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Postwar Europe: the capriciousness of universal values

by Arne Ruth

The Jew is unable (and unwilling) to shake off his uniqueness, but he can live only in a world based on universal values. In this he is unique, but at a deeper level his problem is really a parable on the human condition in general.

- J. L. Talmon

Preface to The Unique and the Universal

(London, 1965)

From the perspective of the settler, the pile is a symbol of permanence. It is the place where a line from heaven to earth intersects with the horizontal plane. It is close both to God and to the dead and buried. It is where all journeys start. It is the unshakable point of return.

The nomad brings his pile to wherever he encamps. His narratives of life and death are based on myths and rituals, constantly varied in the present tense.

Cain, the settler, kills Abel, the nomad, and is turned into a fugitive. The tale of his home and lineage loses its foundation. There is no stable point of departure, no immovable point of return, and no given sequence of collective memories.

The concept of nationhood is, thus, based on the fear of the wandering tribes as the destroyers of communal history.

In the early fifties, Arthur Montgomery, a noted Swedish professor of economics who was in no sense a Marxist, visited Zurich to give a lecture on the Swedish model of economics to a select group of his Swiss colleagues. The essence of his argument was a version of what, a decade later, would be known in the Western world as "the end of ideology." He held that in terms of economic policy, the distance between the ruling Social Democrats and the opposition on the Right was almost nonexistent. One could find neither orthodox liberals nor outright socialists. Since a general agreement had been established on collective social provisions as an inevitable aspect of modernity, the only task left to professionals of economic theory was to give politicians the right advice in balancing the budget.

Montgomery's position generated concern and anger. A prominent Swiss journalist drew comparisons with Bolsheviks and National Socialists; what was emerging now in Sweden was, in his mind, the third attempt within this century to eliminate the cornerstone of freedom, namely, private property. The incident set the tone for a discussion that would accompany the development of the Swedish model over the coming decades. But the twists of history now lend a certain irony to the Swedish-Swiss origins of this controversy.

At the end of the nineties, it is possible to study the postwar period from a distance. One can rediscover the local flavors of how nations adapted to the end of national socialism and the beginning of the Cold War. Sweden and Switzerland remained strictly neutral. Both were accused of being unwilling to define the triumph over fascism and the emerging battle with communism as elements of a struggle for the future of the human race. Their response was to define their own national projects as unique attempts to achieve universal values. Their separateness was a means of upholding the morals of the common good. But in supposedly embracing the liberal universe, they chose different roads.

By remaining the focal point of financial transactions, Switzerland guarded the free market of the world, as it appeared to have done against all odds during the war. Claiming special entitlement to another universal value - national sovereignty - Switzerland refused to enter the emerging structure of global bodies like the United Nations. Its separateness, it seemed, gave it a special role as the central venue for international deliberations.

In a policy paper prepared by the US State Department's Western European experts in December 1944, Swiss neutrality was defined as an asset to the Allies. It was felt that economic warfare considerations should be placed in the perspective of a wider set of relations:

Switzerland differs from other neutrals in that her neutrality is not unilateral. It is a neutrality which has been guaranteed for many years by the major powers. As a result of this neutrality Switzerland performs certain indispensable services for all the belligerents and claims in return the right to trade with such of them as will help maintain its essential economy and internal stability. As far as the United States is concerned Switzerland serves as the protecting power for our prisoners of war in Germany and Japan. It is the agreed policy of the British and US Governments to avoid Switzerland forcing a break with Germany. ...

Lastly, it must be remembered that no people in Europe are more profoundly attached to democratic principles than the Swiss. Continued moderate prosperity will ensure the maintenance of the present economic and political system which is so close to our own.(1)

The US war and navy departments had been pressing for a tougher line, supported, for other reasons, by Henry Morgenthau's treasury department. In the postwar negotiations between the Allies and the Swiss government on the handling of German assets and looted gold, there was constant friction, especially among the Americans, between those advocating a moral position and those essentially viewing the matter in terms of long-term interstate relationships, a perspective increasingly influenced by the nascent Cold War. The latter position won the day when a preliminary Allied-Swiss accord was reached in May 1946, causing the most flamboyant moralist on the American scene, Senator Harley Kilgore, to write a letter of protest to President Truman. In the view of the senator, the agreement violated "both in spirit and in form, the Allies' pledges to root out Nazism and the German War potential."(2) And he found the terms of Switzerland's gold repayment flabbergasting: "Justice, decency, and plain horse sense require that the Allies hold Switzerland responsible for all of the $300 million of looted gold which they accepted from the Nazis and reject their proposition of settling for 20 cents on the dollar."(3)

The recently issued Eizenstat report notes that Kilgore's was a lone voice of protest in the US Senate. A political settlement was soon reached. Swiss politicians continued at home, however, to comment on the position of the Allies in a context in which the issue had been defined as a case of David versus Goliath. A strong body of opinion held the struggle to be a vain attempt to uphold the sanctity of private property against infringements by the Great Powers. In November 1946, the chief Swiss negotiator, Walter Stucki, accused the Allies of having violated the principles embodied in their own Atlantic Charter. The fact that Switzerland, in March 1945, had bowed to American pressure and agreed to freeze all German assets, prohibit the dealing in foreign currencies, and restrict the purchase of gold from Germany was, he stated, the result of pressure worse than anything Goring had ever attempted, a violation of principles in a world "lacking material and moral foundations," where Switzerland found itself in "dangerous political isolation."(4)

The irony of a singularly narrow-minded definition of Swiss national interest proclaiming itself to be the embodiment of universal norms did not become apparent until five decades later, when the World Jewish Congress confronted the Swiss authorities on the matter of wartime Jewish property. The atmosphere heated up as soon as one particularly abhorrent feature was made public: the arrogance of banks asking survivors of the Holocaust to provide death certificates for the relatives they had lost as a condition for getting access to their inheritance. The handling of this "heirless property" erupted into an emotional issue that leading circles in Switzerland seemed unable to deal with. The deeper layers of Switzerland's official double standards then slowly came to light.

The Eizenstat report has laid bare the most important ingredients. When the principles for settling such matters were defined after the war, the Swiss had initially agreed to make the proceeds of heirless assets available to refugee organizations. This promise, however, was never formally included in the Accord, and the Swiss never fulfilled it. Another category, property belonging to survivors of the Holocaust, was classified by the Swiss in a particularly insolent way: since German assets had been blocked due to Allied pressure, Jews who had once held German citizenship, including those who had survived Nazi death camps, were classified as "Germans in Germany." Such persons thus found their assets blocked as part of the project involving Swiss recompense for its dealings with the Third Reich.

On top of all this, in 1949 Switzerland reached a secret accord with communist Poland, allowing the Polish state to acquire the assets in Switzerland of deceased Polish citizens (most of them Jews) defined as being without heirs. These assets were then - as part of the agreement - used by the Poles to settle Swiss claims against Poland. Political reality outside communist countries has probably never been further removed from the classic definition of property rights.

At that point in history, however, there were other issues that tended to overshadow the moral settling of wartime accounts. The US State Department in August 1950 specified US policy objectives towards Switzerland in clear-cut terms:

The Swiss Confederation is an important factor in European economic recovery and a positive force in the maintenance of free democratic institutions in Europe. While traditional neutrality precludes their political or military alignment with the West, the Swiss can nevertheless be relied upon to defend their territory resolutely against any aggressor. As such, Switzerland constitutes a deterrent to the expansion of Soviet influence in Western Europe and a strategic asset, even though a passive one, within the frame of United States objectives.(5)

The Swedes may have been regarded as being slightly less reliable in the epochal battle against communism. On the other hand, Swedish officials had been easier to prod into admitting an element of guilt in their commerce with the Third Reich. Dean Acheson reflected on the matter in his memoirs: "If the Swedes were stubborn, the Swiss were the cube of stubbornness."(6)

After the war, Sweden chose compassion as its own special quality, based on a recently established redefinition of the national project. A form of social change had been instituted in the thirties that could now be proclaimed to be the incarnation of modernity; the communal bodies that had been born in reaction to industrial capitalism had been allowed to share in the management of state affairs. The result was a change not only in the formal division of power but in the moral quality of society. The new social forces, the labor movement and the farmers' association, infused their value systems into the state. It was a trade-off: these values henceforth had the backing of state authority and were even allowed to penetrate the educational system. In return, the labor movement and the farmers had to give up a large part of their class ideology. They were transformed into guardians of the national interest by becoming proponents of a universalistic world view.

The moral basis was enhanced by the Allied victory over fascism. On the one hand, fascist perversion of nationalist ideology finally rendered obsolete the concept of glorious war as a basis for national sentiment. The ideology of participatory democracy as the true legitimation of modern nation-states became firmly embedded in most West European countries. To a varying degree, these countries experienced in their politics an "awareness of common ways and institutions," and for the first time in modern European history this frame of reference was almost exclusively shrouded in a progressive ideology.

The definition of Swedish separateness as the incarnation of universality was fraught with paradox. European political refugees who sought shelter in Sweden in the thirties have testified to how remote the country seemed from the conflicts and trouble spots found on the continent. But at that time Sweden offered hope for the future: harmony as opposed to chaos, common political action as opposed to paralyzing conflicts. When Social Democrats like Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt returned to their native countries after the war, they took with them a blueprint for the European society of the future: the welfare state, the all-inclusive definition of citizenship. Sweden was thought to point the way out of a cumbersome historical tradition.

The Swedish view of Europe at that time was characterized by an opposite view: the continent belonged to Sweden's past; it was a historical burden. The "Old World" seemed only too apt a name for Europe. A closer relationship held little temptation for a nation striving to become the incarnation of modern values. The statement by Tage Erlander, prime minister for two decades, that Europe was composed mainly of Catholics and political reactionaries was typical of the views held by leading Social Democrats at the end of the fifties (the Pope being the incarnation of evil in a country for centuries embedded in Lutheranism). It was commonly held that Sweden was so far ahead, both socially and economically, that there was no point in it getting involved in European cooperation. In time, Western Europe was sure to follow in the footsteps of Sweden and Scandinavia. The continental countries would eventually become "Swedenized."

The debate on Europe, in other words, was conducted as though Sweden were free to choose not only her trading partners but also her geographical and cultural home. Sweden could afford to base her position vis-a-vis Europe on moral considerations. Compassion was directed principally at Third World countries. In the beginning of the sixties, it was defined by a prominent young intellectual and author, Lars Gustafsson, as the transcendence of nationalism: "This awakening of international conscience, I believe, represents a way out [of], and perpetual consolation for, what we experienced for so long as isolation. If Swedish patriotism exists nowadays, it consists of our desire to make ourselves heard in the context of this new solidarity."(7)

The idea of being the most emancipated country in the world was integral to the Swedish model. It was traditional nationalism turned upside down. The psychological impact was exactly the same as in the old-fashioned version: Swedish elites could be very proud of their eminence. They became used to feeling morally superior due to the fact that they were no longer fettered by tradition. And leaving nationalism behind was the core of their achievement.

In hindsight, this use of antinationalism as a national paradigm must be one of the strangest social paradoxes in political history. Politicians and diplomats were convinced that they had a privileged insight into the future of humanity. They projected the Swedish attitude onto the world stage as a special sort of idealism. Sometimes, as when supporting the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa - including giving strong material support to the ANC while it was branded as a communist-front organization - this kind of self-confidence achieved something worthwhile. But there were other areas where the Swedish analytical model simply failed to fit. There idealism turned into arrogance and negligence. The official attitude towards the Baltic countries - regarding them as nonexistent - is a prime case in point. (Sweden was the first Western country to accept Soviet annexation in 1940.) Reluctance to press the Soviet Union into admitting having arrested Raoul Wallenberg is another. Generally speaking, close to home, idealism tended to cede to realpolitik.

It is common knowledge now that the idealist consensus has eroded. The economic aspects of this crisis are only too well known. The Social Democrats, who have returned to power after a short break, switched their position on the European community within a matter of months, applied for EU membership, and legitimized the change with a referendum in which the "yes" ticket drew strength from the carefully orchestrated fear of Sweden being left behind.

But the moral rhetoric of this particularly Swedish brand of progressivism remains unchanged at the official level in times of crisis. When Sweden's ambassador to Washington was summarily called before a Senate committee to answer questions about the Eizenstat report on Nazi gold, he referred to events that boosted Sweden's postwar image of compassion: Raoul Wallenberg's rescue of Hungarian Jews and Prince Folke Bernadotte's efforts to save inmates of the concentration camps toward the end of the war. These, he implied, had been in line with the deeper intentions of Swedish foreign policy. Sweden had adapted her neutrality to Germany's seemingly overwhelming might at the beginning of the war. From today's perspective, this might perhaps appear to be compromising, but the end result was beneficial to humanity. Sweden managed to stay out of the war and thus was able to act as the savior of tens of thousands of refugees, most of them Jews.

II.

History may, as James Joyce said, be a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up. Or it may be a nightmare from which we almost managed to escape by forgetting it. In the nineties, European history folded in the middle. Today, the dream of a continent cleansed of racism suddenly seems to be one of this century's greatest illusions. More than fifty years after the end of the war, Hitler's shadow is suddenly back with us.

Friedrich Meinecke reinterpreted German history as the victory of Nationalstaat over that of Weltburgertum. In his universe, every state was a law unto itself. Striving to embody the ideals of universalism, as Sweden and Switzerland claimed to be doing after the war, could seem to be the exact opposite of the German tradition of historicism. But the nationally defined ideology of progressivism was still based on an assumption of uniqueness. Historians, claiming to demystify the course of events, could use an established concept of nationhood as their screen in choosing and evaluating facts. They could stress apparently progressive elements and disregard the rest.

In Switzerland, the two most prominent postwar authors, Friedrich Durrenmatt and Max Frisch, continually used their talents to describe a counteruniverse, an alternative to the hypocrisy masquerading as objectivity. Frisch's comedy Biography, dating from the sixties, is a satire on the concept of history as a project: a man is given the option of returning to the crucial points of his life and altering the decisions he made at the time. The constant revisions, which seem on the surface to be the result of rational decisions, turn into absurdities that make him realize that whatever preplanned course he takes is the wrong one.

His play Biedermann and the Pyromaniacs is a tragicomedy on doing business with the devil. A man lets three pyromaniacs enter his house; he accepts them as residents, petrol cans, fuse, and all. When they need matches, he duly obliges.

Frisch's most famous play, Andorra, based on an idea that had already appeared in his breakthrough literary work, Tagebuch mit Marion, is a tragic and terrifying depiction of the mechanisms involved in social inclusion and exclusion, where the ritual of omitting someone involves a kind of bonding for those remaining. Out of sheer pettiness, a man begins describing his stepson as a Jew; the boy, facing prejudice, comes to accept this given identity as an unalterable fact. When the country is invaded by a racially defined neighboring state, his fate is sealed.

Andorra can also be seen against the background of a political battle that went on for decades in Switzerland until it was finally settled two years ago. Paul Gruninger, a police chief in the border areas fronting Austria and Germany, was dismissed in 1940, accused of using false information to let Jewish refugees into the country. He was rumored to have made money from the operation and died semi-destitute at the end of the 1960s.

Gruninger was later exonerated, thanks to the testimonies of many of those he saved. A Swiss journalist made a meticulous study of what had occurred; he forced the authorities to produce the minutes of the trial and the reports of the secret police. A cautious estimate is that Gruninger saved three thousand Jews from the Holocaust. There is no evidence that he did so for gain. His breach of the service regulations involved stamping a date of entry in the refugees' passports that preceded the date on which Switzerland closed its borders altogether.

Public opinion forced a reluctant Swiss government to reopen the case, and the court referred in its verdict to an ancient Swiss practice - the right to act in self-defense. Posthumously, Gruninger was fully exonerated. Years after his death, he has become the hero of wartime Switzerland. But the documentation surrounding his fate has released the stink of what realpolitik was about at that time - a power game laced with accommodation and discreet anti-Semitism.

The cupboard doors have scarcely been opened in Sweden. The collusion of the war years culminated in a postwar dictum: let it be. Contrary to what has been the case in Switzerland, the number of major literary works dealing with the morality of Sweden during the war is very limited. Only one of them has attained the international prominence reached by their Swiss counterparts: The Aesthetics of Resistance, a novel by Peter Weiss, who settled in Sweden in 1939 as a Jewish refugee.

Switzerland has landed in an international hurricane of opinion as a result of its gold dealings. In terms of culpability, Switzerland was at center stage, with Sweden as a supporting player. The problem, however, is that present-day analysis of the moral quality of Swedish wartime behavior has to be based on guesswork. Far too little is known about the details.

The main reason why Sweden has so far only experienced a few mild breezes, including what is stated in the Eizenstat report, is more a result of postwar tactics than of wartime realities. Swedish politicians and officials were smarter than their brethren in Switzerland. They appeared more willing after the war to atone for at least some of their dubious transactions. As a result, the outside pressure on Sweden to really investigate what happened has so far been negligible.

Swiss historians and journalists have shown considerably more energy on this account than their Swedish colleagues. Virtually everything that has fed the frenzy about the gold transactions is described in a book from 1985, Raubgold aus Deutschland (Gold Booty from Germany), written by a journalist named Werner Rings. It created scarcely a ripple when it first appeared but has now been reissued, validated by all the international attention. And it has been followed by several other investigative works that break new ground, the foremost of which is Bankgeschafte mit dem Feind (Banking Business with the Enemy), the journalist Gian Trepp's analysis of the strange machinations of the Bern-based Bank for International Settlement (BIS), where Hitler's bankers, all of them party members, worked in harmony with the bank's US president, Thomas H. McKittrick, and British, Swedish, Swiss, and Japanese top-level officials, among others. Considering the structure of the bank, it is not surprising that it was closely involved in gold dealings. Its chief executive, the German Paul Hechler, unashamedly signed letters on the bank's stationery with "Heil Hitler."

Rings and Trepp both look at Sweden's role. They share a basic understanding of what it was all about - invisible, multinational networks of people in power for whom trading with the Third Reich was, at least for a while, business as usual.

In Sweden, the investigative talent of an official at the National Archive, Goran Blomberg, has turned up the fact that a number of Swedish companies went through a voluntary process of "Aryanization" in 1940 and 1941. A secret agency established by the government for the task of reading letters and tapping phone calls was, it seems, extremely diligent. Letters in the thousands were opened and transcribed before being delivered, and the transcripts remain in the National Archives. Among the documents are numerous declarations by Swedish owners and executives assuring their German counterparts - including government authorities - that they could be trusted as solid business partners as there was not a single Jew on their staff.

A private letter from the director of the Swedish-German Chamber of Commerce, Eitel Becker, gives some idea of the situation in February 1941, when a German victory seemed only a matter of time:

It is interesting to note the atmosphere in Sweden, particularly as my work domain lies in a country that is still in possession of its full freedom but geographically is already part of the Grand German financial region. You could say that Sweden's greatest source of concern is its proximity to Russia, which is why the majority view a strong Germany as being in their best interest. There are of course a number of blemishes, in particular the rather difficult press in western Sweden. If you want to work successfully on behalf of the German economy, you must draw a sharp distinction between the press, the politicians, and financial circles in Sweden.... Swedish state policy is the embodiment of a conscious policy of neutrality.(8)

"The rather difficult press in western Sweden" was one man and one newspaper: Torgny Segerstedt of the Goteborgs Handels & Sjofartstidning, a venerable Swedish equivalent of the Financial Times. It was subjected to outright censorship on numerous occasions, including once for trying to publish reports about the use of torture in occupied Norway. In 1940, it was the target of an open letter calling for a boycott by advertisers, initiated by prominent businessmen and published by the main local competitor, a newspaper whose editor was a member of the official censorship board.

In an editorial entitled "The Verdict of History" - published in the mid-1920s - Segerstedt actually described the elements involved in defining history as a progression of events. When the present moves into the past, the events that have occurred are stratified. History is written in terms of winners and losers.

What will finally decide the verdict of future generations, insofar as one is forthcoming? The assessment of those who were contemporaries of the age in question. They are the only witnesses able to view things from within. Those who make the greatest clamor will be the ones heard most. When one considers how easily opinions are formed and legends created, how little the version of events that emerges usually has to do with what actually occurred, one is not inclined to place much trust in the testimony of the time, of what the future will call the present....

Alternatively, one might simply abandon the idea of trying to right wrongs. One can do the good and proper thing for its own sake alone, and seek an inner freedom, thereby achieving a certain independence with regard to what happens in the world. Sometimes right will triumph, sometimes it will be conquered. When belief in retribution and a settling of accounts beyond the grave wavers, and faith in the historian's verdict dims, the door opens to the endless reaches of inner freedom. Whoever passes through need never again suffer disappointment and mortification.(9)

This was the key to Segerstedt's self-view. Right sometimes wins and sometimes loses, but it is not your estimate of the likely outcome that decides the position you take. Segerstedt was not driven by a desire to be on the victors' side when history reached its verdict, nor by any dream of personal glory. He was quite unashamedly a genuine idealist: "Ideas alone can keep people on the human plane."

It was precisely this that made him the odd man out among Swedes in positions of power in the early stages of the war. The main problem, he saw, was not open pro-Nazism - that banner had only a limited appeal. Nor was it fear of Germany - that was both sensible and legitimate in a country so close to the Third Reich. But opportunism was another matter. As the historian Gunnar Richardson has noted in a recently published book, Beundran och fruktan - Sverige infor Tyskland 1940-42 (Admiration and Fear: How Sweden Viewed Germany 1940-42), a line of thinking advocating readjustment, anpassning, ran from the political Right deep into social democracy. The outcome of the war seemed obvious: Germany would stamp its mark on the Europe of the future, and Sweden must adjust its role accordingly. Allan Vougt, editor in chief of a major Social Democratic newspaper, Arbetet, during the war and Sweden's defense minister immediately after it, expressed the essence of this position thus: "After all the shattering events that have occurred since 1938, a German victory must be a source of concern to the small nations, which surely many Germans realize as well. On the other hand, we have no right to doubt the honesty of the Germans' ambition to create a better Europe."(10)

This was written in July 1940. The deportation of Europe's Jews and Gypsies was in full swing. Like Switzerland, Sweden had closed its borders. Paulsson and Rothmund, the officials in charge of these two countries' alien commissions, had jointly arrived at the Columbus egg solution to the refugee issue - they asked Germany to stamp a J in the passports of all Jews. For Segerstedt, this was the key point. Germany could conceivably win the war. But in that case, the moral battle would simply enter a new phase. In military terms, Sweden was neutral, but this was absolutely not the case when it came to fighting the Nazi paradigm.

What did Swedes do with Segerstedt's approach when the war ended? It was confined to the archives. After all, the fight had been won through realpolitik - Hitler and national socialism had been crushed. And the fact that Torgny Segerstedt died in March 1945, when the era he helped shape was ending, instantly left its mark on how his actions were viewed. A prominent conservative newspaperman, Gunnar Unger, who during the war was employed by the state board of information, came close to accusing Segerstedt of treason in an obituary: "He fought perhaps less for the sake of democracy, freedom, and humanity than for himself, the superior being, and he has zealously undermined our reputation abroad through his constant insinuations about the policy of neutrality that has been pursued in accordance with the wishes of the majority. He dared not advocate war yet had no plausible alternative to offer. This stance is both politically and morally irresponsible."(11)

Twenty years later, the end of the war seemed far more than a couple of decades away. Future problems? Surely they had nothing to do with the legacy of Hitler. A famous telegram of protest from Goring, framed and exhibited at the newspaper offices of the Goteborgs Handels & Sjofartstidning, had become no more than a historical footnote. Torgny Segerstedt's final article dealt with "the eternal Closing of Ranks, collective thinking."(12) It proved prophetic in relation to the positions he had taken, which were largely omitted from public discussion.

The turmoil now created by the Nazi gold controversy appears at the intersection between morality and realpolitik. Access to wartime archives brings things into fresh focus.

In Sweden, the investigation has only just begun. A story is emerging that appears to scatter once and for all the claim of Swedish separateness. A pamphlet published in 1989 by journalist Maria-Pia Boethius, which attacked the prevailing view among Swedish historians and which was immediately called overzealous, turns out to be an understated version of the true facts. A former ambassador, Sven-Goran Hedin, and a radio journalist specializing in history, Goran Elgemyr, have together uncovered documents shedding new light on positions taken by the Swedish government during the war.

III.

A year after the end of World War II, both Switzerland and Sweden were under considerable pressure from the Tripartite Commission, a body led by the United States with Britain and France as deputies. The winning side was demanding the return of all the looted gold acquired from Berlin. The Swiss had originally rejected this demand. Since all gold transactions with the Third Reich had taken place in accordance with normal business practices, they could see no grounds whatsoever for complying with the repayment demand.

The first round of negotiations in March 1946 had collapsed. The chief Swiss negotiator, Walter Stucki, had left Washington in protest. Now round two was under way. The Swiss were confronted with evidence proving that they had taken possession of large amounts of gold stolen from Belgium by Nazi Germany. Their new tactic was to offer a "goodwill payment" without conceding that they had been aware that the gold was war loot. Originally, the Commission's claim was for $200 million, about $1.9 billion in current prices. On the basis of available documents, Commission experts had worked out that Switzerland had taken delivery of stolen gold worth up to $289 million. The Swiss offered $58 million in compensation without admitting that they had any guilt in the matter.

A third of the stolen gold had been passed on to other states that were neutral and nonaligned during the war - Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey - and it was clear to everyone how the transactions had been carried out. Germany had no means of paying for the import of war material and strategically vital raw materials with negotiable currency. Via the National Bank in the Swiss capital of Bern, they were able to continually exchange gold for Swiss francs or transfer the gold directly to the country whose debt they were in. It was an adroit procedure. All the countries involved had gold reserves in the Swiss National Bank's underground vaults. When a major transaction was to take place between the Third Reich and other countries, bank officials simply saw to it that the right number of gold bars was transferred from one deposit box to another once the deal had been completed.

It was an official at the Swiss National Bank who had come up with the idea of a multinational gold depository. In the autumn of 1942 he had visited Spain and Portugal to discuss mutual problems. On returning home, he wrote a three-page report in which he noted that in the future Portugal did not intend to accept gold as a means of payment from Berlin, "partly for political reasons, partly as a precautionary legal measure." But, he wrote, there was a solution: "Such objections would no longer apply if the gold were to pass through our hands. We should give this our consideration."(13)

In the spring of 1946, these notes were still a secret, withheld from everyone but the innermost circle of power in Switzerland. The whole world, however, could see that Switzerland had acted as a turnaround point for the Nazi gold. And the governor of the Swedish Central Bank, who had been a constant guest in Bern and Basel during the war, was well aware that Switzerland's role as an intermediary had been an essential precondition for Sweden's war trading. As the end of the war approached, in August 1944, the Swiss National Bank described the situation in sober terms: "These circumstances are not publicly known. Consequently, Sweden is not named in the press as a buyer of 'stolen gold.' Generally speaking, Switzerland is serving as a curtain for Sweden. Our country is giving them an alibi."(14)

But in the minutes of a Swiss National Bank executive meeting in May 1946, Swedish Central Bank governor Ivar Rooth put things in another light. According to Rooth, Emil Puhl, deputy governor of the German Reichsbank, had assured "a Swedish trade delegation" on February 18, 1943 that no stolen gold had been transferred to the Swedish Central Bank. All the gold received as payment in Sweden throughout the war had been "old gold," and no gold had been received after January 15, 1944. Thus, at a sensitive stage in the negotiations, a central Swedish figure in the affair corroborated the Swiss denials. A week later, Sweden's negotiations with the Allies were due to begin in Stockholm.

Rooth was obviously speaking against his own better judgment. But the record ends with a passage that in hindsight takes on new significance:

In conclusion, Herr Rooth also declared that he had been totally convinced that Puhl had spoken nothing but the truth and that he had not signed over his soul to the National Socialist party. He had reached this conclusion as a result of the conversations between Puhl and Hechler [Director General of the Bank for International Settlement] that he had heard on occasion in Basel, conversations that without a shadow of doubt would have cost both gentlemen their lives had they come to the attention of the regime.(15)

Who was Puhl? There is a relevant document dated twenty days prior to the above record that states Rooth's position in relation to one of the prime movers of the stolen gold:

AFFIDAVIT

Baden-Baden, Germany

May 3, 1946

EMIL PUHL, being duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. My name is EMIL PUHL. I was born on August 28, 1889 in Berlin, Germany. I was appointed a member of the Board of Directors of the Reichsbank in 1935 and Vice President of the Reichsbank in 1939, and served in these positions continuously until the surrender of Germany.

2. In the summer of 1942, WALTER FUNK, the President of the Reichsbank and the Reich Minister of Economics, had a conversation with me and later with Mr. Friedrich Wilhelm, who was a member of the board of directors of the Reichsbank. FUNK told me that he had arranged with Reichsfuhrer HIMMLER to have the Reichsbank receive on safe deposit gold and jewels for the SS. FUNK directed that I should work out the arrangements with POHL, who, as head of the Economic Section of the SS, was in charge of the administration of the economic aspects of the concentration camp program.

3. I asked FUNK what the source was of the gold, jewels, banknotes, and other articles to be turned over by the SS. FUNK replied that it was confiscated property from the eastern occupied territories but that I should ask no further questions. I protested against the Reichsbank handling this material. FUNK stated that we were to go ahead with the arrangements for handling the material, and that we were to keep the matter absolutely secret.

4. I arranged subsequently with one of the responsible officials in charge of the cash and vault departments for receiving the material, and reported the matter to the Board of Directors of the Reichsbank at its next meeting. Pohl of the Economic Section of the SS, on the same day telephoned me and asked if I had been advised of the matter. I said I would not discuss it by telephone. He came to see me and reported that the SS has some jewelry on hand for delivery to the Reichsbank for safe keeping. I arranged with him for delivery and from then on deliveries were made from time to time, from August 1942 and for the following years.

5. The material deposited by the SS included jewelry, watches, eyeglass frames, dental gold, and other gold items in great abundance taken from Jews, concentration camp victims, and other persons by the SS. This was brought to our knowledge by SS personnel who attempted to convert this material into cash and who obtained in this connection the assistance of the Reichsbank personnel with FUNK's approval and knowledge. In addition to jewels and gold and other such items the SS also turned over banknotes, currency, and securities to the Reichsbank to be handled in the usual legal procedure established for such items. As far as the jewelry and gold was concerned, FUNK told me that HIMMLER and von KROSIGK, the Reich Minister of Finance, had reached an agreement that the gold and similar material was on deposit for the account of the Reich and that the proceeds resulting from the sale thereof would be credited to the Reich Treasury.

6. From time to time, in the course of my duties, I visited the vaults of the Reichsbank and observed what was in storage. FUNK, in the course of his duties, also visited the vaults from time to time.

7. The Golddiskontobank, at the direction of FUNK, also established a revolving fund which finally reached 10 to 12 million reichsmarks for the use of the economic section of the SS to finance production of materials by concentration camp labor in factories operated by the SS.

I am conversant with the English language and declare that the statements made herein are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Emil Puhl

Witness: Susan Schaeffer(16)

This testimony is taken from the records of the Nuremberg war trials. It was central to the evidence that brought the minister of economics Walter Funk a life sentence. And it was through this testimony that the world first heard confirmation from one of those responsible that the looting was so thorough that it even included the gold teeth of the Holocaust's victims, that it had been conducted as a carefully planned business project, and that Holocaust gold, too, had been part of Germany's trading with neutral countries. Eventually, testimony from SS officers and Puhl's own underlings resulted in Puhl himself being put on trial. In the last of the war crime proceedings, known as the Wilhelmstrasse trial, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment as the person chiefly responsible for managing the valuables from the Holocaust outside the SS structure.

In February 1943, Ivar Rooth had asked the Swedish government for advice on the matter of stolen property, following a statement just issued by the Allies. His own record states that he was told explicitly not to delve too deeply into the problem:

At the beginning of February, I notified the trade minister of the following. In the view of the declaration from the British and other Allied governments that claims may be forthcoming on property deriving from the occupied countries, the Central Bank faced the risk that gold it had bought or might buy in the future from the Reichsbank could be placed in this category. As it seemed likely that the Reichsbank, having sold gold to the Central Bank for a total of SEK 70 million under a previous agreement, would apply to sell further quantities, the risk faced by the Central Bank was likely to grow.

I therefore asked whether the issue of possible further gold transactions should be raised by myself in a letter to Puhl or in talks between Richert [Sweden's ambassador to Berlin] or Hagglof [Foreign Office official] and Puhl. The reason being that I wanted to bring the British declaration to Puhl's attention and to request - in order to avoid any unpleasantness or losses for the Central Bank - that the Reichsbank should in confidence declare its readiness to supply only such gold as did not fall into the category described in the British declaration.

In answer to my question, the minister of trade stated on February 12 that the government was of the unanimous opinion that there were insufficient grounds for raising the matter in any of the ways I had proposed. There was, however, nothing to prevent me from raising it in passing during a personal conversation with Puhl.

On February 15 I received a letter dated February 10 from Reichsbank director Wilhelm, who is head of the bank's foreign affairs department. He wanted us to agree to raise the upper limit for our gold purchases from 70 to 105 million crowns. As a result of this, I raised the matter once again by the minister of trade and the finance minister.... On his own and the Government's behalf, however, he stood by the statements previously made to me in respect of this issue.

I pointed out that a matter of this nature was not something I alone could take responsibility for and said I would bring it before a meeting of the [Central Bank] executive board. The trade minister then authorized me to record in the minutes of the meeting that the government wished the Central Bank to agree to the Reichsbank request for further gold transactions but that the Central Bank should not make this conditional on a declaration from the Reichsbank regarding the nature of the affair. He did, however, repeat what he had previously told me - that there was nothing to stop me raising the question with Puhl in private.

I presented the matter at a meeting of the executive board on February 18. A view voiced by one of those present was that "the government has dismissed the risks rather too hastily."(17)

A week later, the question was, at the request of the Central Bank, put to Puhl in private by the financier Jacob Wallenberg. He promptly received a denial.

It was Emil Puhl who, in his capacity as the day-to-day manager of the Reichsbank's affairs, had approved the gold transactions of 1943-1944 when the Wallenberg empire, Sweden's largest business group, secretly accepted the equivalent of $1 million (worth about $9 million today) as reimbursement for stocks acquired from the German company Bosch in 1940. The Wallenberg group had agreed to act as a front in the United States to prevent confiscation of Bosch's American subsidiary. The records show that Jacob Wallenberg wanted to avoid having possibly contaminated gold paid directly to his company. He suggested to the Germans that they should secretly trade the gold into Swiss securities; they followed his advice. The transaction was completed in May 1944, with the Swiss National Bank acting as the buyer of gold shipped from Berlin as part of the deal.

In June 1944 Emil Puhl was received as a guest in Stockholm, with receptions and dinners given by both the government and top financiers, including the Wallenberg family. And his name appeared as an unofficial referee as late as August 1944, when Jacob Wallenberg tried to get the Swedish Central Bank's permission for yet another gold transaction. His request was denied.

Just three weeks after Puhl supplied his sworn testimony, Ivar Rooth, unaware of what his old friend had admitted, contended that the German banker had certainly not signed over his soul to Nazism. Henceforth, the chief German mover behind Sweden's war trading vanishes into the dark depths of history. The archives of the national newspapers contain not a single line about Puhl's testimony against the minister of economics Walter Funk and not the slightest word about the trial against his own person - events that were fundamental in showing that the Holocaust was not only about mass murder but also about money.

The war trials were conducted in the full glare of international publicity. The absence of Swedish interest in Puhl's case can only be explained as a process of mental repression. In 1941, he had been made a Knight Commander First Class of the Royal Order of The Pole Star, a prestigious Swedish decoration, and his circle of Swedish contacts was impressive. But those who did business with his assistance, or indeed who included him among their friends, have not subsequently commented on his testimony or on the verdict against him. And Swedish historians, in describing Sweden's situation in World War II, have never introduced him as the mastermind behind the stolen, bloodstained gold.

The Swiss have not been able to repress him so easily. The Swiss government's first line of defense before the Allies was that in the spring of 1945 it had agreed to comply with US demands that it cease dealing in gold. In other words, Switzerland tried to state that by its actions, it had shown that it was finally on the right side. While it was busy presenting this line of argument, Senator Harley M. Kilgore was disclosing to his committee in Washington the contents of four letters sent by Emil Puhl from Switzerland to Walter Funk in March and April of 1945. They reveal in detail how Puhl, only a month before the end of the war, persuaded the Swiss to accept three tons of gold. When, in their negotiations with the Allies, the Swiss denied having had any knowledge of the origin of the German gold during the war, they were confronted with statements made by Puhl to his American interrogators: he had told them that Swiss National Bank officials knew they were receiving looted gold.

In closing his final letter to Walter Funk, dated April 6, 1945, Puhl looks back on yet another successful round of negotiations with the Swiss, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and reveals the reason why it succeeded. "Personal contacts on this occasion, as always, were marked by the utmost friendliness, something that is of decisive importance whenever one negotiates. In other words, they should be cultivated at all costs."(18)

IV.

Are the Swiss and Swedish examples of countries secluding themselves from the deeper implications of the war singular aberrations, temporary deviations from a general standard of conduct, a result of their not being involved in the moral struggle?

Not so. Norwegian Jews who survived the Holocaust returned to find others living in their flats and houses. Their bank accounts had been cleaned out, their life insurance policies cancelled, and their personal possessions scattered. The special office created by the Norwegians in 1942 to handle the assets of Norwegian Jews, the Liquidation Board for Confiscated Jewish Property, did not cease to exist after the Liberation. It was renamed the Reparations Office, and some of the administrators were used as experts in defining the terms of retribution. The only officials sentenced for treason were those who had been members of the Quisling party. Thus, returning Jews trying to reclaim their assets could be facing officials who, three years earlier, had handled the authorized theft of their property. And part of the remaining assets of the Liquidation Board was used to pay the salaries of the administrators. The preliminary findings of the Norwegian investigation of the affair indicate that a total of 32 percent of the confiscated funds were used for the Board's operations. One Jewish family from Oslo, whose assets had been fixed at NOK 2 million in 1942, was informed in 1947 that only NOK 19,000 would be returned. The fact that the Jews had been the object of genocide, where the confiscation of their property was the first step in robbing them of both their identity and their life, was never taken into consideration in the postwar settlement. Slightly more than one-third of the Norwegian Jews were killed within three months of their assets being seized.

The affairs of Norwegian seamen were attended to by a specially created authority, whereas the fate of the Jews scarcely entered the public eye. They were portrayed as just a handful of individuals who were victims of the war like everyone else, in a country where ten thousand lives had been lost. The uniqueness of their fate vanished from the historical account. Their status in relation to the resistance fighters was immediately apparent. At the end of the war, the Red Cross's white buses brought Norwegians home from the concentration camps. But the Liberation only applied to political prisoners. Surviving Norwegian Jews had to stay behind and eventually find their way home on their own. After the Liberation, Norwegian refugees in Sweden were given state grants for their journey home. The exceptions were those who were termed stateless Jews, often refugees from Germany who had come to Norway before the occupation and had managed to flee a second time. Among the persecuted, they were at the bottom of the pile. When Norwegian Prime Minister Nygaardsvold was asked why they were left to fend for themselves, he gave an ambiguous reply: "We do not want to refuse them entry to our country but it has not been our wish to use money to bring these people home."

In 1947, two members of the resistance movement were cleared of a charge of killing and robbing a Jewish couple who had tried to flee to Sweden. The evidence against them was strong, but the postwar climate swayed the court.

The Norwegian Constitution, dating from 1814, still applies in all respects except one. Section 2 originally stated that "Jews are excluded from access to the realm." This regulation remained in place until 1851, when the author Henrik Wergeland managed to have it removed as the result of a tenacious campaign. It was reintroduced by Vidkun Quisling. By referencing Norway's most important symbol of nationhood, the constitution that is celebrated every May 17, he was able to present the extermination of the Jews as a Norwegian-minded project, implemented by the Norwegians themselves, with the Germans at a distance.

In the last two years, a historian, Bjarte Bruland, and a journalist, Bjorn Westlie, have exposed a wound that has been festering ever since the war's end: who was involved in the handling of assets that the Quisling regime confiscated from Norwegian Jews? Such property, it turns out, was much sought after and was sold at auctions and at special property markets, where the customers were average Norwegians with full knowledge of where the items had originated. And those who had good contacts within the government agency managing the property were privy to special deals. The Adelsten Company, a clothing business that is now the second biggest in Norway, set up a nationwide chain of stores after the war and began its expansion by buying its main competitor at a fraction of the real value - a shop whose Jewish proprietor, as well as his wife and two small children, had been shipped off to the Holocaust. The son of the buyer was locally in charge of confiscated Jewish property. The only surviving member of the Jewish family, a son who now lives in London, has received a minuscule amount in compensation. When he wanted to restart the family business in 1945, the local bank refused to loan him money, stating that, after all, his standing as a creditor was not as good as his father's.

The orderly lists of stolen Jewish property, meticulously classified and evaluated, were easily accessible in Oslo's National Archive. Until they were found by Westlie, no one had bothered to look through them. And after his disclosures were published, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation, it took eight months before the matter turned into a national scandal and the government was forced to set up a commission of inquiry. The World Jewish Congress had asked Westlie to write a report in English, based on the material he had published in his newspaper report. The facts were already known in Norway, but when they were refloated by an official Jewish body, entering the Norwegian media via international news agencies, the affair suddenly became a matter of national and international concern. The Commission report, published on June 23, immediately caused a major political controversy concerning the terms of compensation.

The Commission members appointed by the state defined the task as a mathematical one. What was the market value of confiscated Jewish property during the war? How much of this sum remained at the time of the Liberation? How much of this did Jews get back? The Commission members arrived at the sum of $13 million (in current prices) as a measure of the difference between the actual loss suffered and what those involved got back. But the majority on the Commission, not including the chairman, failed to take a position on the question of whether and in what way present-day Norwegian Jews should be compensated. Thus, in practice, they reiterated the basic approach that governed official action directly after the war: "all citizens have the legal duty to bear the burdens themselves that the war has imposed on them."

In a minority report, the two members appointed by the Mosaic Congregation, Bruland and psychologist Berit Reisel, made the point that the confiscations did not only affect individuals; the authorities had smashed a cultural sphere. Ultimately, providing compensation for what happened during the war would be a form of recognition - the majority of the population would finally acknowledge that a minority in its midst was almost eliminated. Due to the heat of the discussions, the Norwegian government appears to be agreeing with the minority position rather than accepting the narrow definition applied by the Commission's majority.

As Canadian Law Professor Irvin Cotler has stated in relation to the Norwegian situation, restitution "must compensate for the lives lost as well as the assets plundered; for the destruction of a community as well as the plundering of its individual members; for the unjust enrichment over time by the successor Norwegian governments and Norwegian citizens as well as for the lack of prompt compensation at the time of the 'takings'; for the fact that Norwegian Jews were the only group singled out for genocide...on account of their race."(19)

The controversy in Norway is an instructive case. The documents now coming to light as a result of the furor created by the Nazi gold affair in various parts of Europe clearly indicate that the Norwegians' behavior in relation to Jewish property is only one example of a general abuse in several occupied countries that was not confronted after the Liberation. It adds new dimensions to the problem of guilt. To the wartime collaborators another group has to be added - the profiteers, some of whom might even have been members of resistance organizations.

The money distributed after the war - restitution from the neutral countries and booty found in Germany - was handled by governments, with only a fraction going to agencies and organizations dealing with refugees. Individual recompensation was largely ignored. And no real effort was made to investigate the myriad transactions in Germany and in the occupied countries where Jewish property had been "Aryanized." In 1962, in what amounted to an admission of guilt in the matter, the US Congress approved a token payment of $500,000 to the Jewish restitution successor organization.

In the general climate of a reconstitution of universal human rights, symbolized by the Allied victory, the "Non-Repatriable Victims of Nazism" were left without anyone to act on their behalf. Universalism was essentially defined as a reconstitution of sovereign nation-states in a liberated Europe. And when the Cold War agenda became the overriding issue for the US government, all states except Germany were allowed to define their war history with little regard for primary issues such as the Holocaust. The Swiss and Swedish handling of the matter is colored by their special problems as neutrals, but in terms of claiming a uniqueness with regard to universal issues, they were certainly not alone.

In the three Western zones of occupied Germany, the Allied armies were confronted by the task of handling seven million "displaced persons" - forced laborers, concentration camp victims, and prisoners of war. In Austria and Italy, the number of such individuals was smaller, but the problem was similar. Citizens of Western countries, most of them war prisoners, could easily be reintegrated. A large number of those with origins in Eastern Europe were unwilling to return to their native countries for fear of political reprisals. Jews were initially a small minority among the displaced, but their numbers rose dramatically when Poland entered a period of open anti-Semitism that included pogroms. The number of displaced Jews in Germany rose to 156,000 in 1946.

While the Americans eventually instituted a special status for this category in the US-administered sector of occupied Germany, allowing them to settle in separate camps, the British refused to implement such measures. Jews were forced into a mixed community of displaced persons. Some of their new comrades in these camps had actively supported the Nazi Reich. Britain's policy reflected its status as a Palestine mandatory power. The British government feared the pressure of Jewish emigration to the Middle East and wanted to avoid adverse Arab reaction. A few thousand Jews remained in the last of the German camps until 1957. A German newspaper, commenting on the situation in this camp in 1953, called it "the waiting room of the unfortunate."

Another largely neglected chapter in postwar history is the forced deportation of twelve million persons of German origin from countries in Eastern Europe. The fact that ethnic cleansing on this scale could take place without causing long-term problems is remarkable. However, the fact that these displaced persons were on the whole successfully integrated into the Federal Republic has diverted attention from the constitutional implications of the process. By allowing a change of nationality under these circumstances, the Allies legitimized a continued definition of citizenship based on ethnicity. This now sets Germany apart from other Western nations. Classifying second-generation immigrants of non-German origin as temporary residents as distinct from those of German origin is an integral part of the ethnically based definition of being German.

David S. Wyman's and Charles H. Rosenzveig's The World Reacts to the Holocaust, a broad-based comparative history of national reactions to the issue, describes two prevalent postwar European strategies for escaping the moral issues. In Germany, attempts have been made to play down the uniqueness of the slaughter of the Jews by stressing similarities with other crimes against humanity. One such perspective put forward in the mid-1980s by historian Ernst Nolte caused a major controversy, the so-called Historikerstreit. Nolte was accused of a false universalization of the issue. The matter still cannot be considered settled. The strong feelings aroused by Daniel Goldhagen's accusations of widespread German complicity in the Holocaust indicate that the way people view the part played by Germans during the war is still a highly sensitive national issue.

The focus on German guilt, however, has generated a tendency to assume that countries occupied by Hitler were without guilt. In Wyman's and Rosenzveig's view, occupied countries have attempted to universalize the victims, making no real distinction between the different forms of victimization.

Singling out Switzerland as the main culprit has drawn attention away from the fact that the moral conundrums posed by the Holocaust affected occupied countries as well. Homes, businesses, and valuables owned by Jews changed hands during the war. A number of governments discouraged survivors from confronting the new owners. The question of how to deal with the property of the millions of Jews who perished was given very little attention. In Eastern Europe, communism gave state authorities the chance to treat the Nazi confiscation of Jewish assets as an integral part of the renunciation of private property.

The controversy that has erupted in Norway illustrates a wider problem. Postwar nationhood in most occupied countries was built on myths of general resistance. Norway has only now been forced to confront the fact that its definition of wartime resistance largely excluded the Jews and that this exclusion continued in subtle ways even after the war. In France, where the complicity of the Vichy government had much wider ramifications, this conflict between a heroic mythology and the actual facts is even more apparent. It took the efforts of an American, Robert Paxton, to force French historians to start dealing with the issues.

Some 115,000 Jews living in the Netherlands were killed in the Holocaust, making the scale of the tragedy there the largest in any nation in Western Europe. There were subtle and not-so-subtle elements of anti-Semitism in the postwar reaction to this tragedy. In 1949, a former resistance fighter, the editor of an underground newspaper, set the Dutch Jews apart from the heroic, homespun Nederlanderschap. According to him, they "did not offer resistance against the pogroms." And, he claimed, "this lack of resistance came as no surprise. The Jews, who do not exert themselves when there is no chance of success, were not expected to fight. . . . The Jews may not be heroes, but they are certainly cunning. . . . Only when the Nazis reached out their claws for their capital and goods did the Jews awaken. And then they did very well indeed: with great craftiness, they were able to snatch away uncounted millions from the enemy."(20)

The story of Friedrich Weinreb gives an ironic twist to this perspective. Weinreb was a Dutch Jew who survived the Holocaust and was convicted in 1948 of embezzling money entrusted to him during the war by other Jews. In the sixties, the New Left catapulted him into prominence by describing him as a wartime fighter working against the establishment, continuously fooling the enemy, saving not only himself but also many other Jews. In 1942, he forged a German army document that listed Jews who were supposedly allowed to emigrate and used it to fool the officials in charge of deportation. Hundreds of people applied to be registered. Eventually Weinreb was arrested. Because the authorities believed that army officers had been behind the scheme as part of an operation to privately gain access to Jewish property, Weinreb was allowed to continue with his project, but this time he was used as bait. He was arrested once more when the Germans discovered that the false document had truly been Weinreb's invention. An official then decided to use Weinreb's talents for his own benefit. Weinreb was turned loose once again, this time with the task of helping to secure Jewish property. A number of Jews were actually saved as a result of his activities. The German authorities gave them a stay of deportation, hoping that they would inadvertently give a clue to the whereabouts of their hidden valuables. In February 1944, Weinreb went into hiding and stayed out of sight until the end of the war.

When his case was raised in the sixties, it sparked a countrywide debate on what courage and commitment had meant during the war. Conventions about heroism and cowardice were reexamined. According to Deborah Dwork and Robert-Jan van Pelt, dealing with the Dutch experience in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, the Netherlands - through a combination of circumstances, including the scale of the tragedy - has had to reconsider the mythology of resistance and nationhood to an extent that far surpasses that of other occupied countries. One result of this is now very evident: Dutch historians have been at the forefront of research into the material aspects of the Holocaust and the complicity of sections of the business community in aiding German industry during the war. Two Dutch researchers were the first to question the role of the Swedish Wallenberg group in relation to the Germans.

In other occupied countries, sensitive issues - such as complicity and collaboration, the failure of non-Jews to attempt to save their Jewish compatriots, and the fact that the outside world offered very little in the way of rescue efforts - were largely avoided until the seventies and eighties. The crucial change came when these matters emerged as national issues in the United States, eventually influencing the European perception of them. The Nazi gold controversy is a prime example of this transatlantic interaction.

Without a state, Mazzini told his fellow Italians, "you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the people. You are the Bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will act as sureties for you."(21)

This perspective remains true in an international system based on nation-states. To my mind, the deeper dimension of the Nazi gold controversy is that it reminds us of the fact that the Holocaust was only the climax of a policy whereby a state set out to exclude a casually classified group of citizens, positioning them as enemies of the "real," ethnically defined citizens, then making large segments of the population state accomplices by allowing them to profit from the elimination of the so-called enemy. Confiscation of Jewish property was an integral part of the Third Reich from the beginning. Before the Holocaust, the results of this policy were largely accepted as an unavoidable fact by Germany's neighboring states. Jews did not find faith or protection anywhere.

Besides all its other dimensions, the Holocaust was, on the grandest scale in history, a form of robbery combined with murder, with a network of victims, murderers, fences, and profiteers extending across a whole continent. Nazi gold has become a metaphor for stolen valuables of every kind - stocks and shares, bonds, rights of property, art, antiques, and jewelry. It is this murky swamp that is now seeing the light of day.

European integration is in reality a question of war and peace in the twenty-first century. My deceased friend Francois Mitterand shared this view. He stated before the European Parliament in Strasbourg on January 17, 1995 that nationalism is war. I know that people do not like to hear this. . . . However it is no use burying one's head in the sand. If there is no momentum towards continued integration, this will lead not only to a standstill but also to retrogression. But we have no desire to return to the nation-state of old. It cannot solve the great problems of the twenty-first century. Nationalism has brought great suffering to our continent.(22)

Helmut Kohl's speech in the Belgian city of Louvain last year is colored by the peculiar German predicament faced by Kohl's generation: how to shape a national faith without nationalism. It illustrates one aspect of the European project - how to avoid destructive competition between major states. There is a basic truth in Kohl's position. In Europe, the development of nation-states has been closely interlinked with the history of war. But it lacks emphasis on another aspect of European cooperation, namely, how to guard minority rights in a system of nation-states based on ideas of common history and cultural homogeneity.

Long ago, a historian wrote an open letter to a nameless minister whose office had yet to be established, in a government that had yet to be formed, in a state that had just arisen out of nothing. Like all the other people in this new state, the historian had been granted limited citizenship. He and his compatriots had lived without a constitution or a government for four years. At the time, he lived a stone's throw from the border, in a provincial city whose inhabitants had been forced to change both their nationality and their official language four times in seven decades. The young men of the city had twice in twenty-five years been ordered to fight against the nation that they were now part of once again. This city, the historian declared, would soon become the center of a continent.

The letter writer was Eugen Kogon, the point in history was the autumn of 1949, the state was the German Federal Republic, the city was Strasbourg, once again returned to France, and the letter was entitled "From the Future Capital of Europe."

Kogon had survived six years in the Buchenwald concentration camp. When he was liberated, he ended up in the American zone. His role as a prominent opponent of Hitler was enough to land him one of the most sought-after privileges of the time - permission from the occupying powers to publish printed reading matter for a German public.

In 1946, together with a close friend and political ally, newspaperman Walter Dirks, Kogon launched a quarterly magazine focusing on culture and politics, entitled Frankfurter Hefte. The shortage of paper decided the form it took: the thick volumes were packed with closely printed essays illustrated by drawings the size of postage stamps. But Frankfurter Hefte proved to be a roaring success. In less than a year, its circulation had reached sixty thousand. With its remorseless analysis of the Hitler years and its forward-looking commentaries on current events, the magazine filled an ideological vacuum.

In 1946, as part of the same political project, Kogon published the first historical study anywhere of the political structure behind the Holocaust: Der SS Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell). One central feature of Kogon's analysis was the conclusion that the Third Reich was from the very start a European project, with racial demarcation as an instrument of the government. In 1938, Hitler had stated the matter clearly. He was "exporting only one idea, and that is not the idea of national socialism. It is the idea of anti-Semitism."(23)

Closely connected to this perspective were Kogon's reflections on popular support for political action. Hitler had built up his position as a future dictator from within a system of parliamentary democracy. It was on the basis of the support he commanded from an ethnically defined majority that he claimed absolute power as Germany's fuhrer, the core of his project being the elimination of a minority group of citizens. For Kogon, the concept of popular sovereignty appeared dangerously equivocal. The idea of the people's right to decide is the very basis of democracy. But it has no built-in checks on abuses of power, whether directed at a nation's own minorities or at other nations.

At the time of publishing his open letter pointing to Strasbourg as the future capital of Europe, Kogon, as a German observer, had just witnessed the first session of the Council of Europe. It was a remarkable occasion, where leading European politicians gathered to discuss the future integration of their respective states. Kogon was one of many people there who were hoping that the meeting would lay the foundation for a European parliament with genuine power in important, if limited, spheres. One of the first tasks of such a parliament would be to define human rights on a level higher than that of the national government.

In May 1946, Kogon took part in a congress in The Hague as a member of the European Movement, which involved six organizations who were working from different perspectives toward a united Europe. Among the prime movers at this meeting was Winston Churchill. The congress had a great impact on public opinion, and the debate on Europe took off in several countries. A few months later, the French government presented a proposal for a supranational community with the power to raise matters embracing an entire continent, which was supported by Britain and the Benelux countries. This led to the creation of the Council of Europe.

For Kogon, this was a moment of triumph. The occasion coincided with the founding of the Federal Republic. And the constitution of the new Germany included a clause for which Kogon and Dirks had fought for as long as they had published their journal - voluntary restrictions on national supremacy. The new Germany had written into its constitution that ensuring "peaceful and lasting order in Europe and between the peoples of the world" took priority over clear-cut national interests. The next task was to ensure implementation of the clause by binding Germany to the Council of Europe.

The dream of Strasbourg as the capital of Europe was highly symbolic. Should the province be called Alsace-Lorraine or Elsass-Lothringen? This was one of the questions that had led to three wars in less than seventy years. The battle for supremacy between the French and German languages had culminated in Hitler's total regimentation.

When Kogon wrote his open letter, the legendary cabaret "Barabli" had just had its first performance in Strasbourg. Its creator, Germain Muller, incapable like so many others in the province of defining himself as entirely French or German, satirized the problem by calling his first revue "Let's Stop Talking About It." The name "Barabli" was taken from a joke about how the Allies used to distinguish between real Germans and forcibly recruited soldiers from Alsace in the same prison camp. They held out an umbrella and asked the prisoners what it was called. The Germans always replied Ein Regenschirm while the prisoners from Alsace replied in their own language, E barabli.

Kogon overestimated the experimental inclinations of Europe's established politicians. Two years later, the dream of a Council of Europe leading to a European Parliament was in question. Stagnation had set in at the Council's sessions, and the countries were at a loss as to what to do about it. Narrow national interests blocked their decisions.

Instead of focusing on restrictions on national sovereignty in regards to the implementation of human rights, the move towards Europe took the economic and security policy road. West Germany was linked to France, Italy, and the Benelux countries in the coal and steel community. Brussels, not Strasbourg, emerged into the limelight as the projected capital of a future Europe. It made little difference that Strasbourg eventually became the seat for the European Parliament. Real power was wielded by the bureaucrats and lobbyists in the corridors of Brussels.

The balance of terror gave the impression of having created firm rules for the European power game. But the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia illustrate almost too clearly the abuse of the concept of popular sovereignty that Kogon described as an ever-present dilemma. Milosevic's, Tudjman's, and Karadzic's interpretations of the ethnic majority's right to use violence are echoes from the Third Reich. "Ethnic cleansing" means state-supported plunder. And the problems involved in settling such matters once they have occurred is only too evident. The right of individuals to regain stolen property was not in practice part of the Dayton agreement. The EU has shown itself incapable of mastering the situation. The present structure offers no guarantee that the exigency of unlimited ethnically based national authority will not resurface.

Strasbourg's eclipse saw the disappearance of a crucial idea cherished by the European Movement of the late 1940s - the creation of checks hindering the power politics of individual nations, in the form of a new, supranational system of law guarding minority rights. By manipulating public opinion, governments can still potentially present violations as an expression of popular will. Politicians such as Le Pen and Jorg Haider are setting the stage for ethnic confrontation as an element in European politics. And in a continent in which nations range in size from tiny Andorra to Germany's 80 million, the struggle for dominance is always there, just beneath the surface.

The Nazi gold controversy is, hopefully, the beginning of a meltdown of the national mythologies relating to the Holocaust. Facts kept out of sight until recently are now widely available. The confrontation that brought the issue to life came from the outside, with the World Jewish Congress as the agent provocateur and the US Senate as the sounding board. It could be seen as the result of a seemingly paradoxical American mind-set: an enduring belief in universal values, shaped by strong tendencies towards particularism. The Jewish community, as one American minority among many, has been allowed to define its version of history to an extent that has never been reflected in Europe. The Holocaust has acquired an overwhelming national significance; in terms of the prominence given to the issue, only Israel surpasses the United States. But the American perspective is presented in strictly universal terms. The Eizenstat report is not a conventional official statement, dealing with the national agenda. It is an attempt to objectivize the matter, judging the question of property theft in a comparative perspective and from a moral point of view.

The Holocaust experience - truly unique, yet universal in its significance - has to be integrated into the various national projects that comprise Europe. Emancipatory provocation across borders is necessary to build an element of real universality into the European project. Lord Acton once tried to define the issue in relation to a specific mind-set: "Our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike."(24) A reflection written by Swiss author Adolf Muschg in relation to the gold controversy captures the heart of the matter: "It was a long time ago: now we are paying for the sleepless nights that we did not have because of Auschwitz; now we are overtaken by all the concerns that never affected us when it came to building up Europe, drowsing in the sleep of the self-righteous, a state of mind where tears turned dry."(25)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I drew inspiration from the specific perspectives of Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his book Die Grosse Wanderung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) and Shmuel Eisenstadt in his paper "The United States: The First Constitutional Democracy," unpublished, 1995.

ENDNOTES

1 US Department of State, US and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany during World War II (Washington, D.C.: US Department of State, 1944), 28.

2 Ibid., 83.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 86.

5 Ibid., 105.

6 Ibid., vii.

7 Lars Gustafsson, Predominant Topics of Modern Swedish Debate (Stockholm: Swedish Institute Pamphlet, 1961), 4.

8 Swedish National Archives Document, 1941.

9 Torgny Segerstedt, Handelser och manniskor (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Forlag, 1926), 126.

10 Arbetet, 27 July 1940.

11 Estrid Ancker, Torgny Segerstedt 1876-1945 (Stockholm: Tiden, 1962).

12 Torgny Segerstedt, I dag (Oslo: Johan Grunt Tanum, 1945).

13 Werner Ring, Raubgold aus Deutschland (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 1996), 52.

14 Ibid., 71.

15 Swiss National Bank, Executive Note No. 573,23 May 1946.

16 Affidavit of Emil Puhl, 3 May 1946, Nuremberg Document 3944 PS.

17 Swedish National Archives Document, 19 February 1943.

18 Subcommittee on War Mobilization, US Senate, 26 October 1945, 940.

19 Irvin Cotler, "Nuremberg 50 Years Later: The Restitution of Jewish Property - and Norwegian Justice," remarks made by Cotler in the Norwegian Parliament, 27 November 1996.

20 Deborah Dwork and Robert-Jan van Pelt, "The Netherlands," in David S. Wyman and Charles H. Rosenzveig, The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore, Md. and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 56.

21 Yael Tamir, "The Land of the Fearful and Free," Constellations: A Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 3 (3): 301.

22 Times Literary Supplement, 28 March 1997.

23 Helmut Krausnic and Martin Broszat, Anatomy of the SS State (London: Paladin, 1970), 61.

24 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 76.

25 Adolf Muschg, Wenn Auschwitz in der Schweiz liegt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 18.

Arne Ruth is Editor in Chief of Dagens Nyheter.

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