WASHINGTON — Responding to intensifying attacks about his nation’s wartime dealings with Nazi Germany, Switzerland’s top diplomat here is admonishing U.S. government officials, Jewish groups and the news media to “avoid the trap of hasty conclusions.”
The appeal came as new evidence emerged that Swiss railway officials turned Jews over to the Gestapo and after the war, allowed known Nazis to come to Switzerland.
Switzerland’s ambassador to the United States, Carlo Jagmetti, speaking at a packed news conference Wednesday at the Swiss Embassy here, conceded that Swiss banks made “some real mistakes” in handling claims involving Holocaust survivors.
But he said a rush to judgment should be avoided until the facts become known.
“Accusations should not be made before records have been carefully analyzed, and sinister motives should not be attributed to measures taken out of genuine concern,” Jagmetti said.
The appeal seemed to bewilder officials of the World Jewish Congress.
“I don’t think that when you’re speaking 51 years after this event, any conclusion right or wrong can be termed hasty,” said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the WJC, whose researchers have been sifting through thousands of recently declassified documents in the U.S. National Archives.
The Swiss Parliament is establishing a commission to investigate the fate of all assets that reached Switzerland as a result of Nazi rule.
The Swiss Bankers Association and the WJC also have agreed to have former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker lead an investigation that will determine the value of dormant Swiss bank accounts belonging to Holocaust victims.
Even as Jagmetti sought to defuse the Jewish assets controversy, a newly declassified document uncovered by the WJC and obtained by JTA added new contours to the emerging portrait of Nazi-Swiss collaboration.
An October 1945 internal American government memo from the State Department to the American legation in Bern states that during the war, Swiss railway police helped identify Jews, German deserters and others attempting to escape Nazi Germany and turned them over to the Gestapo.
Moreover, the Swiss rail authorities — who are identified by name and whose pro-Nazi activities are described in the memo — allowed Nazis to gain entrance to Switzerland after the war, the document states.
“The revelations become more shocking and grotesque,” Steinberg said.
Jagmetti, meanwhile, disputed reports that Switzerland reached a secret pact with Poland in 1949 to hand over unclaimed wealth of Polish Holocaust victims to Swiss citizens in order to compensate them for property that Poland’s postwar Communist regime expropriated.
New evidence also suggests that Poland was not alone in reaching postwar agreements with Switzerland to settle claims.
Hungary announced Wednesday that it would publish details of a secret deal between the Hungarian and Swiss governments to transfer assets to Hungary from accounts held by Jewish Holocaust victims.