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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Swiss Getting Upset Over Nazi Assertions

Compiled From Wire Services

After months of being told their history books were wrong and that Switzerland’s war was not a good war, a truculent mood is building here that may turn the nation against atoning for what the Clinton administration and others depict as complicity with Nazi Germany. Increasingly, Swiss diplomats, commentators and ordinary citizens are bristling at what they see as double-standards particularly by the United States, sensing that their wartime predicament and flawed neutrality are being judged by moral criteria that their critics do not apply to themselves.

“In our eyes, morality can mean other elements,” Flavio Cotti, the foreign minister, said in an interview recently. “It was high morality that Great Britain secured Europe in 1940. We could ask the United States why they didn’t enter the war until later.”

And although they have learned that comparisons of their wartime behavior with that of others brings no kudos, officials still seem ready to make them, if only to reflect their frustration that - no matter what they say or do - the image of perfidious Switzerland will not go away.