Swiss Victims of National Socialism

Abstract

The topic of our essay is the Swiss government’s treatment of Swiss victims of National Socialist persecution.¹ This may initially appear surprising, since one might assume that Swiss, as citizens of a neutral country, survived the National Socialist period unharmed. And indeed, historiography has long presented this picture. Until now, Swiss historiography assessed the consequences of the Nazi period from the chronologically limited perspective of the war years and concentrated primarily on economic relations.² With the exception of refugee policy, which has caused a number of controversies since the 1950s, the fate of victims of National Socialism has largely been ignored.³ This pronounced historiographical blindness reflects to a large extent the policies of the time regarding people whose lives, personalities, freedom and physical existence were directly threatened by National Socialism. It is an expression of the fact that Switzerland denies its past involvement with National Socialism or has reinterpreted it as a myth of national self-assertion. Recent research has made clear to what extent Swiss Jews became victims of National Socialist race policy⁴, and in the context of the current debate on heirless assets, the new research has also rescued from oblivion the history of Nazi victims in Switzerland.⁵