The Swiss by their virtual refusal to allow their nationals to be recruited as neutral policemen for the coming Saar plebiscite have placed the League of Nations in a quandary, according to a Chicago Daily News dispatch from Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the correspondent who was stationed in Berlin until he fell into disfavor with the Nazis.
The report, which carries a Geneva date line, relates that High Commissioner Knox has received a communication from “the seven dignitaries constituting the Swiss Federal Council” in which they asked that he please not ask for Swiss policemen, “since for them to consent might seem violation by the Swiss of their own self-proclaimed principle of political neutrality.”
There the matter ends so far as the Swiss are concerned, the dispatch asserts. Knox now faces the problem of trying to find other German-speaking policemen, however.
LUXEMBOURG TO REFUSE
Luxembourg, which had made its acceptance conditioned on Switzerland’s acceptance, will now refuse to lend police. Holland is a neutral possibility and there remain, too, the Austrians and German Bohemians.
“But if the Germans in Germany object to the Swiss as police,” the correspondent point out, “they would roar at the suggestion of Austrians or Czechs.”
This raises an interesting question concerning the mental processes of the Swiss, continues Mowrer’s story.
“Knox himself has no particular love for Swiss policemen as such. But the Swiss have been neutral for so long, they have for so long furnished faithful guards to foreign countries, that it seemed that choice of the Swiss would convince even the most passionate Germans of Knox’s intended neutrality in the coming plebiscite.
“That the Germans themselves feel that any plebiscite in the Saar is not neutral, and that they have consistently trained young Saarlanders in German labor camps to undertake an insurrection against the League officials has been clearly proved by documents published here in the last few days.
“The only reasons the Germans can have for objecting to neutral Swiss policemen is that such a police could prevent their possible plans for an ‘unneutral’ plebiscite.”
The correspondent then tells that Geneva was surprised to learn that the Swiss shared the German view.
“After all,” he writes, “Swiss in gorgeous uniforms designed by Michelangelo stand before the Pope’s door at Rome. Is this violation of neutrality?
“At Lucerne there is a monument; the so-called lion of Lucerne, to commemorate the valor of brave Lucerners who died defending Louis XVI during the French revolution.
“But those were heroic days.
“The Swiss today consider that their terrific fight to keep the Soviets out of the international assembly at Geneva is a form of political neutrality, while to police League of Nations territory in the Saar during the plebiscite would be violation of that neutrality.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
