Eventually we leave. She has regained her calm now. We say we’ll be happy to share our research, if Saurer is willing to open up their archive. She tells us that she’ll have to talk to the directorate about all of this. We get out of the building and out again into the pulsing heat of the August afternoon. J. jokes that he can hear the sound of shredding machines starting. I say they’ve had fifty years to do this, there’s probably not much left, but no doubt there will be some phone calls being made this afternoon to Saurer directors lying on beaches around the Mediterranean or working in their gardens.
The power of a single piece of paper. The power to send a company scurrying. The power to destroy the distance between the past and the present. We shelter from the sun in a shaded café on the little square. A sense of exhilaration, but also now a wave of intense anger and sadness. Nothing remains of those 300,000 people apart from this single piece of paper. But, just for a moment, there is also a sense of representing in some way those men, women and children – or rather re-presenting them – as we’ve just tried to do in the Saurer offices. Fifty-nine years after they died in blackness and unimaginable panic, they were, momentarily, present again, in that airy office in this little Swiss town. The company being held to account. The past returns when it’s buried with such contempt. The people are being spoken of once more. And in that very brief moment, they exist again. The company has to face them.
Before we leave the town we walk back down to the decaying assembly sheds where the Saurer lorries were manufactured. Climbing up to the broken windows, we look in and see that saplings are beginning to grow through the floors. Huge gaps in the roofs are letting the daylight in. There is something strangely hopeful about this reversion to nature. There seems to be a kind of truth here beyond all the offices and all the PR and all the technocracy and all the profiteering of corporations. All will end like this. With the ghosts of thousands of workers, the amnesia of corporations, sinking back into the ground, tree roots cracking the concrete.
6
Saurer: A Coda – ‘The blind spot in the writing of history’
The Bergier Commission, also known as the ‘Independent Commission of Experts’, was established by Swiss government decree on 13 December 1996 to conduct a historical investigation into ‘Switzerland throughout the years of National Socialist dictatorship in Germany and during the Second World War in general’. It was chaired by a distinguished Swiss economic historian, Professor Jean-François Bergier, and its panel of experts included Swiss historians and academics (Jacques Picard, Jakob Tanner, Georg Kreis), Swiss jurists (Daniel Thürer, Joseph Voyame), as well as US-based historians (Harold James, Princeton; Sybil Milton, Holocaust Memorial Museum), an IMF economist (Helen Junz), a Polish writer and diplomat (Wladyslaw Bartoszewski) and an Israeli historian (Saul Friedländer). The commission had a team of over forty researchers, advisors and translators, supported by an equivalent number of administrative staff, and in the five years of its existence it published twenty-five studies and reports, all building towards publication of its final report in 2002. The subjects investigated ranged widely, and you might have thought comprehensively, over the wartime role of Switzerland and its responsibility. Here is a selection of some of the reports published between 1997 and 2001 to give some sense of the scope of the commission:
Flight Assets – Looted Assets: The Transfer of Cultural Assets to and through Switzerland from 1933 to 1945, and the Problem of Restitution
Companies and Forced Labour: Swiss Industrial Enterprises in the Third Reich
Swiss Chemical Enterprises in the Third Reich
The Swiss Armaments Industry and Trade in War Material during the National Socialist Period: Corporate Strategies – Market Trends – Political Control
The Swiss Financial Center and Swiss Banks during the Nazi Period: The Major Swiss Banks and Germany (1931–1946)
Dormant Accounts in Swiss Banks: Deposits, Accounts, and Safe-Deposit Boxes of Nazi Victims and the Problem of Restitution in the Post-War Period
Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War
Roma, Sinti, and Jenisch: Swiss Policy Regarding Gypsies in the Nazi Period
At an early stage it became obvious that the original budget of 5 million Swiss francs was inadequate for the research needed, and in spring 1997 the Swiss government granted an additional 17 million Swiss francs to the project. Five years later, on 22 March 2002, the final report of the Bergier Commission was published in four languages. The report ran to 597 pages, and can now be read online, in its entirety, at www.uek.ch/en/.
In the introduction of the report I came across an intriguingly titled section – ‘The blind spot in the writing of history’, which perhaps could serve as an apposite epitaph for this particular commission. This section referred to Switzerland’s original post-war positioning of itself as a ‘victim of developments in world politics’, and how this has now substantially changed. But not enough, because even in recent Swiss historiography, the passage continues:
the fate and the point of view of the victims of the Nazi regime continued to be neglected (my emphasis). This has mainly to do with the fact that historical interest and enquiry in Switzerland have concentrated much more on the war and the war economy than on the Holocaust. This paradoxically reproduced an attitude in the public that had been prevalent already at the time: although as of 1942 people in Switzerland were able to obtain information about the mass crimes being committed in the territories under the Third Reich’s control.
My hopes were momentarily raised that this report would finally deal fully with the involvement and collusion of Swiss corporations in the Holocaust. Perhaps then you can imagine my consternation when I turned to the index of this seemingly comprehensive report (costing a total of 22 million Swiss francs, and involving the combined labour of almost a hundred people, over five years), and found only a single reference to Saurer: ‘Saurer, Adolph, AG, Arbon – page 202’. I turned to page 202 and what did I find on the subject of Saurer, the Swiss company which manufactured many of the gaswagen?
Nothing.
Or, rather, no words. Only a listing of the company’s name, included in a table showing it to be the ninth-largest value exporter from Switzerland in the war years (buried between Vereinigte Pignons-Fabriken AG and Grenchen Autophon AG, Solothurn) with exports to Germany between 1940 and 1944 worth 4.4 million Swiss francs. Not a single word about what those exports were.
Table 2: Export permits issued for war material destined for Germany and other countries, 1940–4 (in million Swiss francs)
Company
Value of exports to Gemany,
other countries,
(total)
Vereinigte Pignons-Fabriken AG, Grenchen
13.8
0
13.8
Aktiengesellschaft Adolph Saurer, Arbon
4.4
2.3
6.7
Autophon AG, Solothurn
6.4
0
6.4
How to communicate the meaning of those 4.4 million Swiss francs earned for Saurer’s exports to Germany between 1940 and 1944? And all the terror that is hidden in those numbers?