Heinrich Rothmund

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Heinrich Rothmund (born July 6, 1888 in Uster , † April 8, 1961 in Bern ) was head of the Federal Aliens Police between 1919 and 1955 .

Life and activities

Rothmund studied law in Zurich , Bern and Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1916 from the University of Zurich . In the same year he joined the war material administration of the federal administration. From 1919 to 1929 he was head of the Federal Central Office for Aliens Police, from 1929 to 1954 he was head of the new police department of the Federal Justice and Police Department (FDJP) , which was incorporated into the Aliens Police in 1933. From 1929 to 1931, Rothmund played a key role in drafting the Law on Residence and Settlement (ANAG). At the Évian Conference held from July 6 to July 15, 1938 , he was the representative of Switzerland.

During the Second World War , due to his function as head of the Aliens Police, he was one of the main people responsible for the implementation of the Federal Council's refugee policy .

From 1945 to 1947 Rothmund was appointed by the Federal Council as the Swiss representative to the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (IGCR) in Geneva . He was also an ad interim delegate in the preparatory commission of the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

Refugee policy before and during the Second World War

After the annexation of Austria (March 1938), many Jews fled or traveled from there to Switzerland; From May 1938, Jews were also deported to Switzerland.

After the failure of the Évian Conference (July 1938), where Switzerland had offered itself as a transit country for refugees but no European country was willing to accept refugees, it was clear to the Federal Council that Switzerland had to control the influx of refugees.

The first tightening of refugee policy took place with the Federal Council Resolution (BRB) of October 17, 1939. In order to better control immigration and because the Federal Council did not and could not close the borders, the BRB made a distinction between recognized "political refugees" and «Emigrants» who had to leave Switzerland again, made at the discretion of the Aliens Police. A visa was only allowed to be issued if there was a guarantee that the foreigner would leave Switzerland again. After the general mobilization in May 1940, the visas had to be approved beforehand by the Aliens Police. This practice was relaxed again because of political protests and out of consideration for tourism. In March 1940 the Federal Council decided to lift the employment ban for male emigrants and to set up labor camps for them under the direction of the police department.

After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 ( secret decision to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to Eastern Europe and murder them there in extermination camps; see Holocaust ), more Jewish refugees tried to enter Switzerland in the summer of 1942. After visits to the Swiss border in the Jura, on August 13, 1942, following the Federal Council's report of August 4 (with reference to the BRB of October 17, 1939), Rothmund issued a border block for “non-political” refugees by the absent Federal Councilor Eduard von Steiger was subsequently approved. Rothmund feared that Switzerland, as an “island in Europe”, would not be able to take in hundreds of thousands of refugee Jews in Switzerland, and said that one should concentrate on the safety of the refugees already taken in. He had before his eyes the more than 400,000 refugees from Spain , whose flight in 1939 overwhelmed the great France, where the conditions in the French internment camps were catastrophic.

The massive reaction of public opinion to the tightened rejection practice led Federal Councilor von Steiger to ease the rejection on August 23. A total of at least 20,000 people were turned away at the border or extradited to the Nazis during the war, even though they were acutely threatened with murder. The legal distinction between military and civilian refugees was subject to discretion, especially with the forced laborers who fled southern Germany, among whom were captured soldiers and civilians. Above all, Polish and Soviet forced laborers who fled were regularly transferred back to Germany until 1944, when the risk situation was very similar to that of Jewish refugees.

The Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War (ICE) was set up by the Swiss Federal Council on December 19, 1996 and came to the conclusion - in its final report in 2002 - that the Swiss refugee legislation at the time was not compatible with the principles of a constitutional state.

Historical assessment

The activity of the Aliens Police was heavily criticized, especially in connection with the restrictive refugee policy of the Federal Council during the Second World War and also afterwards.

When Rothmund realized that the criticism of the restrictive refugee policy on the children's trains to Switzerland first affected the relief organizations of the Red Cross, he advised the management of Kinderhilfe to transfer all criticism to the immigration police, because the Red Cross should not be burdened with it .

Because of various statements attributed to him, such as, for example, he had warned of the «Judaization» of Switzerland as early as 1919 or he was of the opinion that the admission of Jewish refugees could cause anti-Semitism among the population and that dealing with Jews in itself is the reason for the Historians accused Rothmund of being anti-Semitic . According to Stefan Keller , Rothmund is said to have emphasized that "for twenty years he has fought against the increase in foreign infiltration with the resources of the Aliens Police " and threatened that the Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP) was "finished with the foreign emigrants", next would be «the turn of the Swiss Jews».

In the mid-1950s, Carl Ludwig (1889–1967) wrote an official investigation report on Switzerland's refugee policy (during and after World War II) on behalf of the Federal Council (after the media had published allegations against Rothmund, which at the time had triggered several parliamentary advances). In 1997 a new edition of this “Report Ludwig” appeared. The allegations were based (as it turned out) on a mix-up and were false.

Rothmund visited Berlin from October 12 to November 6, 1942 (including the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on October 21 ) and wrote a confidential report about it to the Federal Council at the end of January 1943.

Jewish stamp (stamp "J")

The invention of the Jewish stamp was falsely blamed on Rothmund for decades due to an article in the Observer of March 31, 1954. More recent research shows that the J stamp was introduced due to an agreement between Switzerland and Germany, but that this was based on a proposal by German authorities who wanted to prevent the introduction of the visa requirement for all German citizens required by the Swiss Federal Council . In 1998, the observer put his accusation against Rothmund into perspective: he had opposed the introduction of the Jewish stamp in 1938 and unsuccessfully advocated a general visa requirement for Germans, as already existed for Austrians.

Fonts

  • Heinrich Rothmund: Switzerland through the eyes of the Aliens Police. Lecture. In: Mitteilungen der Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft 1937, issue 1 (Jan./Febr.).

literature

  • Switzerland and the refugees / La Suisse et les réfugiés 1933–1945. Bern / Stuttgart / Vienna 1996 (= Studies and Sources / Etudes et Sources / Studi e Fonti / Studis e Funtaunas . Journal of the Swiss Federal Archives).
  • Ladislas Mysyrowicz: Le Dr Rothmund et leproblemème juif (février 1941). In: Swiss History Journal . 1982/2, pp. 348-355 ( full text ).
  • Heinz Roschewski: Rothmund and the Jews. A historical case study of anti-Semitism in Swiss refugee policy 1933–1957. Basel 1997.
  • Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942–1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare. Karolinger Verlag , Vienna / Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-85418-147-7 .
  • Georg Kreis : Rothmund, Heinrich , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/2, 2009, p. 697ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ralph Weingarten: Conference by Evian. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  2. ^ A b c Carl Ludwig : The refugee policy of Switzerland from 1933 to the present. In: Ludwig report from 1957
  3. ^ Stefan Keller: Contemporary history: Fortress Switzerland . In: The time . No. 34/2008 ( online ).
  4. ^ A b Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War (Bergier Commission); The final report in book form, Pendo-Verlag, Zurich, 2002
  5. ↑ http://www.uek.ch/de/index.htm
  6. ↑ Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942-1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare
  7. ↑ Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War : Switzerland and the refugees at the time of National Socialism . In: Bergier report , Bern 1999
  8. ↑ Stefan Keller: Grüninger's case. Stories of escape and help. Zurich 1993, p. 111 and 118
  9. ↑ The facts. In: Swiss time . 21/1998, September 25, 1998
  10. ^ The business trip of the Swiss Aliens Police Chief Heinrich Rothmund to Berlin, October 12 to November 6, 1942. In: THATA, Thomas Hunonker Archive Texts Other (full text)
  11. ↑ Document The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (VEJ) 2/127.
  12. ↑ J-stamp is a German invention. In: Hagalil archive ( dpa report from February 22, 2009)
  13. ↑ Urs Rauber : Jewish stamp: correction of a half-truth. ( Memento of the original from October 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Swiss Observer . No. 18, August 9, 1998 ( archive version) ( Memento from July 4, 2012 on WebCite ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.beobachter.ch
personal data
SURNAME Rothmund, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Head of the Federal Aliens Police
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Uster
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1961
Place of death Bern