy officials said 27,000 Jews found refuge in Switzerland during the war, a figure that exceeds the 21,000 that the U.S. government says found asylum in the United States.

The report, by historian Alan Morris Schom, is another in a growing list of publications questioning Switzerland’s wartime activities.

A U.S. government report issued last week said Switzerland bought billions of dollars worth of looted gold from the Nazi government, providing the funds needed to fuel the German war effort. It said Swiss bankers knew or should have known that the gold was stolen from the central banks of occupied countries and from individual victims of the Holocaust because Germany’s own gold reserves would have been depleted by sometime in 1943 at the latest.

While some information in the Wiesenthal Center report is not new, the collaboration it describes between a top Swiss official and a group of avowed anti-Semites raises new and troubling questions about the ostensibly neutral nation’s role in the war.

“The documents in this report show definitively that there was a collusion between the justice minister and an extremist anti-Semitic organization,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a telephone interview. “That is different from what the Swiss government has been saying. The government has been saying that the government was not involved in these policies” of turning Jews away at the border.

The center plans to distribute the report today at a news conference in New York. The Times obtained an advance copy.

Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Wiesenthal Center report supplies “more specific detail” of the Swiss government effort to exclude Jewish refugees. He said the documents “reinforce how ugly the past was. For 50 years, the truth was hidden. The Swiss made every effort to keep it hidden.”

While the Swiss emphasize the numbers of refugees their nation did take in, the embassy’s analysis shows that Jews constituted little more than 10% of the 230,000 refugees admitted to Switzerland during the war.

The embassy also cited the personal stories of Jewish refugees who said they were saved from the gas chambers by obtaining asylum in Switzerland. One of those was Yitzhak Meir, who is now Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland.

The embassy called attention to an interview last November with Meir in a Swiss publication in which the ambassador said he and his family “remained in Switzerland and survived.” (Meir noted in the same interview that Swiss police had intended to turn the family away but decided not to because his mother was pregnant.)

Switzerland was the destination of choice for people fleeing the war because it was a neutral country bordered by Germany, German-allied Italy and German-occupied France.

The latest report focuses on the activities of Nazi and pro-Nazi groups in Switzerland during the war. “Few other countries have had such a great number of extreme right-wing associations per capita . . . as had Switzerland during the Hitlerian era,” the report says. It names 38 such groups, which it says were active in the 1930s and 1940s.

In a telephone interview, Schom said much of the information about pro-Nazi groups has been published. But he said the documents detailing meetings between Steiger and the Fatherland Assn. have never been revealed; all the meetings took place in Steiger’s office in Bern.

“We have irrefutable evidence of secret government meetings where the sole item on the agenda was Jews--keeping them out and keeping them down,” Schom said. “There is no way of refuting this.”

In acknowledging the secret policy of excluding most Jews, Steiger said the government was aware of the “danger” posed by Jewish immigration. But, he asked, “from a practical viewpoint, how do I tell the Swiss people? On the one hand the entire movement in support of the refugees results from the generosity of our people . . . and on the other hand it results from a negative reaction against the Axis.”

In the Oct. 17, 1942, meeting, the Fatherland Assn. urged the government to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Jews. The association dismissed the argument, made then by the government, that Switzerland could not afford to feed all refugees fleeing the war. “Whether one likes it or not, this is a question of race,” the association said.

Four months later, on Feb. 15, 1943, Steiger met again with association leaders, urging them to tone down their anti-refugee rhetoric because the government’s own policy was effectively keeping most Jews out.

“I repeat my request to you to abstain from action,” he said. “Since Jan. 1, 1943, more severe measures are in place against refugees at the border.”

After the war, on Jan. 26, 1946, Steiger again conferred with association officials, thanking the group for “the special role that [it] assumed regarding the refugee situation.” He said the group often passed on information to the government, and, in return, it “frequently received materials that have been classified as official secrets.”

The Swiss Embassy denied that anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi groups played an important role in the country during the war. An embassy statement said Swiss democracy respected the free speech of radical groups. But it said all overtly Nazi groups were suppressed in 1940. “It is well known that by 1948, charges of high treason were brought against 99 supporters of the Nazi party,” the embassy said.