Between the Alps and a Hard Place (15 page)

Since regimes that live by fraud cannot stand honest reporting, much less counterargument, the Nazi regime controlled Germany's own press. As a result, the German people's demand for Swiss German-language newspapers rose. In the first few months of the regime, most of these were not editorially hostile to Hitler. Markus Feldmann's
Neue Berner Zeitung
, later strongly anti-Nazi, even carried a few compliments. The major Radical and Liberal papers such as the
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
and the
Basler Nachrichten
held their fire because they assumed,
like other European conservatives, that Hitler would be tamed by German traditionalists. By 1934, after the Swiss German-language press as a whole had decried the Nazi regime's first mass murders (the Rohm purge), the Third Reich banned it at the border, began harassing its reporters, and lodged demands in Bern that it be curbed.

The Reich demanded that Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria enter into reciprocal agreements to keep their newspapers friendly—a kind of journalistic nonaggression pact among German-speakers. Only Switzerland said no. Foreign Minister Giuseppe Motta argued that the government could make no commitments regarding the press because the press was not an instrument of government.

Alas, the Federal Council did not leave it at that. On March 26, 1934, yielding to an anti-Swiss campaign in Germany's press as well as to diplomatic pressure, the council issued a decree authorizing itself to warn, sanction, or seize any newspaper that endangered good relations with other countries. There were to be no “violent terms,” nor expressions “truly offensive to foreign [leaders], states, and peoples.” The decree reassured the press that the council had no intention of interfering with normal reporting or even editorializing—only to curb flagrant abuses, to protect neutrality, and to avoid provoking war. Although everyone realized that the difference between normal journalism and abuse is subjective, no major journalist objected, perhaps because of faith in the country's leadership. When Motta explained in 1938 that “neutrality is a doctrine of states and not of individuals, nevertheless measure and reflection are incumbent on individuals,” few doubted he meant to impose anything more than the rule of reason.

Three problems, however, bedeviled government policy. First, accurately describing the Nazi regime required harsh words. Second, the notion of “offensive” language gave the “offended” party the right to define the bounds of propriety and ban any expression whatever. The Nazis used this pretense to try imposing on Switzerland what they called a “cultural
Anschluss
.” Third, the order contradicted,
prima facie
, freedom of the press. Whenever government controls any kind of expression, it implicitly approves what it does not penalize.
¹¹
Nevertheless, the Swiss government did assert Switzerland's freedom of the press for anti-Nazi Jewish emigrés. In 1935 the French-based emigré journalist Berthold Jacob Salomon was kidnapped by German agents in Basel and taken to Germany for trial. Swiss police caught one of the kidnappers, and Switzerland pushed the matter so vehemently that Hitler ended up freeing Salomon.

Prior to the war, politicians and bureaucrats limited themselves to informal admonitions to the press to take it easy on Hitler and Mussolini. These were uniformly ignored. In 1938, when the entire press raged against the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia, the Swiss government slapped the wrist of one (foreign-financed) paper. At war's outbreak, however, the Federal Council directed the army's Division of Press and Radio to monitor the media, distribute guidance, hand out warnings, and impose sanctions, including suspension of the right to publish.

Editors chose between fighting the censors, approving bland commentaries, or simply quoting from the press releases of the Axis and the Allies.
¹²
For example, on the morning of May 10, 1940, when Germany attacked France, the Division of Press and Radio allowed the Swiss media to report noises that sounded like shooting as well as troop movement north of Basel. How to characterize what happened to Norway? An
attack. It was important to point out that a small country's borders had been violated by a great power. But value judgments were judged imprudent. What about Belgium? Here the division allowed the word “aggression.” After all, Belgium enjoyed the same status in international law as Switzerland, and to have said less would have shown undue lack of concern for Switzerland's own status. The point was to walk a fine line between telling the truth and angering Germany. The army soon realized that curbing the press meant morally disarming the country—so much so that it felt it necessary to set up its own capillary system of information for civilians. In mid-1940 the army began to beg the Federal Council to take censorship off its shoulders. It became a government function on January 1, 1942.

The division was headed by high-quality people. The first chief was a federal judge on army duty; an advisory committee of prominent journalists acted as a watchdog on the censors. The division also had strict orders not to interfere on debates of domestic issues. But the bureaucracy contained the usual quota of low-level, ham-handed functionaries. Also, during the war there were few if any purely domestic matters. The domestic question
par excellence
was whether the country should adapt itself to the New European Order or resist.

Germany's direct approach backfired. In 1937 and 1938 the Reich had expelled the correspondents of the leading Swiss German dailies, hoping to ruin their careers and make their successors more pliant. Instead they had become heroes. On June 14, 1940, German press attaché Georg Trump informed his contact in the Swiss Foreign Ministry that the editors of these newspapers were obstacles to good relations and demanded that they be replaced. Here is the memorandum of conversation:

Trump then took his demand to fire Schurch to the owner of
Der Bund
, Fritz Pochon, and mentioned that Germany would be making similar demands on the
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
, the
Basler Nachrichten
, and the Swiss wire service. Far from throwing the German diplomat out of his office, Pochon seriously considered complying. He talked things over with other owners and editors as well as with the Swiss Foreign Ministry. Nearly a month later, he wrote to Foreign Minister Pilet Golaz that he and the press would resist. Thenceforth, the Swiss press rejected direct German pressure.

What about the government's role in this? If government has any role, it is to stand between its own citizens and foreign governments. Pilet Golaz should have admonished Herr Trump after his first demarche, and expelled him after the second. Upon receipt of Pochon's first call, President Pilet Golaz should have asked him to cease all communication with German officials, because their request was the business of the state. Instead, the Swiss state countenanced the possibility that some of its own citizens
would determine the employment of others based on the demands of a foreign government. Thus the Swiss state let the Swiss press stand alone before the power of triumphant Germany.

Note that Germany's demand to fire editors and close newspapers came also from Nazi sympathizers in Switzerland. It was included on the list of demands the pro-Nazi National Frontists presented to Pilet Golaz on September 10, 1940; it was part of a petition that 173 people, some of them prominent personalities, presented to the Federal Council; and it was one of the main points in the complaint Colonel Gustav Daniker filed in May 1941.

Still, the only newspapers the Swiss government ever closed down were those of Nazi supporters. Nor will it do to allege that the final banning of
Die Front
and
Der Grenzbote
in 1943 (despite the violent objections of Herr Trump) was due to the turning tide of war. The Federal Council had also banned the soft-on-Nazism
Neue Basler Zeitung
in 1939 and lesser frontist publications even in the grim year of 1940. But never did the government close down a patriotic anti-Nazi paper, regardless of Germany's threats. The Federal Council was clearly afraid of Germany, but it also feared the wrath of anti-Nazi Swiss.

Perhaps the strongest challenge from the anti-Nazi side came from the same quarter as the challenge on refugee policy: Christian activists. The mechanism for controlling the press, like the one for implementing refugee policy, relied heavily on the cooperation of private organizations appointed to serve on the advisory board. This is how modern big government works everywhere: Private organizations exchange their cooperation with government policy for a voice in the formulation of policy and above all for a certain indulgence in the application of policy in their own regard. One of the private organizations that
the government thought it necessary to appoint to its “liaison service for press questions” was the
Evangelischer Pressdienst
(Protestant press service). On October 28, 1941, the service's director, Roger Frey, resigned from the board, charging that the government was forbidding Christians from doing their duty of calling things by their name. Nazism was evil, and the government was trying to force Christians into silent complicity with it. The Protestant churches had already circumvented the government by printing and distributing Karl Barth's famous lecture, and they could do it again. The government could not afford to have substantial numbers of respected, mainstream citizens withdraw their cooperation. What if the big papers, which also chafed under censorship, followed suit? How many journalists could the government afford to arrest? Consequently, press guidelines eased. So in the end, the boundaries of the press control system were set by civil society itself.

Civil society's preferences were never in doubt. But the political consequences of these preferences certainly were. In 1940 the weightiest political issue for the press was to come to terms with the apparently permanent defeat of democracy and liberalism as well as of Britain and France. How would Switzerland fit into the New Europe? What changes would have to be made? The French language press was most prone to adopt the language of the Pétain regime in Vichy. Words like “work,” “family,” and “authority” were bandied about, but no one would reapply them to Swiss politics with any precision. The German language press tried to find an alternative to democracy and liberalism in ancient, mythical Swiss traditions. But it did not discuss why any Swiss should want such things. What would they mean in terms of practical changes to the constitution and the laws? And would any of these changes be enough
to appease the Germans? The government played next to no role in this debate.

Much as the Swiss government lacked courage and insight, it accepted pushes from the right side and not from the wrong. It did little good, but it did not do much harm, and did not prevent the better elements in Swiss society from prevailing.

If the struggle between accommodation and resistance had been merely a matter of ideological preferences, there would have been no contest. Even at the depths of national despair in the early summer of 1940, the small number of people who actually wanted to accommodate the Germans were able to elicit in their fellow citizens resignation at most. The biggest advocates of accommodation were businessmen with foreign contracts, labor unions, and bureaucrats concerned about unemployment. But note that the purpose of the Federal Council's economic concessions was to hold the domestic front
politically
. In this regard, it is strange that the government, and especially Pilet Golaz, are ordinarily thought of as having made political concessions in domestic policy. They did not.

Marcel Pilet Golaz, from the Francophone heartland of Vaud, was a brilliant, haughty technocrat who made his mark as minister of the country's excellent railroad network between 1930 and 1940. His pride in his own judgment and his tendency to regard the objects of public policy as his personal property only increased when he took over the Foreign Ministry and the presidency for the crucial year of 1940. He kept his own counsel, and was cold and bureaucratic. His sentiments for the
boches
, the Germans, were no more positive than those of the majority of French-speakers. He thought Nazi Germany had already won
the war, and was convinced that getting the best out of any given balance of power was a technical task, and that he knew how to handle it.

The standard sentiment of the Swiss
Romands
about France's defeat was expressed by Denis de Rougemont's 1940 account of Paris under the Germans. Physically untouched, the city had become a soulless cemetery of masonry, he wrote. Paris under “the invader” (de Rougemont never named Hitler or Germany) had lost what gave life worth and meaning. The “war chieftain” who would cruise the world's most famous streets might think he was possessing her, but he was only raping a dead body. Any regular fellow could fulfill himself on a June evening by watching the sun set over Saint Germain des Pres, by contemplating the places where so much of mankind's wisdom and misery had passed—but the conquerors could have none of that. These savages just didn't understand. And so, concluded de Rougemont, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
¹⁴
The article did not dispute Germany's victory over France, raise doubts about the Reich's ultimate victory in the war, or suggest that anyone resist. It just found the whole thing surpassingly sad. The Swiss censors gave the
Gazette de Lausanne
trouble for accusing a foreign head of state of necrophilia.