Storming the Eagle's Nest (18 page)

It was true that these sources declared their provenance – either by way of a stamp indicating ownership or the equally telling fact that a filling looks like a filling, a wedding ring a wedding ring. This gold was accordingly smelted in the Prussian mint in Berlin, given a new seal, new numbers, and pre-war dates
that assured the guileless acquirer of the bullion's pristine
pre-war
provenance.

This was the gold that, from January 1941, arrived in Switzerland in an ever-increasing stream from Nazi Germany – conservatively totalling 1.3 billion Swiss francs in the course of the war. The Nazis were reimbursed in Swiss francs and with this convertible currency they duly bought manganese, wolfram, tungsten, aluminium, oil, iron ore and – doubtless – cheap tin trays.

The colloquial term for this is money laundering. Other expressions might be used of those who knowingly handled gold not only looted from those countries occupied by Germany, but scavenged from the concentration and extermination camps. ‘While other neutrals limited or suspended their gold shipments from Berlin, the SNB obligingly left its doors open. Despite Allied accusations of German looting ringing in their ears, the SNB's blithe acceptance of German protestations of innocence, even when uttered by officials who were old acquaintances from before the war, is hard to credit, far less condone.'
8
It was, too, a practice condoned at the highest levels. The bank's board was chaired by Ernst Weber, who himself reported to the bank council, headed by Professor Gottlieb Bachmann. Both were appointees of the Swiss finance ministry. When Bachmann evinced concern about doing business with the Nazis, Weber was reassuring: ‘The National Bank cannot have regard to the provenance of the gold that is sold it by the Deutsche Reichsbank.'
9

Since the huge controversy over this story in the 1990s, the Swiss bank's complicity in the traffic has been put beyond question: it was conceded by Switzerland's own Bergier commission. This stated: ‘It is hardly surprising that the SNB's decisions have – quite legitimately – been the subject of historical and moral assessment on frequent occasions, and that its decisions are judged as having been reprehensible.'
10
In 1996 a new SNB board president, Hans Meyer, displayed refreshing candour, declaring ‘Our predecessors made mistakes.'
11

With the opening of the Second Front against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Reich's need for strategic war materials grew, and with it the requirement for foreign exchange. Two years later in the summer of 1943 – just as Dulles was getting to know the German Foreign Office spy Fritz Kolbe – the Allies' bombing campaign of Germany industrial centres was beginning to bite. Albert Speer, who had just become Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, recorded:

The consequence was that the Reich turned more and more for its war materials to further afield. By 1943, it was importing three-quarters of its wolfram and virtually all its manganese and stainless steel. To fund this, the Reich that year delivered to the Swiss a record figure of gold bars and coins, amounting to 529 million Swiss francs. The guards, porters and bookkeepers in the Bundeshaus worked overtime.

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.

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.

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.

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.