Last week the Swiss Bankers' Association took out advertisements in leading world newspapers. They invited victims of the Holocaust, and their heirs, to make claims on assets lodged by European Jews in Switzerland in the 1930s and early 1940s. It was an acknowledgement, at last, by Swiss financial institutions that some injustice may have been done to these depositors - though the extent of the injustice remains a subject of often bitter debate.
It is over 50 years ago that the government of President Harry Truman was faced with a decision to force Switzerland to release Jewish assets. The Swiss banks and insurance companies were demanding that the heirs of concentration camp victims produce death certificates to prove that the depositors were indeed dead - a clearly absurd requirement. The US Treasury favoured coming down hard on the Swiss. But the State Department won a realpolitik argument, saying that the US should not be seen to be bullying a small, neutral country and that America could not run the risk of driving Switzerland into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The latter consideration was highly implausible, but it did not seem so at the end of the second World War, when much of central, and all of eastern Europe, was falling to communism.
In a curious way, President Clinton is confronted with a similar dilemma. Jewish campaigners in the US have urged that Mr Clinton freeze the estimated $86 billion held in the US by Swiss interests. Their voice is countered again by realpolitik, which says that America should not wound an important trading partner at a time when Switzerland is feeling beleaguered by the examination of a shameful episode in the past; and, besides, the US needs Swiss help in finding drug traffickers and money launderers.
Mr Christoph Blocher, leader of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, has said the campaign by the World Jewish Congress amounts to blackmail of the Swiss nation. His position will have been undermined by the placing of the advertisements last week which clearly imply that the Swiss banks believe there is a problem to answer. Switzerland is to hold a referendum next year to approve the creation of a fund for Holocaust victims and their heirs. The atmosphere in which this debate takes place is swinging uneasily between those Swiss who want to see any injustices righted and others who believe Switzerland is being made a scapegoat by an aggressive campaign by the World Jewish Congress. A recent book by the investigative journalist Tom Bower said that since the second World War, Switzerland has carefully cultivated its image as an island of sanctuary in a then war-torn continent, forced by circumstances to deal with the hated Nazi regime. That image is no longer credible. Of course there were Nazi sympathisers in Switzerland; it would have been surprising if there were not. It is natural that these sympathisers - in banks and elsewhere - would have sought to support the Nazi war efforts by whatever means came to hand. However, it is important to distinguish - as Mr Bower did not - between such sympathisers and the Swiss people as a whole.