This feature accurately depicted Switzerland. On May 4, 1941, the shooting association of the Canton of Fribourg admonished its members not to waste the “precious cartridges” they were allotted. For the Swiss, accurate shooting was a science. In May, the army published a manual entitled Shooting Instructions for the Infantry (Schiessvorschrift für die Infanterie) filled with mathematical formulae and scientific data for firing the rifle, carbine, light machine gun, heavy machine gun, anti-aircraft gun and anti-tank gun. Distances ranged, depending on the weapon, from 50 to 4,000 meters. One diagram demonstrated the great efficiency of single rifle shots over machine-gun fire: a 6-shot group with a spread of 30cm from the carbine versus a 250-shot group with a spread of 90cm from the machine gun, both fired in 30 seconds at 300 meters.21
On April 27, state-controlled Rome radio had sternly warned Switzerland that her “existence” would be jeopardized unless she observed the Axis definition of strict neutrality. “The Swiss must not forget that if they continue to eat it will be due to Italy’s benevolence,” said Enzio Mario Gray, a member of the Supreme Fascist Council and Mussolini’s mouthpiece. He charged that “the majority of the Swiss press is paid by British Jewry and serves British interests. Locarno has become a center of espionage. Switzerland must be careful.”22
In another account of this radio address, Gray said: “Your neutrality is not a divine privilege, and so under no circumstances can it be considered eternal.” The Swiss government was responsible for the “criminal outbursts of the press” which “treat Italy’s victories with extreme flippancy” while reporting British victories in detail. At carnival time, Swiss marchers insulted fascism, he said. “All this leads the Axis Powers to realize that Switzerland has no intention of accepting and subordinating itself to the New Order which is meant for the whole European Continent.” His voiced boomed: “Neither Hitler nor Mussolini will allow the survival of such a dangerous nest of conspirators of the old, defeated world.”23
The German press similarly attacked the Swiss press and people on April 30 for anti-Nazi statements and Swiss aloofness from the New Order, warning that “one day our patience will come to an end.” The Börsen Zeitung described world-famous Swiss theologian Karl Barth as “a fanatic enemy of Germany” and said that “if such people are allowed to preach public hatred against Germany, then it is useless to argue with the Swiss press about the conception of neutrality.”24
The Axis attack continued, as the Italian press predicted that “Switzerland’s turn was coming” because her press had “played up the Italian retreat in Cyrenaica, yet scarcely mentioned the Italian troops’ glorious efforts to regain lost terrain.” (In early 1941, General Erwin Rommel and his Afrikakorps had arrived in North Africa and immediately reversed recent Italian defeats.) In another attack, the Börsen Zeitung wrote: “As the result of previous experience with other European countries, we hold the Swiss government responsible for public opinion. However, this warning does not seem to help.”25
Yet such threats only hardened the Swiss will to resist. “The Swiss are united that in case of attack, they will fight to the last man on every line.”26
In his “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden on May 11–12, in a meeting with Vichy Admiral Darlan, Hitler expressed his disappointment with France’s collaboration and stated that Germany would obtain permanent possession of several French ports as well as of Alsace and Lorraine. In return, France would be allowed to take Belgium’s Wallonia and French Switzerland, albeit without the Reich’s assistance. The Vichy Régime was hardly in a position to attack the Swiss; however, Hitler’s promise demonstrates his assumption that Switzerland would soon be another territory of the Reich, to be divided as he saw fit.27
By May 1941, the entire Swiss field army of nine divisions— 358,000 soldiers and 46,000 horses—was concentrated in the Réduit with provisions for both the people and the army in this region to last for five months. There was just a small number of troops left at the frontier, and only three light brigades stationed in the Plateau for purposes of demolition and the destruction of factories, tunnels and bridges.28 A blitzkrieg would at that time have mostly hit thin air—the Germans would instead need to contemplate combat with the Swiss Army on its chosen ground, in the Alps.
The Réduit utilized vast, concealed underground storage facilities. The prospect of a five-month siege would have dissuaded Germany or any other invader, and in any event the Swiss could likely have conducted raids to acquire more supplies. Further, there would have been nothing worth taking. The Gotthard and Simplon railroad lines would have been destroyed. Factories would have been stripped of essential components. Losses would have been high, especially in the mountains, and the invader would not be able to count on a short campaign. In the Alps, with its narrow passages and vertical terrain, the defending infantry could resist both panzers and the Luftwaffe. The mountains were pocked with heavy fortifications and camouflaged positions.29
As Swiss defense tactics became more refined, so did German offensive tactics. On May 20, the Germans practiced a new form of offense, albeit one they had demonstrated on a smaller scale before, in Norway and the Netherlands: they launched an airborne invasion of the island of Crete. Over 600 German transports and gliders skimmed across the Mediterranean to deliver 7,000 parachutists and mountain troops, against a British Empire garrison of 40,000 men. The carnage on the drop zones was horrendous; many paratroopers of the first wave were killed by ground fire before they even came to earth. But by the end of the week 22,000 Germans had landed while some 600 bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe supported the assault and attempted to keep the Royal Navy at bay. By June 1, in a familiar story, 18,000 British troops were evacuated, this time to Egypt. The Third Reich had won again.
The news of Crete, history’s first conquest by airborne invasion, resonated in Switzerland, as did the seeming German willingness to pay any price in blood, against whatever odds, in pursuit of a quick victory. In fact, Hitler had been repulsed by the steep price his paratroopers had paid for Crete and resolved not to attempt an airborne invasion again. But the Führer’s attitude was unknown to the Swiss, who more than ever wondered what the Nazis had in store with their combined arms that could force a decision in the Alps.
That month’s issue of London’s Contemporary Review noted that Switzerland had maintained her liberty, despite being surrounded by the most powerful enemies of freedom in European history. After the shocking defeats of 1940, the Swiss recommitted themselves to resist and steadily improved their defenses.30 The article went on to surmise, “little use the Nazi army could make of holding Zurich and the lower hills of the Jura, while a few divisions of Swiss snipers could hold the peaks of the Alps for an almost indefinite period.”31
Despite flattering comments in the British press, however, the Swiss had yet to witness a successful land operation performed by the British Army against the Germans. In mid-1941, of course, the United States was still neutral, largely unarmed and remote. With the exception of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, the entire continent, except for democratic Switzerland, was an Axis domain. Who knew if the “Thousand Year Reich” was indeed an irrevocable fact? Even if the Nazis were reluctant to attempt a direct conquest, how soon would it be before Switzerland would be economically strangled or starved?
On June 22, 1941, the Germans launched the greatest offensive in history, against the Soviet Union. The Führer’s former friend Stalin, Hitler’s accomplice in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, now had his turn to see blitzkrieg at first hand. This was a lucky break for the Swiss. Nazi plans to invade Switzerland had been drafted around the same time as plans to attack Russia were being developed. An Italian plan during this period would also have unleashed three armies with 15 divisions on Switzerland. Had Hitler not launched his legions at Russia, Switzerland would surely have been the continued obsession of the German General Staff. Instead, “Operation Barbarossa” meant a delay in the assault on Switzerland.32
While
most Swiss had no sympathy for Soviet totalitarianism, the Aktion Nationaler Widerstand, Switzerland’s total-resistance purists, cheered the Russian resistance and thanked God that Hitler had decided to divert his forces elsewhere in Europe.33
Nevertheless, despite Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, planning continued for an assault on Switzerland. In July, Colonel Adolf Heusinger presented to the Chief of the German Army Operations Department an invasion plan named “Operation Wartegau” (not to be confused with 1940’s sabotage plan of the same name). The plan included not only paratrooper, panzer and Luftwaffe attacks, but also the transportation of forces on hydroplanes which would land on lakes in Switzerland. Informed by good intelligence, General Guisan would plan for just such an attack in the coming months.34
This plan was not consummated, but Hitler did not lose sight of his ambition to destroy the Swiss nation. No one, including Western military observers, expected the Soviet Union to withstand the German onslaught, and a Wehrmacht victory would free up troops for an attack on Switzerland. During 1941, Swiss traitors continued to be trained by the Waffen SS and other Nazi groups in sabotage and espionage for the purpose of carrying out Nazi activities against their homeland.35
However, the Führer believed that the Swiss would not be fit citizens of the Reich. Reflecting on the need to colonize his conquests with racially pure peoples, Hitler insisted: “we must attract the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch into our Eastern territories. They’ll become members of the German Reich. Our duty is methodically to pursue a racial policy.” The Germans created a new Waffen SS division, “Viking,” composed of Scandinavian volunteers and also recruited young men from the Low Countries. Despite the reputation of the Swiss, earned over hundreds of years, as the best infantry and the most intrepid fighters in Europe, however, the Führer was never able to attract more than a handful of Swiss to his endeavors. Himmler’s SS eventually created independent units of various European nationalities from French to Latvian (and also a formation of East Indians), but it was never able to recruit enough Swiss to form a self-standing unit. Regarding the “inferior” people to Germany’s immediate south, Hitler griped: “As for the Swiss, we can use them, at the best, as hotel-keepers.”36
At the June 2 conference between Hitler and Mussolini on the Brenner, the two dictators took turns expressing their hatred for the Swiss. Hitler went first:
The Führer characterized Switzerland as the most despicable and wretched people and national entity. The Swiss were the mortal enemies of the new Germany. . . . They frankly opposed the Reich, hoping that by parting from the common destiny of the German people, they would be better off. . . . Their attitude is determined as it were through the hate of renegades.37
Elsewhere in this harangue, Hitler made an obscure reference apparently expressing resentment against the Swiss for their victory against the Germans in the Swabian War of 1499. He saw Switzerland as the historic enemy of the First as well as the Third Reich.
Mussolini agreed, complaining that the Swiss opposed the Axis nations without regard to language group and sounded out Hitler on dates for an invasion:
On a question of the Duce, what was in store in the future for Switzerland, which is but an anachronism anyway, the German Foreign Minister [Ribbentrop] replied, smiling, that the Duce must talk about it with the Führer. The Duce observed that only the French Swiss in Switzerland stood by France, while the Italian Swiss stood against Italy and the German Swiss against Germany. On the Jewish Question, the Führer said that after the war all Jews would have to get out of Europe completely.38
Thus Hitler managed to link his hatred for both the Swiss and the Jews in the same diatribe. He called for the killing of Swiss until they submitted and the eradication of all Jews, whether or not they submitted.
The Führer held Switzerland in particular contempt because of her policy in favor of peace. On August 20, 1941, he stated: “If one wants to wish the German people something good, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. An army whose only goal is to secure peace, one is led to observe, becomes playing at soldier—one only needs to look at Sweden or Switzerland—or it is in danger in the sense of a revolutionary setting.”39
In September 1941 Heinrich Himmler communicated with his lieutenant Gottlob Berger regarding who might be named Reichs-statthalter (governor) in a conquered Switzerland. Himmler’s papers include a document entitled “Reichsführer SS, SS Hauptamt, Aktion S[chweiz],” which was a detailed plan for a Nazi takeover in Switzerland.40 It is unclear whether Himmler actually chose a Reichsstatt-halter for Switzerland.
Nazi aversion to the Swiss stemmed in part from the Swiss tolerance for different languages, cultures, religions and ethnic groups. Contemporary Jewish Record, a publication of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), commented that in 1941 Switzerland’s 18,000 Jews “have preserved their socio-religious existence, and have still become completely absorbed within the Swiss body-politic. This is the cardinal reason for the fact that there is no anti-Jewish movement in Switzerland worthy of such designation.” Germany tried to finance Nazism in Switzerland, but “when the source of these incomes dries up, Nazi activities and the spread of anti-Semitic poison cease at once.” Almost all anti-Semitism in Switzerland stemmed from German citizens living there, and the authorities vigorously suppressed Nazi activities.41
The umbrella for Jewish groups in Switzerland was the Swiss Union of Jewish Communities (Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund). The AJC publication also stated: “Having found no difficulty in synthesizing their lives as Swiss citizens and as Jews, being left in peace at least for the time being, Swiss Jewry is consolidating its cultural and socio-religious activities with a remarkable degree of success.”42
An article in the American magazine Commonweal commented that Switzerland was the most international country of Europe while at the same time, with her system of local autonomy, the most decentralized. Since the Middle Ages, “the Swiss were a sort of European militia, and their country was recognized as free because it was an ‘Imperial Domain,’ not a feudal state like the others.” The Swiss still represented the same ideals:
Switzerland, at present encircled by the Axis powers, is a living refutation, a concrete and indisputable denial, of the totalitarian ideal. The Swiss have never asked for any other “living space” than liberty. By its very existence Switzerland proves that several races can live together in harmony, and on a footing of scrupulous equality; that it is possible to unite, in a freedom of diversity, various languages, various modes of life, and that this union is far more truly human than the enforced unity of the dictatorships. By its very existence it refutes the racial and nationalistic theories.43
On August 11, Federal Councillor Karl Kobelt, head of the Federal Military Department, defined Switzerland’s double task in the midst of the European war as that of safeguarding her national defense and her food supply. To survive, commercial treaties with other nations had to be undertaken. At the same time, it was necessary to keep spending the three and a half million francs per day to keep mobilized for defense.44
Before France fell, Swiss arms exports were almost equally divided among the warring camps; the defeat of France cut Switzerland off from Allied markets. In 1939, 42 of 64 million francs’ worth of arms exports went to France and Great Britain. In 1940 the official figures were, in millions of Swiss francs: France 26, Great Britain 21, Germany 33, and Italy 34; in 1941, Germany 122, Italy 61, and the Allied countries 0.45 These official figures, though, obscure the major (and often surreptitious) Swiss exports of defense items to the Allies, which would continue for the entire war, as was acknowledged in secret British documents in 1943. Not surprisingly, despite Swiss trade with the Axis, Admiral William D. Leahy, the American Ambassador to Vichy France, found the Swiss in August 1941 to be “in complete sympathy with the cause of the democracies.”46
Under the Hague Conventions governing war between nations, the commercial enterprises of a neutral
may engage in free trade, including trade in arms, with belligerents. A neutral state may not supply one warring party with arms, but a private firm may.47 Hague Conventions 5 and 13 of 1907 concerned the rights and duties of neutrals in war, including the right of all belligerents to equal treatment.48 During the war, Switzerland strictly followed international law and prohibited state-owned firms from selling weapons to belligerents. Private commercial transactions, including those in arms, took place and were consistent with international law.
As a small, landlocked nation surrounded by the Third Reich and its allies, the Swiss, from necessity, traded with the only market available to them—the Axis. More puzzling was the ongoing trade between the Third Reich and the neutral United States. A document written by Major Charles A. Burrows of Military Intelligence addressed to the American War Department on July 15, 1941, stated:
A report has been received from Cleveland, Ohio . . . to the effect that the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey now ships under Panamanian registry, transporting oil (fuel) from Aruba, Dutch West Indies, to Teneriffe, Canary Islands, and is apparently diverting about 20% of this fuel oil to the present German government.49
The September 1941 issue of Fortune magazine noted that the Swiss were denounced at least twice a week at the Wilhelmstrasse press conferences in Berlin. This was because the Swiss, who were “outspoken democrats and antifascists,” had “the only oasis of democracy, free speech, and civilized living in all Europe today.” Surrounded by the Axis, landlocked Switzerland was “a continental island blockaded by the British and counterblockaded by the Germans, yet dependent on foreign trade to live.” Of its four language groups, “the German-speaking, German-descended Volksdeutsche are readiest to fight if Hitler should try to violate their democratic soil.” Yet “nations other than Switzerland, Sweden for example, have taken their place in the Nazi New Order without visible resistance. But the Swiss have shown that they will never peaceably submit to Gleichschaltung.”50
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