As the German position in North Africa neared liquidation by the Allies, and Russia hung in the balance, increased talk of a “Fortress Europe” led Guisan to believe that a very real danger of invasion loomed. Himmler and his colleagues began to contemplate a last stand that could join the Swiss Réduit with the Black Forest, the Arlberg and the Bavarian Alps, the Brenner Pass and the Dolomites. A coup against the Swiss, whose troops were outnumbered six to one, would prolong the war.27
Perhaps in reaction to this tension, the SSV shooting federation encouraged heightened vigilance. To the Swiss, freedom was the “highest good on earth,” but only power and force could secure it.28 The SSV printed a message from Federal Councillor Karl Kobelt, head of the Military Department, encouraging every person to join an official defense organization. Kobelt stated:
Every Swiss who is able to fight and shoot can participate in the fight for our country. But in order not to be regarded as Heckenschuetze [outlaw sniper], he must join an official military organization, the military service, Ortswehr [local defense], or Luftschutz [anti-aircraft defense] and be subject to their rules. . . . The civil population not organized in battle corps . . . must stay out of active armed participation in battle.29
Switzerland was thus relying on the Land War Law of the Hague Convention, which protected a member of a military organization, if captured, from being shot on the spot as an unofficial partisan. Had an invasion actually occurred, it is unclear whether the Germans would have respected this rule; they seemed to have done so more in their Western than their Eastern campaigns. It seems unlikely that Swiss who were not members of an official organization would have foregone resistance activities for that reason. Then again, virtually every Swiss capable of bearing arms was already a member of an officially recognized organization. This raised the question, which the German foreign minister mentioned in 1940, of whether almost the entire population of a country must be recognized under international law as being in a military force.30 In the event of capture, would armed civilians with military armbands be treated as prisoners of war or would they be shot?
Many German military professionals, excluding the SS, recognized the principles of international law. However, the German Army had traditionally abhorred partisan or guerrilla warfare, so it was important that Swiss fighters be recognizable as national soldiers rather than irregulars in any combat with the Wehrmacht. There were no guarantees. The Führer himself had never been greatly impressed with any laws of warfare or nations.
In a May 8 diary entry, Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels described Hitler’s address to the conference of the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, the Nazi Party sub-leaders. “The Führer deduced that all the rubbish of small nations [Kleinstaaten-Geruempel] still existing in Europe must be liquidated as fast as possible.”31 Hitler defended Charlemagne, even though he was branded the “Butcher of the Saxons,” and asked:
Who will guarantee to the Führer that at some later time he will not be attacked as the “Butcher of the Swiss”? Austria, after all, also had to be forced into the Reich. We can be happy that it happened in such a peaceful and enthusiastic manner; but if [Austrian Chancellor] Schuschnigg had offered resistance, it would have been necessary, of course, to overcome this resistance by force.32
Hitler had not yet ventured to become the butcher of the Swiss, in part because the Swiss had the arms and capacity to kill an unacceptably large number of invaders. Indeed, in this period the Swiss Military Department reissued the famous order requiring a fight to the end and prohibiting surrender. On May 24, General Guisan recalled the directions “concerning the conduct of the soldiers not under arms in event of attack” that had been issued on April 18, 1940, and that since then had been printed in the soldiers’ Service Books. The General now directed that the particular portions of the order be adapted to reflect the replacement of certain guarding tasks of the soldiers by Auxiliary Patrol Companies, Ortswehren, air raid defense organizations and factory guards.33 The general provisions of the remarkable no-surrender order remained the same.
On May 31, General Guisan addressed the meeting of the Swiss Society of Noncommissioned Officers in the town of Arbon. Warning that the war would be fought ever closer to the Swiss borders, he noted that preparations for combat must be adjusted accordingly. The strategy must “offer to inflict heavy losses on the potential enemy.” Promising that “the first to penetrate into our country will be our enemy,” Guisan stated that “the people and the army are united more than ever. There are no French, Italian or German Swiss; there is only an indivisible Switzerland.”34
As has been shown, a crucial part of the Swiss strategy was widespread armed resistance on the part of individuals or small units. Elsewhere in Europe, populations had little means with which to fight back against German forces, even after the murderous policies of the occupying power had become clear. The heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising demonstrated that a small population with arms in its hands could effectively resist the Nazis. The second Warsaw aktsia, meaning the violent roundup and deportation of Jews to death camps, which began in early 1943, sparked resistance. Simha Rotem, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB), described the situation:
I and my comrades in the ZOB were determined to fight, but we had almost no weapons, except for a few scattered pistols. . . . In other places, where there were weapons, there was shooting, which amazed the Germans. A few of them were killed and their weapons were taken as loot, which apparently was decisive in the struggle. Three days later, the aktsia ceased. The sudden change in their plans resulted from our unforeseen resistance.35
ZOB members obtained more pistols and some grenades by the time of the April 19 aktsia. Rotem recalled that, despite the Germans’ heavy arms, after an SS unit was ambushed:
I saw and I didn’t believe: German soldiers screaming in panicky flight, leaving their wounded behind. . . . We weren’t marksmen but we did hit some. The Germans took off. But they came back later, fearful, their fingers on their triggers. They didn’t walk, they ran next to the walls.36
Dozens of Germans were killed, but partisan losses were few. In the first three days not a single Jew was taken out of the buildings. Finally, the Germans resorted to artillery and aerial bombings to reduce the ghetto to rubble. On the tenth day, the ghetto was burned down. Many fighters escaped through sewers and into the forests. There they continued the struggle in cooperation with non-Jewish partisans.37
The great Warsaw ghetto uprising of Passover 1943 is described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in the following succinct manner:
More than 2,000 heavily armed German soldiers and police were backed by tanks and artillery. The 700 to 750 ghetto fighters had a few dozen pistols and hand grenades. Yet in three days of street battles, the Germans were unable to defeat the Jewish combatants.38
During the fighting, 24-year-old Mordecai Anieleicz wrote to his liaison with the Polish underground: “Jewish self-defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed resistance and revenge have become a reality.”39 Ironically, this was confirmed in Joseph Goebbels’ May 1 diary entry about the occupied areas:
The only noteworthy item is the exceedingly serious fights in Warsaw between the police and even a part of our Wehrmacht on the one hand and the rebellious Jews on the other. The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto. Heavy engagements are being fought there. . . . It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms.40
The uprising was defeated but it demonstrated the viability of armed resistance. As Notre Voix (Our Voice), a French Jewish partisan paper, stated:
The Warsaw Jews have given to their brothers, and to the whole world, an admirable example of courage. . . . Let us arm ourselves; let us form defense groups to fight back all attempts at arrest and deportation; let us strengthen the Resistance organization. . . . Let us attack the enemy wherever he may be.41
In retrosp
ect it is tragic that the means, both physical and spiritual, forcibly to resist Nazism had not been engendered years before among the groups and nationalities conquered by Hitler. However, before the war and even during the years of German conquests, 1939–41, few people had fully recognized the magnitude of the horrors to come. (The infamous Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942.) Whole countries were surrendered by their leaders to the Führer without a fight, and this attitude of defeatism infected individuals, groups and nations. By 1943, universal resistance, of the kind that Switzerland planned in her own defense, was no longer possible in Europe at large, even though increasing numbers of partisans were fighting back with whatever weapons were at hand. In picking up arms to resist the Nazis, the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto were acting with the same philosophy that had inspired and would save the Swiss.
Polish Jews who fought back from the forests—their equivalent to the Alps in terms of defensive terrain—also illustrated how anti-Nazi defenders with only a few firearms could successfully combat the Wehrmacht. In 1942, resistance leader Harold Werner met about 40 Jews waiting to go to the ghetto, and recruited 15 of them to hide in the forest. They had not a single gun and were even attacked by wild boars and wolves. Eventually they purchased sawed-off shotguns and other firearms from local villagers.42
The Jews entered into alliances with Russian partisans. Werner stated that the “Russians had weapons, and the Germans knew that they were armed. The Germans were more cautious in attacking when they knew there would be resistance.” The Jews’ first attack “was a tremendous uplift to our morale to be able to hit back at the Germans. It was also important to us to show the villagers that Jews, once armed, would strike back.”43
The group tried to persuade Jews at the Adampol slave labor camp to join them in the forest, but the inmates feared the Germans would kill them. The partisans explained that the Germans had superior forces, “but our bullets were just as deadly as theirs, and they were just as afraid of us as we were of them. I explained that the woods were our protection, and that it was easy to disappear into them. . . . I showed them my gun and said: ‘Only this will save us.’”44 An armed partisan who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto uprising joined the group. “It made us feel fortunate to be in the woods, free and armed with weapons with which to defend ourselves.” In a typical ambush, the partisans killed 20 Germans and lost only one of their own.45
By the summer of 1943, the group numbered three hundred fighters, both men and women, all armed. Many of the arms were World War I leftovers. In one incident, the Germans ambushed the forest hideout. Some forty boys and elderly men with rifles held the enemy at bay. The armed Jews effected the escape of many and held off the Germans, although most of the defenders were ultimately killed. In other fights, the Jews and other partisans prevailed over the Germans.46
As a non-belligerent, Switzerland had a prominent humanitarian role to play in the war. That role was featured in the May 1 Saturday Evening Post, which began, “Other people make wars and the Swiss pick up the pieces.” The Swiss had shipped food and medical supplies into desperate areas like Greece and Yugoslavia, brought in French, Belgian and Dutch children for rehabilitation, and had sent nurses and doctors to dangerous war zones. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva maintained records on 1,600,000 war prisoners and sent out countless letters each day. The Swiss safeguarded the rights of both Allied and Axis war prisoners, thereby earning the trust of both sides.47 The Swiss themselves bore three-fourths of the costs of their humanitarian efforts, mostly from voluntary contributions. As an example, 10,000 children brought in for rehabilitation stayed in private homes.48
As a neutral, Switzerland also served as an important financial center to which funds for the resistance in occupied Europe could be transferred. The American Joint Distribution Committee funneled money for the Jewish Resistance in France through the Vaad Hatzalah (Palestine Rescue Funds) in Istanbul, from which funds were transferred to Switzerland.49
Marc Jarblum, a founder of the French Jewish Resistance, escaped from the Gestapo over the Swiss border in April 1943. From Geneva, he informed the world of the needs of the French Resistance, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Saly Mayer, the Joint Distribution Committee head in Switzerland, transferred funds to Jarblum, who distributed them to the Jewish Army, the Communists, and other resistance groups.50
The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was reorganized in April 1943 at the Bermuda Conference to consider the refugee problem. Nothing was solved because none of the countries, including the United States, was prepared to absorb the refugees. In proportion to her population, tiny Switzerland gave asylum to more refugees than any other country.51
Switzerland pleaded with the United States to allow an increase in Swiss foreign trade so that the beleaguered nation could afford to admit more refugees. The U.S. Department of State promised to give sympathetic consideration to the request, acknowledging:
The United States Government is aware of and appreciates greatly the generous reception which the Swiss Government has extended to the large numbers of refugees who have made their way to Swiss territory.52
French Jewish resister Anny Latour wrote that, despite Swiss border guards preventing entry to many adult Jews, “On the brighter side, however, there was an attempt made to rescue the children—they were not sent back, but arms were outstretched to them, and many were thus saved from slaughter.” Rescuers would slip past German soldiers and Vichy police, snip the barbed wire, and send the children running through the opening. “Once on Swiss soil, they were safe—Switzerland, sanctuary for Jewish children.”53
Smuggled children needed both a false and a real identification, the latter to present to Swiss authorities and to the Relief Organization for Children in Geneva, which would care for them. Swiss border guards sometimes also permitted adults with small children to cross the border.54
Georges Loinger smuggled some 600 children into Switzerland. He would take children to a soccer field fifty meters from the border. Some would play while others sneaked across the border. When the Gestapo became suspicious, Loinger managed, just a hundred meters from a German patrol, to throw his wife and two children over the barbed wire. Swiss soldiers helped them escape. Loinger continued his rescue work until the Liberation.55
The Swiss Army’s Adjutant General issued an official pamphlet entitled Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) on May 25. It noted that extremist, nationalist movements had persecuted Jews from the Middle Ages to the present. After an analysis of the historical role of Jews in Switzerland and present demographics, the article stated:
Article 4 of the Federal Constitution states that every Swiss is equal before the law. Democracy is based on the principle of tolerance, tolerance of different views, but also—and to be sure, nowhere like in Switzerland—vis-à-vis different races, different languages and different religions. Mass, race, and class hatred [Massen-, rassen-, und Klassenhass] are fundamentally undemocratic principles.56
Allowing a political doctrine based on racial hatred to be espoused in Switzerland meant letting in an irreconcilable ideology. “Anti-Semitism is simply intolerance,” the Swiss Army publication asserted. “It is therefore undemocratic and tears at the roots of our democratic way of thinking.” The Judenfrage pamphlet concluded: “Anti-Semitism is an invasion of foreign propaganda.”57
On July 7, the Federal Council banned two additional National Socialist parties: Rassemblement Fédéral and National Gemeindschaft Schaffhausen. Two members of these groups had previously been executed by military order for giving military information to a foreign power. The decree of dissolution applied to any organization that would replace these groups.
The New York Times noted that the government adhered to neutrality, but the people were overwhelmingly anti-Axis. “Switzerland, acting strictly within her rights as a neutral, sells Germany goods that Germany needs.” However, “the Swiss are just the people, if pushed a mite too far, who would prefer to starve or di
e fighting rather than give in. Because they are that kind of people they may not have to prove it in action.”58
In May the Allies sought assurances from the Swiss regarding Axis use of the Gotthard railroad. At the Gotthard Convention of 1909, the Swiss had guaranteed that use of the railroad would not be interrupted.59 On June 29, the Federal Council stated to the U.S. Department of State that it adhered to the declaration of neutrality and would never allow foreign troops or military stores to pass through the country. The Council asserted: “As for the transit through Switzerland, the Swiss government is resolved to observe conscientiously the rules of the Law of Nations, as well as International Conventions and to take care that [the transit] is handled in conformity with Switzerland’s policy of neutrality.”60
These assertions would soon be put to the test. On July 9 a mammoth Anglo-American invasion force landed in Sicily. The Italian Army made only a half-hearted defense, and it soon became clear that the Germans alone could not hold the island. Italy would soon become a theater of war. On July 25, Hitler received the news that Mussolini had been deposed. He immediately dispatched eight divisions from Army Group B under Rommel’s command to northern Italy to secure the Alpine passes. This would ensure the supply pipeline to the Wehrmacht forces already in Italy and those still fighting in Sicily.61
Once again, the Nazis threatened to pass through Switzerland, this time to keep Italy in the Axis—a threat that would worry the Swiss profoundly in the months to come. If the Germans had carried out this plan, the Swiss made it clear that they would defend their borders, then fight from the Réduit, where resistance would continue indefinitely. The tunnels would be destroyed and with them rail linkage with Italy, thus defeating the military purpose of any invasion. The Germans were again deterred.62
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