The founders of the Switzerland-Austria-Liechtenstein Chamber of Commerce believed in Vienna’s role as a gateway to the southeast. Her story reveals a lot about bilateral relations, the cool logic of business during World War II, and the economic boom that followed.
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The Switzerland-Austria-Liechtenstein Chamber of Commerce, here on a picture from the 1950s, looks back on an eventful history.
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Making a bet on the future in a chaotic present is either visionary or reckless. But the Swiss industrialists and business people who founded a Chamber of Commerce in Vienna on December 5, 1921 believed in Austria. This differentiated them from the Austrians: three years after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the anchoring of this rump state was extremely low. The victorious powers of the First World War had to prescribe the Austrian connection ban that applied to Germany.
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