alt Hacker NewsSwitzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
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> closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
Ah another week another instance of this maga level crap. Read up on [1], read up on Geneva accepting migrants way after it was clear that Switzerland will starve since it was 100% surrounded by axis. Even after federal government forbade that.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
They walked a fine line.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
There is a definition of neutrality [1][2] based on the Hague convention.
[1]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague05.asp
[2]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague13.asp