Former Nazis also worked in Switzerland

On May 1, 1945, the Federal Council dissolved the Swiss national group of the NSDAP and soon deported 300 Germans. The organization remained undisturbed for years. But now, a few days before the end of the war, people no longer wanted anything to do with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

It didn’t take long. Soon, companies such as the Schweizerhall acid factory or the Holzverzuckerungs AG recruited experts from IG Farben, who were closely linked to the National Socialist policy of extermination during the war. And there were voices in Bern saying that one should not be more papal than the pope. The Americans, the French or the British would bring hundreds of delinquent German experts into the country.

Former SS agent worked at Bührle

During the Cold War, reservations about ex-Nazis quickly dissipated. And so, a few years after 1945, former SS agent Franz Mayr and the far-right arms dealer and secret society Waldemar Pabst returned to work for Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Bührle. Rudolf Oebsger-Röder, who was involved in mass killings in Poland, also wrote for the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”.

A new book on the history of the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) and its predecessor, the Gehlen Organization, shows how this came to be. German historian Gerhard Sälter provides meticulous evidence of how secret service agents systematically recruited people from Hitler’s terror apparatus from the very beginning in his more than 800-page work “NS Continuities in the BND.” “The management of the Gehlen organization wanted exactly these people, including the Gestapo, SS, SD and task forces,” Sälter says. Active participation in acts of violence was seen as evidence of professional experience, not as a barrier to employment. Swiss companies also benefited from this.

The network continued to recruit

Former comrades formed networks that recruited more and more comrades. Such a network was formed around Walther Rauff, one of the “key figures of the Holocaust” (“Spiegel”) immediately after the war in Rome. In 1941, Rauff developed gas vans, which the Nazis used to kill nearly 500,000 people. Actors around Rauff, some of whom already belonged to the Gehlen organization, some of which later joined, organized the escape of the Nazis to South America via the “rat lines”, recruiting Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers, some of whom were heavily burdened. For Syria after the defeat of the Arab states in the 1949 war against Israel. They were also involved in the arms trade with the Middle East.

Peter Studer-Mayr was one of these players. SS Untersturmführer, still referred to as Franz Mayr during the war, was a member of the NSDAP and from 1940 was now an SD agent in Iran. He was arrested by the British secret service in 1943 after the invasion of Iran by Britain and the Soviet Union. He then managed to escape and hid.

In 1948 he was a permanent employee of the Gehlen organization and founded a subsidiary of Terramar, a front company for the recruitment of Syrian immigrants and the arms trade, according to the US secret service CIA. One of its customers was the Zurich arms factory Oerlikon-Bührle. Some transactions are documented, as Gerhard Sälter writes: In 1948 an Egyptian company approached him who wanted to produce grenades and ammunition and needed machines for this. In the autumn of 1949, the Egyptian military attaché in Bern ordered hand grenades, artillery munitions and rockets from Studer-Mayr. In August 1951, he was seen in Addis Ababa, where a former SS officer and a representative from Oerlikon-Bührle was negotiating a major arms deal with the Ethiopian government. That same year, he left BND as Terramar’s business was more lucrative.

Export is delayed

A memorandum from the German secret service indicates that in 1951 Waldemar Pabst also wanted to join the military mission in Syria to “commission the Swiss arms factory Oerlikon-Bührle, which he represents”. Pabst, a far-right leader of the Freikorps after 1918 and responsible for the murders of socialist politicians Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, lived in Switzerland from 1943 to 1955. He maintained business and private relations with the arms manufacturer and art collector Emil Bührle. Among his friends were Colonel-General and BGB-Nationalrat Eugen Bircher or Aliens Police Chief Heinrich Rothmund. After Waldemar Pabst’s previous life became known, Federal Councilor Eduard von Steiger declared him persona non grata in 1944, but with the help of his friends he managed to delay deportation several times.

After the war, the enterprising Pope was also involved in the arms trade of Patvag, which is now owned by Magdalena Martullo-Blocher, founder of Ems-Chemie, as Zurich historian Regula Bochsler has shown in her new book “Nylon und Napalm”.

“Many of these networks and activities during the war were already highlighted by Peter Hug in his Bergier subreport on the Swiss armaments industry,” says historian Jakob Tanner, professor emeritus at the University of Zurich and member of the Bergier Commission. However, the BND study would extend the view to the post-war period.

Actually. Following discussions on the expansion of the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Bührle collection displayed there, a report commissioned by the city and canton of Zurich on the background of Emil Bührle’s art collection and work was published in 2021. Activities of Studer-Mayr or Pabst after 1945 are not included.

BND transferred employees to avoid scandal

A man named Rudolf (Rolf) Oebsger-Röder also worked at the Tegernsee branch where Studer-Mayr worked. As president of the Einsatzkommando 16a, historian Gerhard Sälter writes that in Poland he was “directly involved in mass killings in a leading position”.

The former SS-Oberststurmbannführer joined the Gehlen organization in 1948. Fearing that the BND would expose his past and cause a scandal, Oebsger-Röder was sent to Indonesia in 1958, where he worked for the BND until 1966. According to Sälter, during his time there, the BND supported the putschists, led by General Suharto, who, after 1965, carried out a massacre among his political opponents and killed about 500,000 people, with weapons, technology and training. It is quite possible that Oebsger-Röder coordinated this support.

Former SS man worked for “NZZ”

In 1966, the BND broke up with him after documents came to light proving his involvement and open support for the mass murder in Poland. From then on, Oebsger-Röder worked for nearly two decades as an Indonesian correspondent for newspapers such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ and Neue Zürcher Zeitung (first known in 2004). He wrote of the President of Indonesia in “NZZ” in 1967: “What General Suharto has achieved so far in the political field owes to the cautious method of gentle force.” Pretty idiosyncratic with 500,000 dead.

None of this was a problem with “NZZ” itself. In 2011, an article was published about Walther Rauff, the developer of the gas van. Rudolf Oebsger-Röder is also mentioned in a subclause. It’s not a word that this “fanatic SS guy” is a longtime employee of “NZZ”.