Switzerland closes its border

On 19 April 1945 the Swiss Federal Council – the Bundesrat, the federal government – ordered the gradual closure of the country’s northern, eastern and southern border: with Germany, with the former Austria, annexed to the Reich in 1938, and with German-controlled northern Italy. It was not, however, a hermetic sealing-off from Europe at war. Eleven border crossings were to remain open – from Basel and Riehen, through Rheinfelden, Schleitheim, Ramsen, Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance, St. Margrethen, and Buchs and Trübbach on the Rhine, to Chiasso, Ponte Tresa and Dirinella on the Italian border. The aim was to channel the expected wave of refugees to points where the army and police could control them and, if necessary, turn them back.

The wave duly came. In the last weeks of the war French and American troops were approaching Switzerland’s borders from the north, and the Allies in Italy from the south. Fleeing ahead of the front were concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers, prisoners of war and deserters, but also soldiers from shattered German units, collaborators and officials of the regime seeking to escape accountability. According to estimates cited by Swiss historians, some 50,000 people crossed the border between 19 April and the end of the war on 8 May 1945.

It is often said that Switzerland closed its borders with Germany and the former Austria. In fact the decision of 19 April also covered the border with Italy, and rather than a complete closure it restricted traffic to designated crossings, through which the authorities admitted some refugees and turned others away.

A neutral country in the middle of the war

Switzerland declared its neutrality at the start of the war and maintained it to the end. As early as 30 August 1939 parliament elected General Henri Guisan commander-in-chief of the army, and at the height of mobilisation some 850,000 men were under arms – in a country of little more than 4 million inhabitants. After the fall of France in June 1940 the country was almost entirely surrounded by the Axis. Guisan responded with the concept of the Alpine redoubt (Réduit): in the event of invasion the main forces were to defend themselves in the mountains, and the tunnels and passes carrying traffic between Germany and Italy were prepared for demolition. Military deterrence went hand in hand with economic concessions – Swiss industry worked for Germany, and the railways carried goods between the Reich and Italy over the St Gotthard Pass.

Neutrality made Switzerland the most important protecting power of the war: it represented the interests of 35 states, including belligerent great powers, and its inspectors visited prisoner-of-war camps. The International Committee of the Red Cross was based in Geneva. The country also became a centre for the intelligence services of both sides. In June 1940 more than ten thousand Polish soldiers of the 2nd Rifle Division, who had crossed the border after the defeat of France, were interned there; in Bern the Polish legation under Minister Aleksander Ładoś issued Latin American passports to Jews from occupied Poland (the Ładoś Group).

“The boat is full”

The decision of April 1945 had a long and damning history behind it. From 1933 Switzerland regarded itself as a country of transit, not of destination, and granted political asylum very sparingly; persecution on grounds of descent was not recognised as a basis for asylum. After the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, when Austrian Jews arrived at the border, the authorities introduced restrictions, and at the Évian Conference Switzerland – like almost all the participants – refused to accept a permanent quota of refugees. In the autumn of 1938 the Swiss police, headed by Heinrich Rothmund, brought about the Germans’ decision to mark Jews’ passports with the letter “J”, which made it easier to turn them back at the border.

In August 1942, when transports to the extermination camps were already leaving France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the Federal Council closed the border to refugees fleeing “solely on racial grounds”, even though it knew from diplomatic and police reports what awaited those turned back. In a speech of 30 August 1942 the Justice Minister, Eduard von Steiger, defended this policy with the metaphor of an overcrowded lifeboat – the phrase “the boat is full” (das Boot ist voll) later became its symbol. Only in July 1944 did the authorities recognise Jews as refugees whose lives were in danger and relax the regulations.

The overall record is still the subject of research and dispute. According to figures compiled by the Independent Commission of Experts under Jean-François Bergier, set up by the government in 1996, Switzerland gave refuge during the war – for shorter or longer periods – to some 300,000 people, including more than 100,000 interned soldiers and about 51,000 civilian refugees, of whom 21,000 were Jews. The Bergier Commission estimated the number turned away at the border at about 20,000, and Carl Ludwig’s report of 1957 at about 10,000; later detailed studies, based on records from the canton of Geneva, suggest lower figures. Historians have been able to document subsequent deportation or death for more than a hundred of the Jews turned back; the real number of victims cannot be established.

In the last months of the war groups of prisoners released from the camps through negotiations with the SS reached Switzerland: in August and December 1944 nearly 1,700 Hungarian Jews from the so-called Kasztner train, previously held in Bergen-Belsen, and in February 1945 – thanks to the efforts of a former President of the Confederation, Jean-Marie Musy – about 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt. In all, more than 4,000 camp prisoners reached Switzerland in this way in the final months of the war.

War on the border

In the last year of the war Switzerland felt the proximity of the front ever more painfully. On 1 April 1944 American bombers that had lost their way over cloud-covered Germany bombed Schaffhausen, killing about 40 people. In February 1945, during Operation Clarion, bombs fell on Stein am Rhein among other places, and on 4 March American aircraft attacked Basel and Zurich by mistake. Such errors also occurred over occupied countries at the time, as in the bombing of Prague on 14 February. Washington apologised and paid compensation, but the Swiss saw the raids as a sign of the Allies’ growing impatience with their neutrality.

That impatience had economic roots. According to the findings of the Bergier Commission, most of the Reichsbank’s foreign gold transactions passed through the Swiss banking system – gold largely looted from the central banks of conquered countries and from victims of persecution; with Swiss francs the Germans bought raw materials in other neutral countries. Under Allied pressure Switzerland halted arms exports to Germany in October 1944, froze German assets on 16 February 1945 and on 8 March, after talks with a mission led by the American economist Lauchlin Currie, agreed to restrict transit through the Alps and purchases of German gold.

Switzerland was also the scene of secret talks on ending the war. From March 1945 the head of the American intelligence station in Bern, Allen Dulles, negotiated with the Higher SS and Police Leader in Italy, General Karl Wolff, over the surrender of the German forces on the Italian peninsula (Operation Sunrise). The talks, conducted behind Hitler’s back, provoked sharp protests from Stalin, who suspected the Western Allies of making a separate peace, and they did not halt the Allied spring offensive in Italy.

The front approaches the border

In April 1945 the front was closing in on Switzerland from two sides. After taking Frankfurt am Main and crossing the Rhine, the American armies were pushing deep into southern Germany, while General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army was entering the Black Forest and heading for Lake Constance. In Italy the British Eighth Army and the US Fifth Army were breaking through the German defences south of Bologna. In Switzerland it was feared that retreating German units – or the Allied troops pursuing them – would enter Swiss territory, that a last Nazi bastion might be set up in the Alps, and that tens of thousands of people would pour into the country, among them war criminals and armed soldiers.

The army reinforced its units on the border, and the Federal Council restricted traffic to the eleven crossings. At the posts in Kreuzlingen, St. Margrethen and Chiasso officials decided whom to admit. Those let in were above all forced labourers, escaped prisoners of war and camp inmates; German soldiers who crossed the border with their weapons were disarmed and interned. Since 1944 the Allies had been demanding that neutral states should not give refuge to war criminals, so the Swiss authorities turned back many Nazi and fascist functionaries, although some managed to get across.

Place in the war

The closing of the border on 19 April 1945 was the last act of Swiss refugee policy during the war – an attempt to keep control of the country’s own territory amid the chaos of the collapsing Reich, and at the same time an admission that the country could no longer simply shut itself off from the tide of people fleeing the front. In the last days of April French troops reached the Swiss border in the Lake Constance area, while in the south German soldiers and Italian fascists fled towards it, among them Benito Mussolini, who was captured by partisans before he could reach it. On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender, Switzerland broke off relations with the Reich and took over the buildings of its missions.

After the war the neutrality that had saved the country from destruction became the target of criticism. In the Washington Agreement of 1946 Switzerland agreed to pay the Allies 250 million francs in return for settling the question of German gold. The reckoning with refugee policy came much later: in 1995 the police officer Paul Grüninger, who in 1938 had admitted refugees in breach of the regulations and been convicted for it, was rehabilitated, and the President of the Confederation, Kaspar Villiger, formally apologised for the decisions of half a century earlier, including the “J” stamp in passports. The Bergier Commission’s report of 1999–2002 concluded that the Swiss authorities, in closing the border in 1942, knew what fate they were condemning those turned back to, and contributed to the deaths of some of them.