Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  This was not a secret that could be kept from the Allies. In Britain the Ministry of Economic Warfare had interested itself in the matter of German gold operations for some time. Still, it was not until early 1943 when, buttressed by a similar interest displayed by the US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the Allies agreed on a set of metrics for the Reich’s reserves. The implication of these figures was that the Reich was in considerable financial straits and was likely to be channelling a good deal of gold in the direction of Berne. Quite how much was less apparent. From his desk in the Herrengasse, Dulles had the resources to put enquiries in hand. He found our lanky friend Hans Bernd Gisevius a most useful source. Admiral Canaris’s man in Switzerland was well up on the bankers, lawyers and all the various middlemen involved in money laundering. Soon Dulles tentatively concluded that the Allies were considerably underestimating the extent of Swiss conversion of Nazi gold into Swiss francs. The consequence was that the Allies began to put pressure in an increasingly concerted form on the Swiss.

  In January 1943, three months after Dulles’s arrival in Switzerland, Churchill took a hand. At his behest the ‘Inter-Allied declaration against acts of dispossession committed in territories under enemy control’ was signed. Known as the ‘loot declaration’, this was an attempt to prevent the Reich taking advantage of its booty. It committed the Allies to restoring stolen goods after the war and fired warning shots across the bows of those nations accepting such goods. In April 1943, Washington put direct pressure on the Swiss to cut their loans to the Reich. This Allied proposal was backed up by a threat. Switzerland was dependent – despite the Wahlen plan which had turned flower beds, football fields and public parks into vegetable gardens – for roughly two-thirds of her food on countries beyond her borders. Although some still came from her immediate neighbours, other foodstuffs came from overseas through nearby ports like Genoa and Monaco. As has been remarked, cargoes bound for Switzerland were turned away from these ports or confiscated unless blessed with a navigation certificate issued by the Allies. These certificates would – threatened the US – be withdrawn unless Switzerland complied with Allied wishes. Starvation beckoned.

  The responsible Swiss minister was fifty-nine-year-old Walther Stampfli, chairman of the Federal Department of Economics (Morgenthau’s counterpart). He took exception to the Allied proposal. ‘Just imagine, the Allies are demanding that we join in the war against Germany! Germany has never treated Switzerland as badly as the Allies are doing now.’13 Like the Swiss in general, Stampfli of course needed to keep a balance between the Reich on his doorstep and the Allies still some distance – a diminishing distance but a distance nevertheless – away. Over the course of the summer of 1943, the summer of Mussolini’s fall, he played for time.

  The same strategy was deployed by the top Swiss industrialist Hans Sulzer. Whilst Allied concerns about the gold trade had mounted, so too did their objections to Switzerland’s growing contribution to the Nazi war effort in the form of war materiel: precision instruments, trucks, tractors, railway locomotives, ammunition, weapons and even wooden huts for concentration camps. Unlike their counterparts in the Reich, Swiss factories were not being bombed. In the summer of 1943, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare had told the Swiss minister to London, Walter Thurnheer, that the Allies were considering blacklisting companies that failed to restrain their exports to the Axis. Already hundreds of firms had earned this mark of distinction. These negotiations were handled by the sixty-six-year-old Sulzer in his capacity as proprietor of the family engineering concern Gebrüder Sulzer AG, president of the employers’ federation the Verband Schweizerischer Maschinenindustrieller, and president of the Supervisory Committee for Imports and Exports. The British case was that since 1940 Swiss exports to the Axis outweighed those to the Allies by six to one. It was perhaps this figure that led to the saying that the Swiss worked for the Axis during the week and the Allies at weekends. In any case, according to Sulzer the figures were fiction; British estimates of Swiss exports to the Axis were grossly overestimated, an ‘optical illusion’, he declared. So negotiations continued for nine months.

  On Dulles’s return to his Herrengasse desk from meeting the partisans in Lugano in early November 1943, the American spymaster found these two matters – money laundering and Swiss exports to the Reich – still unresolved. Meanwhile gold deliveries to the Bundeshaus grew and grew.

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  Somewhat removed on the moral spectrum from the industrialists and bankers were the Swiss diplomats, the International Red Cross, and some individual Swiss citizens.

  Switzerland was first known for its mountains and its mercenaries and subsequently for its money. In the interval it was defined by its diplomats. When countries sever diplomatic relations, the interests of their citizens still need to be represented, their institutions and their people based in another country looked after, lent money, extracted from jail, sent home. Third parties representing such interests are ‘protecting powers’. The Swiss made a name for themselves in this role during the Franco-Prussian War, and it was a part they enlarged upon during the First World War. It culminated in the Second World War when – at the height of her responsibilities in 1944 – Berne represented thirty-five countries.

  At the outbreak of war in 1939, the Swiss had been appointed to represent Germany throughout the British Empire. This they discharged conscientiously and successfully, though not very cheaply. In German territories, British interests were at first handled by the United States. When the US entered the war in December 1941, the Swiss took over. Berne accordingly found herself in the unique position of representing the principal belligerents on both sides of the conflict. Much as Berne worked hard on behalf of the Germans, so did they toil for the British. In the course of 1942 the diplomats visited civilian camps on twenty occasions, POW camps 174 times. They also talked their way into British civilian internment camps in France that had been closed to the Americans and the Red Cross. This was a cause for congratulation from Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office in Whitehall. In 1943 came controversy.

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  In August 1942 Canadian forces taken prisoner in the cross-Channel raid on Dieppe were found to be carrying orders requiring them to tie the hands of any prisoners they might take; some had actually done so. This was strictly against the Geneva Conventions, the international laws that enshrine the humanitarian treatment of victims of – and participants in – war. OKW at once retaliated. At Dieppe itself, 1,376 Allied prisoners were chained and it was announced that British and Commonwealth POWs would henceforth be shackled. Churchill reciprocated by ordering German prisoners in Britain and Canada to be chained. On 13 October 1942 the PM announced that Germany had been requested to rescind her action in shackling prisoners and that if she did so Britain would cancel her own reprisals. These requests were made through and by Berne. ‘GERMANY TO CONTINUE CHAINING PRISONERS’, ran a subsequent newspaper headline: ‘Request for Negotiation Rejected’. Tit for tat continued until 27 November 1942, when the Germans declared that if the practice continued it would no longer respect any aspect of the Conventions in its dealings with the Allies.

  At this point Churchill reluctantly asked Berne to take an active role in resolving the matter. The task fell to Marcel Pilet-Golaz, the former President of the Federal Council, who was already working on an exchange between the two warring nations of sick and wounded POWs. On 10 December 1942, he achieved a Christmas armistice. This was respected by both sides. In the New Year, Berlin resumed shackling, but in a half-hearted way. In the following months the affair slowly blew over and reached formal resolution in November 1943, not long after Italy had changed sides. This was a month after Pilet-Golaz’s efforts to achieve a prisoner exchange saw 4,000 British and 5,000 Germans repatriated. Together, these two episodes combined to define Switzerland’s position in British eyes as an exemplary protecting power.

  If this seems a diplomatic nicety, it was not. At the time very soon to come – the Tehran Conference between
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – at which discussions were taking place at the most senior level between the Allies on the shape of post-war Europe, this stood the Swiss in very good stead. ‘No other single issue [than the handling of POWs] had a more profound influence on the tenor of Anglo-Swiss relations.’14 When Stalin proposed the invasion of Switzerland in the autumn of 1944 as a means of turning the Siegfried Line, Churchill remembered the shackling crisis.

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  Switzerland’s other principal humanitarian effort was the Red Cross.

  This was an organisation founded by the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant. In 1859 he had witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in Lombardy between Austrian and French forces, and had been horrified by the sufferings of the 40,000 dead and dying. Four years later in 1863, at Dunant’s suggestion, the Swiss government mounted an international conference on the issue in Geneva. The signatories of the First Geneva Convention dedicated themselves to the ‘amelioration of the condition of the wounded in Armies in the field’. By 1876 this body had become known as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), was headquartered in Geneva, and was the co-ordinating body for national Red Cross societies that had formed themselves in most of the European countries and in the United States. In 1901 Dunant shared with a fellow pacifist the very first Nobel Peace Prize.

  The Second World War proved the Committee’s sternest test. The legal basis on which the ICRC operated was the Geneva Convention of 1929. Germany was a signatory, as were the other major Western powers. The Soviet Union was not. The notorious Soviet treatment of Nazi POWs, and vice versa, showed the value of the Convention. Yet the ICRC could only do its work in liaison with the national Red Cross committees. Germany had its own such committee but this would have no truck with the ICRC: it had been subsumed into the Nazi Party. This meant that for long the International Committee could not obtain agreement with the Nazis about the treatment of the prisoners in the concentration camps, let alone the the activities of the SS-Totenkopfverbände in the extermination camps. Only in November 1943, the month of Dulles’s trip to Lugano, did the ICRC finally manage to obtain permission to supplement the rations of concentration camp detainees. That month, parcels began to flow to Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen.

  This was a victory but a heavily qualified one. The Red Cross aligned itself closely with the Swiss government and – like the Federal Council – was reluctant to press its monstrous neighbour too hard. A year previously, on 14 October 1942, several ICRC board members had proposed a motion condemning Nazi treatment of detainees in the concentration camps, in effect proposing to make a very public international appeal in support of Europe’s Jews. It was vetoed by the Swiss Federal Council and the remaining members of the board.

  As Caroline Moorhead judged in her history of the ICRC, this failure ‘has caused the organization great and lasting damage, both immediately after the war and in recent years … [Its failure] has haunted it ever since.’ Yves Sandoz of the Committee wrote of ‘the greatest defeat in the 125-year history of our humanitarian mission’.15

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  In any case, in November 1943, the ICRC found it had a good deal to do rather closer to home than Auschwitz.

  Since the seizure of the Franco-Swiss border by the Seventh Army in November 1942 the democracy had become an oasis in a fascist desert, and there were accordingly many who aspired to drink at the well. As we have seen, the Swiss categorised those seeking sanctuary as evaders (military personnel in plain clothes), Internierten (military personnel clothed as such) and Flüchtlings – civilian refugees. We also saw how the drizzle of Jewish refugees became a downpour after the German occupation of the French occupied zone in 1942; and how Switzerland was flooded with escaped POWs after Italy changed sides in September 1943. To this line of rather unwelcome guests was added fresh impetus that same autumn in the form of visitors from the skies. On 24 August 1942, a damaged RAF Mosquito fighter-bomber became the first Allied aircraft to find refuge on Swiss soil. It was the first of thirteen RAF aircraft that formed the prologue to the big wing of the USAAF.

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  To complement the night-bombing campaign against Germany of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris’s RAF Bomber Command, in August 1942 the United States Eighth Air Force under Major-General Carl Spaatz had started its own campaign of daylight raids on Continental Europe. By the spring of 1943 this had gathered momentum, with April seeing a huge raid of 115 heavy bombers on the North Sea port of Bremen. At first these raids concentrated on Germany; later Italy was added to the target list. Crews of aircraft damaged en route to these targets, over the targets, or on their return flights naturally regarded Switzerland as any port in a storm.

  On 13 August 1943 the first USAAF aircraft crash-landed in Switzerland. The B-24 Liberator Death Dealer had left its base in North Africa on a mission to the industrial city of Wiener Neustadt, some thirty miles south of the sometime capital of Austria. Sustaining damage over the target and with only two of its four engines running, the pilot First Lieutenant Alva Geron realised he would never make it back to base. He headed for Switzerland and crash-landed his craft at Thurau near the city of Wil in St Gallen, in the east of the country. He set fire to the remains of the B-24 and surrendered himself and his crew to the Swiss police.

  As the summer turned to autumn, such Allied violations of Swiss airspace became frequent. These infractions meant that General Guisan – with the Nazis breathing down his neck – was obliged to take action. On 25 October the commander of Swiss forces ordered the Swiss air force to shoot down all bombers in Swiss airspace not indicating their willingness to land. A handful were indeed destroyed by the republic’s fighters or by Swiss flak; most were safely escorted to the neutral Swiss airfields. Some airmen also parachuted from their stricken planes. There were also rumours that, given the familiar attractions of Switzerland even during the war, there were some aircrews who landed in Switzerland in planes that were perfectly serviceable. William Joyce was the Irish propagandist who worked for the Nazis. Dubbed ‘Lord Haw Haw’ for his nasal ‘Jairmany Calling’ accent, he imaginatively suggested that such crews had their golf bags on board.

  In reality, few of the young American airmen arriving in Switzerland found themselves on the tee reaching for their drivers. They were interrogated by the Swiss, briefly quarantined, then sent off into internment: a legal requirement, as they were of course wearing military uniform.

  At first in that autumn of 1943, their numbers were such that they could be accommodated in a couple of hotels: the Bellevue at Macolin and the Hôtel Trois Sapins at Evilard, both close to Berne. By November it was apparent that something larger would be necessary. The remote resort of Adelboden, forty miles south of Berne, was already being used as a camp for British and Commonwealth POWs who had escaped from Italy. Now it seemed a good solution for the Americans too. There was a large, empty hotel with what might have seemed to a Swiss bureaucrat a suitable name: the Nevada Palace. This formed the nucleus of a camp which the Americans named Camp Moloney. Sergeant Clinton Norby recalled his first impressions:

  When we reached the top, the bus took us right through town (one street about four blocks long) to the other end where The Nevada Palace was located. There was a 30 foot picture window about 15 feet high which looked out over a valley about 2,000 to 3,000 feet below us. You could see clouds move up the valley and then they would just stop below the hotel. In fact, one day when I was looking out the window, the sun was shining on us, but looking down the slope, you could see it snowing.16

  Picturesque though this might be, the former farmhands from Alabama and clerks from Albuquerque failed to find the experience very congenial. It was a long way from home, Mae West, root beer and other staples of the 1940s American lifestyle; they were subjected to a daily roll-call, an evening curfew, restriction to the immediate surroundings of the village, and generally kept under observation by the Swiss authorities; they were given the same rations as the Swiss army – 1,500 cal
ories – which few found adequate; and above all they did not have enough to do. Lieutenant James D. Mahaffey remembered, ‘In Adelboden, about the only thing we had to do was drink, read a few books, and eventually they had movies twice a week. I did manage to get in about a month of skiing, which I enjoyed quite a bit.’17 If this was not war, neither was it precisely peace.

  Like all such camps, Adelboden was subject to ICRC inspection. The Committee helped the internees make contact with home, and checked up on their hygiene and health, their clothing, lodging and food. It arranged for such matters as dental treatment, medicines, spectacles, and the other incidentals of life beyond the interest or remit of the Swiss internment authorities. The inspectors were subjected to complaints about the facilities and duly passed these on to the central committee in Geneva. The ICRC then duly made enquiries: normally of another office in Geneva, or sometimes Zurich. It could do little about keeping the Americans suitably occupied, and a number of these idle hands tried to escape. Those that did and were recaptured were dispatched to the Swiss punishment camps. These included one that became notorious: Wauwilermoos in Lucerne. Here, as we will see, the ICRC really did have a job to do.

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  The final aspect of Switzerland’s humanitarian story lies with individual Swiss citizens.

  Samedan was the village close to St Moritz where the South African corporal Billy Marais had been taken after escaping from Italy. The pastor at Samedan was a remarkable man. Fortunat Guidon was born in 1910 in Latsch, a medieval hamlet seven hundred feet above the 4,485-foot railway village of Bergün, on the line between St Moritz and Davos. He had met his wife Trudi Manz in 1935 while studying theology at the University of Bonn. There, perforce, the couple also studied the Nazi movement: many of their friends were Jews. In 1939, Guidon was appointed to the benefice of the reformed Protestant church at Samedan. He was twenty-nine, and this was only his second job. A man with a rigorous sense of right and wrong, he heard that the Swiss government was contravening the terms of its own neutrality by letting arms pass from Germany to Italy through the St Gotthard railway tunnel. He denounced the authorities from his pulpit. A local girl whom he had confirmed wrote from Berlin announcing her engagement to an SS officer. She sought testimony from him of the purity of her Aryan descent, a necessary procedure under the Nuremberg Laws. He refused. When the request was repeated and again turned down, Fortunat was told that his family had been earmarked for extermination. It was not surprising that refugees of all stripes threw themselves on the mercy of this man. These included old friends from Bonn, who turned up on his doorstep having escaped the Reich over the border with Austria, some twenty-five miles north. Guidon and his wife were determined to do what they could to help these people reach the safety of the Swiss interior. This placed them in a vulnerable position with regard to the cantonal authorities. The Samedan apartment in which the family lived was in a block that also housed both the police station and the cantonal authorities themselves.