(Check against Delivery)

Today, 30 August 2001, is an important day. The Commission, availing itself of your intervention, is presenting to the Country as well as to the international public the first installment, that is to say, the first eight "Studies" of its final report. As you know, the nine remaining studies and several complementary contributions will be appearing in the upcoming months. At the end of the year, this work will be submitted in its entirety to the Federal Council and, according to plan, will be published within the first quarter of 2002. Even though each study provides the context relevant to the subject matter dealt with therein, it goes without saying that it is the report taken as a whole that will portray the overall context in broad outline.

These eight studies have been chosen on an arbitrary basis. There is no notion of priority or any type of Commission-internal logic involved. The simple fact is that staggering the publication of the report was necessary for practical, editorial reasons, and that these texts happened to be ready to be published somewhat earlier than the others. All of the studies presented today but for one, were prepared by our research associates under the supervision of the Commission. The one exception is the analysis of the press with respect to the issue of refugees and foreign economic policy. This study was carried out upon our request by Prof. Kurt Imhof and his team at the University of Zurich.

Just a bit less than five years has passed since December 1996 till present. This period of time accorded to the Commission may have appeared long to those who were impatient to learn what might have been, in some of its more controversial aspects, the behavior of Switzerland or that of its citizens, before, during and after the war; an equally long wait for those who felt in a hurry to turn the page, to forget an uneasy past, or to those desirous of conserving the mythical image of the past that they had created for themselves. This has also appeared a lengthy deadline in the eyes of those who underestimate the working conditions, the scientific requirements of the historian's job, the mass of archives to be consulted, the complexity of the hypotheses to be formulated and subsequently verified - reviewed - and refined, the gaps to be filled in as much as possible, and finally the formulation of the information gathered along with placing it in a proper perspective. A veritable jigsaw puzzle in a "beat-the-clock" setting.

And so, although too long for some, for us the deadline proved far too short. Too short, in fact, to touch upon and to resolve all of the issues worthy of being addressed. We are well aware of the fact that much will remain to be done on the majority of topics we have delved into. Moreover, one can never really consider any historical research as ever being terminated and the last word as having been said. Yet the short amount of time which was at our disposal implies still something else. It provided us with scant leisure to obtain an overall picture from the facts we observed, and to unfailingly distinguish the essential from the incidental. The image of not being able to see the forest for the trees is apt. The accumulation of details, dates, figures, anecdotes, quotations, and such tended at times to blur the picture and to obscure the path. To put it differently, we didn't have enough time to make our studies any shorter. The reader who plunges himself into them will probably feel like he is about to drown. He too will be required to exercise patience and discernment.
Even if we are presenting such a quantity of information of varying significance and value to the attention of the public, we are nevertheless doing so with a clear conscience. Apart from the excuse of not having had enough time, we do have another good reason. It lies in the fact that the greater part of the information which we are reporting originates from corporate archives, and we don't know whether they will ever be opened up to other researchers, or when this might take place and under what conditions. And so, whatever be the failings which readers and colleagues lying in wait at the edge of the forest shall rush to criticize in our work, we are in any event making an abundance of solid information available from which future research can draw benefit. No one will be able to accuse the staff of the Commission of having been lazy, ill-intentioned, or negligent.

How many times have I repeated, and others along with me, that the historian's role cannot be that of judge or moral authority. His task is to examine, to report, and to explain. However, the historian is also a human being, that is to say he has his emotions. He also has his enthusiasms and his antipathies. So why then should he not, within the bounds of objectivity, impart them to his readers mindful to respect everyone's individual conscience? But the destiny of the Commission, of its members, and of its research staff would have it that the mandate with which we were entrusted concerns a series of specific issues which have been stirred up in the course of the last years and are frequently brought up in an emotionalized and politicized atmosphere. It involves issues that have rightly or wrongly called into question the behavior, the intentions, and the probity of Switzerland or at least that of some of its key protagonists during or after the war. And so we were and still are treading on thin ice.

Yet we have detected and are reporting, as is our duty, a certain number of facts, manners of conduct, as well as intentions that are certain to surprise, disappoint, or puzzle when looked at from today's perspective. Whether they pertain to actions taken (or those not taken, for instance, the negligence of the banks in handling the famous dormant accounts, or the non-inspection of goods transiting through Switzerland), or to decisions made, they did have adverse effects on Switzerland, exert an influence of the conduct of the war, and/or were wrought with consequences for the possessions of numerous individuals and even (in the case of the refugees who were sent back) for the very lives of these persons. This was to be expected; moreover, we already knew it to a certain degree. Why should Switzerland and the Swiss people have demonstrated greater virtue and been graced with more clairvoyance than any of the other states other peoples?

Very rare are those who acted out of pure malice or blind ideological conviction. The protagonists from the public sector (the state and the administration) as a general rule served the interests of the country as they understood them to be, honestly, faithfully, and sometimes with remarkable dedication. It was possible that they made mistakes, got bogged down into a routine, or yielded to fear. The protagonists from the private sector, that is to say the entrepreneurs (bankers, insurance agents, industrialists, businessmen, etc.) were quite evidently concerned first and foremost with business operation results and with the future of the company. It was inevitable that conflicts of interest arise between the private and the public sectors of the economy, or within different branches of the economy as, for instance, with respect to the beneficiaries of the clearing operations which regulated payments between Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. As of 1940, the entrepreneurs were haunted by the prospect of the post-war period, possessed by the evolving and ever-changing facets of this future prospect which they were rarely able to predict. These considerations alone determined their strategies and their more or less resolute involvement in the war economies of the Axis and/or of the Allied countries. Those who completely withdrew from the German market constitute a rare exception. However, few and far between are those who drew large benefits from the war economies and chalked up a veritable war-induced profit.

To be sure, all of them were imbued, on the one hand, by the traumatic and still fresh experience of the "Great War", i.e., the First World War, and the crises of the 1920s and 1930s, and marked, on the other hand, by their culture along with the mentality, the "Zeitgeist" of the period. They were marked by the fears which were widespread in all of western society: the fear of bolshevism (one totalitarianism can mask another); that of unemployment and of social unrest; fear of the "Others", of strangers, of people with different customs or religion, of those from a different culture. This explains the anti-Semitism prevalent at the time, and the desire for order - not order of a totalitarian nature (something completely foreign to the Swiss mentality), but rather of a relatively authoritarian type, providing a sense of security, the feeling of being part of a whole.

The compromises and sometimes the compromising of principles that the public and private-sector leaders of Switzerland were obliged or thought it better to enter into, did not cause the country to veer from its determination to safeguard its independence, democracy, and federalism. On the contrary, they saw the pragmatic politics and the delicate balances that they were implementing, as a guarantee of those values to which the vast majority of Swiss people were attached. "Adaptation or resistance" (Anpassung oder Widerstand): this was, at the time, a pseudo dilemma. This is because there was resistance taking place by virtue of an adaptation which had been calculated as a risk. The true dilemma, the one which had not been fully resolved, was to know up to just what point this adaptation was averting the risk.

I have yet to expressed my thanks. First of all, my thanks go out to all the staff and research associates of the Commission. They are the craftsmen of these studies, and have accomplished an epoch-marking job. They have done their work under intellectually, psychologically, and morally difficult conditions. And they have brought it to a good, indeed very good, conclusion with courage, vitality, and judgment. I would like to emphasize this point, and may they receive all the credit for what they have done. Let me next extend my gratitude to the archivists, and to all those who aided, assisted and advised us. I would like to thank the companies who put up with our presence, and who not only encouraged, but criticized us as well. They have taken the time to read the manuscripts of the studies concerning them, and have drawn our attention to several errors; however, we assume full responsibility for what we have written about them. Finally, I would like to thank the media who have taken care of informing public opinion and of maintaining the deserved interest in our mission. You have kept expectations high. We hope they will not be let down.