Restitution without injustice. Coming to terms with the era of national socialism in Switzerland

Between 1997 and 2004 US-american pressure moved Swiss companies to pay more than 2 Billion Swiss Franks (1,3 Billion Q for Holocaust survivors all over the world. Switzerland did not declare these payments as reparations, although it took typical measures associated with reparations: the restitution of dormant accounts, the compensations for slave labour and refugees, and the juridical rehabilitation of people who had been sentenced because of what was then illegal assistance offered to refugees. Since the end of the Second World. War Switzerland has refused to talk about "reparations". This has been due to the dominance of a strictly legal point of view according to which the German Reich - and not the Swiss democracy - was responsible for the crimes. The fact that Switzerland took these various steps was not only as a consequence of American claims. It was also because of the combination of the unsolved problem of dormant accounts with Switzerland's moral guilt because of its restrictive politics regarding Jewish refugees.