Life In Europe

I thought this little bit was illuminating:

It was a big drafty old house they found in Geneva. But nobody was very happy there. What the Volksdeutsch and the Austrians did with party operatives, the Swiss did with clerks. Nobody actually said anything about the magazine---he could, apparently, publish whatever he wanted in Democratic Switzerland, but life was a spiderweb of rules and regulations that controlled mailing permits, alien residence, and, it seemed to Adler, the very air they breathed.

From Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst, page 25.