Report Takes Swiss to Task for War Role

ZURICH, Switzerland —  Switzerland shirked its moral responsibilities to victims of the Nazis as the Holocaust raged, cloaking itself in neutrality to justify business as usual with the Axis powers, international historians concluded Friday.

In a final report after a five-year study of Switzerland’s wartime role, the nine-member panel blasted a refugee policy that turned back thousands to near-certain death, and the nation’s excessive cooperation with Nazi Germany and failure to return wealth to its rightful owners when World War II ended.

The emotional debate escalated into a bitter feud that was defused only when Switzerland’s biggest banks agreed in 1998 to pay $1.25 billion to settle all Holocaust-era claims against the financial institutions, Swiss industry, the central bank and the government.

Critics lambasted the study as hopelessly slanted.

“A free country should not shell out taxpayers’ money to confirm . . . the opinions that were already in the heads of historians selected on one-sided political criteria,” the right-wing Swiss People’s Party said.

However, the government in Bern hailed it as a big contribution to the public debate on Swiss history and a reminder of how the country and its leaders at times acted less than honorably.