During World War II, Switzerland maintained extensive and highly profitable economic ties with Nazi Germany, a relationship that has been a subject of significant historical scrutiny.
The Bergier Commission: The Swiss government’s own independent inquiry, the Bergier Commission, conducted the most comprehensive study of Swiss relations with Nazi Germany, documenting extensive economic ties across banking, industry, transport, and insurance. Final Report – synthesis PDF.
Banking and gold: The Swiss National Bank (SNB) and commercial banks purchased large quantities of gold from the German Reichsbank, much of it looted from occupied Europe and victims of Nazi persecution — a pattern detailed in the official U.S. government Eizenstat report and in the SNB’s own historical study. State Dept. summary; SNB report PDF.
Industry and exports: Swiss firms supplied Germany with machinery, precision instruments, and war-relevant goods. Official research shows Swiss exports of war-relevant goods rose from 47 million CHF in 1937 to 425 million CHF in 1943. Bergier economic chapter – PDF. Additional Bergier studies found that munitions exports overwhelmingly favored the Axis. Swissinfo summary.
Prefabricated barracks and espionage. Declassified U.S. intelligence records detail the activities of SS officer Hans Wilhelm Eggen, a close associate of Heinrich Himmler. These documents show that Eggen both arranged multi-million-franc purchases of prefabricated huts from Swiss suppliers and used these transactions as cover for building an SS intelligence network and managing clandestine finances in Switzerland. CIA Reading Room – doc 1; CIA Reading Room – doc 2
Whatever one calls Switzerland’s political stance, the historical record shows that Swiss institutions and companies actively engaged in — and profited from — economic relationships with Nazi Germany across finance and industry. Bergier Commission portal.
The Frauenkirche (“Church of Our Lady”) stands on the eastern side of the main market in Nuremberg, Germany. An example of brick Gothic architecture, it was built between 1352 and 1362 on the initiative of Charles IV (1316–1378), Holy Roman Emperor.
The church’s origins are bound up with tragedy. In 1349, during the Black Death, a violent pogrom led to the expulsion of Nuremberg’s Jewish community. Charles IV ordered the city’s synagogue demolished, and the Frauenkirche was built on its ruins as part of the newly created Hauptmarkt.
Yet within a few years, the city authorities, short of money, sought to attract Jews back. In 1351, Charles IV allowed their return under specific conditions, and by 1382 the Jewish community numbered more than 500, concentrated in the Judengasse (today’s Judenstrasse). More background can be found at the Jewish Virtual Library.
Centuries later, between the two world wars, Nuremberg became a stronghold of the Nazi Party. Julius Streicher (1885–1946) founded one of the first local branches there in 1922 and published the antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer. The city also hosted massive Nazi rallies, and its Jews lived under daily harassment and threat.
The Frauenkirche itself was nearly destroyed during the bombing of Nuremberg (see photo above) in World War II, leaving only its nave walls and façade. Restoration was completed in 1953, and today the church once again dominates the Hauptmarkt as both a historic monument and a reminder of the city’s layered past.
The Pegnitz is a river in Franconia, in the German state of Bavaria. Its source is in the town of Pegnitz (population ~15,000), about 27 km south of Bayreuth. The river runs for about 113 km (70 mi) before meeting the Rednitz in Fürth to form the Regnitz. Along its course, it flows through Nuremberg (population ~545,000), the largest city in Franconia, the second-largest in Bavaria, and the 14th-largest in Germany.
Nuremberg is famous for its castle and extensive city walls, with their many towers—among the most impressive fortifications in Europe.
Nuremberg in the Nazi Era
From 1933 to 1945, Nuremberg held special significance for the Nazi regime. The city was chosen as the site of massive Nazi Party rallies, staged in 1927, 1929, and annually from 1933 to 1938. These events were designed as propaganda spectacles.
At the 1935 rally, Hitler convened the Reichstag in Nuremberg to pass the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews and other so-called “non-Aryans” of German citizenship.
After the collapse of Nazi Germany, Nuremberg again became a focal point of world history. Between 1945 and 1946, the surviving top Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Military Tribunal. The proceedings took place in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. (The cross visible today in the courtroom was added later by the postwar German government and was not present during the trials.)
Between 1933 and 1938, Nazi Germany staged massive rallies in Nuremberg. The former Nazi Party Rally Grounds remain the largest surviving complex of National Socialist architecture in today’s Germany. Designed by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, the vast structures still convey the immense power of Nazi propaganda. Speer was later convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He served 20 years in prison and died in London in 1981.
The Zeppelinfeld (Zeppelin Field), shown above, is one of the most striking remains. Its massive grandstand, 360 meters wide, was modeled on the Pergamon Altar of ancient Greece, with square piers inspired by Franco-American architect Paul Philippe Cret. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, American forces famously blew the swastika from its top. The name “Zeppelinfeld” refers to the landing of Count Zeppelin’s airship (LZ6) here in 1909.
I visited in April 2024, on a cold and windy day, with my cousin from Nuremberg who graciously served as my guide. The site felt stark, desolate, and impossibly vast—its scale resisting any attempt to capture it in photographs. Only a handful of visitors were there, but the immensity of the place chilled me. I tried to imagine the grounds filled with uniformed followers of Adolf Hitler, roaring in unison. The thought sent a shiver down my spine.
How could this have happened in Germany—a country with such a deep tradition of culture, learning, and science? Could it happen again? Is it already happening? The pull of the far right has not disappeared; it is rising once more.
What happened here was not inevitable. It can happen again.
The name Auschwitz is the German version of the Polish town Oświęcim, located about 40 miles (64 km) west of Kraków. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the region was annexed into the Third Reich.
The railway tracks leading into Auschwitz II–Birkenau. From 1944, this was the arrival point for hundreds of thousands of deportees, many of whom were sent directly to their deaths upon arrival.
In 1940, Nazi Germany established a concentration camp on the outskirts of Oświęcim, known today as Auschwitz I, or the Main Camp. In 1941, they began building a much larger killing center two miles away in the village of Brzezinka, renamed Birkenau. This site — Auschwitz II — became the heart of the extermination process.
That is the geography and the history. But what I found when I arrived went far beyond what books and maps can convey.
Despite years of studying photographs, listening to survivor testimonies, and watching documentaries, nothing prepared me for Auschwitz II–Birkenau. Not its immense scale, nor the unsettling quiet that hung over the gray May morning in 2025 when I arrived.
In September 1982, I visited Dachau with my father. He had been imprisoned at HASAG, a Nazi forced labor camp in Częstochowa, and was later transferred through a series of camps as the Nazis evacuated prisoners westward in the final stages of the war. In 1944, he was sent from HASAG to Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and finally to Dachau.
Gate to the Death Wall – Block 11, Auschwitz I
One of his most harrowing memories was the transfer from Flossenbürg to Dachau. Along with 500 other prisoners, he was first forced to march, then packed into freight cars “like cattle,” as he later described in a 1973 interview with the Pittsburgh Press. Only 18 of the 500 survived the journey. My father was one of them.
During our visit to Dachau in 1982, my father shared this story in German with a group of high school students. Hearing him speak about what he had endured—on the very ground where his imprisonment had ended—moved me deeply. Yet even with that experience, Birkenau struck me in ways I hadn’t expected.
Although Dachau had a gas chamber, historical evidence suggests it was never used for mass executions. It was equipped and capable—part of the same machinery of terror—but not used systematically for mass murder like the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most deaths at Dachau occurred through forced labor, shootings, disease, and medical experiments. Still, standing in that room with my father years ago was sobering. Even unused, the gas chamber embodied the intent of a system built on death.
His brother—my uncle—was deported to Auschwitz and survived. He was among those liberated when the Red Army arrived in January 1945. These are not just historical facts to me; they are the roots of my identity.
So I came to Auschwitz not as a historian, nor just as a photographer, but as a son and a nephew. I didn’t come seeking understanding—I don’t believe Auschwitz can be understood. I came to listen, to stand where memory persists, and to bear witness.
What struck me most wasn’t a particular building or exhibit, but the vastness of Birkenau. It spans roughly 346 acres—more than half a square mile of barracks, chimneys, tracks, and ruins. It felt like a mechanized landscape of erasure, a place where lives were reduced, processed, and obliterated. The train tracks still slice through the camp. Rows of chimneys stretch toward the forest line. The emptiness felt both infinite and suffocating. At one point, I stopped walking and heard only the gravel under my shoes and the wind moving through the wire. It was a silence not of peace, but of reverberation.
Wooden bunks where prisoners slept in overcrowded, in humane conditions.
Auschwitz is one of the most visited Holocaust memorial sites in the world. In recent years, more than two million people a year have come—students, families, descendants of survivors, visitors from every corner of the globe. That fact lingered with me as I walked. I knew I was one of many, yet I felt completely alone.
During my visit, I saw two groups of Israelis. The first were students, draped respectfully in Israeli flags, walking the grounds where their history was nearly erased. The second were soldiers in uniform—quiet, focused, listening intently to their guides. They were not tourists, but heirs to a story that had nearly ended here. Their presence filled me with quiet pride and a sense of defiance. It felt like an answer—a living affirmation of survival and responsibility.
Inside the crematorium at Auschwitz I. Though smaller than the gas chambers later built at Birkenau, this was one of the earliest sites of industrialized murder. Its walls remain stained by fire and time.
I also visited the crematorium at Auschwitz I—preserved as part of the museum—and later, the ruins of the much larger gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau. These were the industrial centers of death.
The crematorium at Auschwitz I surprised me with its scale. It was smaller and more intimate than I had expected—but no less chilling. It was an early site of killing, later eclipsed by the vast machinery of death at Birkenau. There, the system of extermination became larger, more efficient, and partially hidden underground. Seeing the shattered remains of those later structures brought the full scope of the killing into terrifying clarity.
At Birkenau, the ruins sit in quiet collapse, half-swallowed by the earth. It’s one thing to know what happened there. It’s another to stand where it happened. The deliberate effort to erase these places—and the lives taken within them—was itself part of the crime.
A view of the barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, seen through barbed wire.
I’m grateful to the many Poles who have preserved this site with care. I recognize that Auschwitz was built and operated by Germans, and that the responsibility for the Holocaust rests with them. But it would be dishonest to say I felt only gratitude. My visit stirred unease. Poland’s relationship with its Jewish past is complicated—marked by courage and complicity, remembrance and denial. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the camps. That truth is hard to ignore.
Still, I didn’t come to accuse. I came with questions. I came because I needed to be in the place where history and memory hang so heavily that even the air feels changed.
I left without answers. But I left with something else: a deeper connection to the voices that once filled this place, and a stronger sense of responsibility to keep their stories alive.
Memory alone is not enough. But without memory, nothing remains.
Abram Enzel was born in Częstochowa, Poland, on June 18, 1916, to Chaim and Faigle Enzel. Chaim worked as a kosher butcher. They had five children — three boys and two girls — with Abram as the firstborn. In 1939, there were 28,500 Jews living in Częstochowa, about 124 miles (200 km) southeast of Warsaw.
The Germans entered Częstochowa on Sunday, September 3, 1939, and persecution of its Jews began immediately. More than 300 Jews were killed the following day, in what became known as “Bloody Monday.” On December 25, 1939, a second pogrom took place, and the Great Synagogue was set on fire. The family survived both pogroms.
On the morning after Yom Kippur in September 1942, Abram was separated from his family. One brother, Nathan, had previously been taken by the Germans to a concentration camp. The rest of Abram’s family was gassed and cremated three days later in Treblinka.
Abram was sent to work in a munitions plant operated by HASAG (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the largest German industrial companies using concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest such company after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Göring Werke. It operated four camps in Częstochowa, the largest of which — HASAG-Apparatebau — held 7,000 Jewish prisoners. The wages of these forced laborers were paid directly to the SS. Those unfit for work were killed under the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through work”). From July 1944 to early 1945, HASAG moved most of its equipment and Jewish workers to Germany. No HASAG personnel were tried by the Allies at Nuremberg.
In 1944, Abram was transferred from HASAG to Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and finally to Dachau. One of his most haunting memories was the transfer from Flossenbürg to Dachau with 500 prisoners. In a 1973 Pittsburgh Press interview, Abram recalled: “They made us march at first. But later they herded us like cattle on some old freight cars.” Only 18 of the 500 survived to reach Dachau — Abram among them.
On April 29, 1945, the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armored Division of the U.S. Army liberated Dachau. The next day, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Abram weighed just 78 pounds at liberation, compared to a healthy 130 pounds before the war.
By June 1946, 2,167 Jews had returned to Częstochowa, but Abram chose not to. He recovered in Germany, ran a grocery store in Bayreuth, and emigrated to the United States in 1951, settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In Pittsburgh, Abram met Dora Weiss, a survivor from Munkács, Czechoslovakia (now Mukačevo, Ukraine). Her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. They married on June 8, 1952, and had one son, David, born January 21, 1955.
Dora died of cancer on July 30, 1958, at age 35. Abram never remarried. He worked at H.J. Heinz before joining the Concordia Club, where he rose from busboy to maître d’. He considered his 30 years there the happiest of his life.
David moved to Washington, D.C., in 1979. Abram retired in 1981 and soon followed. He died on May 10, 1994, in Washington, the capital of the country that had liberated him.
The residence of the United States Ambassador to Paris is at 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the 8th arrondissement. It is known as the Hôtel de Pontalba. It was built by Louis Visconti for the New Orleans–born Baroness Micaela Almonester de Pontalba between 1842 and 1855. Edmond James de Rothschild acquired the building in 1876.
During the German occupation of France, the mansion, then owned by Baron Maurice de Rothschild, was requisitioned as an officers’ club for the Luftwaffe. After the war, it was rented out to the British Royal Air Force Club, and then to the United States.
In 1948, the American government purchased the building, primarily for the United States Information Service. These offices were moved to the Hôtel Talleyrand as restoration was completed in 1971 during the tenure of Ambassador Arthur K. Watson. The building then became the official residence of the ambassador. This magnificent structure has only been the Ambassador’s residence for a little more than fifty years.
Dietrich v. Choltitz — Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R63712 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE via Wikimedia Commons
At the end of WWII, Adolf Hitler ordered Choltitz to hold Paris, but if that wasn’t possible, to destroy it. Although General Choltitz had been very loyal to Hitler, he could not bring himself to obliterate the City of Light. He ultimately surrendered Paris to French forces on August 25, 1944. He’s been called the “Saviour of Paris” for preventing its destruction.
After his surrender, Choltitz was held for the remainder of the war in London and the United States and was ultimately released from captivity in 1947. He died in Baden-Baden in 1966.
The author of this exceptional book was the distinguished political scientist and biographer Jean Edward Smith. Smith’s work includes highly regarded biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He died on September 1, 2019 at the age of 86.
I recently learned that, Maisie Hitchcock, a guide on a Rick Steves tour of Switzerland I took in 2018 died peacefully of ovarian cancer on August 9, 2023 in the company of her family.
Maisie is the third from the left.
Maisie was a kind, gentle guide who did an excellent job showing us the highlights of Switzerland. Although she was English, she lived in Berlin and spoke fluent German.
Maisie enjoyed people and knew how to relate to each person as an individual. Maisie’s father, Robyn Hitchcock, is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. He wrote a loving memory of his daughter on Instagram.
During that 2018 trip, my suitcase broke and I asked Maisie where I could buy a new bag. Maisie helpfully sent me to Manor in Lugano where I bought a bag that I continue to use on my travels.
May Maisie’s memory be a blessing for many years to come.
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is celebrating its 90th birthday. It is the oldest continuously functioning archive documenting Nazi crimes.
The Library has its origins in the work of Dr. Alfred Wiener (1885-1964). Dr. Wiener was a German Jew from Berlin who campaigned against Nazism during the 1920s and 30s and gathered evidence about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Dr. Wiener and his family fled Germany in 1933 and settled in Amsterdam. Later that year he set up the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO) at the request of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. This archive collected information about the Nazis, which formed the basis of campaigns to undermine their activities.
Following Kristallnacht (the November Pogrom of 1938), Wiener prepared to bring his collection to the UK. It arrived the following summer and is believed to have opened on the day the Nazis invaded Poland.
During the war, staff gathered evidence to document and publicize reports of Nazi efforts to annihilate European Jewry, including an eyewitness account of Kristallnacht.
Throughout the war, the JCIO served the British Government as it fought the Nazi regime. Increasingly the collection was referred to as ‘Dr Wiener’s Library’ and eventually this led to its renaming.
Wiener’s recognition of the danger posed by the Nazis didn’t begin after Hitler came to power in 1933. Instead, he can justly lay claim to having been one of the first intellectuals to raise the alarm about the rise of antisemitism after World War I.
Horrified by the surge in anti-Jewish right-wing nationalism that he encountered when he returned from the trenches to his homeland, in 1919 Wiener published a tract, “Prelude to Pogroms?”, in which he warned: “A mighty antisemitic storm has broken over us.” If left unchecked, Wiener predicted, this antisemitism would lead to “bestial murders and violence” and the “blood of citizens running on the pavements.”
