Coal, gold, rice and money: the war economy of the frontier

The Gotthard as an Axis artery

The most important economic function of Ticino in the Second World War was transit. The Gotthard line and the border station of Chiasso carried the coal that Germany delivered to Italy, its ally, after the sea routes from Britain had been cut. According to the Historical Dictionary, the transit traffic through Switzerland quadrupled during the war, and German coal for export accounted for 88 per cent of the total transit volume.¹ Mauro Cerutti gives the peak figure for the Gotthard: in 1942 the monthly average exceeded 500,000 tonnes, of which more than three quarters were coal.² The traffic was legal under the Gotthard Convention of 1909 and under the law of neutrality, which allowed the transit of non-military goods. It was also Switzerland's strongest card in its relations with the Axis, because a destroyed tunnel would have cut the supply of coal to Italian industry for months. Chapter C.III describes the conventions that governed the line.

Swiss financial relations with the Axis followed the same logic. On 9 August 1940 Switzerland granted Germany a clearing credit of CHF 150 million, and in 1941 a further credit of CHF 850 million followed. Italy, which received CHF 75 million in August 1940 for deliveries of arms and munitions, demanded and obtained more.³ Germany's debt in the clearing account eventually reached CHF 1,119 million, the socalled "clearing billion", of which the Federal Republic of Germany acknowledged CHF 650 million in 1952.⁴ These credits financed Swiss exports to the Axis and kept Swiss industry employed. They were the price of Swiss supplies of coal and raw materials, which also reached the country through Axis territory.

Gold and the Swiss franc

The Swiss franc was the only international currency that remained freely convertible throughout the war. Guex explains that this made Switzerland the indispensable platform for large financial operations, in particular gold purchases on behalf of Nazi Germany.⁵ The Historical Dictionary records that Germany sold gold worth CHF 1,212 million to the Swiss National Bank and CHF 267 million to the big Swiss banks.⁶ Much of this gold had been looted from the central banks of occupied countries or taken from victims of persecution. The Bergier Commission, an independent commission of historians set up in December 1996 and chaired by Jean-François Bergier, investigated these transactions, the dormant accounts in Swiss banks and the refugee policy, and published 25 studies and a final report in 2002.⁷ Its findings acknowledged the constraints under which Switzerland acted and identified the room for manoeuvre that the authorities and the banks had left unused.

The gold trade with Germany passed through Bern and Zurich and hardly touched Lugano. For Ticino the relevant financial movements were smaller and more personal. Italian residents of all classes sought to secure part of their wealth in Swiss francs as the regime collapsed in 1943. After the armistice the Social Republic and the German occupation authorities controlled the north, where most Italian private wealth was located, and a deposit in Lugano offered protection against confiscation, inflation and the uncertainty of the outcome of the war. Industrialists who wanted to protect their companies, Jewish families who had to flee, officials of the regime who foresaw its end and partisans who needed funds all had reasons to move money across the border.⁸ The lira, as the Bank of Italy records, fell to one thirtieth of its pre-war value.⁹ Whoever had held Swiss francs since the 1930s had preserved his wealth.

Notes

1. Hans-Ulrich Schiedt, "Trafic de transit", in DHS, version of 7 January 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/014051/2014-01-07/: "Pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, ce transit quadrupla; le charbon exporté par l'Allemagne représentait alors 88% du volume total du trafic de transit." ↩
2. Cerutti, "L'Italia fascista e la Svizzera" (above). ↩
3. Cerutti, "L'Italia fascista e la Svizzera" (above). ↩
4. Meier, "Clearing" (above). ↩
5. Guex, "Piazza finanziaria" (above): "Il Franco sviz. fu l'unica valuta intern. a rimanere liberamente convertibile per tutta la durata del conflitto". ↩
6. Senn et al., "Weltkrieg, Zweiter" (above). ↩
7. Senn et al., "Weltkrieg, Zweiter" (above); Wikipedia (English), "Bergier commission" (above, consulted as a last resort): "The Bergier commission in Bern was formed by the Swiss government on 12 December 1996." ↩
8. Source as cited in the printed edition. ↩
9. Banca d'Italia, "Seconda guerra mondiale e stabilità postbellica", https://www.bancaditalia.it/chi-siamo/storia/seconda-guerra-mondiale/index.html: "La lira si ridusse a un trentesimo del suo valore prebellico". ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.