In December 1942, 15-year-old Estelle Sapir slipped away from her forced labor at a prison hospital and spoke with her father for the last time. Furtively conducted through the fence of a Nazi deportation camp near Perpignan, France, the conversation lasted no more than 10 minutes.
“I could not approach him. I couldn’t kiss him. I kissed his fingers. He kissed my fingers,” Sapir, now a frail but fiery 70-year-old woman, recalled recently. ” And that’s when he told me.”
What Joseph Sapir, once a prominent and well-traveled Polish investment banker, told his daughter was what many other Jews apparently told their families before they, too, died in the Nazi Holocaust. His promise, as she put it, was simple and reassuring: “Don’t worry for money. You have plenty of money in Switzerland.”
More than half a century later, Estelle Sapir has yet to find her father’s money. But the echoes of his promise, and those of countless others, are raising complex and troubling questions about Switzerland’s relationship with Nazi Germany during World War II.
Like other nations, from Europe to Asia to Latin America, undertaking anguished re-examinations of their history on the cusp of the millennium, Switzerland is confronting the fact that it cannot close its books on the 20th Century without reopening some questions long considered answered.
Reverberating from American courtrooms to the highest levels of the Swiss government, these questions have triggered a public, and often bitter, national soul-searching on a scale unprecedented in the tiny Alpine country’s 706-year history. The outcome likely will have lasting effects on Switzerland’s foreign policy, its vaunted banking procedures and, most profoundly, on the people’s understanding of their own history and what it means to be Swiss.
Events surrounding the 50th anniversary of the war’s end in 1995 and the simultaneous declassification of Allied wartime documents have resurrected damning details of neutral Switzerland’s behavior during the war. This often wrenching review of history will be back in the spotlight in coming weeks with a long-awaited U.S. government report scheduled for release in April.
The most controversial elements of the Swiss story concern the dealings of Switzerland’s government and banks with Nazi Germany, the government’s refusal to admit some 30,000 Jewish refugees, and the banks’ handling of dormant accounts belonging to Jews and other victims of Hitler’s death camps. The argument also has been raised that World War II would have ended in 1943 had not Swiss banks oiled the German war machine by laundering gold looted by the Nazis.
Loudly and relentlessly publicized in recent months by U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), the World Jewish Congress and litigants in class action suits seeking restitution for Jewish depositors and their heirs, these disclosures and allegations have shattered what some consider the smug tranquility of Switzerland, tarnished its reputation for propriety and thrust its 7 million citizens into an unaccustomed crisis of identity.
For the Swiss people, more accustomed to being associated with Heidi, cuckoo clocks and William Tell, such unflattering attention and international opprobrium is humiliating. For many, long steeped in the romantic notion that their nation’s freedom from the Nazis was preserved by its 500,000 citizen-soldiers, not purchased by its bankers, confronting the past is even more unnerving.
“I think a lot of Swiss people feel attacked, especially those who stood on the border,” said Francois Loeb, a Jewish member of Parliament, referring to the rifle-toting Swiss posted in border trenches to repel the Nazi invasion that never came.
His constituency particularly is incensed by the blanket nature of the criticism, Loeb said. “There’s no differentiation made between wrong positions within the administration and what the people did, especially the senior citizens. People say, `What did we do wrong? We were five years on the border. Now, everything we did was wrong.’ “
The situation has been no less discomfiting for the Swiss government and banks, particularly with Senate Banking committee chairman D’Amato, who has seized upon the situation as a campaign issue, holding hearings, and New York State and New York City threatening to boycott Swiss investments. The Clinton administration has commissioned its own report on the U.S. role in finding and disbursing wartime assets looted by the Nazis and the involvement of Switzerland and other neutral countries. The report, overseen by Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade Stuart Eizenstat is due next month.
The Swiss initially handled the pressure with spectacular clumsiness. In January, Union Bank of Switzerland, one of the nation’s three biggest, was caught shredding World War II-era documents less than a month after the government had banned the destruction of such material. Less than two weeks later, the Swiss ambassador to the U.S. resigned in the wake of a leaked memo in which he characterized those seeking an accounting of Swiss wartime activities as “opponents” who “cannot be trusted.”
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After a faltering start, the Swiss swung into action, launching investigations, appointing a task force and, most notably, creating two humanitarian-oriented funds in the last two months.
The first fund, founded by the biggest three banks, currently contains more than $150 million earmarked for needy Holocaust survivors and their heirs. The second, pending approval by the Swiss public, will be a $5 billion foundation, funded by the revaluation of Swiss gold reserves and designated to be equally divided among victims of poverty, human rights abuses and other catastrophes in Switzerland and abroad.
Nonetheless, Switzerland acknowledges an aura of suspicion clouds its reputation and that it will be judged less on the events of 50 years ago than on how it reacts to them now.
“There’s a lot of mistrust. Unfortunately, people do not believe us as readily anymore,” said Ambassador Thomas Borer, appointed in October to head the Swiss task force coordinating Switzerland’s response to questions about its wartime role.
Borer, at 39, belongs to a new, younger breed of Swiss diplomats, bankers and businessmen. As a generation free of personal contact with the war years, they appear more willing to confront less admirable aspects of Switzerland’s past and move on than some of their older colleagues.
“It’s very difficult for the Swiss to say, `I’m wrong. I’m sorry,’ ” Borer said. “It’s part of our culture. We are mountaineers. We are very introverted.”
After numerous frustrating and fruitless encounters with Swiss officials and banks, Estelle Sapir wants more than an apology. “I’m not fighting for the money. I want justice. I need the money –you can see for yourself,” she said, waving a thin arm around the single room in which she lives. “But more important is the justice.”
Ripped by the war from what she described as a privileged Warsaw life of governesses and country houses, Sapir has spent the last 20 years living in a boarding house in a tattered section of Queens, N.Y., near the Atlantic Ocean.
Remnants of that comfortable upbringing still seem apparent in the gracious manner with which she serves tea on her room’s single, lace-covered table, the few treasured bits of old crystal displayed on her small breakfront and the elegant way she knots a bright silk scarf to the handle of her handbag.
A petite, russet-haired woman who speaks English accented by the postwar years she spent in France, Sapir lives alone with Kyra, a fluffy white Lhasa apso, which snoozes most of the day on her mistress’ daybed, curled up on a coverlet of faded violets.
Never married and retired two years ago from a job in a local drugstore, Sapir now devotes herself to bringing Kyra to visit patients in nursing homes and fighting to reclaim her father’s legacy.
Sapir and her family fled Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, and went to Paris. With the arrival of the Germans in 1940, the family headed to the south of France with hopes of finding refuge in Switzerland.
They were turned away at the Swiss border. “I remember when they sent us back,” Sapir says softly.
The Swiss, who had encouraged the Germans to mark Jewish passports with the letter “J,” closed their borders completely to Jewish refugees by the summer of 1942. Some 30,000 Jews found themselves shut out; many eventually died in the Nazi concentration camps.
Sapir’s father was among them. After another aborted attempt to find safety in Spain, Josef Sapir, his son Lucien and Estelle were arrested and detained by police in France. Estelle and Lucien eventually escaped from detention camps and joined the Resistance. Their mother, Szayna, whom they rescued from a prison hospital, also survived the war. But Josef Sapir was deported to Poland. He died there at the Majdanek death camp on March 3, 1943.
Proffering a brittle photograph of her family, Sapir said of her father, “I don’t have a grave. I don’t have anything. You know, on my mother’s gravestone, I put his name.”
In 1946, Sapir made the first of several unsuccessful attempts to find the money her father had told her was deposited in Switzerland. Armed with a receipt, she went to Credit Suisse in Geneva. There, she said, an official produced a file labeled “J. Sapir,” but demanded that she produce her father’s death certificate.
Angrily asking the official if she should ask Hitler or Himmler for such a document, Sapir said she left the bank in tears. “They are very cold people,” she said of the Swiss.
Not cold, rather, “bureaucratic,” said Georg Krayer, president of the Swiss Bankers Association. “Some countries are confronted even now with the issue that they acted like machines, in a `proper’ way, but in a way that destroyed lives. I am confronted with the fact that Swiss behavior until 1995 was `correct,’ which is that we acted like a Swiss watch, demanding full accounting, full accuracy.”
Most of the information causing the current furor is, in fact, not new. And most of it, with the exception of accusations that banks hoarded the unclaimed assets of Nazi Holocaust victims, essentially is not disputed by the government or the banking establishment.
“Of course, a lot of the things that are causing great emotion today were known 20 to 25 years ago, but only known by a few specialists and not taken into account by the public,” said Jean-Francois Bergier, a prominent Swiss historian now charged with heading a government-mandated investigation into Switzerland’s wartime role.
Bergier officially began work March 5 with an independent, international commission of historians reviewing wartime actions of the country and its banks. While interim reports, particularly on Swiss traffic in Nazi gold and its Jewish refugee policy, are expected this spring, the investigation may take up to five years.
At the same time, a detailed audit of dormant accounts in Swiss banks is being conducted by the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, an international panel appointed by the Swiss Bankers Association and Jewish groups and headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The government has lifted bank secrecy restrictions to allow unfettered access to bank records by both Volcker’s panel and the Bergier commission.
These investigations, coupled with unrelenting pressure on the Swiss by the World Jewish Congress and D’Amato, among others, have revived Jewish hopes that money and assets believed to be held in Swiss banks may be recovered.
After a search in 1995, about $40 million was found in dormant Swiss accounts, but it is yet to be determined how much of that belonged to Holocaust victims. Despite the continuing processing of 4,000 claims filed to date by families of victims and all the new investigations in place, several officials privately express doubts that there is much more money to be found.
Pointing out the possibility that some accounts were transferred out of Switzerland, many were claimed by surviving family members after the war and others may have been opened under third-party names to further protect the identity of their Jewish owners, one government official said, “Even if you find another $10 million, I will be very surprised.”
Nonetheless, thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs have joined three class action suits against Swiss banks, accusing them of wrongfully retaining and obstructing access to dormant accounts and other assets deposited but never reclaimed after the war. The suits were combined into one case earlier this month by a Manhattan federal court judge.
Estelle Sapir still hopes her father’s account may be uncovered. But, according to Christoph Meier, a spokesman for Credit Suisse in Zurich, a bank search for the account has turned up only “a piece of paper that said `J. Sapir’ and an account number” at a Basel branch. The account, he said, “must be closed because there was nothing (no money) behind it.” Since bank records are destroyed after 10 years, there is no information on the circumstances of the account closing.
“How could a dead man close an account?” asked Sapir, who suspects the banks of stealing money from such long-dormant accounts. In another setback for Sapir, the bank receipt she preserved for more than 50 years disappeared last autumn when her niece was mugged while taking the receipt to be copied.
Ironically, Meier said, if the rules of proof used by the banks today were in place in 1946, what Sapir offered then would have been enough to grant her access to the account.
Unquestionably, Nazi Germany depended on Switzerland to buy gold in exchange for Swiss francs that could be used to purchase war materiel. Swiss historians and even some bankers acknowledge that it is likely that some of that gold was looted from the treasuries and citizens of occupied countries. There is evidence that some of it even had been melted down from the jewelry and dental work of murdered Jews.
Surrounded by Nazi-occupied countries and fearful of invasion, Switzerland had few choices, said Jean-Pierre Roth, vice chairman of the Swiss National Bank, the nation’s central bank. “In order to survive in such a situation–between God and the devil–you have to make concessions you would never make in normal times,” he said.
“They were legalistic, I think, maybe by necessity. They had to survive in the middle of this Europe controlled by Germans. They had to defend themselves. In order to defend themselves, they had to buy raw material. To buy raw material, they had to sell things to the Germans.”
But was German economic dependency so crucial that, as Swiss member of Parliament Jean Ziegler asserted recently, “Without the Swiss banks, the war would have been over around 1943”?
“This is a claim that already was made by the Allies during World War II,” said Marc Perrenoud, a Swiss historian and deputy director of the Bergier commission. “I don’t have a clear-cut opinion. All I can say is that the Swiss historians who are working on this matter feel Switzerland’s role in Germany’s economy increasingly is seen as a central role. Before, it was thought to be marginal.”
Whatever its findings, the upcoming Eizenstat report likely will spark renewed anger among the Swiss, many of whom already feel undue pressure from the U.S.
“Maybe we have been `the stonewalling Swiss,’ whatever,” said Lili Nabholz-Haidegger, a member of Parliament and chairwoman of the government’s legal affairs committee. But, she pointed out with exasperation, since the president of the federation apologized on May 8, 1995, for Switzerland’s behavior toward the Jews during the war, nobody seems willing to give Switzerland any credit for its recent efforts.
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“But, all the time, the criticism didn’t stop,” she said. “That is the painful thing to us. And, even as a person very close to the issue, very open to the issue, it starts to make me angry.” Nabholz-Haidegger said.
That sense of being unfairly hounded by critics comes as a particular shock to a country “long considered to be the poster boy of propriety within the international community,” as Flavio Cotti, the Swiss foreign minister, put it during a recent visit to New York.
Inevitably, perhaps, there has been a backlash in the form of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Switzerland that the government is striving to quell.
That sentiment, though not overtly felt by Switzerland’s 18,000 Jews in recent years, is not new, said Rolf Bloch, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities.
“I mention that the Swiss population were against the Nazis, but that doesn’t mean they were for the Jews. The underlying sentiment was anti-Semitic and that made it possible for the government to have the policy it had.” he said.
More fundamentally, the country’s crisis relating to the Nazi Holocaust has made religion an issue in a manner previously unknown to most Swiss.
Borer noted that he recently was taken aback when he asked a longtime colleague to serve on the task force and she asked him if he wanted to reconsider because she wasn’t sure he knew she was Jewish.
“We never asked each other who was what,” said Borer, referring to religion. “Now, we do.”
The current controversy also has prompted the Swiss to ask themselves questions about the nature of their traditional neutrality and the future of their foreign policy.
The debate over Switzerland’s wartime conduct may have damaged irreparably the long-cherished Swiss culture–some say myth–of the nation as a “special case.” This concept argues that Switzerland owes its peace and prosperity solely to its chosen role as an outsider, neutral in any conflict.
Even before the current debate, the Swiss had begun to struggle with the wisdom of adhering to this traditional, insular concept. The Swiss government argues strongly that the nation’s future security and prosperity undeniably are linked to taking its place as a decision-maker in Europe and the world.
The population’s gut-level fear about changing Switzerland’s traditional foreign policy clearly came across in popular referendums that rejected the country’s entrance into the United Nations and the European Union.
People, particularly the young, are beginning to question the image of Switzerland they have held since childhood. ” Maybe the image of Switzerland was wrong –a paradise of chocolate and watches, with a few cows. Suddenly, we start to be a normal country,” said Francois Loeb, wearily.
The meaning of the country’s neutrality, a concept that unites a nation comprising four languages and ethnic cultures, also has come into question.
“Since the Renaissance the Swiss have kept out of foreign wars. But, we are no longer in 1515 or 1815 and soon we shall be in 2015. And the question in 2015 is: Should we still be neutral? We have not answered that question yet,” said Bloch, a chocolate manufacturer whose family has been in Switzerland for 150 years.
Nevertheless, the government suggested in a 1993 report that the nation may someday have to ask itself whether “neutrality might offer less security than membership in a defense pact.”
Bankers, Switzerland’s fabled, faceless gnomes, also are feeling the pressure to update their procedures. The controversy over the dormant accounts of Nazi Holocaust victims has accelerated the push for legislation to change the way such accounts are handled. Currently, dormant accounts– those in which no contact has been had with the account holder for 10 years–are kept indefinitely.
Krayer and the Swiss Bankers Association support a new law, similar to that followed in the U.S. and elsewhere. It mandates that after a period of time the names of dormant account holders would be published; the assets, if still unclaimed, would revert to the state.
Such a measure flies in the face of the banks’ tradition of secrecy and is expected to produce significant debate before passing.
Despite the monumental sums being bandied about, money, in the end, will not purchase the ultimate answer to Switzerland’s current identity crisis nor satisfy its critics’ craving for closure.