Between the Alps and a Hard Place (13 page)

True. In the 1930s the only economists who disagreed with the proposition that the Depression was caused by an excess rather than a deficiency of government intervention were of the Austrian School—right-wing outcasts. Few if any in the Swiss Establishment, and certainly not the Socialists outside of it, remembered without scorn the pre-1914 conventional wisdom that free international trade benefits everyone. Few argued against the web of restrictions and subsidies that made up the modern economic catechism. Fewer could remember that labor makes wealth, or imagine that in a few years Switzerland (and other nations) would prosper by recruiting foreign labor. Certainly not the Socialist opposition.

So, given such near unanimity, what harm did the Swiss do to themselves by giving up democracy in economic and other matters? Quite a lot. The virtue of democracy is not that any given decision by the people produces good policy. Indeed, Tocqueville reminds us that democracies are prone to lemming-like unanimity in gross errors. Rather, democracy is good because it allows fickle peoples to disown disastrous policies quickly. Responsible as they might be for bad judgments, the people simply blame and sack those who had lately been their instruments. But elites who are personally responsible for bad policy are stuck with themselves, and compound disaster trying to prove that they had been right all along.

Room for remedying bad policy is least when a democratic people puts its “full powers” into the hands of a group that represents all (or most) parties and supposedly takes account of the full spectrum of opinion. (In America such things are called
“bipartisan” or “blue ribbon” commissions.) Competition among the Establishment parties—not naturally a hardy plant—withers as the parties' fortunes are merged. The Establishment insulates itself from criticism of its own errors and turns away from disturbing thoughts. As the people lack legitimate vehicles for their dissatisfaction with Establishment idiots, they tend to give their support to strange politicians.

It turned out for the best, then, that the Swiss Federal Council excluded the Socialists for most of the war. The fact that the Socialists had argued against the Federal Council's policies ever since the autumn of 1940 gave the Swiss people a responsible vehicle for their protest.

Let us now look closely at three sets of policies elaborated by a consensus of Swiss experts and hotly contested among the Swiss people.

The notion of
Überfremdung
, of being overwhelmed by foreigners, was a legacy of World War I. Prior to that, the nations of Western Europe, and the United States, had been relatively tolerant of immigrants. Then, Woodrow Wilson's attempt to transform the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires into nation-states set off rounds of ethnic cleansing and flights of refugees that threatened to overwhelm welcoming states (and that continue into our time). By 1924, when the Johnson Act sharply restricted immigration into the United States, all major countries of Europe had already done so. Only Switzerland's borders remained relatively open.

Prior to 1914 European governments did not require each others' citizens to show passports at border crossings in time of peace. Ordinary people flowed across borders at will. After 1919
almost every government retained the wartime practice of requiring passports, and even visas. Economic liberalism and free trade had been replaced by the notions of economic autarchy and neomercantilist competition. The Turkish slaughter of Armenians, the Polish pogroms against Jews, the Bolshevik barbarities—all drove into Western Europe thousands of people who looked, acted, and smelled different. As the nations sorted themselves out and the Depression took hold, more refugees were on the way.

Switzerland's diversity and tradition of welcoming refugees made it a magnet in Europe. In the two years after Louis XIV's 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 150,000 French Protestants flowed through Switzerland, while just 20,000 stayed in Switzerland. After the failed revolutions of 1848 came the persecuted Italians, Poles, and Hungarians. After the failed Russian uprisings of 1905 Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) and his Bolsheviks found haven in Zurich.

But Switzerland, one-tenth the size of France or Italy, one-twentieth the size of Germany, could not absorb large numbers of refugees before alarm bells went off. Note, however, that the bells went off while the foreign population was actually
declining
. In 1914, 14 percent of Switzerland's inhabitants were foreigners. By 1920 the percentage of foreigners was down to 10.4, and by 1941, when
Überfremdung
was a big issue, it was half that—about a third of the foreign population that had raised no eyebrows a quarter century before, and a fourth of the foreign presence in the year 2000.

Still, as late as 1939 (by this time with a dose of hypocrisy) Swiss authorities put up a sign in the Zurich National Exposition that read: “Our proud tradition is that Switzerland is a haven for the dispossessed. This is not only our thanks to the
world for centuries of peace, but also and especially our acknowledgment of the great enrichment that has been brought to us by homeless fugitives since time immemorial.” But the truth was that Switzerland's post–World War I bureaucracy had narrowed the country's open door.

This increased sensitivity to foreigners was not anti-Semitism, because as the numbers of all foreigners dropped, the Swiss allowed the number of Jews to rise. By 1941 Jews constituted the largest group of refugee foreigners. Though few in the Establishment
liked
Jews, anti-Semitism was very much out of fashion. Nor was the issue a shortage of public money, or even of food to care for refugees. Most (at least of the Jewish) refugees were cared for at the expense of private charitable organizations eager to do even more, and although food was rationed during the war, there was no real hunger. Clearly, the active ingredient was a certain set of ideas embodied in the bureaucracy and the Establishment political parties.

Like so many other bad things, it all began during World War I. In 1917 an ordinance of the Federal Council established the Foreigners' Police as a branch of the Federal Department of Justice and Police to coordinate the cantons' surveillance of foreigners in wartime. Alas, government agencies tend to survive the end of the circumstances that called them forth. In 1920 thirty-year-old Heinrich Rothmund brought his dogged bureaucratic skills to the branch and quickly became known for interpreting every regulation in a way that would chase the maximum number of foreigners out and keep to a minimum those coming in. In 1931, as an alternative to quotas on immigration, the parliament approved the Federal Council's broadly worded proposal to give the Foreigners' Police discretion over the residence of foreigners on a case-by-case basis. Of course
the council and the governing parties made eloquent statements in support of Switzerland's tradition of asylum for political refugees. Nonetheless, because the law gave the Federal Council, to which Rothmund reported, arbitrary power to determine the meaning of “refugee,” it took the whole matter out of electoral and parliamentary politics—much as U.S. law grants broad discretion to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Keep in mind, however, that the bureaucrats and ministers justified almost everything they did in this field in terms of defending Swiss labor. Rothmund himself published a magazine article in 1921 listing the kinds of foreigners who would be most useful to the country—those who brought rare skills or capital and who were easily assimilable. The least desirable were the least assimilable and those who would add to surplus skills. He concluded that Jews from the East were least desirable.
³
Nevertheless, because of the Nazis, the number of Jews arriving in Switzerland rose. That is because, however much Rothmund and his friends may have wanted to keep them out, Jews could come in and go out of Switzerland like anybody else.

Economism also shaped Rothmund's reaction to Nazi persecutions. Whereas Hitler attacked his political enemies physically as soon as he came to power, his first act against the Jews, on April 1, 1933, was economic—requesting German citizens to boycott Jewish businesses. Only three days later, Rothmund concluded in a memo to his department head that any Jews seeking permanent residence in Switzerland were not to be treated as political refugees. If they scrambled to flee Germany, Rothmund argued, it was because the Nazis were making life economically and socially difficult for them—not because the Nazis were putting their lives in direct jeopardy.
⁴
Later he
acknowledged that because the Jews were victims of state policy, their plight was somehow political. Nevertheless, their lack of political activity, in short their innocence, disqualified them as political refugees. Rothmund interpreted the category “political refugee” to include only those whose life was endangered as a result of specific political acts on their part—and interpreted it so narrowly that between 1933 and 1942 only about ten persons per month qualified. Other countries were also using the distinction between “economic refugees” and supposedly real ones to keep out foreigners while salving their consciences. Meanwhile, of course, one of history's greatest tragedies was unfolding quite outside of any country's bureaucratic categories.

It would be nice if the experiences of World War II had shamed countries out of this way of looking at refugees. But, alas, in 1994 the United States began returning Cuban refugees to Fidel Castro's Communist regime, claiming they were only “economic refugees.” Thus did the United States end the last vestige of its former policy of being a refuge from Communist tyranny. In the European Union of the year 2000, politicians from Britain to Spain vied with one another to limit the number of foreigners seeking a better life or escape from dictators.

We should also remember that in the 1930s it seemed impossible that a civilized state like Germany would kill people because of their ancestry. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of German Jews were slow to take the Nazis at their word. In 1933 about sixty thousand left. By 1935 the flow had shrunk to half that number, and between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Jews actually
returned
to Germany. Only in 1938 did Jews begin to flee in desperation, spurred by the March 11
Anschluss
of
Austria and by the
Kristallnacht
of November, Hitler's first act of generalized physical violence against Jews. Even then, many remained, believing that the regime's latest outrage against them would be the last. When Hitler came to power, approximately a half million Jews were in Germany; by 1939 about half had left. During the rest of the war only about another fifty thousand managed to get out to destinations as far away as China.

How did the Swiss respond to this flow of refugees? Until 1938 the Swiss never considered refusing
entry
to anyone from a neighboring country; the restrictions were on the right to take up permanent residence. Despite the Foreigners' Police, there are no comprehensive statistics on the number of Jews who passed into Switzerland. We know that in 1933 some 10,000 German Jews were registered. In 1936 the canton of Bern officially had 638, but the cantons did not necessarily have accurate figures or report accurately. That year, one Swiss Jewish agency reported having helped 2,400 Jews and counseled another 800. The best estimates for the mid- to late-1930s were of 12,000 fugitive Jews in the country at any one time.
⁵
It appears that between one in six and one in ten Jews fleeing Germany went through Switzerland. It was, of course, geographically more convenient for most to go through France, Belgium, and other countries.

With the
Anschluss
the stream of Jewish refugees became a flood. Beginning in March 1938 Swiss policy—“official preference” would be a more accurate term, since no screening at the borders was yet possible—was to admit only those Jews who had reasonable prospects of moving through to another destination. Swiss authorities were briefly delighted when President Franklin Roosevelt called for a conference of thirty-two countries to find homes for fleeing Jews. The conference
opened in Evian, France, on July 9, 1938. Switzerland, represented by Rothmund, offered to be the staging area for the exodus. But no country, including the United States, would take significant numbers.

This posed a special problem for Switzerland because, almost alone in the world, it did not require visas for border crossings. Its reputation as a haven began to draw an ever-increasing proportion of Jewish refugees to its borders. In July and August 1938 alone, 4,600 Jews entered the country without means or prospects of moving on. In 1938 it was all too easy to project the July and August numbers into
Überfremdung
. Swiss officials therefore sought some means of restricting entry to those who could show that they could move elsewhere, or to well-off retirees who could remain in Switzerland without taking anyone's job.

Swiss officials began to restrict entry by imposing bureaucratic restrictions. This began with instructions to border police not to honor any Austrian passports (invalid under international law since the
Anschluss
had extinguished Austria) unless stamped with a visa from a Swiss consulate. This in turn allowed the consulates to screen out Jewish refugees. But many consulates, notably the one in Rome, issued visas to Austrian Jews anyway.

Jewish refugees with German passports posed a bigger problem. Switzerland could not simply impose a visa requirement on all Germans. Nor did any Swiss official want to put his name to a policy of exclusion of Jews
per se
. Nor did any Swiss official want to abet the Reich's discrimination against Jews, much less do anything that might imply or entail discrimination against Jewish citizens of Switzerland. Nevertheless, while most Germans crossing into Switzerland were likely to go home again, Jewish Germans crossing into Switzerland were
likely to stay. Not even Rothmund objected to large numbers of Jews coming in. But there was support for limiting the number of any and all permanent refugees. And in 1938 permanent refugees were Jews. So Swiss officials threatened the Reich with the inconvenience of a universal visa unless it did something, anything, to channel the flood of Jewish refugees away from Switzerland. Since Reich policy (until the beginning of the war) was to push Jews out, German officials were not eager to solve Switzerland's problems. On September 29, 1938, however, the Reich responded by stamping the passports of Jews with the letter “J.” This allowed Swiss officials to subject these and no other German passport holders to the equivalent of a visa requirement. This would seem perhaps the most concrete example of a policy aimed exclusively at Jews. But of course the Jews were the only border crossers likely to stay indefinitely. This visa requirement in turn nearly shut off the legal flow, except of course from those who found consulates and border guards that would ignore the new rules.