Swiss helped Nazis by refusing entry to Jews

The Swiss authorities knowingly contributed to the Holocaust by turning away Jewish refugees, a five-year study concluded yesterday.

"Large numbers of people whose lives were in danger were turned away - needlessly," said Jean-François Bergier, who led an international panel of historians given first-time access to archives.

The panel included historians from Switzerland, the US, Israel, Britain and Poland, following criticism from Jewish groups in the mid-1990s that Swiss banks had withheld the assets of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

Professor Bergier of Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology, said: "The refugee policy of our authorities contributed to the most atrocious of Nazi objectives - the Holocaust."

Overall, Switzerland provided shelter during the war to nearly 30,000 Jews, the panel said. But the historians added that "it must be assumed that Switzerland turned back or deported over 20,000 refugees" during the war, and that a large proportion were Jewish.

Many of those rejected were believed captured by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps, where they died.

But the historians rejected a 1997 assertion by the then US under-secretary of commerce Stuart Eizenstat, who said that Swiss links with Germany helped prolong the second world war.

The Swiss role was so small in comparison with "the enormous economic dimension of this war", they said.

The third main conclusion of the study was that Swiss government, banks, companies and art museums failed to respond "in a timely manner" to Nazi victims' claims for restitution after the war, he said.