Almost daily, we are reading about new and deeply disturbing revelations regarding the financial role played by Switzerland and its banks during World War II.
This reminds us yet again that more than 50 years after the war’s end, we are still learning important new facts about that nightmarish period and continuing to face a number of pressing and unresolved issues.
No gesture by any government or bank can ever begin to make up for the incalculable losses endured by the victims of Nazi Germany and its allies. That is beyond question.
What is necessary, though, is the urgent need to demonstrate good faith in helping the remaining Holocaust survivors live out their last years in dignity and with the chance of regaining at least some of their assets. Switzerland has this opportunity today; it should seize it.
At the same time, there is an equally compelling need for moral stock-taking in Switzerland. For decades, the Swiss lived with certain myths about their policy of strict neutrality in World War II. Government, insurance and banking records now reveal a much more messy reality. Political neutrality, in too many instances, tragically turned into moral neutrality.
This presents the Swiss people with a remarkable opportunity to explore honestly and learn from their wartime experience and in so doing to emerge stronger as a nation and more aware of what can go wrong without moral accountability.
As the philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
