16. Family

Swiss families are not radically different from their counterparts in 
the United States or Europe, affirming the truism that "all happy 
families are alike." They are, however, slightly more stable and 
close. The laws of the state, likewise, are somewhat more pro-family, 
or family based, than in most other highly developed countries. There 
is, moreover, a somewhat greater modesty in manners and dress, and in 
statutes governing such matters as decency in the mass media. Policies 
like those of social welfare treat the family, rather than the 
individual, as the fundamental unit of society, and thus, reinforce 
family structure. Switzerland has divorce, child abuse and neglect, 
deadbeat dads, and many of the other ills seen in the West. It has 
them, though, with marginally less frequency. And it responds 
differently, legally and socially, when these maladies appear.

The net result, for an American, is a feeling that one is somehow 
visiting with a group of American families from the 1950s who have 
been transplanted into modern Western society. It is not an 
artificial, time-warp sort of feeling, and the culture does not in any 
way feel restrictive. On the contrary, the time appears to be the 
present, but the family structure somewhat transplanted. The modesty 
of the Swiss, if you will, is modest - a quiet preference for stable, 
family-based life and a disciplined and responsible commitment to it. 
One probably hears appeals to "family values" and the like far less in 
Switzerland than in the United States, or even much of Europe.

One of the first social impressions likely to strike someone visiting 
Switzerland, second only perhaps to their facility with languages, is 
that of the large number of couples still married to their original 
spouse. My own sample in visiting was admittedly biased, at first, 
toward meetings with affluent professionals. It felt unusual, 
nevertheless, to meet one high-income man after another who was with 
his wife of twenty, thirty, and even forty years. Of course, this 
impression built up only cumulatively, until after many weeks it 
struck me that very few divorces seemed to take place. A little 
resolution formed, made both to test my own powers of observation and 
to keep such observations fresh from any sociological preconceptions, 
to make sure not to look at any statistics about Swiss family life. 
Similar, but even more subtle, was the impression formed by meeting 
young people in large numbers whose parents were still together. Time 
after time, these youngsters did not describe, for example, plans to 
spend the week before Christmas with their fathers and the week after 
with their mothers, and the like. Mothers and fathers most commonly 
lived in the same place, or so it seemed. After a time, a social 
relaxation takes place in Switzerland. There are not quite as many 
dual locations to keep track of; there are fewer Doreen Smiths no 
longer married to Jasper Smith, and vice-versa; in Switzerland, one 
worries just a little bit less that the Hendersons will disagree about 
what restaurant to go to, or whether their daughter should study 
architecture.

Swiss couples exhibit a natural ease, a fitting-togetherness one 
encounters in America and Europe as well, but perhaps not as often. 
When Mr. and Mrs. Fred Isler entertained me and a friend, for example, 
it became clear just how seamlessly their two lives intertwined. Mr. 
Isler was going over a kind of bar chart of his various charitable and 
community service activities over the years, telling little vignettes 
about each bar or answering my questions - "yes, being a civilian in 
the appeals court, I would be involved in several cases a month. We 
shared the workload depending on the types of cases and who was 
particularly busy at a certain time." Now and then, however, Isler 
would be uncertain about who had attended a particular event, or what 
had been the resolution of a particular event or activity. At such 
times, Mrs. Isler would sometimes interject with words such as, "I 
think this was even three years," rather than two. Mr. Isler, on the 
other hand, frequently used the word "we" to describe a particular 
activity or commitment - even if nominally it had been "his" position. 
In an unobtrusive, unpretentious way, they seemed to agree that such 
tasks had been joint. In fact, of course, they had. "I went to the 
meetings," Isler said of the town council (or some similar task), for 
instance. "But when we got into a real disagreement, I would bring 
everyone here, and she always knew how to smooth it over."

Similarly, when Dr. Paul Jolies, the former Swiss State Secretary and 
Chairman of Nestlé, would review his decisions and involvements in 
government, he would rely on Mrs. Jolies to fill in blanks - and at 
times, correct him - regarding important events or details. It is 
natural for many couples to settle into a routine of mutual 
skepticism. Such raillery between the Jolleses, however, seemed 
largely to consist of her insisting that his actions had been much 
more wise or incisive than he would admit - and his countering that it 
was Mrs. Jolies who had encouraged him to do this or that. When some 
of Switzerland's differences with the United States and Europe in 
recent years came up for discussion, for example, Dr. Jolies was 
inclined to sympathize with Swiss officials. He said they had made 
mistakes, but that some of these were a heritage from years of neglect 
by other governments. Mrs. Jolies agreed but added a simpler 
explanation, which was, "They don't listen to you or people like you. 
In fact," she added, looking at me, "they don't even really ask for 
his advice or opinion at all." Dr. Jolies smiled, "which means they 
also don't get hers - a real mistake."

It is difficult, of course, to paint a portrait of this ordinary 
family life that works without seeming wide-eyed and, indeed, a bit 
sappy. The fact is, though, that the Swiss have retained a degree of 
family solidarity that many would envy, whether or not it has an 
element of Ozzie and Harriet. Indeed, an honest search of my memory of 
interviews with more than 500 Swiss brings to mind only a few divorced 
men or women. Of course, many of these conversations were too short to 
be likely to have obtained such information. And undoubtedly, some of 
these people were divorced, some even remarried. It is perhaps 
revealing, though, that even in cases where there have been divorces, 
the subject is less apt to come up among the Swiss. There is just a 
little more of the melancholy that used to attend the matter, 
socially, still present among the Swiss.

In addition, the relative reserve of the Swiss generally explains 
much. In the United States and Europe, one sometimes encounters the 
corporate giant who rides a bicycle to work, or flies coach even on 
long trips.(1) In Switzerland, such behavior, if not the mathematical 
norm, is certainly frequent. The chairman of ABB for many years rode a 
bicycle to work through the streets of Baden. François Loeb, head of 
one of the largest retail chains in Switzerland, drives a two-seat 
car, apparently spun off from the Yugo and achieving something like 70 
miles per gallon of gasoline in the city. It is difficult enough to 
imagine a Swiss living in the imperial manner of some American or 
British corporate chieftans. To picture a Swiss executive bouncing 
between several wives, or dating young women twenty to forty years his 
junior, is difficult. It must happen in Switzerland, but it happens 
infrequently, and when it does, it is less the object of snickering 
admiration or newspaper headlines than of quiet embarrassment.

The Swiss man is close to family without being a house husband or 
highly sensitive child coddler. Swiss men with young children seemed 
less familiar with their day-to-day affairs than their mothers. But 
when the children reach age ten or older, the fathers become more 
highly engaged in their schooling and later, their professional life 
or family life. In conversations about women, Swiss men are less 
coarse than is the Western norm, and far less coarse than the American 
norm. There is less of an obsession with sex in normal conversation - 
whether there is less interest in sex, is impossible to say, but 
certainly it is less obvious.

The statistics, it turns out, do more or less bear out the 
impressionistic picture of the Swiss as enjoying a closeness of family 
life rare in developed societies, as Table 16.1 suggests.

Table 16-1
The Families of Nations (selected comparative statistics)

Divorces per 100 marriages
Percent of families with one parent
Divorces per 1000 population
Married (%of population over 16 years)

Germany
39
18
n.a.
55

United States
48
24
4.5
53

Switzerland
29
14
4.3
62

Source: U.S. Census Bureau; René Levy, The Social Structure of 
Switzerland, Helvetica; Swiss Statistical Abstract, and author's 
calculations based on data.
---

In addition to all the factors mentioned above, Swiss family law 
probably plays a role in the relatively high rate of family stability. 
Divorce laws, of course, vary by the canton, but as a general matter 
the advance of no-fault divorce has not been as great as in many 
Western countries. Even in such cantons as Geneva and Vaud, 
requirements are higher than the P.O.-box divorce systems of some U.S. 
states. And in the Waldsättte, or the central Forest Cantons with 
large numbers of orthodox Catholics, rules are more demanding 
substantively and procedures more rigorous.

As well, the social implications of divorce are more serious than in 
America. Swiss attitudes and laws, and the familiar character of most 
communities, make it very difficult for fathers to default on 
supporting their children both financially and emotionally, and for 
mothers to neglect a child who needs attention, support, or 
discipline. There are thus somewhat firmer supports for marriage and 
less of a "ticket to freedom" from marital breakup than in many 
developed countries.

Children in Switzerland are neither as revered as in Germany, treated 
as informally as in America, nor shunted aside as in England, Spain, 
or France. The Swiss take their children seriously and systematically. 
There is less emphasis than in the United States on early formal 
instruction, but perhaps more parent-to-child discipline and self-
responsibility taught. An American four or five years of age is more 
likely to read than a Swiss child of that age, or to make a precocious 
comment, but is also more likely to wander off into the house and 
scribble all over one of the walls with a pen or waddle out into a 
busy parking lot where drivers are maneuvering aggressively for a 
choice spot or a fast exit.

>From figures on women in the workplace, and my own anecdotal 
observations, a larger share of Swiss children aged zero through five 
are taken care of by their own mothers the bulk of the day, and a 
smaller proportion sent to day care or pre-school so their mothers can 
work part or full time, or manage the rest of the children. Although 
this could not be verified directly from international statistics, it 
seems supported by estimates of the number of Swiss mothers in the 
labor force - about one-third of mothers with children at home, and 
perhaps a fifth or less of mothers with children younger than age six, 
work outside the home. The same conclusion would also seem to be 
supported by the complaint of many Swiss that young children do not 
receive enough formal schooling. From the performance of its economy, 
the Swiss do not appear to have suffered significantly from this. And 
there may be benefits in the greater socialization and feelings of 
greater security of Swiss youngsters.

Sheer geography may even lend a hand to Swiss marriages. Americans 
with a large number of children often bemoan the great distances that 
extended families find between parents and grandparents, brothers, and 
other relatives. Of course, there is little to stop individual Swiss 
families from living 2,000 miles apart, but if they do so, they will 
find their relatives in Israel, Turkey, Bulgaria, or even Western 
Russia. Since emigration is a large step, the vast majority of persons 
in any country, barring dire circumstances, are bound to remain in the 
country of their birth. For the Swiss, remaining in the country means 
living no more than a few hours from any other relatives still in 
Switzerland. Even relatives who move to Germany or France, two of the 
most common destinations, are relatively close compared to the 
distances that often separate members of an extended family in the 
United States.

As in other countries, the Swiss encounter some problems with their 
children in the adolescent years. Swiss suicide rates, in fact, are 
among the highest in the world. Surely one factor in these is the 
absence of some Swiss fathers in the more sexually divided work roles 
of dad at the office, mom at home. Others attribute these rates to 
mere density of population (a la Japan), particularly when one factors 
in the consideration that two-thirds of the Swiss nation is nearly 
uninhabitable mountains. Still another factor, according to some 
Swiss, is the high pressure placed on Swiss youth in the teenage years 
and early twenties to perform in school and other areas of life.

Among all Swiss, the fact of a seeming permanent affluence has led to 
a search for meaning. As the suicide rates indicated, not all are 
successful in finding it. Religion has withered, particularly among 
Protestants and among Catholics outside the highly Orthodox churches 
of Schwyz and the surrounding cantons. Even much religious life is 
quasi-secular. Church services in the major cities, and even to some 
extent the more fervent countryside, are not highly sacramental or 
theological. The religion of many Swiss has become almost the civic, 
Godless religion of Rousseau, though this trend is not as advanced as 
in France, Italy, or the United States.

A more happy picture, for the Swiss, emerges when one considers other 
social indices of adolescent adjustment. Perhaps the turmoil that 
seems evident in teen suicides, for example, is driven largely by 
accidental factors. Rates of violent crimes, which are normally 
committed by persons under thirty, are low. Teen pregnancy, abortion 
both by juveniles and as an overall rate, and similar unhappy 
statistics are relatively low, as Table 16.2 shows.

Public laws on abortion are characteristically Swiss - federalist and 
nuanced. A national law prohibits certain kinds of abortion 
restrictions and guards a right to abortion - but the latter does not 
cover all cases, and the former allows for exceptions for cases 
involving the mental or physical health of the mother. In some 
cantons, these rules are interpreted quite liberally so that there is 
little practical restriction on abortion at all. In others, especially 
the Central and Eastern Waldstätte, women must visit a doctor, confer 
with a cantonal or community health official, and so on - a series of 
three, four, or more steps. According to a 1996 article in the Swiss 
Medical Bulletin,(2) rates

Table 16.2
Teen Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion Rates

Adolescent abortion rate
Adolescent pregnancy rate
Adolescent birth rate

Canada
15.5
45.4
24.2

France
12.4
51.2
10.0

Finland
10.0
52.9
9.8

Germany
7.6
23.0
12.5

Ireland
5.9
21.9
15.0

Israel
14.2
35.3
18.0

Japan
13.8
61.9
3.9

Sweden
18.7
69.6
7.7

United States
22.9
83.6
54.4

Switzerland
8.4
21.1
5.7

Notes: "Abortion rate" is legal abortions per 1,000 residents aged 15-
19. "Pregnancy rate" equals pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19. 
"Birth rate" equals births per 1,000 women aged 15-19.

Source: Alan Guttmacher Institute, from country data. Swiss data on 
adolescent pregnancy calculated by author from Swiss data.
---

of abortion varied by a factor of three and more from canton to 
canton. Some of this disparity, of course, may reflect women seeking 
out abortion services in the cantons where laws are more relaxed, but 
of course this is frowned on, and often entails a lack of health 
insurance coverage.

Few people in Switzerland are entirely happy with this cluttered 
situation, especially those who crave a clear-cut decision either to 
allow or to abolish abortion. The degree of unhappiness, however, is 
much less than in many Western countries where one side or the other 
has achieved a winner-take-all victory. Abortion rights advocates have 
achieved no national decision - but can take solace that there is some 
liberty to obtain an abortion for most Swiss women, especially in the 
major cities. Opponents enjoy less than total ban, but neither have 
they had to endure, in the manner of the U.S., a sweeping decision by 
judicial elites to wipe out the action of democratic legislatures. 
Federalism allows Swiss families to seek out a community where the 
existing laws on abortion and other social matters comport with their 
sense of propriety and morality, while letting other cantons and cells 
establish the order that seems best to them. Where there is lobbying, 
it is by its nature decentralized, focused in two dozen cantonal 
parliaments and in thousands of communities overseeing the 
implementation of local standards by doctors and other professionals.

Periodic initiatives and referenda, at the national and cantonal 
levels, have the effect of giving voters a feeling of fine motor 
control, and the voters have generally opted to make compromises in 
the middle of the abortion debate, preferring not to enact the program 
of either the committed restrictionists nor the advocates of abortion 
rights. Whereas in other countries vast campaigns must be launched 
merely to achieve a vote on public financing, or third-trimester 
restrictions, before the appropriate congressional committee, in the 
Swiss system there is always access. This access - the fact of its 
availability, even if it is not always used - has a soothing impact on 
the nerves of both the passionate advocates of both sides of the 
spectrum and of voters in between. The net result is, perhaps, a messy 
compromise, but one that works for the Swiss. Ironically, given their 
reticence toward controversy, the Swiss feel that the abortion 
question is a sensitive one and the controversy hot. This may so be in 
Swiss terms, but one has the impression that the abortion question and 
like issues are in fact less agitated in Switzerland than in most 
Western countries, and far less so than in countries with significant 
ethnic and religious differences underlying the disputes.

Women at Work

Some Swiss women felt, until recently, stranded "not in the 1950s but 
in the nineteenth century," as a Swiss feminist leader proclaimed in 
1981. Pay for the same work by similarly qualified women runs about a 
quarter to a third less than for the same work done by a man, 
according to sociologist René Levy, although like most such 
statistics, these measurements appear not to account for the greater 
likelihood that a woman's career will be interrupted by children. 
Women occupy almost no CEO or COO positions among the top one-hundred 
Swiss corporations. The highest-ranking woman among major Swiss 
companies appears to be one of eighty division vice presidents at 
Nestlé, who oversees the company's operations in Poland.

Swiss executives are so sensitive about the topic that when a high-
ranking Nestlé official was told his company has been praised by some 
as encouraging a more rapid rise by female executives, he preferred 
not to discuss the matter.(3) "This is an area where all Swiss 
companies, including ours, would like to do more, and need to do more,
" he said.

What is true at the top is less true, but somewhat, throughout the 
work force. Swiss women make up about 44 percent of the work force; in 
the United States, 47 percent. On this macroeconomic level, the 
picture for working women in Switzerland is not radically better or 
worse than in most Western countries. Salaries in the banking, 
service, and professional sectors are 30 percent higher for men than 
women, with a lower gap among Swiss age thirty-nine or younger. This 
is similar to U.S. and European levels. In government service, average 
salaries are within 20 percent for men and women as a whole, and for 
men and women under forty the gap is less than 10 percent. All these 
figures suggest a work equation in which there are differences of 
opportunity, some of which can be explained by home care and other 
social choices made by women and men, some of which cannot.

If we start from 1940 as a base year, women's wages have been 
outpacing men's in Switzerland ever since. In absolute terms, this 
only means they have been catching up. The years of the most dramatic 
improvement were from 1960 to 1980, when general economic growth and 
the decline of large families encouraged women to seek work outside 
the home in greater numbers. In the 1990s, the rate of closure slowed, 
partly due to an influx of foreign women (more likely to raise 
children at home), partly due to the economic slowdown.

Swiss women do not appear to feel marginalized, and the vast majority 
do not consider themselves the object of any systematic or conscious 
antifeminine bias by employers. "Many women prefer to work part time, 
or be away from work for some period to be with their families," 
comments Beatrice Gyssler, who works with a Swiss investment firm in 
Zürich. To that extent, some women are choosing to forego some 
earnings and professional opportunities in order to care for their 
children and be in the home more. Surveys indicate that for most Swiss 
married women who continue to work, the decisive reason is the belief 
that the husband's earnings alone are insufficient. The flip side is 
that many women, given the choice, would prefer to remain part of one-
earner families. Even after the bumpy recession of 1990-96

Figure 16.1
Swiss Women's Wages, 1940-2000

Women (approx.), Men (approx.)

1940 - 100, 100
1950 - 135, 115
1960 - 160, 140
1970 - 220, 190
1980 - 275, 240
1990 - 305, 260
2000 - 315, 270
---

Switzerland's economy still generates sufficient high-paying jobs for 
men to permit many families to prosper with only one worker outside 
the home.

In Swiss families with one or more children under the age of fifteen, 
there are 700,000 fathers working outside the home, and 450,000 
mothers. (This figure includes foreign-born residents.) In Swiss 
families with no children under the age of fifteen, there are 1.4 
million fathers working outside the home, and 1.2 million mothers - a 
much closer ratio.

"The more the husband earns, the less likely the wife is to go out to 
work," as René Levy, a sociologist at the University of Lausanne, 
writes. "Many Swiss women prefer a role in the home over work, and if 
they must work, they prefer the maximum role in the home," observes 
Esther Girsberger, former editor of the Zürich daily Tages Anzeiger. 
"The statistics on women's pay and employment overstate the problem if 
you look at them expecting a statistical equality. Women's 
expectations and their preferences differ from that of Swiss men." 
Girsberger is an example of a field that has proven a natural entry 
point for women, journalism. Women are also making rapid strides in 
such professions as the law, computer software and service functions, 
and politics, to name just a few.

Small business has proven to be a natural venue for women in 
Switzerland as it has in a number of other developed countries. Home-
based and small businesses often offer flexibility in hours that is 
highly valuable to women with children. In 1970, less than 20 percent 
of self-employed Swiss were women. In 1996,34 percent were. (This 
excludes farm wives and family workers.) This figure compares 
favorably to the absolute levels of small-business ownership by women 
in other Western countries - 39 percent in the United States, 30 
percent in Britain, and less than 30 percent in Germany, Sweden, 
Italy, and Finland - and is growing at a faster rate. To be sure, some 
of these businesses are of marginal profitability, and have difficulty 
obtaining capital for expansion if they desire it. But they offer 
another alternative for women who want some income, and some 
activities outside the home, but may not have the time for 
uninterrupted employment in a traditional 9-to-5 pattern.

For many, of course, the role of Swiss women was symbolized by the 
country's decision, in 1971, to allow women to vote - a right 
previously not recognized. The long delay was not quite as backward as 
it might have sounded. Women were neither that militant about the 
right to vote, nor had men (the only voters allowed to act on previous 
proposals, of course) been firmly opposed. The proposal, needing a 
supermajority of voters and cantons, however, had always fared poorly 
in a few of the central cantons - some for substantive reasons, some 
because they feared that cantonal and community Landsgemeinde, 
literally overfilled by too many people, would become unworkable if 
the voting population suddenly doubled. Women mostly wanted the vote, 
understandably, not merely because they might occasionally make the 
difference in a specific decision on policy, but because they wanted 
to be heard and to have the institutional respect granted them in all 
the other democracies.

Ironically, although gaining the vote at a much later date, Swiss 
women have made great advances in elective politics in Switzerland. 
Well-educated and articulate, and experienced in thinking about issues 
as are all Swiss, the Swiss woman brings much to the profession of 
politics. Given the nature of Swiss government, however, politics is 
still something of a part-time profession. The cantonal legislatures 
and even federal parliament are paid little, have no dedicated staff, 
and are in session less than ten weeks a year. "There is a good fit 
between the Swiss militia system," meaning citizen government, "and 
the immense talent offered by Swiss women," as the late investor and 
publisher David dePury observed.

Indeed, the Swiss have a higher percentage of women in their 
parliament, more than 20 percent of the combined chambers, than the 
United States or most European countries. (In the lower house of the 
federal parliament, more than 23 percent are women, and of the 
combined membership of the cantonal parliaments, more then 25 percent.
) Switzerland has now had one woman president, and following the 
election of another woman to the federal council in 1998, will have 
two more terms by women presidents by 2010, under the country's 
rotating presidency.

Swiss families feel the same strains as families throughout the West, 
tugged between economic forces outside and the job of raising children 
inside. It cannot be said that the Swiss have invented any unique 
answers to these modern tensions, but their institutions have coped 
with them in interesting and different ways. The Swiss family has 
proven flexible and, in some ways - such as the rapid movement of 
women into positions in the country's citizen-government - innovative.

Notes

There is a German joke about Swiss frugality that the Swiss enjoy 
telling, which goes: "Why did the Swiss executive fly third class? 
Because there was no fourth class."

M. Dondénaz, et al., "Interruptions de grossese en Suisse 1991-1994," 
Bulletin demedicins suisses, 1996, vol. 77, pp. 308-14.

Asked for the names of prominent women chief executive officers of 
Swiss corporations, editor Markus Gisler of CASH, the Zürich-based 
financial weekly, said, "There really aren't any. I think Nestlé has a 
woman running its Poland division, and possibly one or two others. 
They are known as one of the companies where women have been 
encouraged." Gisler's staff helped me track down several other female 
executives, mostly at much smaller companies


 17. Army

Switzerland's army cannot be fully understood except in combination 
with Swiss neutrality, and Swiss neutrality likewise cannot be 
understood in isolation from the Swiss army. Even as the country 
prepares to enact significant changes in the size and structure of the 
army in the early twenty-first century, it remains a uniquely 
universalist institution, and a force for social integration. Whatever 
adjustments are made to it in the coming years, the Swiss army is 
likely to remain such a force for the foreseeable future.

Unlike most other neutrals throughout history Swiss forces, while 
small, have been tenacious fighters and even, for several centuries, 
one of the most powerful armies in the world. Twice in two thousand 
years have the ferocious peasant Helvetii of the Alpine redoubt been 
defeated and occupied. The first time was by Julius Caesar, who, in 58 
B.C., stopped the Helvetii when they tried to migrate en masse to what 
is now Western France. Caesar carefully co-opted the beaten adversary 
into the Roman security system, the Helvetii guarding the Rhine 
against Germanic invasions and enjoying a measure of self-rule in 
their internal affairs in exchange. Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1796-97, 
consciously imitating Caesar, conquered upper Italy for France and 
wanted to assure himself of the Swiss alpine passes. The Swiss 
resisted in 1798, but not as strenuously as could be expected. Part of 
this was due to initial sympathy to the values of the French 
Revolution. Part was due to the fear of confiscation on the part of 
Swiss elites - dividing a society whose poorer members mainly wanted 
to resist. The French left and returned twice, but continued to enjoy 
predominant influence in Switzerland until 1813. Napoleon, like many 
French emperors before him, found the soldiers of Switzerland to be a 
formidable addition to his armies. "The best troops - those in whom 
you can have the most confidence," Napoleon advised one of his 
generals, "are the Swiss." In this he mirrored the assessment of 
Machiavelli, who considered them, "the new Romans."

Unlike the other nations of great bravery, meanwhile - such small but 
tenacious powers such as Israel, Britain, Mongolia, Vietnam, or 
Afghanistan - the Swiss have been able to maintain a policy of honest 
neutrality, and a state of peace and freedom from external invasion, 
for centuries. The Swiss felt tempted to engage themselves in the 
conflicts swirling around them more than once. In 1914, there was 
significant popular sentiment for Germany. More than one Swiss 
official had to be removed for actions contrary to neutrality. 
Nevertheless, the country has maintained a strict neutrality for 
nearly five centuries, all the while remaining sufficiently armed to 
scare away all but a handful of attempts at invasion.

Its toughness gives Swiss neutrality teeth. Meanwhile Swiss neutrality 
and equality temper and discipline the toughness to be ready to die, 
but only for defense of the country. "The Swiss have not fought a war 
for nearly five hundred years," John McPhee writes, "and are 
determined to know how so as not to."(1)

Today, Switzerland is no longer one of the most feared military 
establishments in the world. Yet it is not inconsiderable. Some 2,000 
or 3,000 airstrips dot the country like Band-Aids, ready to help repel 
enemy air power and conduct Swiss defensive operations. Mountains, 
caves, hills, and forest cellars the size of a Home Depot Store are 
loaded with ammunition, explosives, food, trucks, and other military 
equipment. People's barns, garages, and even tool sheds are available 
for use for storage, hiding troop movements, housing troops overnight 
- and are all mapped out and accounted for in elaborate mobilization 
plans. Bridges and other transportation chokepoints are mined to be 
blown up at a moment's notice. While the Northern strip of Switzerland 
- a lowland of gently rolling hills and dense population - is highly 
vulnerable to assault, the Southern "redoubt" would be an attacker's 
nightmare. "You could defend the Gotthard highway with ten men," a 
Swiss officer estimates.

At the battle of Morgarten, the fourteenth-century Swiss triumphed 
shortly after the signing of the Bundesbrief. Austrian knights trapped 
in a narrow pass were attacked by peasants rolling logs, boulders, and 
other falling objects. There was a sensation, according to one later 
perhaps mythologized report, that "the rocks themselves" were rising 
up to take arms against the attacker. "Thorn and rose, there is 
scarcely a scene in Switzerland that would not sell a calendar, and - 
valley after valley, mountain after mountain - there is scarcely a 
scene in Switzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an 
invasive war," McPhee writes.

The real story of Switzerland's military bite, however, lies not in 
hardware, but people. With a population of only six million, the Swiss 
can place 400,000 trained, armed, highly skilled troops in the field 
within forty-eight hours. On any given day, considering this, the 
Swiss might have the third or fourth-largest fighting force in the 
world.

There is only one way, of course, for such a small country to man a 
force of this size. Every male Swiss from the age of twenty until 
approximately age forty-two is a soldier. The enlisted men serve a 
total of 300 days over that twenty-year period; officers, sometimes 
more than 1,000, continuing on to age fifty-two. Women are allowed to 
join, and do, though not in combat roles, but they are not obligated 
to do so. Men and women are paid by their regular employer while they 
are on training, and the employer is reimbursed by the government - 
though only for 70 percent, not 100 percent, of the lost time. Given 
the number of hours put in informally by the Swiss on army matters, 
especially by officers, this amounts to a significant subsidy of the 
military by the private sector. Some companies are happy about this, 
some acquiesce, some grumble.

After an initial "basic training" course of some 120 days, the Swiss 
soldier will drill approximately fifteen days a year, and probably 
commit some hours every month to filling out paperwork, keeping his 
equipment in repair, practicing his shooting. The Swiss must pass a 
shooting test every year, and take remedial practice if they fail the 
test. Gun clubs and shops dot the city of Bern the way used bookstores 
dot a college campus in the United States. More than 500,000 assault 
rifles are kept at home by Swiss men, in part so that their sons can 
get used to having a gun around.

One cannot but notice, even in peacetime, the signs of a nation the 
whole population of which is involved in active defense. On a Friday 
afternoon you see the young men in their early twenties boarding 
trains in Bern, Zürich, or Luzern in military uniform. Businessmen in 
a coffee shop in Geneva pull out their small military service book to 
make notations or do paperwork on their lunch break. Walking down a 
country road you hear regular gun bursts in the distance - too many 
for a hunter - and know that someone is practicing. On a porch is an 
old man, probably by now limited to one of the auxiliary services, 
cleaning a pair of army boots.

The Swiss not only enjoy widespread volunteer involvement in the army; 
they rely to an unusual degree on individual citizens to take personal 
responsibility for their own perfection in military technique. 
Simulator rooms, which help infantry and artillery forces practice in 
battle, are open for training during off-duty hours and are used 
heavily, according to an officer with the army's skeletal full-time 
staff. Rifle training, of course, is everywhere.

On a Saturday, touring a 600-year-old castle ruin on the heights above 
Baden, my solitude was broken by the sound of a gentle but high-
pitched hiss coming down the road. All of a sudden, three young men in 
camouflage fatigues and white helmets - hiss, zip, hissss - whizzed by 
me, guns on their shoulder. It appeared to me at the time as if they 
were on their way to a training session somewhere, perhaps a bit late. 
But a few hours later the same three young men were at the Banhof, 
enjoying a bratwurst and bottles of beer at stand-up tables. One of 
them struck up a conversation with me, during which he explained that 
the men were not on their way to on-duty training, nor even taking 
part in a formal training session itself. They were practicing 
reconnaissance runs and moving about while keeping in electronic 
contact over the hills, crags, and electronic interference of Baden - 
on their own time.

The Swiss, it turns out, use not only mountains and barns in their 
defense, but until recently common passenger bicycles. "The bicycle is 
fast, quiet, cheap, and flexible," a staff officer later told me with 
a ninja-master-like tone. "We use anything that contributes to the 
defense of the country." The man or woman at work is always a citizen 
- and the citizen does not leave his private skills and ideals at the 
door, but brings them with him to the collective enterprise of 
managing and defending the state. There is, in short, a great trust in 
people. This trust tells much about Swiss assumptions regarding people 
and the society. It is a sign, surely, of one of the most developed 
and capable societies in the world.

Universal service thus works on many levels. It generates numbers. If 
a comparable number of U.S. citizens were members of our army or naval 
reserve, America would have some twenty-five million men at arms. It 
also establishes a presence in society. The fact of citizens doing 
their duty, universally, is too ubiquitous to be unseen. Military 
activity is legitimized, and linked into practically every home and 
family in the country. The people's consciousness is raised of the 
sacrifices that are being made for the national safety. There are even 
certain practical benefits to promoting an informed citizenry, and one 
with a strong immediate interest in sound management of the military. 
Nearly every male voter is also a military man - and, with a full-time 
military establishment of only about 1,000 officials or less, nearly 
every military man earns his living in the civilian economy. No doubt 
this is one reason there have been relatively few of the military 
scandals in Switzerland, either as to over-priced procurement items, 
what weapons to purchase, or other matters.

The militia system is egalitarian in imposing its burden. There are a 
few ways to get an exemption from military service, but only a few, 
and none is advanced by social standing. Absolute mental or physical 
inability will get you out. Policemen can sometimes earn a waiver 
since they might be needed in two places at once. A 1977 ballot 
initiative sought to allow men to fill their service obligation 
outside the armed forces - cleaning parks, teaching reading, and so 
on. It was rejected by more than 60 percent of the voters. A decade 
later, a smaller proposed exception passed, but is still socially 
frowned upon.

Importantly, all Swiss men start off as privates. The son or daughter 
of a Swiss president, member of parliament, or captain of industry is 
a grunt. The earliest promotion to officer generally takes place after 
several years of service. Thus there is no separate officer class as 
in most countries, even the democracies. Most of these officers 
(roughly 98 percent or more) are part-time or "reservist" soldiers 
with regular employment. A small, full-time force of less than 1,000 
staff constitutes Switzerland's entire professional military.

There is, to be sure, a tendency for military and professional 
advancement to correlate - but both are based on merit. Generally, 
many of those who are advancing in their career often thrive in their 
military service, and vice-versa. "The colonel and the barrister, the 
banker and the captain, the major and the businessman are one," McPhee 
writes. And while there are many cases of parallel advancement, there 
are others of social criss-crossing - of nonprofessionals in daily 
life advancing in the military, or of high-ranking business executives 
continuing to serve as privates or sergeants. "There are at least two 
bank presidents who march with the rank and file. An army captain has 
told me that he once leaped to his feet because the soldier serving 
him food was an executive vice-president of the company he worked for 
in Basel. To be high in business and low in the army is less unusual 
than the reverse."

Perhaps the most important impact of the militia is the way it 
integrates the military and the society as a whole. In most developed 
societies there is alienation between the people and the military 
class, one of the reasons the American Founding Fathers, rightly, 
feared such a class. The citizen-based force of the Swiss, by 
contrast, is practical and efficient in military terms, and wholesome 
for the society.

Can there be any higher function of the state than the preservation 
and protection of the state and the people from external violence? As 
in other walks of Swiss political life - making laws, altering the 
constitution, defending the nation - we see supreme acts of 
sovereignty being carried out, for the most part, by ordinary 
citizens.

In perhaps every fourth or fifth meeting with a Swiss of any length, 
army contacts and experiences are likely to come up. Christian Kuoni, 
the president of one of the largest privately owned manufacturing 
companies in Switzerland, Jakob Muller, asks about my meetings later 
in the day. One is with Carlo Schmid, an attorney, Landamann of Canton 
Appenzell, and a member of the federal senate. "Carlo Schmid?" he 
asks. "We drilled in the army together for years." And Kuoni whips out 
his little service book, proceeding to tick through some of his 
assignments with various other corporate officers, workers from his 
own factory and others, journalists, a union leader from Geneva, the 
fellow who runs the local post office. As he ticks along, it strikes 
me that the Swiss have their confessional and other differences, but 
there is one church they all attend: the army. There is, of course, no 
even remotely comparable experience in the United States and most of 
Europe. The Swiss Army slashes across all walks of life, institutions, 
interest groups, and people and brings every citizen of the state - or 
rather, every male citizen, but through them, involves a majority of 
the women as well - together for an act of regular communion.

It is important to note that early in the twenty-first century the 
Swiss began a reduction in the size and universality of their military 
service. This reduction, of about one-third, was hard to argue against 
in terms of the relative military peace in Europe, but the change will 
have social impacts. The reduction especially of the principle of 
broad, almost universal service, will change the psychology and role 
of army service. Switzerland's rate of military service will still far 
exceed that of nearly any other country in the world with the 
exception of Israel. For this reason, the Swiss Army, albeit smaller, 
will continue to play a significant social and economic role in the 
country.

As the Swiss army makes Swiss neutrality muscular, so Swiss neutrality 
gives the army - and the society - both a strong moral raison d'etre 
in foreign affairs and, to a degree, an ethos not only for the nation 
as a whole but for the individual.

Swiss neutrality's roots are as deep as the oath on the Rütli, but the 
decisive event in its development came with the Swiss defeat of 1515 
at the hands of the French army at Marignano. "I have conquered those 
whom only Caesar managed to conquer before me," boasted King Francois 
I. Actually, he had not conquered the Swiss; he had defeated them in 
battle. The impact, however, was still great. Switzerland was a poor 
country, and, indeed, still only a country in the most generous sense 
of the term - a loose confederation of thirteen cantons, linked by a 
small, impermanent court that floated from one capital city to another 
every year like Gulliver's island of Laputa. They decided, quite 
prudently, that this was no core from which to build a vast empire 
through military conquest. Nicholaus von der Flue, the respected friar 
and political-religious activist, added powerful moral arguments to 
these practical ones, and the policy took root.

For centuries, of course, neutrality as a policy of the confederation 
was really something of a statement of impotence by that rather thin 
body of government. The cantons aligned themselves with competing 
princes all over Europe - usually renting the services of their highly 
sought armies or units of them as mercenaries. For hundreds of years, 
as one military historian has written, arms of this sort were 
"Switzerland's leading export."

This practice indeed helped enrich the region, while at the same time 
maintaining what De Gaulle called "the edge of the sword" - and thus, 
while Switzerland was neutral, the Swiss were fighting all the time: 
hard, sharp. This practice, however, led to its own absurdities. It 
helped keep Switzerland divided and even encouraged foreign meddling, 
since it was well known that for the right price most cantons could be 
swayed to shift alliances. It also led to the repeated comedy - a sad 
comedy at that - of Swiss troops from different cantons facing one 
another in battle. With grim logic, the Swiss fought bravely in such 
struggles, killing many of themselves.

On the more glorious side of the ledger, Swiss soldiers participated 
in (and played a key role) in some of the most important battles of 
the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The French kings saw 
the Swiss in action and hired them to guard the royal person. While 
many French guards deserted during the seizure of Louis and Antoinette 
during the Revolution, the Swiss fought to the death, and were thereby 
honored and respected even by the revolutionaries for performing an 
honest duty so bravely. Centuries before, the Popes, having seen the 
Swiss bodyguards in action, decided to retain their own units for 
protection of the Vatican. The brave Swiss guards of canton Fribourg 
remained in this service at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

As a practical benefit most foreign powers, even the great empires, 
while they certainly looked to the cantons for troops, generally 
thought of any occupation or absorption of Switzerland as a high-cost 
enterprise with few likely benefits. Thus the policy of neutrality, 
while viewed with an understandable skepticism by some modern-day 
critics, grew and evolved over time into something solid.

Franz Muheim, a typically Swiss Swiss - former industry leader, 
military officer, senator, author, intellectual - explains some of the 
deep roots and wide branches of that broad concept, Swiss neutrality.

"There is a basic point of view that you could call Swiss," he tells 
me in English - his third or fourth language - at the Hotel Metropol 
in Luzern, over a pleasant luncheon. "It is not predetermined by the 
mountains and the geography, but certainly, these make it very 
natural.

"The Swiss, you see, are not so much a mountain people, as a valley 
people - separated by mountains. Farmers, small manufacturers, gate 
keepers. The land makes it not inevitable, but certainly very easy, 
for small, independent communities to form.

"If one of these communities even wanted to conquer and enslave one of 
their neighbors, it would not be an easy task," he continued. A 
picture of Jean-Jacques Rousseau flashed into my mind, with his 
classic commentary on the impossibility of slavery in the state of 
nature, from the essay on the origins of inequality to the Academy at 
Dijon. "Of course, you could not do it, nor did the Swiss ever want to 
do it.

"The Swiss wants primarily to be left alone by the next village, and 
to cooperate with his friends and neighbors while retaining a certain 
autonomy and independence even within this intimate cell. He does not 
want to be involved in fights against or between his neighbors, both 
because he knows how hard it is to intervene usefully, and because he 
recognizes the limited ability his small village would have to 
influence matters anyway."

"This way of thinking applies from the individual Swiss of those 
villages, hundreds of years ago, up to the state - and today, as well, 
from the state down to and through the individual."

Neutrality, thus, is a state of mind and personal philosophy, a 
broadened version of that very wise beginning of the doctor's 
Hippocratic Oath: "First do no harm." It is policy, but it is more 
than that.

Likewise the Swiss military-industrial complex is an arm of the 
government - but not just an arm of the government. It is, like many 
Swiss institutions, inextricably linked with the society - achieving 
something akin to the Maoist dictum that the guerrilla must be as a 
fish is to the sea.

"You must understand," as Swiss Divisionnaire Adrien Tschumy, told the 
journalist McPhee, "there is no difference between the Swiss people 
and the Swiss Army."

Note

1. La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984. 
McPhee's book is a quiet classic for Americans, but among the Swiss, 
it is almost at the level of a cult. McPhee, a New Yorker editor, 
drilled with several Swiss units and described his conversations and 
experience in some detail. It is a bragging point among the Swiss not 
merely to have been mentioned in the book, or to have had some contact 
with McPhee, but to know someone who has. "I once drilled with someone 
who had previously drilled in that unit, though he was not there at 
the time McPhee was," a Swiss businessman, who heads a Fortune 500 
company, told me proudly.


 18. Switzerland Accused

Hans Bär was not ready for my question. It was not on the list of 
topics faxed before our talk and, in fact, wasn't even in my mind 
until we were about half-way through. He wasn't angry about it - to my 
relief. But he was surprised. It surprised me, too; my voice seemed to 
come from someone else.

"How do you feel about Switzerland and the Holocaust?"

Simple words, but that last one evokes strong emotions. Hans Bär, the 
head of an old and respected investment bank in Zürich, didn't know me 
except as a writer interested in Switzerland. It would have been 
understandable if he were taken aback, even offended.

At the same time, even before Bär answered, it felt right. The 
question of the Nazi reign of terror and the country's response to it 
is one that troubles the Swiss deeply. And the international grilling 
of Switzerland in the late 1990s was a blow to the national pride and 
a cause of deep hurt. Here was a man who felt all these emotions 
strongly and personally - an informed man of some sensitivity. The 
question had to be asked.

"I feel..." Bär said, and paused. He seemed to be thinking about his 
feelings on this, improbable as it sounds, for the first time. "I feel 
very proud and very ashamed of my country. I am a Swiss, and a Jew. I 
am both."

"Switzerland made mistakes - was guilty of horrible political 
stupidity after the war. There should have been an active effort to 
recompense the owners and the descendants of the dormant accounts." 
(Bär is speaking of accounts opened by foreign Jews in Swiss banks 
before the war, but which lapsed afterward. In some cases, the account 
holders died. In others, they simply forgot the accounts, or allowed 
them to sit fallow. In some cases, money was paid out.) "At the same 
time, Switzerland resisted the Nazis for years when she was completely 
surrounded." Indeed, even before the war, Switzerland was the first 
country to launch a significant armament program to defend against the 
Nazi threat.

"It is even more complicated than this, because, for example, there 
were elements of anti-Semitism here, too. They were not nearly as 
strong as in Germany or elsewhere. But there was some. We would see 
banners in Zürich occasionally, read newspaper articles, hear threats.
"

Bär's natural conflictedness was well captured when his preparatory 
school in the United States, the Horace Mann School, asked him to 
accept an award in 1998.(1) Bär was flattered. He would have liked to 
receive the honor. "But I could not accept an award in the United 
States, while my country was being treated as it was by the U.S. 
government and in the U.S. press - and in the very circles of people 
whom I would be receiving this award from. I told them, as a Swiss, I 
could not accept."

A year passed. The U.S. government, while not explicitly apologizing 
for its allegation that Swiss actions had "helped prolong" World War 
II, issued a second report qualifying some of the more extreme claims 
of the first one. Vice President Gore appeared in Davos, Switzerland, 
to tell the Swiss President, Mrs. Dreifuss, that his government hoped 
the controversy would wind down and planned no further actions 
designed to bring pressure or opprobrium on the Swiss. The school 
offered the award again. Bär accepted, using his speech as an 
opportunity to put the Swiss record in context - and encourage his 
American audience to consider our own sins of omission in the Nazi 
Holocaust and other such events, before lecturing others. The crisis 
seemed to be defusing itself, the wounds starting to heal. "There is 
little doubt in my mind," Bär told the Horace Mann School, "that the 
declared end of the very serious bickering between the United States 
and Switzerland over its role during and after the Second World War, 
as it was solemnly declared in Davos only a couple of weeks ago, 
really marks the end of that episode."

Even if so, however, some painful historical questions remain - not 
only for the Swiss but for other countries that, unlike Switzerland, 
have not begun to come to terms with their wartime and postwar banking 
transactions. Furthermore, it was far from clear, as Bär commented a 
year later, that the Davos "ceasefire" represented anything more than 
a temporary lull by some U.S. officials in a long and inexplicable 
vendetta against the Swiss.

For the Swiss democracy, regardless of U.S. attitudes, there are 
institutional questions raised by the Holocaust issue. These events 
raise questions that the Swiss will have to address. The future is 
bound to bring moral-political issues of this type, issues over the 
Swiss banking system and issues that arise out of Swiss neutrality - a 
policy that is always vulnerable to misinterpretation and, at times, 
abuses. How will Switzerland handle them?

"The controversy," as the Swiss refer to it, was latent in the 
practices of Swiss banks going back to the early postwar years, and, 
indeed, to before the war itself. During the war and in the years 
afterward, some 50,000 to 100,000 accounts fell dormant, or were 
closed. It is doubtful that a majority of these belonged to Holocaust 
victims or other Jews. In fact, according to studies of the Swiss 
accounts, it is all but certain that a third or less were. It is 
equally certain, however, that some finite percentage of these 
accounts did belong to Jews. According to the Swiss Bankers 
Association, nearly 20,000 persons have registered claims for dormant 
accounts. (Many of these, of course, are duplicate claims from 
relatives of the same prospective account holder.) The Volcker 
Committee, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul 
Volcker, studied the matter of dormant accounts and other unclaimed 
assets in Swiss banks deposited by victims of the Nazis. It concluded, 
in an interim report, that when interest and inflation over the years 
are added to the initial principal, perhaps $1 billion to $2 billion 
in such assets exist. This committee was established by the Swiss 
Bankers Association in cooperation with the World Jewish Relief 
Organization and the World Jewish Congress.

These matters remained closed and generally uncontroversial for 
several decades due to two factors. One was the renowned sacredness of 
Swiss banking privacy. This policy has always been somewhat 
misunderstood. For instance, the provisions provide no shield against 
domestic or international criminal prosecutions. Nevertheless, the 
policy did make it hard for relatives, journalists, and others both 
from obtaining specific account information and from compiling a broad 
profile of the scope and magnitude of the accounts. Often such 
accounts were opened under fictitious names, or using passwords or 
numeric codes. If the person who opened the account died, relatives 
might have no idea where the money was. Relatives coming back after 
the war, or even decades later, lacking the needed account information 
might ask the Swiss banks for help, but the banks declined to give out 
the needed information. The reputation of Swiss secrecy discouraged 
many from even trying.

The second factor was a certain smugness, or at the least 
indifference, on the part of Swiss bankers and politicians when 
inquiries and appeals were made. In the case of some business and 
political elites, in fact, more than indifference was involved. The 
Swiss people, in plain terms, were sometimes lied to about the 
activities of the government and the banks. Individual requests for 
access to dormant accounts by Holocaust victims were treated no worse 
than if they involved an account in no way linked to a Holocaust 
victim, but they were treated no better. Group appeals (from Jewish 
organizations, corporations, or governments) were politely referred to 
the banks. This policy might be defensible from a narrow legal 
standpoint, but it took little account of the special circumstances of 
this group of people. To keep these matters in perspective, of course, 
Americans and Europeans outside Switzerland must remember the 
indifference of some of their own financial and political institutions 
before, during, and after the war. Researchers have argued that 
Deutsche Bank, Ford Motor Company, Allianz, and General Motors all 
benefited from unsavory relations with the Nazi regime before or after 
the war. "New York State," as Bär points out, "was the beneficiary of 
most of the Holocaust funds transferred to the U.S. under your 
escheatment laws - and never returned a penny."

What was underneath the surface became a heated debate when a group 
representing the families of Holocaust victims filed a class action 
suit against a number of Swiss banks in 1996. The suit called for the 
return of what the plaintiffs said was some $20 billion owed in 
principal and interest to the survivors and their families. The case 
was ultimately settled for about $1.5 billion, more than the amount 
estimated by the Volcker Commission as due on dormant accounts to 
Holocaust victims, and much less than the original suit. As the press, 
foreign governments, and others began to comment on the specific 
situation with the accounts, however, they catalyzed a discussion of 
several broader issues, including:

- gold and other transactions by the Swiss National Bank with the 
Germans;

- the broader Swiss economic relationship with Germany and the other 
Axis powers;

- Swiss military efforts to resist potential Nazi aggression; and

- the meaning, benefits, and (if any) harms of Swiss neutrality 
policy.

That the Swiss carried out large gold transactions with Nazi Germany 
can not be denied, and never was. As a neutral nation, Switzerland 
naturally kept up some economic and political relations with her 
largest trading power. A secret British report late in the war 
concluded that Swiss neutrality had been highly beneficial to the 
allies, as did such American officials as William Clayton, Dean 
Acheson, and John Foster Dulles. As well, as a practical matter, 
Switzerland was physically surrounded for much of the war by Axis 
troops. Dependent on other countries for energy and food imports, 
Switzerland built machinery and other exports for trade, and carried 
out that trade in the international medium of exchange at the time: 
gold.

Given the volume of gold being transacted by the German central bank, 
it is impossible to believe that the Swiss did not purchase some 
amount of gold from Holocaust victims including but not limited to the 
particular purchases identified in recent investigations that the 
Swiss either conducted themselves, or cooperated with. In all, the 
Swiss purchased some 1.5 billion Swiss francs worth of gold from the 
German central bank from 1938 until 1945, most of it concentrated in 
the peak war years of 1941 through 1943.

The supposition that the Swiss traded significantly in the gold stolen 
and in some cases physically removed from Jewish victims, however, is 
highly doubtful. Once the issue of gold transactions became a serious 
issue and the Swiss were aroused to act - too late, but not too little 
- the Swiss attacked the problem. The Confederation appointed a 
commission to consider the gold transactions and other issues of 
policy during the war. Working from shattered records and moldy 
microfilms spread from Missouri to Moscow, the
commission managed to locate at least three specific bars of gold that 
clearly originated in a shipment from SS Captain Bruno Melmer.

"Specifically," the commission reported, "these were bars from the 
seventh Melmer shipment" to the German Reichsbank on 27 November 1942, 
"bearing the numbers 36903, 36904, and 36905 and having a total weight 
of 37.5411 kfg. They were sent by the Reichsbank to the SNB [Swiss 
National Bank] in Bern on 5 January 1943." As well, "gold bars with 
the numbers 36783 and 36784," as well as "numbers 36902 and 36907," 
were "delivered to the Prussian Mint on 25 February 1943." These four 
bars were in turn resmelted and sold to the Swiss and to German 
commercial banks.

There is a distinction between gold stolen from Jews when they were 
rounded up, and gold literally taken from their bodies in the Nazi 
death camps. That the latter was taking place was not known until the 
final days of the war. The former phenomenon - the theft of gold from 
people as they were rounded up for what were presumed to be horrible 
work camps, but not genocide - was understood by the Swiss from their 
own intelligence reports and indeed press accounts from Germany, 
Italy, and elsewhere. "For those who want to know," an article in the 
Neve Zürcher Zeitung on August 16, 1942, argued, "there can be no more 
illusions concerning the real situation of gold trade with Germany." 
The article went on to detail the looting of gold from foreign central 
banks and from individuals. "It is known that assets held by private 
individuals were also confiscated in the occupied territories," the 
director of the Swiss National Bank's legal department commented on 
December 2, 1943. "For example, from deported Jews or from persons 
affected by sanctions, etc."

Nevertheless, Switzerland was not the only country to receive gold the 
Nazis stole from Holocaust victims, or looted from foreign central 
banks. From 1935 to 1945, some $20 billion flowed out of Europe to the 
United States. Much of it, albeit indirectly, was Nazi gold. Swiss 
purchases of gold from Germany, Italy, and Japan ($319 million) were 
barely half that from the allies ($688 million), most of it coming 
from the United States ($518 million). The U.S. was also the leading 
purchaser of gold from the Swiss, at $165 million, numbers which imply 
there was some victim gold involved.

The Swiss encirclement was exacerbated by the American economic 
embargo of the Axis powers, which was a de facto quarantine on all of 
Western Europe. In December, 1941, Washington froze Swiss assets in 
the United States, including substantial gold reserves. The ironic 
result was to drive Switzerland, needing gold reserves to conduct 
trade and defend its currency, into the arms of Germany, a needy 
supplier of gold and the one country that could unilaterally engage in 
actual transfers of the metal. Figure 18.1 shows the pattern of Swiss 
gold purchases from Germany, spiking in the first quarter of 1942, and 
returning to normal after the third quarter of 1944, when the allies 
opened a small transit corridor to Switzerland through France.

Figure 18.1
Swiss National Bank Gold Purchases from German Reichsbank, Expressed 
as a Three-Quarter Moving Average

Millions of Swiss Francs (approx.)

1940.25 - 05
1940.50 - 10
1940.75 - 00
1941.00 - 13
1941.25 - 15
1941.50 - 23
1941.75 - 08 (Dec. 1941: U.S. freezes Swiss gold assets)
1942.00 - 40
1942.25 - 80
1942.50 - 110
1942.75 - 95
1943.00 - 83
1943.25 - 93
1943.50 - 90
1943.75 - 84
1944.00 - 80
1944.25 - 82
1944.50 - 60 (Aug. 1944: Allies open Swiss corridor)
1944.75 - 40
1945.00 - 20
1945.25 - 15
1945.50 - 13
1945.75 - 00

Source: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution from data supplied by SNB, 
the Swiss Task Force on World War II, and the German Bundesbank.
---

Especially painful to the Swiss is the accusation that their country 
was "neutral for Hitler." The accusation takes various forms. Some 
argue that the Swiss, by selling specific equipment and armaments to 
the Germans, or trading with them at all, were aiding the German war 
effort. (The Swiss, despite their position, traded nearly as much with 
the allies and smuggled out precision instruments vital to the allied 
effort in the critical air war.) Others suggest that merely by trading 
with Germany in any extensive way, the Swiss must have been helping 
the Nazis, and therefore, are culpable.

An official U.S. document, the first Eisenstadt report, argues that 
Swiss actions even helped "prolong the war." Still others convict the 
Swiss of a kind of cultural affinity. "They're basically German," as a 
staff aide who contributed to the Eisenstadt report commented. "You 
have to keep that in mind." (Report author Stuart Eisenstadt later 
said he regretted some of the report's conclusions, but critics noted 
that this retraction took place only after Eisenstadt allegedly went 
on the payroll of a major Swiss bank.)

These notions of an insufficient disdain for Hitler, and a kind of 
tacit, cultural self-Anschluss, are highly insidious - nearly 
impossible to combat.

Once motives are impugned, much objective evidence becomes 
meaningless, even usable against itself. Any wartime action that 
advanced Switzerland's own interests, no matter how legitimately, can 
be added to the tally as another sign of shrewd Swiss venality. 
Selling paper clips to the Germans? There they go again, providing 
valuable supplies. Selling paper clips to the Americans? The Swiss are 
always out to make a profit at our expense. At various points in the 
war, both the allies and the Germans were furious with the Swiss for 
what they perceived as a tilt toward the other. America, in a much 
stronger position to chart its own course than Switzerland, continued 
a substantial trade with Germany even after the attack on France. We 
justified our policy as part of a needed effort to rebuild American 
production capacity for armaments. Later, in order to expedite the war 
against Nazism, the U.S. formed an alliance with Stalinist Russia.

Finally, the Swiss have no tradition of self-apologetics, and their 
system is designed against it. America has had great power for a 
century now, and, accordingly, attracted a long stream of insults and 
denunciations. The U.S. is inured to being assaulted as corrupt, 
aggressive, or insensitive. It has calluses for these attacks, and 
experience at wooing and battering world opinion against them. 
Switzerland, a small nation that has not threatened its neighbors 
militarily for centuries, has not often been engaged in defending 
itself from this kind of attack. The Swiss have faced and repelled 
armies. The international press, Western politicians, and university 
researchers are a different matter, and to the Swiss, in some ways 
more threatening.

For the Swiss, World War II, as an economic phenomenon, began a few 
weeks after the German leadership appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor in 
January, 1933. In the Swiss tradition, the political leaders in Bern, 
and newspaper readers around the country, had read Hitler's statements 
before and after coming to power. Unlike most in the West, the Swiss 
took them seriously. "Our people will never allow itself to be brought 
into line according to the German pattern," Federal Councilor Rudolf 
Minger, head of the military department, declared in March, 1933, 
justifying his proposal for increased Swiss defense preparedness. That 
October, as Hitler announced Germany's intention to withdraw from the 
League of Nations, Minger drew up a plan to increase Swiss military 
spending by 15 million francs in 1934, a 20 percent increase, as part 
of a four-year addition of 100 million francs - a near doubling of 
Swiss defense spending by 1938. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in an 
October 12 editorial, approved, adding that the country not only 
needed such armaments, but a vigorous "spiritual defense" as well - a 
term that became a Swiss rallying cry. On December 10, The New York 
Times published an article alleging that Germany had drawn up plans 
for the invasion of France through Switzerland. The account may have 
been spurious, but the Swiss could not assume that it was. On December 
14, the federal council approved more than 80 million francs in 
additional defense spending. Among the items was the start of 
construction of a vast series of hidden mountain fortifications and 
guns. This fortress Switzerland program became a $15 billion project 
in today's dollars - not much less than what Ronald Reagan and the 
United States spent on his Star Wars defense program during his entire 
term in office. At the same time, the Swiss decided to build a new 
museum to house the Bundesbrief and other documents of national 
independence - exemplifying the Swiss political and sentimental 
separation from Austria and Germany, or what one writer later called 
"pan-this and pan-that." This is where Swiss policy toward Germany 
stood in 1933, before Hitler had spent a full year in office.

The war measures continued and expanded through Hitler's abrogation of 
the Versaille treaty (August, 1935), occupation of the Rhineland 
(March, 1936), absorption of Austria (March, 1938), the Kristallnacht 
assault on Jews (November, 1938), the annexation of Czechoslovakia 
(1939), and the invasion of Poland (April, 1940), Denmark and Norway 
(April, 1940), and France (May, 1941 ). In the spring of 1934, Nazi 
textbook writers drew maps of showing Switzerland as part of a 
conceived "Greater Germany" based on language and ethnic lines. "Quite 
naturally, we count you Swiss as offshoots of the German nation," Nazi 
historian Ewald Banse, author of one of the textbooks, commented. 
Swiss newspapers and officials attacked his conception. Theodore 
Fischer, the leader of Switzerland's tiny pro-German faction, promised 
the country would be liberated from its status as a "vassal state of 
France under Jewish control."

Federal Councillor Jean Marie Musy, the Swiss finance minister, spoke 
for most of the country when he promised that Switzerland would 
"remain a democracy or cease to be Switzerland." The "racial ideal," 
he said, "can never be the basis of Swiss nationality." Defense 
Minister Minger echoed: "Events abroad have reawoken Switzerland's 
ancient defiance and the feelings for justice and liberty have been 
renewed."

In the following twelve months the Swiss banned the wearing of 
uniforms by political parties; expanded the period for basic military 
training by twenty days; increased the defense budget by more than 30 
percent; enacted additional protections for the press against German 
threats and complaints; expelled German agents who were trolling 
through Zürich and Basel hoping to identify private bank transfers 
made by Jews; and rejected an initiative, supported by the small 
national socialist group, calling for greater centralized economic 
planning such as enacted in Germany, Italy, and the United States.

The Swiss people signaled their support for these measures whenever 
tested. In some ways they were more anti-German than their leaders. In 
1935, the Communist Party and others challenged the near doubling of 
defense expenditures in a national vote - a "facultative" referendum. 
They lost, 54 percent to 46 percent. This was the height of the Great 
Depression in Switzerland. It was the only significant facultative 
referendum between 1929 and 1946 that passed. And it was the only one 
between 1916and 1946 that passed while calling for significant 
government expenditures.

>From 1933 to 1937, land cultivation in Switzerland doubled. While 
there were government incentive programs, a large portion of the 
increase was the result of appeals to the Swiss people to increase the 
country's food supply voluntarily. On the eve of the war, the 
government asked for volunteers for extra military home defense units. 
The council hoped to find 20,000 to 30,000 able boys and old men who 
could shuttle ammunition to key points, aid in communications, and 
perform similar duties. Within three months, more than 200,000 had 
volunteered.

Popular war preparations accelerated in the spring of 1938, as Hitler 
swallowed Austria. This made Switzerland, as The New York Times noted, 
"a democratic peninsula in a politically autocratic and economically 
autarchic league." A few days later, the Socialist Party of Basel, the 
city with the closest ties to Germany, collected signatures for an 
initiative to criminalize membership in the Nazi Party. The initiative 
achieved the highest number of signatures ever seen in the city. The 
national parliament, meanwhile, had also approved a significant 
revision of the penal code. Among other things, it allowed persons 
charged with treason and other collaboration with the enemy - 
including civilians - to be tried by military courts. This change was 
challenged in a facultative referendum, but the new law was approved 
in July, 1938, with 54 percent support.

In December, 1940, the leading Nazi group was banned and its leaders 
arrested. In the United States, by contrast, Nazi groups, though 
small, were still active. America completed its second consecutive 
year of more than $100 million in trade with the Nazis as Henry Luce 
and others tried (with little initial success) to rally popular 
support for aid to Britain and other Nazi foes. The Swiss, of course, 
faced a much greater threat than the Americans did in the 1930s, and 
indeed throughout the war; they had more reason to prepare for the 
Nazis.

Figure 18.2 compares Swiss military expenditures with those of other 
European countries in dollars per capita for 1937. These figures 
understate the relative Swiss resistance to Nazism, because of the 
popular nature of the Swiss Army, which incorporated 400,000 members, 
expanding to more than 750,000 during an actual attack. The former 
figure meant that Switzerland, in 1938, had approximately 10 percent 
of the population under arms. Only Finland (8 percent) and Belgium (8 
percent) compare favorably and even these are significantly below the 
lower Swiss figure. The Netherlands (5 percent), Norway (4 percent), 
Denmark (4 percent), and France (3 percent) were even lower.

The Swiss looked not only to physical measures, but also to 
psychological and even metaphysical ones as well. In 1937, Federal 
Councillor Philipp Etter published a book entitled Geistige 
Landesverteidung - roughly, Spiritual Defense. The book was a Swiss 
best seller and reportedly was distributed

Table 18.1
Meeting the Nazi Threat Military Spending per Capita, 1935

Finland 24.9
Switzerland 22.6
Belgium 19.7
Norway 17.9
The Netherlands 16.5
Denmark 14.3
Austria 11.9
(in 1935 Swiss francs)

Source: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution research memorandum, 1999, 
from national data and population figures.
---

widely in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and other soon-to-be "possessions 
of the German Reich," as Hitler termed them.

'The German people will never forget the attitude of the Swiss during 
this war," growled the Frankfurter Zeitung on December 2, 1940. "A 
nation of 80,000,000, while fighting for bare existence, finds itself 
almost uninterruptedly attacked, insulted, and slandered by the 
newspapers of a minuscule country whose government claims to be 
neutral."

The pages above place a lot of emphasis on Swiss actions prior to the 
German Blitzkrieg of France in the spring of 1940 and in the immediate 
months that followed. There's a good reason. We learn a lot about 
Swiss hopes and intentions during the period when Nazism was reaching 
its zenith. This was the time when Denmark, Belgium, and Austria were 
either giving up without a fight, or fighting but offering only a few 
days or weeks (France) of resistance.

On June 14, a Friday in 1940, Paris fell. The Swiss, neutral to the 
teeth, were already aggressively engaged in the defense of their 
national territory against "all potential aggressors" - i.e., Hitler. 
American entry into the war was still more than 500 days away, 
awaiting Pearl Harbor and the gratuitous German declaration of war 
hours later. The following Monday, June 17, General Henri Guisan - 
elected to head the Swiss war effort shortly after the German invasion 
of Poland - called together the Swiss general staff to discuss 
preparations for the defense of Switzerland against a possible 
occupation by the Nazis. Late in June, as the German-French truce 
became effective, German Captain Otto Wilhelm von Menges submitted a 
plan for an attack on Switzerland to the German general staff. On July 
25, Guisan and the Swiss general staff gathered in Luzern to boat down 
the lake to the banks of the Rütli, where they renewed the sacred oath 
of their ancestors from 1291 and the Bundesbrief. Author Stephen 
Halbrook paints the scene:

  On a beautiful day, Guisan faced the senior officers of the army 
standing in a semicircle on the Rütli Meadow, facing the lake. Canton 
Uri's flag of the Battalion 87 flew above. Addressing the measures 
taken "for the resistance in the reduit," Guisan ordered "resistance 
to all aggression." He continued: "Here, soldiers of 1940, we will 
inspire ourselves with the lessons and spirit of the past to envisage 
resolution of the present and future of the country, to hear the 
mysterious call that pervades this meadow."

Swiss elite troops had already been on active duty for almost a year - 
they were called up on August 25, 1939. "The country has one tenth of 
its population under arms; more than any other in the world," William 
Shirer diarized. "They're ready to defend their way of life."

Switzerland's orders for organization of "the entire army for 
resistance" promised the Germans that Switzerland as a nation would 
never capitulate - even if its government did. The order was posted 
all over the country both to reassure the people and to warn the 
Germans. In the event of attack, it said, the Swiss would be notified 
"through poster, radio, courier, town crier, storm bells, and the 
dropping of leaflets from airplanes." The response would not be 
limited to formal military groups acting as official units. "All 
soldiers and those with them are to attack with ruthlessness 
parachutists, airborne infantry, and saboteurs. Where no officers and 
noncommissioned officers are present, each soldier acts under exertion 
of all powers of his own initiative." Bearing in mind the case of 
other countries which had been intimidated into surrendering because 
of the capitulation of the national leadership, the order continued:

  If by radio, leaflets, or other media any information is transmitted 
doubting the will of the Federal Council or of the Army High Command 
to resist an attacker, this information must be regarded as lies of 
enemy propaganda. Our country will resist the aggression with all 
means in its power and to the bitter end.

In effect, the government was committing itself and the people to what 
Etter had called "total spiritual warfare." They deprived themselves 
of the ability to surrender even if they later wanted too: Swiss army 
units and citizens were under orders to ignore reports of such a 
decision and continue fighting.

All this makes it easy to understand the Swiss frustration at 
accusations that their country was in complicity with the Nazis during 
World War II. In fact, the Swiss people put up stiffer resistance, 
against greater odds, to the Germans than those of any other country. 
As Walter Lippmann, responding to an article in a U.S. magazine 
implying Switzerland was "occupied" by the Germans, wrote in January, 
1943:

  The Swiss nation is entirely surrounded by Axis armies, beyond reach 
of any help from the democracies.... Switzerland, which cannot live 
without trading with the surrounding Axis countries, still is an 
independent democracy....

That is the remarkable thing about Switzerland. The real news is not 
that her factories make munitions for Germany but that the Swiss have 
an army which stands guard against invasion, that their frontiers are 
defended, that their free institutions continue to exist, and that 
there has been no Swiss Quisling, and no Swiss Laval. The Swiss 
remained true to themselves even in the darkest days of 1940 and 1941, 
when it seemed that nothing but the valor of the British and the blind 
faith of free men elsewhere stood between Hitler and the creation of a 
totalitarian new order in Europe.

Surely, if ever the honor of a people was put to the test, the honor 
of the Swiss was tested and proved then and there... .They have 
demonstrated that the traditions of freedom can be stronger than the 
ties of race and of language and economic interest.

"Switzerland stands today as an island in a Nazi ocean," The New York 
Times echoed in a January 28 editorial. Referring to German 
publications that continually described Switzerland as a country 
harboring, and dominated by, Jews, the Times added, "perhaps the Swiss 
didn't mind being called a 'medley of criminals, particularly Jews.' 
To be called a criminal by a Nazi is to receive a high compliment. To 
be called a Jew by a Nazi is to be classed with those who have 
suffered martyrdom for freedom's sake."

Over the nine years of Swiss vulnerability, the Germans developed more 
than a dozen attack plans for Switzerland which were discussed at the 
highest military levels. These included deliberations by Hitler 
himself in 1934, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945. 
Except for a respite in 1941-42 while the German army was occupied 
with the assault on Russia - which ended as the Nazi retreat from 
Russia raised interest in grabbing Switzerland as a final redoubt - 
the Swiss were under near-constant peril.

"We woke up every morning and looked over the Rhein," a Jewish woman 
who lived in Basel comments, "and wondered whether the Germans would 
be invading that day." The woman, who asked that her name be withheld, 
said that her family attempted several times to emigrate to the United 
States. This was not because they were ill-treated in Switzerland - 
she lives near Davos where her husband is in a nursing home - but 
because they knew that if the Nazis did invade, they would be primary 
targets. They were, however, turned down, as were most appeals for 
asylum by European Jews to the U.S. State Department.

Why didn't the Germans actually seize Switzerland? The answer does not 
lie in any especially beneficial economic relationship. Swiss supplies 
of machinery to the Germans never totaled more than 3 percent of 
industrial production for a month, and averaged less than 2 percent 
over the war. Invasion would not have jeopardized much of this total 
because the Germans could seize most of the factories in the flat, 
Northern strip of the country that is most easily occupied.

The answer lies in German estimates that concluded that it would take 
anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 men to subdue the country, followed 
by a smaller but still substantial occupation presence. Had they done 
this as well, the Germans were assured, the Swiss would destroy the 
tunnel and bridges through the Alps, depriving the Nazis of the most 
direct connection to their Italian allies. Such a move, in combination 
with German occupation of the Northern plain, would also have 
effectively destroyed the Swiss economy. It would have meant death for 
many Swiss and internees (including Jews) who lived there; the rest 
would have been, like other occupied populations, Nazi hostages. But 
the Swiss repeatedly assured the Germans that they would take this 
step and they mined key transportation points so as to be able to 
carry that threat out almost the instant Nazi troops crossed the 
frontier.

A retired Swiss official who was part of the economic planning team 
during the war told me that in regular meetings the Germans repeatedly 
threatened both occupation and personal violence against the Swiss 
officials who were standing up to the German demands. "We were never 
belligerent back," he said, "but we did calmly and repeatedly refer 
them to our government's policies for dealing with those 
eventualities, which were published and repeated often to make sure 
they understood that our government and our people intended to carry 
them out."

In the context of all the country's actions, the Swiss threat to 
commit suicide - but pull Germany down as they went; a reciprocating 
Mosada - apparently struck the Germans as credible. "The Swiss are 
just the people," as The New York Times observed, "if pushed a mite 
too far, who would prefer to starve or die fighting rather than give 
in. Because they are that kind of people, they may not have to prove 
it in action."

Hitler seemed to sense this determination in the Swiss, and, as a 
result, had a loathing for them as a nation that rivaled his hatred of 
Winston Churchill as an individual and the Jews as a people.

At a war-planning conference with Mussolini in 1940, Hitler and the 
Italian dictator discussed what Hitler saw as the need to occupy 
Switzerland, to put an end to its "insolent defiance" of the New 
Europe and "collaboration with and harboring of the Jews." Later that 
year, Hitler learned of the delivery of precision engineering products 
from Switzerland to England, and flew into a tantrum. He immediately 
ordered his generals to draw up fresh invasion plans and described 
Bern - accurately - as the "center of international spying against 
Germany." Again in 1941, Hitler and the Italian dictator traded 
insulting characterizations of Switzerland, discussing the matter for 
more than half an hour. "The Führer characterized Switzerland as the 
most despicable and wretched people," recalled an aide who attended 
the meeting - the Swiss were, he later said, a "bastard" nation 
because of the intermingling of German blood with those of inferior 
races. "They frankly opposed the Reich," Hitler said, "hoping that by 
parting from the common destiny of the German people, they would be 
better off." Discussing his plans for the post-war economic order, 
Hitler said: "As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as 
hotel-keepers."

The Swiss press was a constant irritant to Hitler. It was not just 
what it said about him, but the very fact of its freedom. In July of 
1942, Hitler encountered Swiss press reports about the military 
strength of Soviet Russia. "Not only in England and America," Hitler 
groaned, but in Switzerland, "the population believes in Jewish 
claptrap." The Jews, he told an aide, must have special influence with 
the Swiss, because they cared about little other than grain prices, 
cows, and clocks. That August, impatient with the estimates of his 
generals that the Germans would need perhaps 500,000 men to subdue 
Switzerland - many times the relative troop strength used to conquer 
France - the Führer launched into another tirade about the Swiss.

"A state like Switzerland," Hitler told his staff, "which is nothing 
but a pimple on the face of Europe, cannot be allowed to continue." 
The wording is revealing: The Swiss state, for Hitler, must not be 
suffered even to continue. To the Reich, Switzerland's existence was 
an offense.

It was no accident that Hitler linked the Jews with the Swiss in many 
of his eruptions. Although many Jewish refugees were turned away at 
the Swiss border, thousands, particularly children and families with 
children, were accepted. (More by far than were welcomed by any other 
country in per capita terms.) The resulting Swiss ratio of rejection 
to acceptance was not nearly high enough to please the Führer. "The 
Jew must get out of Europe," he exploded at a meeting a few days after 
the infamous Wannsee Conference, where the plan to annihilate the Jews 
was drawn into a grisly blueprint. "Out of Switzerland and out of 
Sweden, they must be driven out."

Like the Finns and the Poles, the Swiss had the special honor of 
confronting both the German and Russian dictators, and exciting their 
special contempt. At the Yalta conference in 1944, Stalin proposed the 
invasion and occupation of Switzerland - ostensibly to foreclose the 
German option of using it to stage a final defense. The allies 
refused, and that night, in a conversation with Molotov, Stalin 
denounced the Swiss as a "contemptible little nation of bankers and 
farmers," and somewhere, Lenin, Bismarck, and Metternich smiled in 
agreement. Several months later, Churchill commented on the discussion 
in a memorandum to his foreign secretary:

  I put this down for the record. Of all the neutrals, Switzerland has 
the greatest right to distinction. She has been the sole international 
force linking the hideously surrendered nations and ourselves. What 
does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial 
advantages we desire or has given too many to the Germans, to keep 
herself alive?

Swiss today, particularly those who remember the war, are proud of 
Hitler's special disdain. They are, accordingly, hurt and angry at 
accusations that their country was complicit in any way with the Nazi 
regime. For all the superficial similarities of race and language, one 
can argue that there is not a country in the world that less resembles 
Nazi Germany than Switzerland.

 It is impossible to evaluate Switzerland's total moral position, if 
you will, in World War II without mentioning the country's positive 
contribution to the escape of thousands of Jews and other refugees 
from the Nazis. Figure 18.3 compares the per capita number of refugees 
accepted by the Swiss to those taken in by the United States, Great 
Britain, and France.

These figures understate the contribution the Swiss made to the 
protection of Jews and other refugees from Hitler's destruction, as 
the country was economically isolated for most of the period. The 
relative sacrifice made by the Swiss to care for several hundred 
thousand total refugees, interned prisoners, and others was even 
larger than the graphic suggests.

Statistics, moreover, omit the human face of Switzerland's 
humanitarian mission. One such flesh-and-blood contribution was made 
by Mr. and Mrs. Carl Lutz.

Carl Lutz was born in 1895 in Appenzell, the second youngest of ten 
children. He emigrated to the United States at age eighteen to work in 
a factory in Granite City, Illinois, not far from East St. Louis. For 
most of the 1920s he worked in assorted Swiss diplomatic offices in 
the U.S. Eventually, the Swiss Foreign Office appointed Lutz as a 
consular official in Jaffa, Palestine, where he served from 1935 to 
1939, an eyewitness to the Arab-Jewish conflicts. While there, he also 
helped some 2,500 Jewish emigrants from Germany to escape deportation 
by the British as illegal aliens.

>From 1942 to 1944, Lutz worked closely with the Jewish Agency of 
Palestine, headed by Moshe Krausz, to document and transport an 
estimated 10,000 Jewish children and young adults to (what would soon 
become) Israel. Some were orphans, others had parents who had been 
deported. Most had been smuggled to Hungary from other countries 
(Poland, Czechoslovakia,

Table 18.2
Havens from the Holocast

Jewish Refugees from Germany Accepted per 1 Million Persons in 
Country's 1930 Population

1933-38
1933-45

United States
650
900

Great Britain
1,400
1,600

Sweden
550
1,500

France
850
1,100

Holland
1,000
n.a

Denmark
750
850

Belgium
1,700
1,900

Switzerland
2,200
8,100

Source: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution from figures from the UN. 
High Commission on Refugees, Yad Vashem, and the Statistical Yearbook 
of the National Immigration and Naturalization Service.
---

even Germany itself) by Chalutzim, Jewish pioneers. To evade the 
authorities, Lutz used British-approved Palestine Certificates, which 
he countersigned and supplemented with Swiss Schutzbriefe, protective 
"letters of transit."

In March of 1944, the Nazis, who had dominated the country but 
refrained from blatant interference, occupied all of Hungary, imposing 
a hand-picked government. On March 21, the Nazi regent closed the 
borders to all further emigration. This blocked some 8,000 Jews who 
should have been free to leave. Lutz demanded their immediate, 
unconditional release. But soon the problem was much greater than a 
matter of 8,000 emigrants waiting to leave. Though Lutz did not yet 
know it, SS Chief Adolf Eichmann, aided by the puppet government, had 
already made plans to deport all 762,000 Jews in Hungary to the 
Auschwitz concentration camp. The situation grew even more acute in 
October when the Arrow-Cross Party, the most extreme of the pro-German 
factions, came to power. The Nazis, feeling the circle closing around 
them, decided to slaughter as many Jews as they could through low-
technology methods: the infamous death march of November 1944, when 
more than 70,000 Jews were scourged towards the Austrian border.

Working against the Nazis and the clock, Lutz and his wife used every 
legal method they could think of to bring Jews under his protection. 
They used many illegal methods as well. When the Germans promised to 
respect the protection of the 8,000 visas he had issued, but only 
provided he issue no more, Lutz agreed in order to gain time. In the 
meantime he continued to print visas, perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 - but 
always numbering them between 1 and 8,000, so that if individuals were 
stopped and produced their papers, it might appear there had been no 
duplication of visas. "This idea," the Encyclopedia of the Houlocaust 
reports, "served as a model for various types of protective letters 
issued by other neutral countries and by the International Red Cross."

When the Germans caught on to this device, Lutz transferred his 
mission's emigration department to the now-famous Glass House on 
Vadasz Street, placing the building under his diplomatic immunity. He 
assembled several dozen leaders of the Jewish Community to act as 
liaisons, and collected thousands of photographs and signatures in a 
few days. Lutz then issued a series of "collective passports," 
covering some 40,000 persons in chunks of 1,000 and more apiece. Again 
the Nazis eventually penetrated the legal ruse, but it took time, and 
with the help of some of the Hungarians, Lutz had stalled the game out 
still further.

The Lutzes formed a circle of sympathetic diplomats from the other 
neutrals, such as papal nuncio Angelo Rotta, to build a network of 
safe houses throughout the city where Jews could be placed under his 
protection. He bought apartment buildings with help from sympathetic 
officials in the government and transferred several thousand Jews to 
them. When Eichmann and the SS demanded that the Jews of Budapest be 
concentrated in one spot to facilitate deportation, Lutz persuaded 
Hungarian officials to provide him with more than seventy protective 
houses within the ghetto, in the Szent-Istvan area of Budapest. This 
bought precious weeks for the more than 30,000 Schutzbrief holders 
that Lutz placed there. Lutz also acted as a mentor to other 
diplomats, such as Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, recruiting them to the 
cause and sharing his methods. By the end of the war these men and 
women formed a wide network.

At times, the task was truly grim. Several times in the fall of 1944 
and winter of 1945, Lutz and his wife were hauled out late at night to 
the Obuda brickyard. On those occasions, the Nazis would line up Jews 
holding authentic and forged Schutzbriefe with identical numbers, 
demanding that Lutz decide which documents were legitimate and which 
were not. If he did not so indicate, the SS guards were under orders 
to simply deport all the assembled Jews. In effect, Lutz was being 
asked to determine which people should live and which were sentenced 
to death. After one such session, Lutz feared he was near a breakdown, 
and his wife asked if they should consider leaving the country. The 
next day, there was an attempt on Lutz's life, one of several apparent 
efforts by the SS officers on hand.

Like the border guards and Swiss families who regularly allowed Jews 
across the Swiss border, Lutz did not have the support of his 
government - nor of the British and American governments he 
represented. More than one exchange between Bern and London indicates 
that the two states contemplated recalling Lutz - London because it 
did not want so many Jews sent to Palestine, Bern because it worried 
Lutz's methods would compromise Swiss neutrality.

Lutz worked to make sure Western governments and eventually Western 
publics understood what was at stake. When two prisoners escaped from 
Auschwitz and related the grisly reality of what was taking place 
there, he immediately dispatched an urgent report to his superiors in 
Bern and London. When these official channels failed to act, he 
scurried copies of key documents to a friend who had taken an 
assignment as a representative of El Salvador. The news of Auschwitz 
broke in the Swiss press and soon produced an outcry in Paris, London, 
and New York. Lutz, of course, was risking his job and his life with 
each such maneuver.

The reward came in the frantic spring of 1945, as Russian troops 
closed in and the Nazis moved to slaughter as many Jews as possible 
before having to retreat. As the Soviet artillery neared, Lutz and his 
wife had to take cover in an isolated part of the city and were 
trapped for some weeks, out of contact with the world and unable to 
determine whether their efforts had even succeeded. Not long before 
the actual surrender of Germany, Lutz himself was liberated from his 
cellar in Pest.

The letters, the safe houses, the bribes, and the leaks had saved, by 
a conservative calculation, some 62,000 lives. It measures the 
magnitude of the Holocaust to consider that this total was less than 1 
percent of the number put to death by Hitler's Germany. On the other 
hand, this was the work of one Swiss citizen.

Though Lutz was in a position to render aid on a large scale, there 
were many Swiss who helped save others from the Hitler death camps one 
victim at a time. Official Swiss policy was to turn away all would-be 
entrants without passports, Jewish (whose passports carried a 
stigmatizing "J") and otherwise. But the feelings of the Swiss people 
were considerably more liberal, and families, sometimes whole 
communities, were willing to defy their own government.

Leopold Koss, now a doctor in New York City, was a beneficiary of this 
quiet heroism as he sought to escape the German occupation of France 
in 1942:

  On August 24 or 25, 1942 - I no longer remember the exact date - I 
crossed the French-Swiss border illegally on foot....The odds of being 
arrested in France as a Polish Jew and former soldier, and sent to a 
German concentration camp, were extremely high.

On the way to my destination, I heard that although the official 
policies of the Swiss government were against acceptance of refugees 
and that many (including some friends of mine) were returned to France 
or into the hands of the Gestapo, there was a recent swell of public 
opinion to open the border. In fact, a woman on the train, perhaps 
guessing my destination, handed me an article in the Journal de 
Geneve, published some days before, openly exhorting the government to 
open the borders to the victims of Nazi persecution. Apparently 
similar articles appeared in August 1942 in the German-speaking press, 
notably the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

I entered Switzerland without difficulty and was soon several 
kilometers inland, not having been molested by anyone. Rather 
exhausted, hungry and thirsty, I voluntarily entered the barracks of a 
military unit... I was fed and offered a cot. The soldiers, simple 
Swiss citizens, couldn't have been nicer.

The next day... I was interrogated by a police officer who promptly 
informed me that I was to be sent back to France as an illegal alien. 
However, he consented to listen to my story, told through tears, and 
offered to inquire of the authorities in Bern what should be done with 
me. I discovered shortly thereafter that there was a group of at least 
30 men in the same predicament.... We were all treated with great 
consideration by the police and the guards. A few days later we were 
apparently accepted and sent to a camp for political refugees - 
Belchasse. I spent several months in Belchasse, followed by several 
months in a labor camp in Aesch-bei-Birmensdorf, near Zürich. It was 
hardly luxury - but it was safe. I only wish my parents and my sister, 
who stayed in Poland, could have been with me. They all perished.

In September 1943, I was allowed to resume my studies of medicine in 
Bern. During the three and a half years that I spent at the University 
of Bern, I never had to pay any tuition.... The federal police, to 
whom I had to report on a weekly and then a monthly basis, were 
increasingly friendly.... In fact, as I was leaving Switzerland for 
the United States in 1947 to start a new life, they addressed their 
last communications to me with the title, "doctor," better than the 
previous "refugee."

Dr. Koss remains grateful to the Swiss - and takes issue with the 
"dreary image" of wartime Switzerland presented by some Western 
governments and press reports. "There was another wartime Switzerland,
" he says - one "very remote" from the portrait of "greed and 
collusion with the Nazis" that some present. Indeed, Koss writes:

  The Swiss have not only saved my life and that of many thousands of 
other refugees, but also gave me an outstanding education that has 
allowed me to forge a successful scientific career in the United 
States. I am now 76 years old and eternally grateful to the Swiss 
people for what they have done for me.

The question is not whether Switzerland or countries such as Britain 
and the U.S. did enough to stop the Holocaust. None did. The question, 
rather, is whether any countries did more to liberate Jews and other 
potential victims of the Nazi death camps, or began a firm (and 
unwavering) resistance to Hitler earlier than the Swiss. If there are 
any, they are few.

Note

1. Like many Jews, Bär's family left Europe in 1941 because of the 
threat from Nazi Germany. Whole companies - Julius Bär, Credit Suisse, 
Nestlé, and others - moved their headquarters overseas. Most went to 
the U.S., some to Latin America.


 19 Diversity

"In Switzerland, minorities are not tolerated. They are favored." A. 
Togni

As the country eases into social peace and unity, it is easy to forget 
that, for most of its life, Switzerland was gripped by Europe's 
grudges. Alexis de Tocqueville summed up the Swiss situation in 1835 
as follows:

  One people, composed of several races, speaking several languages; 
with several religious beliefs, various dissident sects, two churches 
both equally established and privileged; all religious questions 
turning into political ones, and all political questions turning 
quickly into religious ones - in short, two societies, one very old 
and the other very young, joined in marriage in spite of the age 
difference. That is a fair sketch of Switzerland.

Even today, Switzerland suffers from natural divisions any one of 
which would severely strain national solidarity in most countries. The 
Swiss have three major languages, each of which is the home language 
to a powerful nation and culture on the Swiss frontier. Those national 
cultures along the Swiss border - in many cases less separated by 
natural boundaries from their affinity group than the three major 
Swiss language populations are from one another - have been an 
entropic magnet, always urging the country apart. "Nature has hindered 
movement and exchange within the country," as American sociologist 
Carol Schmid observes, "more than with the neighboring countries of 
the same language group."(1)

Ethnic Italians, Germans, French, Jews, and Arabs - groups that 
haven't been able to get along anywhere else for centuries - swirl 
together within a work force more than one-fifth foreign born. The 
country has long been home to two of the sternest Protestant sects in 
the world, the followers of Calvin and Zwingli, and to a highly 
orthodox Roman Catholic population in the Forest Cantons. For hundreds 
of years these sects have held sway in various cantons and communities 
not merely as the religion of preference, but as state-sponsored 
churches. Scholars and historians comparing Switzerland to such 
multilingual nations as Belgium, Canada, India, Nigeria, and South 
Africa are intrigued at the degree to which the Swiss have managed to 
form a bona fide nation.

It is tempting to call the result a melting pot. Yet this would not be 
accurate. The Swiss system is held together by something, but it does 
not homogenize its members. In the United States, ethnic groups tend - 
when not burdened by perverse incentives - to learn English, adopt 
American customs, and thus, gradually, become one people in many 
practices. The Swiss blend together on some customs, but tend to 
retain their mother tongue. They learn to cooperate with others who 
speak a different language, and, to an extent seen in few other 
countries, tend to learn one or more tongues outside their first.

Visiting Switzerland today, one remarks at the smoothness with which 
the Swiss handle their three-way language barrier. At first you notice 
it everywhere. And then, after a while, you hardly notice it at all.

Riding from Bern to Geneva, the train crosses over an invisible 
cantonal border - and the conductor shifts effortlessly from German to 
French. The P.A. announcements continue to be in both languages, but 
now French is first, and is spoken by the same voice with a nearly 
perfect accent.

In a court room, one of the more formal and tense of situations, the 
participants deal in their language of choice - with a translator if 
necessary, though it seldom is if the languages are German, French, 
Italian, or even English. In some cases, a listener simply followed 
along in his second or third language where possible, then asked for a 
translation if needed. What struck me in several different courts was 
the matter-of-fact way in which language was simply dealt with. In 
some ways, there seemed an advantage in the occasional pause for 
translation. The hiatuses cut against any buildup of emotion of the 
type one often sees even in an American traffic court. It never 
caused, in my experience, significant friction. In general, as one 
might expect, in dealings with the government poly-lingualism is 
visible and its costs seem high. In almost any settings where 
government documents are on display, one will see four or five stacks 
of everything - always German and French, and frequently in Italian, 
English, or Romansch. Even small public buildings or services often 
seem to have a second or third official around who appears to be there 
in large part to communicate with the occasional Italian, English, or 
Romansch speaker.

Restaurant menus are normally printed in the language of the district, 
though in the larger and more cosmopolitan cities there are invariably 
French or German subtexts; occasionally Italian and English ones as 
well. In German-speaking Switzerland, even in relatively remote parts 
of Schwyz, Uri, Glarus, or Appenzell, my informal survey found that 
more than 90 percent of the people could hold a basic conversation 
outside of German - either in French or English. An American asking 
for directions in Switzerland would, in many regions, have less 
difficulty than if he or she were to visit a convenience store or a 
gas station in the U.S. These statistics far exceed the levels one 
obtains from more formal surveys, but the problem with the formal 
studies is that they seek a higher level of competence than my 
informal test. The level at which a Swiss calls himself or another 
Swiss competent in a language is higher than the level at which a 
taxicab driver or office security guard might be able to communicate, 
with a few added hand signs or occasional German word, with another.

Language, for the Swiss, is the object of a whole invisible 
superstructure of conventions and assumptions and social devices. When 
a group of three Swiss, already conversing in German, is joined by a 
Swiss they know to be much more comfortable in French - and if they do 
not know at first, the Swiss are adept at finding out, so well-tuned 
is their ear - then the existing line of conversation will shift into 
French. On the other hand, an Italian-speaking Swiss, joining a larger 
group, will resist being spoken to in Italian - feeling that surely 
some of those present will not be comfortable in that language. He 
will attempt to steer the conversation back to German - or the whole 
group will ease into French, which as the second language of choice 
for both German-speaking and Italian-speaking Swiss, is a handy unit 
of exchange. In this way, everyone in the room is making some slight 
adjustment, but no one feels patronized or patronizing.

Interestingly, even "German-speaking" Swiss do not speak true German - 
but rather one of more than a dozen highly particularized local 
dialects. "High German," as is used in Germany and Austria more 
broadly, is virtually always used in Swiss written documents, even 
unimportant ones. This sets off a whole further set of practices and 
distinctions. One important effect of these dialects is to make all 
German Swiss into quasi-minorities. As German speakers they add up to 
a majority, but no dialect is anything more than a tiny minority. The 
dialects also reinforce a certain Swiss pride in separation from 
Germany and Austria. If one wants to insult a German-speaking Swiss on 
a number of levels, one need only tell him that his German sounds like 
the German spoken in Bonn or Berlin.

The Swiss linguistic codes are subtle, unwritten, seldom even 
articulated. Probably for this reason they even vary occasionally from 
one Swiss to another.(2) But they exist - and are part of a whole 
ethos of adaptivity and businesslike consideration that is the essence 
of Swiss culture and society.

In almost any social setting where a group of Swiss who didn't know me 
(or my origins) came into contact with me, they made a tangible effort 
to determine as quickly as possible what my primary language was, and 
to use it. Generally this took place within thirty seconds - though my 
later practice of speaking French in German-speaking cantons, and 
German in the French-speaking ones often achieved a delay of up to 
several minutes before my Americanism was ferreted out.

Watching the Swiss in these situations is like watching a beautiful 
waltz or minuet danced by a couple emphasizing grace and simplicity, 
not flair. There are few excesses, no gaudy shows, only an easy 
agility. In America, the non-English speaker is met with a kind of 
benign arrogance - the lovable but ugly American at home, who will 
raise his voice and say to the Japanese tourist very slowly "It's next 
to the World Trade Center." Germans now exert at least a friendly 
helpless cultural smile, "nein, kann kein Englisch," in situations 
where in Switzerland, there would be a prompt turn to a colleague and 
a resolution. In France, there is an active contempt; even the 
Frenchman who can speak English will often abstain from doing so, as 
if exacting some petty revenge. Even in Belgium (Flemish and French) 
or Canada (French and English) the determination of one party or 
another to assert his linguistic heritage sometimes makes one feel he 
is in a battle zone. The quiet dance of the tongues is one of the most 
endearing elements of Swiss society, and this facility for dancing, 
developed in one sphere, contributes to balance and grace in a host of 
others.

How have the Swiss achieved this facility at languages - and more 
broadly, a national facility, almost an article of patriotism, for 
listening and adapting to other languages, practices, and cultures? 
The answer is a mixture of history, special factors, deliberate 
policy, and predictable (but not necessarily intended) aspects of 
policy - a tapestry of causes and effects. And yet, behind the 
picture, or abstracting from it, are strong unifying themes, such as 
the Willensnation concept of a people determined to be a people, 
adhering by free choice to a credo of democratic ideals.

We can divide the causes of Switzerland's adaptation to diversity into 
three general groups. The first group consists of historical factors 
and accidents: some of them purely random - true "accidents" - and 
others a mixture of luck and institutions. The second group consists 
of deliberate acts of policy, such as intensive instruction in second 
and even third languages in Swiss schools. The third group is composed 
of deliberate policies or institutions that do not have assimilation 
as their primary aim, but which nevertheless contribute to it. In this 
group are a whole range of Swiss institutions from the army to the 
people's strong patriotism and its basis in a set of shared ideals.

Facts, Tendencies, and Happy Accidents

Perhaps the most important fact about Switzerland's various groups is 
that there are a number of them, and they tend to criss-cross and 
overlap. There's a sufficient diversity of different societal 
groupings (race, language, religion) and of different levels of 
government and other institutions so that most Swiss are in some 
important minority and some majority groups - particularly if one 
considers more than one unit of society. Meanwhile the highly fluid, 
nonpartisan, multiparty structure of Swiss politics brings these 
groups into regular coalitions and cooperative enterprises. Much as 
Madison counted on a multiplicity of special interests to act as a 
check on one another in The Federalist, so Swiss society defuses some 
of the rigid rivalries that have formed in other countries divided 
into groups.

Religion and language cross-cuts offer one good illustration. In 
Switzerland as a whole, Roman Catholics are a minority in the 
population and a minority in the population of most cantons, albeit a 
growing one. And, of course, the majority of Swiss people and of 
cantons are primarily German-speaking. Yet there are many German-
speaking Catholics in Switzerland, as well as French-speaking 
Protestants. Anyone who belongs to one of these groups is in one 
national minority already.

The picture gets more subtle and interesting when we look at the 
cantonal level. A German-speaking Swiss Catholic who now lives in the 
Ticino, the Southern, Italian-speaking portion of the country, is in a 
national majority as to language and a cantonal majority as to 
religion, but is in a cantonal minority as to language and a national 
minority as to religion. A French Protestant in Geneva is in the 
cantonal minority but the national majority in his religion; but his 
is in the cantonal majority and national minority as to his primary 
language.

"It is one of the fortunate accidents of Swiss history," Carol Schmid 
writes, "that the linguistic and religious boundaries do not coincide. 
Language conflict was moderated, since both religions had their 
adherents in every language area." The Swiss have learned to respect 
one another's rights as minorities - and, at the same time, the right 
of local majorities to run schools, churches, and other institutions 
by the language and faith of their heritage.

These dynamics become more powerful, not less, when we broaden our 
scope and look at other group characteristics and interests. 
Sociologist Jurg Steiner writes: "There is usually a cross-cutting 
rather than a cumulative separation between political parties, 
economic interest groups, voluntary associations, and newspapers."

Zürich, for instance, is considered a center of German culture, 
wealth, and Protestantism. Yet it ranks behind French Geneva and 
Catholic Zug in per capita income. In economic matters, the French 
cantons have tended to vote for social democratic programs - higher 
spending, higher taxes, greater federal powers. On cultural matters, 
however, the French Swiss emphasize federalism and autonomy. Several 
French cantons (Geneva, Vaud, and Neuchatel) are among the most 
affluent in Switzerland, though shaken by 1990s fiscal crisis and tax 
incentives. "The disparities are far greater within each linguistic 
group than between them," Schmid notes.

The populations of the Italian-speaking cantons, being a distinct 
minority nationally (about 5 percent of citizens and 9 percent of the 
resident population), naturally view with reserve any proposal that 
might empower Bern, or erode local identity and autonomy. The federal 
government has proved a friend in some instances, however - for 
example, in sponsoring language programs in the Ticino and the 
Grisons, to preserve the Italian language and culture as well as 
Romansch. Though less than 1 percent of Swiss nationally speak 
Romansch, it is the primary language of almost one-fifth of the people 
in Grisons canton. Hence the Italian Swiss have some suspicion of the 
federal government, but also a certain affinity for it.

Yet these myriad divisions could simply balkanize the Swiss further. 
Furthermore, some of these same criss-crosses are present today in 
multilingual societies that do not enjoy Switzerland's harmony. So 
there must be added explanations and factors that explain why the 
system does not simply fly apart - some kind of binding that, while 
allowing freedom of movement, holds the parts together as well.

A history and ethic of inclusion. Switzerland's tradition of accepting 
immigrants, small border states, and relying on foreign trade for much 
of its commerce has fostered a spirit of inclusion among the people 
and their institutions. The history is as old as 1291 and the effort 
of the Forest Cantons to form relationships with the powerful cities 
and peoples of Bern and Zürich, or accept Protestant and Jewish 
emigrés from Germany and France, and as recent as the repeated Swiss 
votes against efforts to set tight limits on immigration, and for 
promoting Romansch as an official language of Switzerland.

Foreign threats. For many nations, foreign threats become a spur to 
ethnic rivalry - since many nations are based on, or have strong 
elements of ethnicity. For the Swiss, a multiethnic nation, foreign 
threats have generally functioned the other way around. It was ethnic 
or cultural nationalism and exclusionism that threatened from the 
outside. For the Swiss, unity against these threats meant unity, in 
part, in support of their own diversity.

This phenomenon has deep roots, but is also a product of recent 
experience. If not for the alliance with border areas, Switzerland 
would have been swallowed up by Austria, Italy, or Germany in the 
fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, or by the French in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - as they were, briefly, by 
France in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, of course, 
the threat from Germany led to a rallying against "Germanism" in Swiss 
culture and politics, symbolized by the building of the Bundesbrief 
Museum in 1935.

It is revealing that the one foreign invasion of Switzerland that 
succeeded in 1,000 years, the French occupation of the late eighteenth 
and early nine-teenth centuries, was at the front of a powerful 
ideology - and a universalist, inclusionary ideology at that. By 
contrast, in 1914, when Swiss leaders wanted to rally the people 
against the Kaiser's Germany, the federal council issued a declaration 
rallying the people to Swiss values. Among them was "the ideal of our 
country as a cultural community and a political ideal above the diver

 sity of race and language." Switzerland's French-speaking general in 
World War II insisted, "we are a people and culture of inclusion," in 
calling for a military "and philosophical" resistance to Nazism.

- Elite leadership, and popular acceptance of it. Swiss elites have 
long held a more or less self-consciously liberal view, in the 
European sense, on the matter of dealing with diversity. This holds on 
questions from trade and immigration to their own children's 
education. It is a common practice, for example, among German-speaking 
Swiss to send their children abroad for a year or two to improve their 
French or (popular in recent years) English. Many German-speaking 
Swiss attend a university, or take a first job, in the French-speaking 
region.

Arend Lijphart, the sociologist who first coined the term 
"Consociational democracy," goes so far as to say that this leadership 
is the key to effective acceptance of diversity. This may go a bit too 
far. At best, it ignores the critical question of why Swiss elites 
have been able to achieve such a positive sum outlook, while those in 
many other countries seem to feel they have more to gain by engaging 
in divisive, winner-take-all politics. The Swiss open door, moreover, 
was not always laid out by elites first. During World War II, for 
instance, it was the Swiss people who allowed thousands of Jewish 
children (and in some cases their parents) over the border and into 
their homes. In so doing they went against government policy and, in 
fact, suffered occasional arrests by the border police.

Nevertheless it is true that Swiss leaders have adopted a generally 
liberal attitude, and have a proud record of leadership on such 
questions. Once again, the unusual degree of harmony between people 
and elites in Switzerland, the mutual respect unusual even in 
democratic societies, makes it very difficult to say who is leading 
whom.

Deliberate Policies

The most visible and most important means by which the Swiss 
deliberately encourage pluralistic harmony is through the schools. 
Instruction in a second national language is mandatory, and in a third 
and even fourth language is now the common practice, especially given 
the popularity and importance of English.

In a 1973 survey of Swiss twenty years of age or older, two-thirds had 
a working knowledge of at least one other official language. Sixty-
five percent of German-speaking Swiss had a working knowledge of 
French, and 52 percent of French-speaking Swiss were capable in 
German. Today the figures are higher in each category, and as well, 
there are large numbers of Swiss who are capable in English: More than 
60 percent according to official data, and more than 70 percent in my 
experience, which probably accepts a lower level of English as 
constituting some capability. Dozens of Swiss told me they were "not 
very good in English, but willing to use English" - and then proceeded 
to converse with high fluency.

This formal training is buttressed by Swiss arts, newspapers, and 
other teachers from the school of life and culture. Most Swiss movie 
theaters carry French movies with German subtitles and German movies 
with French subtitles. Italian films and Italian subtitling is not 
ubiquitous, but normally applies to 5 or 10 percent of the offerings 
in any major German city, and more in the French zones. The result is 
an easy way for students or adults to polish one language or another. 
Newspaper stands, television, and other mass media offer a similar 
range of cross-translated materials, now supplemented by the Internet. 
Much of this activity would take place without government assistance; 
some would not. The government aid, as much as adding sheer resources, 
gives a stamp of approval and makes a statement that this is valuable 
activity. The combined message of this policy and the private 
activities is that serious Swiss citizens should be able to 
communicate in two languages or more.

An important concept that contributes to Swiss harmony is the 
principle of territoriality. Under this principle, the language of 
instruction for schools, the first language of discourse for public 
facilities and government agencies, and so on are all set by the 
canton or the community. Furthermore, this language, as set, is not to 
be challenged. Hence if in a particular district, the number of 
French-speaking Swiss was to change from 47 percent to 53 percent, 
this would not imply a change in the official language structure. It 
would remain German.

This feature of medium-term immutability is not written down; it is a 
tacit arrangement, a modus vivendi. It is, however, no less powerful 
for being understood rather than explicit. It is, in fact, likely that 
if a much larger shift were to occur in the language of usage, it 
might, like other elements of Swiss politics, eventually be adjusted. 
The formula by which seats on the executive council were allocated for 
fifty years, for instance, appeared on the verge of change after the 
1999 Swiss elections. One thing the principle would definitely rule 
out, however, in its subtle way, would be any sort of agitation of the 
question; such arrangements, once reached, tend to remain in place 
until circumstances have long since rendered them clearly obsolete. 
And by then, they are so clearly obsolete that the thing is changed 
with minimal fanfare or excitement.

The great Swiss jurist Walter Burckhardt describes the subtle way in 
which this practice can fairly be called a policy, and yet, is not a 
matter of statute or regulation:

  It is now a tacitly recognized principle that each locality should 
be able to retain its traditional language... and that linguistic 
boundaries once settled should not be shifted, neither to the 
detriment of the majority nor of minorities. It is trust in this tacit 
agreement that provides a foundation for peaceful relations.... 
Adherence to this rule, as well as respect of each group for the 
individuality of the others, is an obligation of Swiss loyalty. It is 
no less sacred because it is not laid down in law; it is one of the 
foundations of the state itself.

This implicit understanding, avoiding the persistent churning and 
reopening of certain arrangements, is critical to making the principle 
of territoriality work to defuse conflicts - rather than set off new 
ones. If a society were to merely emulate Swiss federalism as a 
negative concept - letting states and localities select their own 
language, but allowing this to change on a regular basis - it is easy 
to see that the result could be the very opposite of the social peace 
enjoyed by the Swiss. Shifting populations would render temporary 
majorities tenuous, and there would be constant battles in districts 
with evenly balanced minority populations. It was this dynamic, in 
part, that rendered the Kansas-Nebraska Act so odious to Abraham 
Lincoln and the American Republicans in the 1850s, as against the 
Missouri Compromise setting out accepted slave and free territories. 
Efforts at mere federalism, especially with unit rule and spoils 
systems, can provoke new conflicts rather than solving them.

This is an illustration of the dangers of adapting Swiss institutions 
or lessons piecemeal into different situations. Swiss federalism takes 
place in a cultural and social context. Of course, this is an argument 
for care in adapting them - not for ignoring these precious lessons 
merely because they are not an exact, test-tube match for situations 
elsewhere. He who ignores history, because it contains slight 
variations from his own situation, is condemned to repeat it, with 
slight variations.

The Swiss do not give minority languages, institutions, and cultures 
their due. They strive to give them a little more than their due. 
Swiss majority groups do not demand what they have coming. They demand 
a little less, and take comfort in their secure position as a 
majority.

This approach by both minority and majority groupings is another 
policy or tendency - or an element of many policies - that helps 
explain much of Switzerland's ability to thrive on diversity. The 
Swiss do this in both political situations such as the policies 
mentioned for language, and in social ones, such as the gentle race to 
find a person's first language and put him at ease by using it.

"No effort whatsoever is made by the Swiss Germans, who are in the 
overwhelming majority numerically, to assert any linguistic dominance,
" writes Kurt Mayer. "There are no linguistic minorities, either in a 
legal or in an informal sense."

Carol Schmid has an excellent term for this, suggesting that Swiss 
linguistic and religious majorities often "do not act like majorities.
" Or, one might say, they act as confident majorities - majorities 
that are not threatened by the rights of minorities, and gladly allow 
them to flourish. When asked what foreign country they would most like 
to live in, French-speaking Swiss, not surprisingly, named France 
first (45 percent), followed by Holland (22 percent), and Austria (10 
percent). Interestingly, though, German-speaking Swiss also listed 
France first (30 percent), followed in this case by Austria (23 
percent), and Holland (17 percent).

Perhaps Sch