Economic strangulation, Fortune continued, forced the Swiss to trade with the Axis. “For to fight Germany they must meantime live and work and produce—and because of their economic isolation they can do so only on German sufferance. The ironic result is that by arming themselves, they are forced to arm Germany as well.”51
Before the war, Swiss trade with England accounted for 17% of total foreign trade, but this was now almost totally blocked. Switzerland had imported foodstuffs, tobacco, rubber goods, and machinery from the United States, but England, fearing that the goods might find their way to the Nazis, had in the previous April stopped issuing permits for U.S.-Swiss trade in bulk foods and many materials.52 With Switzerland’s markets now severely restricted, Fortune described the situation:
The Axis sets its own prices, and the Swiss say that their profits have been cut to the bone. But nothing can be done. The factories must go on producing if Switzerland is to implement its own defenses. They must produce at full blast or there will be unemployment—and unemployed men are open targets for Nazi propaganda. The factories can run at all only because Germany sells, or permits others to sell, coal, iron, copper, and other necessary raw materials, and the supplies come through only because Germany receives war materials in return.53
In a telling incident showing the attitude of the average Swiss, the authors of the Fortune article had recently returned from Germany via Switzerland, and observed the following rather humorous phenomenon seen at movie houses that showed both American and German newsreels:
The Nazi reels move with a peculiar jerkiness, a result of the removal of all “heiling” for the Swiss market. The Germans are still puzzled, but they found that Swiss audiences laughed uproariously at every sight of a grim-faced German shooting up his hand like a railroad signal and grunting “Heil, Hitler!” One theatre had to stop the film to restore calm after a scene in which Hitler himself had said “Heil, Hitler!”54
As the brutal nature of German occupation of foreign territories unfolded during 1941, it became clear how the Nazis might have responded to a nation of armed citizens, of which Switzerland was the best—indeed, the only—example. The Germans took the sternest measures against the few citizens who possessed arms in the occupied countries. At year’s end, the Nazis decreed:
The death penalty or, in less serious cases, imprisonment shall be imposed on any Pole or Jew . . . if he is in unlawful possession of firearms . . . or if he has credible information that a Pole or a Jew is in unlawful possession of such objects, and fails to notify the authorities forthwith.55
This decree was related in part to the activities of the Einsatz-gruppen, Nazi killing squads that exterminated Jews and others in the East. A half-million Soviet Jews were murdered in the second half of 1941. In Riga, Latvia, a mere 23 men killed 10,600 people. As Raul Hilberg observed in his 1985 book: “The killers were well armed. . . . The victims were unarmed.”56 The Einsatzgruppen killed two million people between fall 1939 and summer 1942. 57
Six Einsatzgruppen of a few hundred members each, and divided into Einsatzkommandos, operated in Poland and Russia. Their tasks included arrest of the politically unreliable, confiscation of weapons, and extermination.58 The Einsatzgruppen reports to superiors in Berlin during 1941–42 are enlightening. Interspersed with report after report of thousands executed were accounts of snipers. For instance, Einsatzgruppe C reported in September 1941 that, besides liquidating Jews and Communists, its operations included, “above all, the fight against all partisan activities, beginning with the well-organized bands and the individual snipers down to the systematic rumor mongers.”59
Typical executions were that of one woman “for being found without a Jewish badge and for refusing to move into the ghetto” and of another “for sniping.” Persons found in possession of firearms were shot on the spot. Reports of sniping and partisan activity increased over time.60
Even under the most repressive conditions, a small proportion of the citizens who had arms gave the Nazis great anguish. The Nazis did not overlook the “sniping” to be expected should an incursion into Switzerland be ventured. If they needed a reminder, they could read about it in the Swiss Shooting Federation’s newspaper: “Swiss weapons are part of the Swiss mentality. . . . The government has the confidence to give the people weapons and even ammunition to save us from any surprise.”61 Swiss Jews received arms just like all other citizens.
It was reported from Bern on December 2 that Germany was expected to demand that the Swiss expel all British nationals. Britain’s offensive in Libya and the resistance of the Russians were believed to have delayed the Nazis’ “Swiss revisionist plan” to integrate Switzerland into the New Order. The Swiss were prepared to resist any new push to become part of an economically and politically related Nazi bloc.62
Switzerland’s role as a neutral in World War II concerned not merely military defense and trade policy but also, continuing an age-old tradition, diplomacy. The United States remained neutral until forced into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Three days later, it was announced that Switzerland would likely represent the interests of the United States in Japan. Her first duty would be to arrange the exchange of officials and nationals of each country.63
On the 11th, the German and Italian ambassadors notified the American government that their countries had entered into a state of war with the United States. The Germans appointed the Swiss to represent their interests in the United States, beginning with the exchange of nationals.64 Six days later, the State Department announced that Switzerland would in turn represent American interests in all belligerent countries and all occupied countries. While the Swiss would represent the Americans in Japan, Japan selected Spain to represent her in the United States.65
By the following month, Switzerland was representing the interests of twenty belligerents, a function that included the exchange of wounded prisoners.66 In Germany, the Swiss represented the interests of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, among others.67
Throughout the war, Hitler continued to exhibit both hatred and fear of things Swiss. One incident from 1941 illustrates the point. In June, Hitler personally forbade Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell from being performed in Germany or read in the schools. Tell was a freedom fighter, and his killing of a tyrant reminded Hitler of the 1938 attempt of the Swiss citizen Maurice Bavaud to kill him. Bavaud, though he had not succeeded, resembled a modern Tell.68 Schiller’s play, however, could still be performed at theatres in Switzerland, the only free German-speaking theatres left in Europe.
The historic Rütli Meadow on July 25, 1940, just after the fall of France. On the very spot where the “Companions of the Oath” had formed the Swiss Confederation in 1291, General Henri Guisan summoned his highest officers to stand before him and receive his orders: Switzerland would never surrender!
“If my first arrow had my dear child struck, The second arrow I had aimed at you, And this, I swear, would not have missed its mark. “—William Tell to the tyrant Gessler (Schiller, 1804). From a painting by Ludwig Vogel.
1315: The Battle of Morgarten, where 1,400 Swiss peasants defeated 20,000 Habsburg knights and infantry. Pummeled with huge stones and driven into the lake, 2,000 Austrians were killed to only 12 Swiss. The painting is by Ferdinand Wagner.
Henri Guisan, Switzerland’s wartime leader, has been compared to Winston Churchill for the inspiration he gave his people during times of crisis.
August 30, 1939: At the Federal Parliament in Bern, General Guisan is made commander-in-chief of the Swiss Army. With Guisan are, from left to right, Federal Councilors Marcel Pilet-Golaz, Philipp Etter and Rudolf Minger.
General Guisan reviews a unit of troops. Swiss soldiers traditionally keep their arms and equipment at home, allowing for rapid mobilizations.
The Ortswehren (Local Guards), consisting of older men from the shooting associations, as well as teenaged marksmen, carried the old Model 1889 rifle. Armbands identified
them as members of the Swiss military.
German troops enter a Belgian town in May 1940. Belgium, the Netherlands and France would fall and the British would evacuate the continent after a campaign that lasted only six weeks.
June 18,1940: Hitler and Mussolini in Munich, where they discussed plans to attack and carve up Switzerland.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels fumed about the Swiss press throughout the war. In May 1942 he called Switzerland “this stinking little state.”
The German attacking force under the 1940 von Menges plan would have been Army Group C commanded by General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb.
Allan W. Dulles arrived in Bern in November 1942 to establish the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American intelligence network. Switzerland was an ideal location to spy on the Axis, encourage French and Italian partisans and communicate with Germany’s underground.
The Swiss applied a fluid defense between the border and the the Alps. Each mobile 11-man squad was equipped with a light machine gun (right), a submachine gun and nine K31 carbines. The main strength of the Swiss Army, however, awaited a German attack in fortified Alpine positions (below).
Although Switzerland has been called a country where marksmanship is the “national sport,” the Swiss Army also trained in other martial skills.
When the men were under mobilization orders, the rural women, helped only by the children, were left with all of the farm work.
Climbing uphill with skis carried in a backpack specially designed for mountain troops (top). On ski maneuvers, troops travelled light with a K31 carbine and 48 cartridges each. The soldier at left has a rope around his waist which is tied to each following member of his squad. This kind of terrain, inaccessible to German panzers, would also have frustrated Luftwaffe raids.
Camouflaged Swiss mountain snipers were ready to confront the German Army in the Alps.
Women in the auxiliary forces, identified by the armband with the Swiss flag—white cross on red background (not to be confused with the Red Cross emblem of a red cross on a white background).
A 75mm mountain cannon (above) and a 105mm turret cannon (left). Such artillery was typically placed at high positions overlooking valleys through which an invader would have to pass.
This Swiss-made 20mm anti-aircraft gun fired 250 rounds per minute with a range of 4,500 meters.
Swiss Messerschmitt fighters originally purchased from Germany. In 1940, Swiss pilots shot down 11 Luftwaffe planes and lost only 3 of their own.
The Luftschutz (air raid defense), which included many female members, detected and plotted the paths of intruding bombers and fighters.
Scrambling into the cockpit during an air raid alarm (below). The plane appears to be armed with a Model 1925 light machine gun.
The woman standing points to the Gotthard fortification on the map at a military communications office.
The tragic bombing of Schaffhausen on April 1, 1944 by thirty American Liberators, whose pilots thought they were over Germany, killed scores of Swiss. The Swiss forgave the attack and provided a safe haven for 1,700 downed American pilots.
A Swiss infantry combat unit. The Swiss feared, and stayed in readiness for, a German attack from the beginning of the war in 1939 until the end in 1945.
The Swiss hosted over 100,000 interned soldiers during the war, 65 percent of whom were Allied. French Colonial troops pictured above found refuge in Switzerland after the fall of France.
Fort Airolo, part of the Gotthard fortification located in northern Ticino, pointed its long-range guns in the direction of a probable Italian invasion. The flag flies peacefully today.
July 16, 1995: A young woman with a Sturmgewehr 90, the current service rifle, and a young man with a Sturmgewehr 57, a now obsolete military rifle, march in a parade in Thun celebrating the Federal Shooting Festival.
Chapter 7
1942
“Oasis of Democracy”
AS 1942 UNFOLDED AND AN ALLIED VICTORY SEEMED REMOTE, the battle for hearts and minds was at a critical stage. On January 5, the Swiss arrested an artillery soldier and his co-conspirators whom German intelligence had paid to steal certain Swiss weapons and munitions and to make maps of Swiss Army positions. By a judgment on October 9, he became the first Swiss soldier sentenced to death for treason.1
The Führer’s intent to impose Nazi rule on Switzerland at some future date was evident again during a discussion on his policy toward Jews on January 27. A week after the notorious Wannsee Conference, where the plan to annihilate the Jewish people was settled, Hitler insisted: “The Jew must get out of Europe! . . . Out of Switzerland and out of Sweden, they must be driven out.”2
Nazi spies and propagandists were busy, but the Swiss were equally vigilant, as a sampling of reports for the first quarter of 1942 reveals. Two workers at the Altdorf Munitions Works were convicted of communicating fortification plans to a foreign power.3 Six Nazi agents were sentenced to prison for revealing military secrets.4 In Lucerne, Swiss police arrested nineteen National Socialists, followers of Swiss Nazi propagandist Franz Burri, for distribution of prohibited propaganda.5 Burri had already fled from Swiss authorities and was in exile in Vienna. In Zurich, two were sentenced to prison for violation of military secrets and eleven were jailed for organizing unlawful propaganda.6
The two founders of the Swiss National Socialist movement, which had been dissolved in 1940, were convicted by a Zurich court in absentia of threatening national security and were sentenced to prison.7 Several men were convicted of revealing military secrets to a foreign state and stealing ammunition and weapons parts from the military, some receiving life sentences.8
Also in January, General Guisan took steps to make official the collaboration between the security service and the public communications section known as Heer und Haus (Army and Home). That organization was invited to “commence the struggle against all extremist propaganda for the purpose of instruction and dissuasive activities.”9 This meant that nothing was barred by the censor for fear of Nazi retaliation—lecturers could explicitly discuss the advantages of Swiss democracy over National Socialism, and of shooting as many Wehrmacht invaders as possible.
In the January 9th issue of Reich magazine, Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels attacked “the remaining so-called neutrals in the European hegemony” and charged that “Switzerland and Sweden are lacking in the most elementary appreciation of the security of their nations and their future existence.” Goebbels insisted:
If these neutrals are not prepared to fight with us for the German victory, they should at least pray God for that victory. But they have not even enough sense for that. . . . Their political tendencies incline them toward bolshevism.10
As Goebbels wrote those words, for the first time in the war he might have been growing nervous. German Army Group Center, surprised by both the Russian weather and Soviet reserves, was just barely staving off a huge counteroffensive outside Moscow. Still, in the preceding months the Nazis had surrounded Leningrad, occupied the Baltic states, and taken Kiev and most of Ukraine.
The January 25th New York Times Magazine included an article on Switzerland entitled “Oasis of Democracy” which argued that while the Swiss took every measure to guarantee peace, they never followed an appeasement strategy. “Dependent though they are upon their Axis neighbors for everything, the Swiss, democrats and independents to the core, have never acquiesced in Germany’s ‘New Order’.”11
Nevertheless, Switzerland was feeling the effects of the war. There was only enough coal to heat one room per house, the article noted. Most commodities were rationed, and there were three meatless days a week. Both private and public grounds, including soccer fields and, in at least one case, the front lawn of a library, were given over to growing potatoes. The Swiss survived only through foreign trade, and all exports required a German permit. Yet their trade with Germany paradoxically allowed them to defend themselves from Germany. Indeed, “by manufacturing arms for Germany they have been ab
le to make arms for themselves.”12 In any event, Swiss manufactures accounted for only a miniscule part of German weapons acquisitions. For the entire war period, Swiss arms deliveries to Germany accounted for 0.6% of Germany’s total armaments.
Despite protests from the Reich, Switzerland refused to recognize Axis conquests and allowed the occupied countries to maintain their embassies in Bern. This policy corresponded to the British policy of permitting similar embassies, as well as entire governments-in-exile, to operate in London. The Swiss were ready for an invasion, according to the Times: “Their citizen army is tiny by comparison with the millions mustered by its neighbors, but its equipment is excellent and it is highly trained.”13
While far too few partisans in the occupied East had guns, the small number who did continued to wreak havoc. Propaganda Minister Goebbels made the following diary entry on March 16, 1942:
The activity of partisans has increased noticeably during recent weeks. They are conducting a well-organized guerrilla war. It is very difficult to get at them because they are using such terrorist methods in the areas occupied by us that the population is afraid of collaborating with us loyally any longer. The spearheads of this whole partisan activity are the political commissars and especially the Jews.14
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