(It was other “neutrals” and US corporations who collaborated with Nazi industry, not Switzerland)
A few years ago a long campaign of criticism of Switzerland’s war time purchase of stolen “Nazi Gold” took on such proportions that there would seem to be more behind the press exposure and diplomatic attacks than the justified concerns of Jewish victims of the Nazis. There seems little doubt that it is Switzerland’s (highly profitable and democratic) non-membership of the imperial and ambitious European Union that prompted these attacks.
It was therefore encouraging to see the Swiss ambassador to London denouncing the criticisms and in particular the (all too predictable) excesses of a BBC programme. But criticism of the Swiss from those European countries which were responsible for or collaborated with 1940s Fascism (Germany, Italy and France) exhibits an extraordinary hypocrisy, as do attacks by US politicians since many American corporations supported the Nazi industrial machine during the 1930s and early 1940s.
It was American corporations (condemned at the time by American democratic forces) which established critical industrial patents with Nazi industry throughout the 1930s and which helped the Nazi war machine until well into 1943. Without the synthetic rubber and aircraft fuel technology provided by American companies the Nazi war machine would have been ineffective. American companies were used by the Germans to “cloak” their activities in the USA, American vehicle manufacturers were great supporters of Nazi industry (Henry Ford received Germany’s highest honour and was much praised by Hitler for writing the book “The International Jew”) and US banks were even accused by their own Treasury Department of helping the Nazis.
Perhaps the most scandalous collaboration was between Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.G Farben, the chief Nazi industrial combine which was holding mock war games as early as 1934! I G Farben was also one of the main firms to accept SS officers on secondment. From 1935 even the American business press had recognised the role of German industry in war preparations. One of Standard Oil’s biggest contributions was the transfer to I G Farben in the early 1930s of technology to produce synthetic petrol from coal. By 1944 Germany (with the help of this technology) was producing over 5 million tons of synthetic oil from coal compared to a mere 300,000 tons in 1934. The US War Department concluded that:
“without I G Farben’s immense productive facilities, its intense research and vast
international affiliations, Germany’s prosecution of the war would have been
unthinkable. Farben not only directed its energies toward arming Germany, but
concentrated on weakening her intended victims (expanding) the German industrial
potential for war and restricting that of the rest of the world…The proof is
overwhelming that I G Farben officials had full prior knowledge of Germany’s plan
for world conquest and of each specific aggressive act later undertaken.”
Nevertheless sitting on the board of American I G were American directors of Ford, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, National City Bank and Standard Oil of New Jersey. Unlike a number of their German fellow directors, these American businessmen were not convicted at Nuremburg!
The extent to which the Hitlerian project for Europe has been reproduced by transatlantic corporatism since 1972 was nowhere better demonstrated than in October 1997 when a senior executive of General Motors demanded that the British should abolish the Pound and the Bank of England in favour of the Single European Currency or else the company would close its production in the United Kingdom.
General Motors has a record of political and economic support for European oppression. In 1936 the US ambassador in Berlin complained to Roosevelt about that company’s “..enormous business here, they complicate things and add to our war dangers.” (1) By 1936 General Motors subsidiary Opel was one of the two leading producers of tanks for the Nazi war machine (2) and in 1935 the US War Department protested to the company about its transfer of ethyl lead technology which was so critical in military aircraft.(3)
It is precisely such corporatist power, combined with State control which we fought two world wars to prevent. Now we are threatened by companies who have been guests in Britain for many decades, playing with our 800-year-old constitution as they would with a car production line.
As the President of the Norwegian parliament said of the Nazi takeover in 1940: “What stupefied the Norwegians was how men with whom one had had intimate business relations, who had been cordially welcomed in one’s home were in fact agents of destruction.” (4) The same threats to our nations and democracies now return in the ambitions of multinational corporations.
The American collaboration with the Nazi regime (witting or unwitting) was of a far higher order than that of which the Swiss have been accused – and, unlike Switzerland, the USA was not surrounded by two all conquering fascist powers. At least the Swiss were in a position of armed neutrality and would have fought had Hitler followed up his hatred of them (“most despicable and wretched people and national entity…mortal enemies of the new Germany”) by realising his detailed 1940 plans for invasion. Even in 1942 the Americans did not in fact declare war on Germany (Germany declared war on the US). Indeed the main way in which Switzerland aided war time Germany was the direct responsibility of the Americans. US insurance companies re-insured allied shipping movements with Swiss companies – thus alerting the German navy to the routes of war time cargoes!
The Swiss people completely rejected Nazi politics. Despite being surrounded and verbally attacked and physically threatened by the Nazis to the North and the Fascists to the South only one single National Front member ever sat in the Swiss parliament. Switzerland’s “armed neutrality” was defended by an army of 800,000 – no less than 20% of the entire population! The Swiss Red Cross aided refugees and Allied prisoners of war held by the Axis powers. During the war Switzerland was home to 300,000 refugees (the equivalent in today’s United Kingdom as a percentage of the indigenous population would be 4.5 million) As Churchill said of Switzerland at the end of the war:
“Of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction. She has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self defence among her mountains and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side.”
The Herald Tribune wrote in 1943:
“The Swiss remained true to themselves even in the darkest hours of the year 1940 when
nothing but the valour of Great Britain and the blind faith of free men in the rest of the
world stood between Hitler and Europe.”
What makes the recent upsurge in the criticism of the Swiss more than suspect is the complete lack of criticism of “neutral” war-time Sweden – which is of course a member of the European Union! Sweden’s war time record (like France’s) was highly controversial, having bought much Nazi gold to the benefit of Germany’s foreign exchange resources. In addition the Swedes built ships for the German navy, escorted German ships through their waters, allowed German troops to pass through their country into Finland and allowed SKF, the ball bearing manufacturer, to supply vast amounts of that indispensable war material to compensate for German losses from allied bombing. At the end of the war it was only the need to concentrate American attention on the new Soviet Communist enemy to the East which prevented the prosecution of Swedish businessmen.
Needless to say, prominent in the present targeting of Switzerland is the BBC, a case of rank hypocrisy, given that it kept Churchill off the air for nearly two years between 1937 and 1939 and was broadcasting appeasement politics to Germany as late as 1939 in its German language programme “Sonderbericht”. The BBC’s Eurofascist tendencies have of course continued into the 1990s with suppression of anti EU opinions and their refusal to analyse or even mention the constitutional destruction wrought by the Acts of 1972, 1986 and 1992. Nothing could be more indicative of their political manipulations of British public opinion than their conspicuous absence from the ranks of international television stations at the biggest political meeting held in the United Kingdom since the war (10,000 attended the rally at Alexandra Palace of the “Referendum Party”, the principal anti-EU party at the 1997 British general elction).
There seems little doubt therefore that these co-ordinated attacks on the Swiss suited certain corporatist and political powers bent on co-ercion of those free nations which have so far failed to surrender to the new Eurostate. Sweden has undoubtedly been spared such attacks because it is inside the European Union and Switzerland (the richest country in Europe) has remained resolutely outside, resisting, as in the 1940s, the expansion of the German Euro-State.
References:
1. Edgar B Nixon ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Foreign Affairs, Vol III, Cambridge, Mass. 1969
2. Professor Anthony Sutton “Wall Street and
the rise of Hitler”. Bloomfield Books 1976 page 31
3. United States Congress. Senate Hearings
before a Subcommittee on Military Affairs,
Scientific and technical mobilisation 78th
Congress First Session, S.702, GPO 1944.
4. Winston Churchill, The History of the Second
World War, Vol 1 page 546
