Switzerland: An Unsung 'Schindler'

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By Newsweek Editors

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HE WAS SWITZERLAND'S Oskar Schindler--and as unlikely a savior of Jews. The police chief of St. Gall, Paul Gruninger seemed a typically emotionless, meticulous bureaucrat. But all that changed in 1938, the year Germany swallowed Austria in the Anschluss, and the Swiss government, eager to appease Hitler, ordered the expulsion of Jewish refugees. "Something snapped in Gruninger," says his biographer Stefan Keller. Collaborating with a few local Jewish leaders, Gruninger quietly doctored visa papers and log entries of some 3,000 Jews--mostly by moving back their arrival date in Switzerland--saving them from repatriation and almost certain death. The next year authorities discovered the scheme and convicted Gruninger of falsifying documents, stripping him of his job, his pension and his standing in a society that cherishes obedience. For the rest of his life, he held temporary jobs, and died in relative obscurity in 1972.

More than 20 years later, his ghost has risen. Keller's new book, "Gruninger's Case," has become a best seller--and provoked a debate on the neutrality of Switzerland's wartime role. As early as 1938, Bern began forcibly returning Jews (about 10,000 in all), arguing that admitting them would stir anti-Semitism. That policy changed only when it became clear that Germany would lose the war. Under public pressure, St. Gall officials recently granted a "political" exoneration of Gruninger, noting he disobeyed the law "out of conscience," but they still refused to lift his conviction. What prompted his heroism? Gruninger, an uncommunicative man, never explained. Only once, not long before he died, he stubbornly said, "I would do the same again."

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