Target Switzerland
Page 23
On March 29, OSS operative Allen Dulles prepared a report on a conference he had had with General Guisan, who wanted to know whether France would be invaded soon. “He fears the threat to Switzerland present in the fact that the Nazis may wish to use Swiss railroads to transport Nazi forces into safety in the event of a retreat of the Germans from the south.”6
The Germans occupied Hungary on March 30 in response to an advance by the Red Army on the Carpathians and because they suspected a movement in the Hungarian government to hand the country over to the Soviets. To the Swiss, this proved once again that Hitler could suddenly launch the Wehrmacht into Switzerland any time it suited him or whenever he felt German strategic interests would be served.7
The April 1944 issue of American Mercury included an intriguing article entitled “If Switzerland Is Invaded.” As his attack on the Soviet Union demonstrated, the Führer could do unexpected things. But if Switzerland managed to stay out of the war, said the magazine, it was only because of her ingenious military preparations.8
If Switzerland were to be attacked, demolition would begin in seconds. “Terrific explosions [would] rend the air all along the Swiss frontiers, as if hundreds of avalanches were thundering down the mountain slopes of the land.” All bridges over the Rhine would collapse, and mines would await invaders who tried to cross by rafts or amphibious tanks. The Simplon and the St. Gotthard tunnels would be immediately destroyed. Roads, railways, bridges, power stations and air fields would be blown up. Camouflaged tank traps and electric barbed-wire fences would stop many panzers and infantry.9 Just as they had done at the Battle of Morgarten in 1315, when they launched boulders down the mountain sides to crush the Austrian invaders, the Swiss could use modern technology to cause landslides and avalanches that no infantry and armored divisions could survive.
Both World War I and Hitler’s blitzkrieg tactics demonstrated to the Swiss General Staff the need for lightning mobilization. As soon as the order was broadcast, every soldier not already on duty would grab his rifle and report to a nearby post. American Mercury continued:
It is the pride of the country that every citizen is allowed to keep his army rifle and ammunition in his house. So orderly and ethically advanced is the population of this model country that there is rarely a case where this officially sanctioned and encouraged custom leads to violence.10
American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators conducted major raids over southern Germany on March 18, destroying a factory that produced the Messerschmitt 109 fighter. Prompting an air-raid alarm, sixteen of the bombers flew into Swiss air space. Most had been damaged in the raids and crash-landed, their crews parachuting to safety and then being interned. Swiss pursuit planes brought down one bomber which appeared to be fleeing.11
Fifty Swiss were reported killed and over 150 seriously wounded on April 1 when thirty American Liberator bombers dropped explosive and phosphorus incendiary bombs on the Swiss city of Schaffhausen, which lies north of the Rhine. Six factories were destroyed and the busy marketplace was hit. The American target was apparently Singen, a German town and rail junction eleven miles away. No Swiss fighters pursued the American bombers. Astonishingly, while grieving for their dead, the people of Schaffhausen reportedly expressed no hard feelings toward the United States for what they truly believed to be a tragic mistake.12
Leland Harrison, American Minister to Switzerland, expressed his deepest regrets for the accidental bombing. A mass funeral was planned. American fliers, when told of their mistake, were exceedingly distressed, remembering that Switzerland provided a safe haven for American airmen interned there. “There are a lot of our airmen alive today because they were able to come down there instead of in enemy territory,” said Lt. Howard McCormick of Michigan.13 Speaking of conditions in Switzerland for interned American airmen, Lt. Robert A. Long of New Jersey said, “The Swiss people were good to us.”
Insisting that measures be taken to prevent a repetition of the disaster, the New York Times commented:
The tragic error through which the peaceful and friendly Swiss town of Schaffhausen was laid waste by American Liberators shows that our precision bombing is not always as precise as we have assumed. . . . The reaction of the Swiss themselves is characteristic. Only an admirably self-disciplined people could grieve without anger over so unnecessary a calamity.14
Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson offered their apologies and promised that steps would be taken to prevent a recurrence, even as bodies continued to be found in the smoldering rubble.15
American Minister Harrison called on former President, now Foreign Minister, Pilet-Golaz on April 4 in Bern to communicate the American apology and to assure the Swiss that the tragedy would not be repeated. The meeting was interrupted by another air raid alert, however, as U.S. bombers once again strayed over the border. While official American explanations blamed the April 1 mistake on bad weather, the Swiss press noted that the sky over Schaffhausen had been clear, with excellent visibility, and nearby Lake Constance and the Rhine falls were definitive landmarks.16 The final report of the official investigation cited malfunctioning of the navigational equipment of the leading plane and high winds. Directives were revised to prohibit bombing targets in Germany that were not positively identified if within 50 miles of the Swiss border.17
On April 13, thirteen American bombers flew over Switzerland after attacks on southern Germany. Twelve of the planes obeyed instructions issued by the formations of Swiss fighters intercepting them and landed safely. The thirteenth plane was shot down by the fighters in the canton of Schwyz, in central Switzerland, after it refused to obey Swiss instructions. Its crew members parachuted out.18
That day, Swiss radio announced more details of the accidental Schaffhausen bombing. A total of 331 incendiary and explosive bombs had been dropped. The number reported dead was revised downward to 39, although several of the wounded were near death, and others were invalids. Some 438 Swiss citizens lost their homes.19
In an article published in American and Swiss newspapers, Walter Lippmann called upon President Roosevelt to take the occasion of the Schaffhausen tragedy to reexamine and liberalize America’s economic policies toward Switzerland, arguing that Switzerland was a neutral, not a German satellite. By maintaining their democratic freedoms while surrounded by fascism in the darkest days of the war, the Swiss “contributed to humanity.” Americans, Lippmann concluded, should appreciate the positive role played by Switzerland, which in the future would have a role to play in the recovery of Europe.20
On June 4, the American Army entered Rome. Two days later the greatest invasion fleet the world had ever seen landed at Normandy in France. After years of battling the German Army in the Mediterranean theater, the strongest Allied army yet had attacked in northern Europe, breaching Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall.” The next day, General Guisan requested the Swiss cabinet’s authorization for a mobilization of troops based on continued reports of hostile intentions on the part of the Nazis. Public opinion welcomed the Allied landing, and the mobilization was favorably received.21 Military leaders had long expressed concern that Switzerland would face increased danger as the borders of the Reich constricted—a fear confirmed by Wehrmacht disengagement actions in Italy.22
On June 10, as Swiss soldiers mobilized, a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division claimed to have discovered explosives in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, France. The Germans rounded up and executed 642 people, almost the entire population.23 The Nazis were as unpredictable and ruthless as ever.
General Guisan warned Swiss soldiers on June 15 that the threats to Switzerland “might be progressively discernible or could appear quite suddenly,” thus requiring new forces to be called up. Guisan’s order of the day stated:
The risk to which this country is exposed does not of a necessity—as many pretended to believe—spring from the threat from this or that group of belligerents. Neither does it apply to this or that frontier, or always pre
sent itself in this or that concrete form.
It can come quite slowly and progressively increase, or it can break out with startling suddenness. It can even take on a form you have never imagined, but one which it is the duty of your leader who is entrusted with defense to reflect upon and measure in all its consequences.
To parry this danger, determination, courage, the best troops, armaments and fortifications alone will never suffice, unless we are ready in time. It is far better, therefore, that we are ready too soon than too late. It is far better to watch all outposts, even those deemed unimportant, than to find that we have neglected a single one.24
The Nazis were still capable of dangerous surprises. As General Guisan spoke, the first of the German “Vengeance” rockets—the Vergeltungswaffe 1—exploded over London. In rocket technology, Nazi scientists had leapfrogged their Allied counterparts. The big question then being asked by a select few in the United States and Britain was: how close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb?25
“As the war in Europe reaches its climax the position of Switzerland becomes more precarious,” said Werner Richter in the July 1944 issue of Foreign Affairs. Unlike Nazi-encircled Switzerland, all of the other neutrals—Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Turkey and Sweden—had a seacoast and thus the capacity for contact with the Allies. If the Wehrmacht was expelled from the Po Valley or from eastern or southern France, however, it might attempt to overrun and then to resist from Switzerland. Further, the Reich’s plans for its final stand on the “inner line” could entail seizure of Swiss railways connecting France with Austria and Germany with Italy.26 Allied tactics of blanketing German forces with massive firepower, especially from artillery and bombers, would have grave implications for Swiss cities and civilians if the Nazis fought from Swiss territory.
Richter noted that the Swiss were determined to prevent any such invasion. The Swiss militia was equivalent to a superior standing army and, until the Allied invasion of Italy, was the only armed force in continental Europe not subject to Hitler’s orders.27
German imperialists historically stigmatized the Swiss as rebels, Richter continued. Until the seventeenth century, the word “Swiss” in Germany was equivalent to the French radical term “Jacobin.” The centralization of the German state under Bismarck and Wilhelm II coincided with the alienation of the Swiss. Essentially, it was the Austrian-born Führer, Hitler, who had renewed the old Habsburg claim to Switzerland. The Swiss, Hitler believed, remained traitors against their “German blood”; Nazi school maps depicted Switzerland in the “Grossdeutsches Reich.” But the contrast between Germany and Switzerland had grown dramatically in the previous eighty years:
While the Reich became more and more the incarnation of imperialism, centralism, deification of the state and negation of the individual, Switzerland grew more and more firmly attached to the principles of her origin—democracy, federalism and individual freedom.28
Economically, according to Richter, Switzerland was in fact paying tribute to Germany. Had Switzerland not traded with Germany, “she would soon have been forced by starvation into capitulation and would have become one more on the list of occupied countries, while her factories went ahead full blast under Nazi management.”
The most critical internal problem was the food supply. Rations of essential foods were still far below those in the United States. Yet the Swiss resisted Nazi attempts to use commercial negotiations to extort political concessions, such as demobilization of troops. That did not prevent, of course, harangues from German loudspeakers telling Swiss frontier troops that they would be massacred within hours.29
By 1944, Richter wrote, Switzerland was a refuge for over 60,000 men and women who had fled from the New Order. More than 100 million francs of federal funds had been expended on helping refugees. The Swiss government, moreover, took measures to protect the rights of Jews with interests or presence in Switzerland:
When a German decree maintained that the property of German Jews in Switzerland was forfeited to the Reich, the Court of Appeals in Zurich—only a few minutes’ flight from German bombing bases—condemned this law and declared it to “constitute an intolerable violation of our native sense of justice.” And when the Gestapo seized a Jewish refugee on Swiss territory at Basel as a spy, the Swiss Government protested and stubbornly maintained its protest, regardless of risks, until the captive was returned.30
Allied intelligence derived substantial benefits from operations conceived in neutral Switzerland. From his arrival in Bern until midsummer 1944, OSS operative Allen Dulles had devoted considerable effort to supporting the French Resistance. Maquis fighters and couriers slipped into Switzerland, where the OSS would give them funds, plan parachute drops of arms, and coordinate resistance activities with the Allied forces which had swept into France. Dulles noted that “the groups we had worked with in the Haute-Savoie region adjoining Switzerland had been instrumental in clearing the way for the American thrust northward after the landings on the coast of southern France in July of 1944.” In addition, Italian partisan leaders would slip over the border into Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton, and arrange with the OSS for air drops of supplies to their mountain bases.31
The German underground also plotted Hitler’s death from Switzerland, where Dulles served as the intermediary between the conspirators and the Allies.32 On July 20, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb at Hitler’s headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair,” and flew back to Berlin to stage a coup against the Nazi regime. Hitler survived the blast, however, and the discovered plotters were executed in a barbaric manner. Thousands more would be rounded up and killed. Dr. Hans Gisevius, a longtime leader of the German Resistance, escaped to Zurich with the help of OSS-forged papers.33 Tragically, the failure of the “Officers’ Plot” left Hitler with a more committed, hard-core military cadre than before. Anyone within the professional ranks of the Wehrmacht suspected of being insufficiently instilled with the Nazi cause was purged. Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Gunther von Kluge committed suicide. Hitler now had an officer corps too intimidated to object to even his wildest and most destructive whims.
The untested but highly regarded Swiss capacity for a universal partisan war could be contrasted with the pitiful condition of the partisans in occupied Europe, who were hardly armed at all. The Allies would therefore parachute into Europe one million Liberator pistols—a cheap single-shot, smooth-bore pistol that was useless for anything except shooting a Nazi in the head at point-blank range in order to steal his arms. The partisan was lucky if the Liberator did not blow up in his own hand.34
The Swiss were feeling the effects of desperate Luftwaffe attacks near the frontier with France. The Swiss village of Morgins, a mile from the French border, was bombed and machine-gunned by the Luftwaffe on August 6, as the Germans were conducting an operation against the maquis in the French department of Haute-Savoie, where they inflicted severe damage. The population of the French village of Novel escaped injury by being evacuated into Switzerland. Luftwaffe planes also flew over the Valais in western Switzerland.35
On August 15, just as the German front in Normandy was cracking, the Allies landed another army on the French Mediterranean coast. Like the Normandy invasion, the Allied strike into southern France increased the danger of a desperate Wehrmacht incursion into Switzerland.36
In southern Germany, special forces under SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny plotted to send frogmen to blow up bridges and power plants along the Rhine. They also conspired to assassinate Free French General de Lattre de Tassigny, but the Swiss military warned the Allies in time.37 An American intelligence report dated August 19 noted the formation of two groups: the National Sozialistische Schweizer Bund in Vienna and the Bund der Schweizer in Gross-Deutschland in Stuttgart. These groups consisted of Swiss trained by the Nazis for the purpose of occupying and transforming Switzerland into a National Socialist state.38
As the battlefront neared the border, and in view of the fluid situation, the Swiss Federal Council
ordered additional security measures and called up more troops on August 25.39 That same day, American armies reached the Swiss border near Geneva. For the first time since 1940, the Axis no longer completely encircled Switzerland. As Allen Dulles wrote: “Until American troops broke through to the frontier near Geneva in August 1944, Switzerland was an island of democracy in a sea of Nazi and Fascist despotism. Radio communication was our only link with the outside world.”40 The Swiss regarded the combat in the Lyons region as dangerous for them, which explained their additional military measures.41
Because they had entered as refugees, over 9,000 Allied troops who had escaped from Italian and French prison camps into Switzerland were allowed to depart and join the American units at the Swiss border, according to the terms of The Hague Convention. Airmen who had bailed out or were forced down over Switzerland while on combat missions, however, remained for the time being as internees.42
With the Germans falling back toward the Belfort Gap near the Swiss border, on September 5 the Federal Council ordered increased mobilization of first-line frontier troops “in preparation for all eventualities.” The Germans were driven out of two of their last three strongholds in the Jura Department before the Belfort Gap, when Besançon and Pontarlier fell. The remaining German stronghold, Baume-les-Dames, midway between Besançon and Montbéliard, was surrounded. German deserters flowed into the Porrentruy pocket of Switzerland and were interned.43
As the Allies approached the Swiss border, the sounds of artillery fire were easily heard in Switzerland. Remobilized militiamen were taken from the Réduit and were positioned, without explanation, in the Plateau. To inform the soldiers of the nature of the current peril, artillery corporal August Lindt drafted a report dated September 9 entitled “Information on the Situation,” which was then distributed through liaison officers to the Swiss military. Lindt gave lectures for the Heer und Haus (Army and Home) communications center and would become an ambassador after the war.