European countries before and after the WW-2. The Second World War in Europe
MCHFC
LECTURE 8
Part 1. European countries before and after the WW-2. The Second World War in Europe.
Europe before World War Two (1939)
The map of Europe changed significantly after the First World War. The war brought the monarchies in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire to their knees. The older nations and the new republics were unable to establish a stable political order. Smouldering territorial conflicts were compounded by boundary disputes, as the borders of such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had been drawn arbitrarily and with little regard for national or ethnic integrity.
Territorial changes
Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was compelled to make territorial concessions. Aside from substantial territory, the former German Empire lost some six million inhabitants. The creation of the "Polish Corridor" resulted in the isolation of East Prussia from the bulk of Germany. Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to France, the Hlu?n Region to Czechoslovakia. Danzig was made a protectorate of the League of Nations. In a number of regions (North Schleswig, Upper Silesia, West and East Prussia, Eupen-Malmedy and the Saarland) national affiliation was determined by plebiscite. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken apart. The successor nations of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were established within the territory of the former Habsburg monarchy, while other regions went to Italy, Poland, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes proclaimed in 1918.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was followed by the creation of the Russian Socialist Federative Republic in 1918. The new republic emerged victorious from a series of civil wars but lost terrotiry in the bargain. Belarus and the Ukraine, which had declared their independence after the Russo-Polish War of 1920, were divided between the USSR and Poland. In 1918, the Republic was proclaimed in Poland, which had been united with Russia in a single kingdom since the Congress of Vienna. The former Russian Baltic provinces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also declared their independence in 1918. Finland had become a sovereign state in 1917 and was proclaimed a republic in 1919.
While the borders of Portugal and Spain remained as they had been, Italy made small territorial gains in the North and East. Turkey under Kemal Atatrk secured the territory occupied for the most part by the present republic under the terms of the Peace of Lausanne in 1923. The independent Irish Republic was proclaimed in 1916 and became a free state after ceding the province of Ulster (Northern Ireland) to Great Britain in 1921. Iceland was recognized as a sovereign state under the Danish king in 1918.
The German Reich occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, thereby violating the Locarno Treaties, with which the European nations, prompted among other things by proposal by German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, had sought to guarantee their territorial integrity in 1925. The invasion of Austria in 1938 and the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 following the Munich Conference, at which the French and British had agreed to the German occupation of the Sudetenland, were the first campaigns in Germany's war of conquest.
Dates and Belligerents of World War Two
For a start, there’s disagreement on when the war started and two common dates for when it finished. In terms of Europe, Russia generally holds that the 'Great Patriotic War' began on June 22nd 1941 with Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of Russia) while Western Europe uses September 1st 1939, the German invasion of Poland. Both use the date of Germany's unconditional surrender as the end in Europe, but the Western Allies accepted the surrender on May 8th and the Russian May 9th 1945.
The bulk of the European war was fought by the fascist 'Axis' of Germany and Italy against the uneasy alliance of France, the British Empire, the United States and Communist Russia with numerous small contributors on both sides. However, Russia began the war by seizing and suppressing Poland in allegiance with Germany in 1939 - albeit having first tried to find support against Germany from the western nations – until Germany invaded Russia in 1941, while an Italy freed from fascist rulers joined the Allies in 1943. All across Europe over fifty million combatants fought, with over ten million causalities and equal that number of civilian deaths.
The Causes of World War Two
The immediate trigger for war was the Nazi invasion of Poland, a conquest too far for the allied nations who had seen Austrian and Czech lands subsumed into the Reich already. The driving force was unquestionably Hitler, who wanted war and racial domination. But argument rages about the wider background, the political, cultural and economic climate which allowed Hitler into power to begin with.
Many start in 1918 with the end of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, whose 'war guilt' and rampant anti-German clauses has led some to say another war was inevitable, or even that world wars one and two are part of the same conflict, albeit with a large ceasefire in the middle. Hitler certainly played on German beliefs that they had been betrayed and treated unfairly at the war's end. The Allied Occupation of Germany which ended World War Two prevented a repeat.
World War Two Itself
World War Two in Europe was fought on three main fronts: East, West and Italian. The most decisive and bloody was the East, where Axis troops reached Stalingrad in the south and almost Moscow in the north before being pushed all the way back to Berlin by a Soviet army of over twenty million combatants. The Western Front was temporarily dominated by Germany after their swift conquest of France in 1940, but on June 6th 1944 it was reopened by successful allied landings in Normandy. The Italian front, often called the 'forgotten front' saw Allied troops fight their way up the peninsular, allowing a non-fascist Italy to join the Allies. European troops also fought in North Africa, Asia and Australasia.
Unlike many previous conflicts, World War Two was also a battle of racial and individual survival. Nazi Germany was actively trying to enslave the Slavic groups and exterminate Jews, Gypsies and the physically or mentally handicapped, leading to the deployment of mass execution and the development of death camps which murdered twelve million people, the most infamous being Auschwiz-Birkenau. At the same time the Soviet Gulag system imprisoned millions, while the ideology/cruelty of Communist high command, which considered people as just another national resource to be spent, led to millions of civilian deaths. The Soviets, just like the Nazis, also purged (чистка) the Polish population of 'enemies'.
The Aftermath of World War Two
You cannot overstate the consequences of World War Two; every facet of human life was change, often permanently. The borders of Europe were redrawn again and the Cold War developed from a Europe divided between democratic western Allies and a newly dominant Soviet Union. Science advanced as code-breakers invented computers, synthetic materials and vaccines were developed and the atomic age began. Culture was radically altered as class and race systems broke down and humanity began to face the horror of what had occurred.
Key Themes of World War Two
- Battles
A number of battles/events have earnt considerable attention. In the west the aerial battle of Britain, the D-Day landings and Operation Market Garden, in the East the siege of Stalingrad, the Battle for Moscow, Kursk (the largest tank battle ever fought) and the Warsaw Uprising.
- Tanks and Blitzkrieg
In terms of studying weapons and tactics the tanks – or 'panzers'- are particularly prominent, each side racing to develop improved types, as are the 'blitzkrieg' tactics of German armies.
- The Holocaust
There are people around the world who try to deny the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's attempt (with considerable assistance from other nations) to kill every single Jew. Let me be clear: there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the Holocaust occurred and that it killed six million people. However, the figure of six million is sometimes misleading: Nazi executions at concentration and death camps, as well as elsewhere, actually killed twelve million people of all races and creeds.
- Appeasement
The governments of Europe were slow to tackle Nazi aggression, with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believing he had negotiated 'Peace in Our Time' with a man whose ideology demanded war.
Key Debates
- Who Did We Really Win?
The Allied West went to war in 1939 to free Poland from Nazi tyranny, but when the war closed in 1945 Poland was under Soviet tyranny. Debate still rages about the consequences of removing the Nazis but leaving the Soviets in Eastern Europe. Did World War Two only really end once democracy had replaced Soviet rule?
- Were Allied Carpet Bombings War Crimes?
As the war raged Allied air crews bombed Germany, not just to destroy armies and production, but to leave such terror in German hearts that there would be no World War Three caused by them. Today some historians and politicians look back and call these actions war crimes.
- Who Won the War?
The question of who did the most to won the war, although pathetic, is still raised every day in chats across the world as national pride rears an ugly head. No single nation was the sole cause of victory, and perhaps the best you can say is Soviet manpower, American supplies and British (Empire) bombing won the day.
- Could the Nazis have won?
LECTURE 8
PART 2. EUROPEAN COUNTRIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE WW 2. EUROPE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
It is time for Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain to acknowledge that there were no truly neutral countries on the European continent during World War II. It is now time for those four nations to acknowledge that they were part of the Nazis' New Order and that they bear some responsibility for the tragic history of the Thirties and Forties.
Neutrality, when practiced by nations, is not always neutral. It does not preclude involvement in international affairs, or even partisanship. According to international law, there are varying kinds of neutrality. For example, Switzerland adopted "differentiated" neutrality in 1920, a decision which indicated a willingness to employ economic sanctions to communicate disapprobation of another nation; in 1938 the Swiss embraced "integral,"or supposedly unconditional, neutrality.
Despite the apparent precision of these legal terms, neutrality for Switzerland during World War II, as well as for the other continental European countries that claimed neutral status during that period -- Portugal, Sweden, Spain, and the Vatican -- can best be summed up by the phrase, self-interested noncombatant. These nations shared the common objectives of preserving relative independence in foreign policy and resisting encroachment into domestic affairs. But the costs were high: Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain, at certain points, deserved the unpleasant label -- to borrow the title from Donald Waters' book on Switzerland -- "Hitler's Secret Ally." From a late-twentieth century perspective, these nations can be seen to have occupied a gray area on the continuum between black complicity with the Third Reich and white resistance to the Nazi regime. What is striking about this in relation to Switzerland is not only that it puts that country on a par with fascist Spain, but that it challenges a pervasive myth the Swiss have about their wartime virtue and innocence. Indeed, the Swiss are tainted not just by their collaboration with the Reich, but by their postwar failure to confront a problematic past. To comprehend the magnitude of this "taint," it is necessary both to understand Switzerland's degree of involvement in Nazi crimes, and to place that involvement in the context of the wartime behavior of the other three "neutrals."
The Swiss and the Nazi Regime
The Swiss bolstered the Nazi regime in many ways, ways that can be summarized by the following categories: border policies, opportunities for trade, and financial transactions. Behavior in all of these categories was either immoral or amoral, but Switzerland's closing of escape routes over its border is probably the most troubling. Because the Swiss feared that the appearance of "softness" with respect to its borders adjoining Nazi Germany would be an incentive for Hitler to attack (to undertake "Operation Tannenbaum"), they were highly vigilant in guarding against those attempting to cross those borders into Switzerland without the appropriate visas. The Swiss did establish a series of internment camps during the war to provide sanctuary for a precious few (лагеря для интернированных во время войны, чтобы обеспечить убежище): 200,000 refugees of whom 20,000 were Jews. The Swiss Jewish community and other organizations were then charged a head tax to support them. Many others who were fleeing the Nazis were turned away by the Swiss -- 30,000 Jews in 1942 alone were denied entry.5Very often, those who sought sanctuary were apprehended by Swiss authorities and then delivered either to the Germans themselves, or, in the case of refugees trying to enter Switzerland from France, to officials of the collaborationist Vichy government. Moreover, it was the Swiss, specifically the head of the Federal Justice and Police Department, Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, who suggested to the Reich in 1938 that German Jews have their passports stamped with a red letter J. Rothmund is also credited with coining the now-famous phrase, "the lifeboat is full." The tradition of Swiss asylum, then, was effectively undermined during this period.
Switzerland did not guard its borders solely to placate the Germans: many individual Swiss citizens happened to harbor racist and xenophobic sentiments. Although the Swiss Nazi movement was quite small -- it numbered only a few thousand -- and the party was even temporarily banned in 1936 to prevent disturbances after the assassination of Landesgruppenleiter Wilhelm Gustloff by a Jewish student, many Swiss were quite sympathetic to the racial agenda of the National Socialists. There were a variety of indigenous fascist parties, such as the Nationale Front and the Eidgenssische Soziale Arbeiter-Partei. Additionally, the Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (Foreign Organization of the Nazi Party) was active in Switzerland, exploiting attitudes that were "anti-Jewish, anti-Free Mason, anti-Marxist, anti-pacifist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal.
And despite the paucity of support for the idea of joining Hitler's Reich, there were many Swiss who envisioned some kind of role for Switzerland in the Nazi New Order.
The second way that Switzerland sustained the Reich was through trade ventures with the Nazi regime; these undertakings can best be summarized as cynical opportunism. Because Nazi government officials dominated Germany's foreign trade -- the "New Plan" conceived by Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht in 1934 centralized economic policy and gave the Reich government control over imports and exports as well as precious foreign currency -- trade with Germany effectively meant doing business with the Nazi leaders themselves. The Germans traded their coal for Swiss steel (among other products); Swiss armament producers, such as Oerlikon (known for multibarrel antiaircraft guns), also sent their wares northward. Swiss rail officials cooperated completely with the Nazi government: "Through the transalpine lifeline of Switzerland's St. Gotthard rail tunnel flowed supplies between the Axis partners Germany and Italy. As far as rail transport was concerned, Switzerland was effectively part of the Greater German Reich.
The immorality of Swiss trade policies with respect to Germany can, perhaps, best be seen in the way the two nations collaborated together to traffic in works of art. These transactions, as with so many business deals involving Switzerland and the Reich, put Swiss businessmen in direct contact with prominent Nazis. The Lucerne art dealer Theodor Fischer, for example, who held two auctions (in June and August 1939) of modern art purged from German state museums, corresponded directly with Martin Bormann in the party Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels in the Propaganda Ministry, and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, among other important individuals. Furthermore, Fischer often dealt with the German art dealers who catered to the Nazi leaders, such as the Berliner Karl Haberstock. Using a favorite strategy of Swiss businessmen, Fischer entered into a partnership with a German dealer - C. W. Bmming of Darmstadt -- which facilitated transfers of art and money between the two countries. Needless to say, Fischer profited handsomely from these transactions. Besides Swiss art dealers, other Swiss citizens and institutions also exploited the traffic in art between Switzerland and Nazi Germany. The Kunstmuseum Basel, for example, took advantage of the favorable deals engendered by the Nazis' sale of state-owned modern art.
As the war progressed and Switzerland emerged as one of the centers of the international art market, the Swiss dealers altered their areas of specialization to better serve their Nazi clientele. One Office of Strategic Services (OSS) report noted, for example, that "the normal Swiss market had never been interesting to Goering because it offered mostly Impressionists and Modern Art. However, during the war, there appeared suddenly a large number of pictures of the German school and it was in Switzerland that he bought his best Cranachs. The Swiss import taxes for works of art were almost non-existent and the prospect of payment in Swiss francs, one of the most stable currencies, made this a most attractive proposition." Gring's art agent, Walter Andreas Hofer, reported that "many of the objects which were proposed to him by middlemen were located in the banks, which he describes as being 'full of pictures.'" The collusion of Swiss bankers in this commerce with Nazi leaders should come as no surprise by this point. (Important Nazis used German officials stationed in Switzerland to transfer funds and transport objects in the diplomatic pouch. OSS investigators, for example, found that Consul Rieckman of the German legation in Bern "received funds and pictures from Berlin for delivery to Hofer in Bern. He also sent pictures through the diplomatic pouch to Berlin.)
Because of the Germans' need for foreign currency and their hostility toward modern art, they were eager to dispatch impressionist and expressionist paintings to Switzerland. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of German-Swiss art trafficking involved works looted from French Jews by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (this was a plundering unit, under the leadership of the Nazi "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg, that stole cultural property from "enemies" of National Socialism throughout occupied Europe). Paintings belonging to the dealer Paul Rosenberg, as well as to such prominent families as the Rothschilds, Levy-Benzions, Kanns, and Lindenbaums, were traded to Swiss dealers for more ideologically acceptable old masters and German nineteenth-century paintings. One transaction, in 1942, involved Gring and his agent Hofer, and the Swiss dealer Hans Wendland. Gring received Rembrandt's Portrait of an Old Man with a Beard and two sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries in exchange for 28 impressionist and postimpressionist works, 16 of which came from Paul Rosenberg's plundered collection. The works traded by Gring included paintings by Corot, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Seurat. It should be stated that this deal violated Swiss laws. It should also be stated that these laws were frequently ignored by Swiss citizens -- by corrupt art dealers, to be sure, but also by others. OSS reports detailed the illicit trafficking in art by such prominent Swiss as Herr Buerhle, the primary owner of the Oerlikon armaments factory.
The financial transactions involving Switzerland and the Third Reich's looted gold, and Swiss banks and the deposited assets of Jewish Holocaust victims, are treated elsewhere in this issue of Dimensions, and will not be discussed in this article, except to note that Swiss bankers accepted deposits from Nazileaders of vast sums of both currency and gold. Hitler appears to have placed revenues derived from the sale of Mein Kampf in a Swiss bank, and a December 10, 1941 report from the British embassy in Washington to the U.S. Treasury Department noted that "every leading member of the governing groups in all the Axis countries have funds in Switzerland. Some have fortunes. A Nazi official responsible for foreign exchanges estimated after the war that German assets worth 15 billion Reichsmarks entered Switzerland. Some of these assets were expropriated from Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and some of the gold sent to Switzerland was looted from the reserves of conquered European countries.
Sweden
Sweden, like Switzerland, was also deeply concerned about possible German aggression (especially after the occupation of Denmark and Norway, and Finland's entry into the war on the side of the Axis). Some of its policies toward the Reich are open to criticism, but the Swedes acted commendably by providing a safe haven for Danish Jews, and they gradually extricated themselves from Germany's political and economic network after 1943. Judging Sweden by the three categories used to judge Switzerland -- border policies, trade and finance -- we can assert the following. First, though the Swedes permitted the Germans to transport freight through northern Sweden, the nation's border policies were more humane than Switzerland's when it came to the question of refugees. Sweden's crowning achievement, as just noted, was to permit nearly 8,000 Jewish refugees to enter in 1943, and then to protect them. Additionally, approximately 44,000 Norwegians escaped the harsh Nazi occupation of their country by being smuggled into Sweden. (Raoul Wallenberg's efforts to rescue Jews in Hungary in 1944 -- he saved upwards of 20,000 Jews from deportation and death by providing them with Swedish passports -- also helped maintain his nation's honor. The Swiss counterpart of Wallenberg was Carl Lutz, who also worked as a diplomat in Budapest during the war and saved Jewish lives by providing protective passports; but Lutz was reprimanded by his government for having overstepped his authority.
However, when it came to trade with the Nazi regime, the Swedes, for a period of time, accommodated themselves to the Reich to an even greater extent than the Swiss did. The Swedish economy was, for a number of years, almost fully integrated into the Nazis' New Order; the country supplied Germany with high-grade iron ore (30 percent of that used by the German armaments industry), as well as ball bearings, foodstuffs, wood, and many other raw materials. In matters of finance, the Swedes cooperated with Germany by providing credit, which allowed the delivery of vast quantities of military equipment to the Wehrmacht. Moreover, after the war, the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank, "examined gold it had received from the Nazis in payment for exports and returned about 13 tons that presumably had been stolen from Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Swedes believed, at least for the first years of the war, that cooperation with Germany was necessary to preserve a precarious neutrality. But after 1943 the Swedish government, heeding Allied warnings about neutrals doing business with Germany, detached the country from the German "political and commercial web," and gradually established closer ties with the Allies. There is no doubt that for several years Sweden put its considerable economic resources at the disposal of the Reich; but its behavior in the latter stages of the war removed much of the stigma of collaboration.
The Role of Portugal
Portugal is geographically farther from Germany than are Switzerland and Sweden, but the country and its colonies were still very vulnerable to pressure from the Reich. Moreover, the authoritarian Portuguese dictator, Antnio de Oliveira Salazar, was sympathetic to the Axis powers (especially after siding with Franco in the Spanish Civil War). These factors resulted in considerable collaboration between Portugal and Nazi Germany. Salazar provided shipments of tungsten to the Third Reich that were important for the German armaments industry, and allowed German espionage agents to operate in his country. (Portugal, in fact, like Switzerland, was a hive of spying during the Second World War.)
Because Salazar incorporated many facets of fascism into his government -- including corporatist social and economic policies, the debasement of democracy and parliament, an extensive secret police, and a ban on strikes -- he was viewed favorably by Hitler and Mussolini, as well as by Spain's General Franco. He used that approval to obtain financial profit. While the exact amount of that profit is difficult to determine, there are clues that convey its value. The 44 tons of German gold which the United States wanted Portugal to surrender at war's end (going so far, to compel agreement, as to freeze Portuguese assets in the U.S.) is a case in point.
Despite his ties to the Axis nations, Salazar also, at times, cooperated with the Allies. He leased bases in the Azores to the British, and he permitted many refugees who escaped the Nazis to travel through Lisbon, Portugal's capital.
Spain
General Francisco Franco of Spain was another leader whose ideological sympathies with National Socialism led him to the brink of a close alliance with the Reich. Like Salazar, however, he refrained from completely crossing that line. In March 1939, Spain concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany (it augmented (дополнил) the secret treaties for diplomatic and economic cooperation of March and July 1937). And as of June 13, 1940, Franco moved Spain from neutrality to non belligerency, which reflected unambiguous sympathy for the Axis. Yet he kept Spain out of the war, while pursuing a program of self-interested collaboration. Despite a concerted effort on the part of Hitler (most noticeably in a meeting between the two dictators and various ministers in October 1940) to persuade Franco to provide full-scale military support to the Axis side, the Spanish dictator refused to do so. The Generalissimo demanded colonies in French-held northwest Africa as payment for such a commitment (обязательство). Hitler's unwillingness to agree -- he didn't want to alienate Vichy France and lose its resources, including the French fleet -- strongly motivated Franco's ultimate decision not to allow the Spanish armed forces to fight for the Axis. (A division of approximately 47,000 Spanish volunteers, the so-called Blue Division -- the name was derived from the unit's blue Falangist shirts -- did fight on the Eastern Front as part of the Wehrmacht.)
With respect to immigration and transmigration policies, the Spanish were similar to other neutrals: there was a general reluctance to accommodate refugees. Requirements for visas were both stringent and variable, and the Spanish bureaucracy frequently created nightmarish situations for those trying to flee the Nazis. One thinks of the distinguished German man of letters, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in France after being denied haven in Spain in 1940. He had climbed over the Pyrenees despite heart problems "only to learn that Spain had closed the border the same day and that the border officials did not honor visas made out in Marseille. Others, however, did reach safety in Spain: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel were among the most illustrious of these individuals. One historian has stated that 28,000 fugitives (беглецы) were smuggled across the French-Spanish border during the war, including 20,000 Frenchmen (many of whom later fought for De Gaulle's Free French forces28). The Spanish, then, were much like the Swiss when it came to assisting refugees: while they attempted to discourage those seeking asylum, in the end they did save a number of lives. It should also be noted that during the latter part of the war, the Allies channeled pilots and soldiers rescued from the Nazis through Spain (the Allies channeled pilots and soldiers rescued from the Nazis through Spain.).
As for economic and financial collaboration: Spain played a role within the Nazi New Order, but retained a certain autonomy and prevented the Germans from completely exploiting Spanish resources. At the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Nazis, through Gring and his agent Johannes Bernhardt, had established a trading company in Spain called the Sociedad Hispano-Marroqui de Transportes (HISMA), which coordinated trade in a manner advantageous to the Germans. In return for German arms, Franco eventually provided valuable mineral resources and other raw materials to the Reich. By the end of the Spanish Civil War and the onset of World War II, Franco had incurred significant debts to the Germans and this increased Hitler's leverage over the Generalissimo. On December 22, 1939, Spain and Germany signed a treaty in which Franco "agreed to reserve the greater part of [his nation's] exports for Germany, in particular iron ore, zinc, lead, mercury, wolfram, wool, and hides. Spain, then, contributed significantly to the German war effort, at least up to the autumn of 1942, when the Allies' military campaign in North Africa induced Franco to adopt a more cautious policy. However, economic relations between Spain and Germany continued until the end of the war.
Spain is also comparable to Switzerland in that the Germans made use of it as a repository for assets. (The relative volume, however, was in no way comparable: the Reich made far greater use of Switzerland than of Spain.) Late in the war, when the outcome of the conflict looked increasingly bleak for the Axis, Gring, Bormann, and other Nazi leaders dispatched assets, including works of art, to Spain, hoping to preserve them for future use. After the war, investigative journalists claimed to have uncovered a project, overseen by Martin Bormann and code-named Tierra del Fuego, which entailed sending Nazi assets to South America. This scheme, if in fact true, involved using Spain as part of the pipeline. The smuggling of assets is difficult to document with any precision. But it occurred, and Spain -- like Switzerland -- figured in the Nazis' schemes.
It must be stressed that in Switzerland -- and in the other neutral continental countries -- there were many who opposed the Third Reich and acted in a humane -- even self-sacrificing -- manner. As noted above, the Swiss did provide sanctuary for some individuals fleeing the Nazis. The Swiss authorities intervened on occasion to prevent business dealings which they knew or suspected to be unlawful. Gring's art dealer, Walter Andreas Hofer, for example, was denied an entry visa in May 1944 (the grounds were not specified -- only that "entrance cannot be granted in view of the present circumstances). The Swiss were also determined to thwart spying by Nazi Germany: 17 citizens were executed for passing military secrets to the Reich. However, Switzerland served as a Continental base for Allied businessmen and spies. Moreover, Allen Dulles and his colleagues in the Office of Strategic Services could not have operated as effectively as they did in Switzerland without the support of many Swiss nationals. Colonel Max Waibel, for example, helped Dulles innumerable times -- for instance, during the negotiations concerning the German surrender in Italy.
It seems clear that even now, many Swiss cannot, in effect, acknowledge the disquieting aspects of their nation's wartime behavior. Consider the recent statement by the Swiss envoy Thomas Borer in December 1996 to the U.S. Congressional Committee on Banking and Financial Services: "The Swiss have a reputation for being no-nonsense people, attached to values of hard work and exacting precision. There lies in our national character a strong preference for realism over fantasy, for compromise rather than ideology. Having said that, however, there has never been any lack of idealism in the land of the Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, and of the European headquarters of the United Nations. They serve as an acknowledgment of the tolerance and understanding that have long been part of the fabric of Swiss society. Among many other such examples stands the fact that almost a century ago Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress on Swiss territory, in the city of Basel." Implicit in this assertion is the suggestion that Switzerland could not, would not, have acted less than admirably during the war. Another description of Switzerland's sense of its own national identity was provided by the New York Times journalist Roger Cohen: "The neutral state stood in the middle between the globe's conflicting forces. It connoted a certain decency, cold and formal perhaps, but incompatible with the concealment of Nazi plunder or other skullduggery."37 And still another journalist has described Switzerland's conception of itself: "a proud neutral country -- founder of the Red Cross, defender of democratic values, oasis of peace and multiethnic harmony."
This sense of themselves helps explain why the Swiss have been so stung by the recent denunciations aimed at their country's wartime and postwar activities (criticism involving the latter revolves around the reluctance of Swiss financial institutions to return the assets of Holocaust victims to heirs). For example, Switzerland's recent ambassador to the United States, Carlo Jagmetti, has said, concerning the current scandal over his nation's wartime banking practices: "This is a war which Switzerland must conduct on the foreign and domestic front and must win." Besides the anti-Semitic undertones of Ambassador Jagmetti's statement (he was referring to Jews as the opponents in this war), his views evince a reluctance to engage Swiss history in an honest manner. Of course, Switzerland is not the only nation with a problematic relation to its past; the reader will not be surprised to learn that Sweden, Spain and Portugal are also afflicted with the same conundrum. The moral ambiguities and divided political loyalties of the past make for histories which are difficult to master. But it is time for Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain to acknowledge that there were no truly neutral countries on the European continent during World War II. It is now time for those four nations to acknowledge that they were part of the Nazis' New Order and that they bear some responsibility for the tragic history of the Thirties and Forties.
European countries before and after the WW-2. The Second World War in Europe