(MENAFN- Swissinfo)
Work was part of daily life at the Ulmenhof women's home in Ottenbach, canton Zurich, August 1970. Keystone
Slave labour existed in Switzerland until the mid-1970s – and was justified as educational. It also benefited Swiss industry.
This content was published on May 13, 2023 May 13, 2023 Yves Demuth Deutsch
(de)
"erziehung zur arbeit": schweizer zwangsarbeit im wirtschaftsboom (original) Español
(es)
“reeducación para el trabajo”: el trabajo forzado en el período del auge económico en suiza 中文
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黑历史:瑞士经济繁荣期的强迫劳动 عربي
(ar)
"إعادة التأهيل" عبر العمل القَسري في عصر الازدهار الاقتصادي Français
(fr)
«éducation au travail»: le travail forcé dans la suisse du boom économique Pусский
(ru)
принудительный труд в швейцарии в послевоенное время 日本語
(ja)
教育と称して少女を工場送りに スイスで1970年代まで続いた強制労働 Italiano
(it)
donne svizzere e lavoro forzato, una storia dimenticata
A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Swiss parliament took action. It decided to join the international convention prohibiting forced labourexternal link that remains in force to this day.
Switzerland said it was only joining the agreement for moral reasons. The text did not affect Switzerland, the government wrote, as it merely regulated "the work of natives in colonial territories".
This was a colossal mistake. The agreement concerned Switzerland directly because slave labour existed there too. But awareness of this only came decades later – much too late for thousands of people taken into institutional“care.”
Working without payTake Liselotte S. Like hundreds of other teenage girls, she was sent to a privately run factory home for "re-education". From 1960 to 1962, she was locked away in the Sonnenberg home in Walzenhausen, a village in northeastern Switzerland. Such homes were financed by forcing the inmates to work for Swiss industrial companies without pay.
The workshop in the Lärchenheim home for women in Lutzenberg, canton Aargau, where residents make knitting machine needles for a company in Neuchâtel. Above them are the slogans: "Shut your mouths! Maintain order!" RBA/Staatsarchiv Aargau/Reto Hügin During the post-war economic boom, the home, which was registered as a company, even received commission payments from two industrialists for recruiting inmates.
The Walzenhausen factory home operated according to strict rules. Anyone who rebelled could end up in detention. Anyone who fled was hunted down. Anyone who refused to return after fleeing could be temporarily locked up in a prison cell.
"It is a great injustice and one that no one has ever had to answer for," says Liselotte S., now 82.
Liselotte S. arrived in Walzenhausen on March 22, 1960. The Swinging Sixties had just begun. In Switzerland, the hit song Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini was revolutionising swimwear. In Zurich, the city police were going after young“yobs” in denim jackets who were unsettling the bourgeoisie. In Walzenhausen, 19 schoolchildren walked in wooden shoes handed out by the welfare office because their parents were too poor to buy them proper shoes.
On that March day, 19-year-old Liselotte S. boarded the cog railway in Rheineck in the Rhine Valley and rode eastward to canton Appenzell. She was accompanied by a welfare officer. "I didn't know where they were taking me,” she recalls.“All they said was: 'You're going to a place where you can work.'"
The alleged education consisted of monotonous factory work in the privately run women's home. The wages went directly to the home to cover accommodation and food as well as personal expenses, such as health insurance.
There are a lot of things that she sees more critically today than she did back then, Liselotte S. says. "The home's manager exploited us. He took advantage of the fact that we were not free. I think that's awful. At the time, it just seemed normal to us girls."
Self-financed confinementThere was method to this exploitation: the state used the money to finance the incarceration of teenage girls. The authorities in her native Bern had specifically chosen a home for Liselotte S. that cost them nothing.
Liselotte S.'s social insurance certificate shows in Swiss francs and centimes how much money the state saved with the slave labour-financed "care": on paper, Liselotte S. earned CHF8,475 ($9,554) during the 33 months she was locked away. In today's terms, that would be around CHF34,000. But after all the deductions from her savings account, she had only 1% of that money left. When she was released from the home at the age of 21, Liselotte S. had no education and was penniless.
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