• Regretting and repeating Regretting and repeating In August 1938, the government of Switzerland, under pressure from the German Reich of Adolph Hitler, closed its borders with Germany and Austria to people fleeing “for racial reasons only.” Turned away at
• Regretting and repeating
Regretting and repeating
In August 1938, the government of Switzerland, under pressure from the German Reich of Adolph Hitler, closed its borders with Germany and Austria to people fleeing “for racial reasons only.” Turned away at the borders, 20,000 Jewish refugees were captured by the Gestapo and went to their deaths in concentration camps.
Many Swiss citizens, to their everlasting glory, ignored their government; 300,000 Jews found unofficial refuge in Switzerland. In the northeastern border canton of Sankt Gallen, for example, police Capt. Paul Grueninger backdated entry documents and issued subpoenas to German and Austrian Jews in concentration camps, ordering them to come to Switzerland, where he found them refuge. For his courage, he lost his job and his pension and died in poverty in 1972.
Last week, the Swiss government finally got around to pardoning Mr. Grueninger and other “Jew-helpers” of World War II. A new law annuls all sentences for smuggling and harboring refugees. The remarkable aspect of this is not that it happened 65 years too late, but that it happened at all.
The Swiss are determinedly proud of their official neutrality, and many don’t believe their country has anything to apologize for. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Swiss banks turned over the financial assets of Holocaust victims to their heirs.
Indeed, even as the country took its small step toward admitting its past failures, it was taking a larger step toward repeating them. The same day the pardons went into effect, Christopher Blocher, a far-right nationalist and anti-immigration zealot, took over as Minister of Justice. He immediately began drafting a plan to expel anyone without Swiss citizenship. Mr. Blocher’s opponents can look forward to being pardoned in 2069.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
