Public debate and the Swiss self-image

The memory of the generation of active service

The intensity of the debate of the late 1990s can only be understood against the background of the memory that it challenged. For the generation that had served in the army during the war, the survival of Switzerland was the achievement of the militia, of General Henri Guisan and of the decision in the summer of 1940 to withdraw the main forces into the Alpine redoubt. The economic concessions to Germany, the gold purchases and the refugee policy played at most a marginal role in this memory. It was an image of a small nation standing alone and armed in the middle of a Europe dominated by dictatorships, reinforced by the spiritual national defence of the 1930s, by the civic education of the post-war decades and by the Cold War, which gave the model of armed neutrality a new purpose. The “Diamant” celebrations of 1989 were the last great public expression of this memory.¹

Historians had questioned this image long before the 1990s. Edgar Bonjour’s official history of Swiss neutrality, commissioned by the Federal Council and published from the late 1960s, had already discussed the economic concessions and the refugee policy, while Alfred A. Häsler’s book Das Boot ist voll of 1967 had brought the fate of the rejected refugees to a wide readership.² The Swiss research on the war economy in the 1970s and 1980s, including early work on the gold transactions, had also produced much of the knowledge that the Commission later confirmed. What changed in the 1990s was the political context. The questions came from outside, from American politicians, Jewish organisations and foreign media, and concerned money. That combination touched the self-image of the country at its most sensitive point.

Reactions to the Commission and its findings

The reactions to the Commission’s work divided the country. Many historians, journalists and politicians welcomed the reports as an overdue confrontation with uncomfortable truths. A vocal minority rejected them as an unjust indictment of a generation that had kept the country out of the war. The leading figure of the Swiss People’s Party, Christoph Blocher, gave a much-noticed speech in Zurich in March 1997 in which he defended the conduct of wartime Switzerland and rejected the demands for payments.³ A group of veterans and conservative historians formed a working group that published counter-studies and pamphlets in defence of the wartime generation. Bergier himself later observed that opposing books, pamphlets and articles had been published, particularly by those who defended the rosy picture of Switzerland.⁴

The political reception of the final report was cautious. The Federal Council issued a short declaration when the final report was published on 22 March 2002, without taking a detailed position on its conclusions.⁵ The parliamentary commission responsible decided in March 2002 not to hold the scheduled debate on the report in Parliament. Bergier described his first disappointment as the realisation that the politicians were no longer interested in the civic mission of the Commission. He added that the report had set out to show that Switzerland had not been quite as spotless as some had maintained, and that public interest had remained lively, with well-attended debates and a successful travelling exhibition.⁶

The political treatment of the financial side of the affair followed a different path. In February 1997 the Swiss big banks, joined by other companies and later by the SNB, created a special fund for needy victims of the Holocaust. In March 1997 the Federal Council proposed a Swiss Solidarity Foundation, to be financed from the proceeds of part of the SNB’s gold reserves that were no longer needed for monetary policy. The foundation was eventually abandoned after the electorate rejected, on 22 September 2002, both a popular initiative to allocate the surplus gold to the old-age pension fund and the government’s counter-proposal that included the foundation.⁷ The outcome showed that the willingness to acknowledge the past did not extend to a permanent institution financed from the national gold.

A contested and continuing history

The Commission’s findings have not remained static. Critics questioned the number of rejected refugees, and later research has revised it in both directions. The analysis of the Geneva border records commissioned by the cantonal archives in 2000 showed that the Geneva sector had turned back far fewer refugees than a simple extrapolation of the national figures suggested.⁸ Newer studies of the northern border and of visa refusals point the other way. Economic historians have in the meantime placed the gold transactions in the wider context of German war finance, emphasising that the Swiss contribution, although significant, was small compared with what Germany extracted from the occupied countries. None of these revisions has overturned the core findings on gold, the banks, the insurers and refugee policy. They show, however, that the Commission opened a field of research and did not close it.

For the reader of a companion volume on Geneva, one comparison deserves mention. Geneva, lying on the border with France, saw its private banks, its lawyers and its police directly involved in the flight of people and assets across the Franco-Swiss frontier. Zurich lay further from the frontier with Germany, but it was the seat of the institutions that handled the money: the Governing Board of the SNB, the head offices of the big banks, the Clearing Office and the stock exchange. In the geography of wartime Switzerland, Geneva was a place of arrival and passage, while Zurich was a place of administration and finance. The Bergier Commission, whose president taught at ETH Zurich and which had its seat in Bern, drew on the archives of both cities.

Notes

1. Thomas Bürgisser, “Remembering the Second World War – but how?”, Swiss National Museum blog, January 2026, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2026/01/remembering-the-second-world-war-but-how/. ↩
2. Wikipedia, “Edgar Bonjour”, on the six-volume Geschichte der schweizerischen Neutralität of 1965–1970 and the three final volumes on the war years written from 1962 under a mandate of the Federal Council (the “Bonjour-Bericht”), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bonjour; Wikipedia, “Alfred A. Häsler” (above), on the publication of Das Boot ist voll in 1967. ↩
3. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, entry of 1 March 1997: “Referat von Christoph Blocher ‘Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Eine Klarstellung’”. ↩
4. “Bergier saddened by lack of political feedback”, SWI swissinfo.ch, https://swissinfo.ch/eng/bergier-saddened-by-lack-of-political-feedback/5786308. ↩
5. Federal Council, “Erklärung des Bundesrates zur Veröffentlichung des Schlussberichts der Unabhängigen Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg”, 22 March 2002, https://www.admin.ch/de/nsb?id=19886. ↩
6. “Bergier saddened by lack of political feedback”, SWI swissinfo.ch, https://swissinfo.ch/eng/bergier-saddened-by-lack-of-political-feedback/5786308. Bergier also mentioned a schoolbook based on the Commission’s findings, which aroused renewed controversy. ↩
7. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, entries of 26 February 1997 (ordinance on the special fund for needy victims of Holocaust/Shoa, in force 1 March 1997) and 5 March 1997 (declaration of Federal President Koller before the Federal Assembly proposing a “Schweizerische Stiftung für Solidarität”). Année politique suisse, “Volksinitiative ‘Überschüssige Goldreserven in den AHV-Fonds’”, https://politchronik.swiss/de/prozesse/837-volksinitiative-uberschussige-goldreserven-in-den-ahv-fonds-brg-01-020: on 22 September 2002 the people rejected both the SVP initiative (52.4 per cent no) and the counter-proposal (51.8 per cent no), and neither obtained a majority of the cantons. ↩
8. “Bergier-Bericht: Das wird kritisiert”, Beobachter, 19 March 2001, https://www.beobachter.ch/gesellschaft/bergier-bericht-das-wird-kritisiert. The Geneva sector accounted for about 40 per cent of refugee entries. ↩

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 September 2025.