two German envoys with the signed surrender of the German armies in North Italy were waiting at the Swiss frontier. If they passed quickly and safely to the German headquarters in Italy, the war in North Italy would be over—without further destruction and bloodshed. Guerrilla warfare in the mountains surrounding Switzerland would be avoided.39
Stucki understood that the emergency precluded formal consultations and dispatched orders to let the German envoys pass. Once over the border into Austria, the envoys eluded the Gestapo—which wanted to arrest them—and reached Bolzano with the surrender documents that night. At last Army Group C would be authorized to lay down its arms when the armistice took place on May 2.
According to Waibel’s account—credited as accurate by former American Ambassador Hugh Wilson—the delays in negotiating the surrender caused by Stalin’s pressure on Roosevelt cost Allied lives. Waibel wrote:
For over two months we tried to work out as quickly as possible a cease fire. On March 7, weeks before the end of the war, our goal seemed reached. In April it was possible to end the war five to seven days earlier had not the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, on April 21, given orders to break off negotiations a day before the Germans came in to surrender. On April 23, when the authorities from the German Army arrived in Switzerland, the Allies were still south of the Po. Much blood and destruction could have been saved if the Allied attack across the Po had not been carried out.40
In any event, the surrender, assisted by private Swiss citizens, avoided a bloodbath in northern Italy and encouraged the capitulation of the remaining forces. This helped prevent what SS General Wolff himself called the “madness” of a last-ditch German Alpine Redoubt stand. It protected Switzerland from the German armed horde and hastened the end of the war, saving thousands of lives of Allied soldiers and Italian civilians alike.41
Adolf Hitler commited suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30. Benito Mussolini had been captured by Italian partisans and killed on April 28. In early May, the French occupied the Vorarlberg in western Austria, and the threat of war for Switzerland finally ceased. The Reich unconditionally surrendered on May 8, and the war officially ended at midnight.42
On the date of surrender, the Swiss Federal Council announced that it no longer recognized the Third Reich as the government of Germany and Swiss authorities proceeded to expel all foreigners considered inimical to the national interest. The Swiss had fought Nazi subversion ever since Hitler came to power, and the closing of the Reich Embassy made it possible to suppress completely the espionage it generated. Immediate action was taken to expel Nazis and Fascists. Anyone who had been a member of a foreign organization known for violence, such as the Gestapo, and anyone who would continue to promote National Socialism by unlawful methods was to be expelled, as would persons likely to engage in sabotage or assassination. The U.S. State Department, in a report entitled Swiss Policies on Purge of Axis Supporters, clearly recognized Swiss efforts to rid their country of Nazi sympathizers.43
Though the direct military threat to Switzerland had ended, as in the rest of Europe the economic and social effects of the war were far from over. In May 1945 there were 115,000 people in refugee centers in Switzerland, and thousands of others elsewhere. During the entire war, 400,000 refugees and emigrants came to the country, and one billion Swiss francs were spent on related assistance.44 The Atlantic Monthly commented:
To these, as to the refugee problems, the country has steadily responded with generous gifts and help of all sorts, including the providing of temporary shelter during the war for 35,000 Jews. (If we had made a comparable effort, we should have taken in 1,225,000, since our population is 35 times that of Switzerland; actually, we did not take as many as Switzerland.)45
Refugees included interned soldiers, sick and wounded, escaped prisoners of war, civilians who escaped either from concentration camps or had fear of being imprisoned, and the frontier fugitives at the end of the war. Throughout the war, the number continued to increase despite repatriation measures.46 Between August 13, 1943 and April 20, 1945, 166 American planes landed or crashed in Switzerland. Allied planes sometimes flew to Switzerland as a place of refuge after being damaged in battle or because of spent fuel or mechanical failure. By contrast, Axis planes that landed there did so because they were shot down or made navigational mistakes.47 Some 1,700 American airmen would be safely interned in Switzerland during the war.48
As a protecting power between nations which had severed diplomatic relations, Switzerland interned civilians and wounded prisoners of war, and facilitated POW exchanges between the Allies and the Axis. Many thousands of prisoner exchanges took place without the public being aware of them.49
The following table sets forth the national origins and numbers of foreign soldiers interned in Switzerland from June 20, 1940 through December 31, 1945, as reported by the Commission for Interned and Hospitalized Military Persons.50
Country of Origin Soldiers
France 32,621
Italy 29,213
Poland 14,972
Russia 8,415
Germany & Austria 7,532
Britain 5,139
Yugoslavia 2,921
United States 1,742
Greece 846
Belgium 783
Czechoslovakia 516
Finland 105
Diverse 81
By interning these soldiers Switzerland fulfilled her obligations as a neutral under international law, but more importantly, demonstrated singular humanitarian concern as the numbers were great in proportion to the Swiss population. Fully 68,141, or 65 percent, of the internees were Allied soldiers, most of whom had been interned since 1940. Most of the Axis internees were Italians, not Germans, and they were interned relatively late in the war. (By being interned, many of these Italians escaped having to fight for the Germans.) Large numbers of Allied soldiers would have lost their lives had they been kept in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps.
Headquartered in Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a voluntary association of citizens recognized by governments for its humanitarian work in war zones around the world. When the war began, the Central Agency for Prisoners of War was established pursuant to the Geneva Convention Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Beginning with 50 volunteers in September 1939, by the end of the war the ICRC employed over 2,500 workers in Switzerland.51
The ICRC kept lists of all prisoners of war and transmitted messages between prisoners and their families. Millions of communications involving both civilians and prisoners were generated during the war. Besides locating missing persons, ICRC personnel visited prisoner camps, sent relief packages to military and civilian prisoners, provided information about violations of the Geneva Conventions, supplied medicine and protected captured partisans. Except for the Soviet Union, all warring nations relied on the ICRC,52 which assisted or registered 477,000 Americans, most of them POWs and a few civilian internees, during the war. A total of 10 million Allied prisoners and civilian internees were assisted overall by this uniquely Swiss organization.53
The ICRC also succeeded in convincing the Germans to recognize Free French partisans as legitimate armed forces, thereby preventing some massacres. As rumors of the Holocaust spread, the ICRC sought access to concentration camps to seek freedom for children and the aged and to provide relief. After a period of refusal, in 1942 the ICRC gained permission to provide food parcels to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which imprisoned 40,000 Jews, and to other camps. However, the Allies prohibited the use of food imported into Switzerland for these prisoners. It took two years of work before the ICRC could overcome Allied objections. Not until 1944 was permission granted for such provisions.54 By the end of the war, ICRC delegations had conducted 2,200 visits to prison camps. Delegates helped arrange the surrender of German concentration camps to the Allies and prevented last-minute executions.55
Swiss diplomats, particularly Carl Lutz and delegates of the ICRC in Budapest, were abl
e to save thousands of Jewish lives in late 1944 and early 1945 by extending Swiss diplomatic protection.56 A total of 1,355 inmates, mainly Hungarian Jews, of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp arrived in Switzerland in December 1944. As their destination was Palestine, the U.S. Department of State argued to the British in January 1945: “This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to the Swiss our good faith in promising to find temporary havens for all refugee Jews arriving in Switzerland from Hungary.”57 Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew cabled Bern that the United States “would deeply appreciate continued Swiss cooperation in this humanitarian endeavor by admitting all such refugees who may be able to reach Switzerland, without regard to numbers.” However, for months the Allies had refused to permit the Swiss to use French roads and railways to import some 300,000 tons of foodstuffs warehoused in a Spanish port.58
The U.S. War Refugee Board asked the ICRC to “distribute food, medicine and clothing to concentration camp inmates in enemy controlled areas and to remove them, if possible, to safety in Switzerland without unnecessary delay.”59
According to SS General Walter Schellenberg, in mid-January Himmler promised former Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy to release 1,200 Jews to Switzerland every two weeks. The program began in February. However, through a decoded message, Hitler discovered the agreement, and ordered that any German who helped a Jew or a British or American prisoner escape would be executed immediately. Schellenberg persuaded the chief of the Prisoner of War Administration not to pass on Hitler’s order. He further arranged to countermand the order to evacuate concentration camp inmates liable to be liberated by the Allies, and arranged for meetings with Dr. Carl Burckhardt, the ICRC president.60
The end of the Pacific war also involved Switzerland. On July 22, 1945, after three-and-a-half years of war with the Western powers, Japan finally agreed to comply with international law permitting neutral observers to visit prisoner-of-war camps. As reported by the New York Times, the Swiss had recently agreed to represent Japan in the United States (replacing Spain) only on condition that Japan allow Swiss observers to visit all camps where Americans were held.61 After the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan capitulated on August 14. The Swiss transmitted Japan’s surrender offer to the United States and handled the subsequent dispatches between those powers.62
Between 1939 and 1945, Switzerland spent 4 billion Swiss francs for arms and another 4 billion to maintain the army, for a total of 8 billion francs or, at today’s rate, 80 billion francs.63 In 1940, defense expenditures were fully 12 percent of the entire Swiss national income as Switzerland concentrated her efforts on fortifications and the Réduit National; in 1945, the figure remained high at 7 percent.64 The monetary costs of defense and preparedness, together with the personal efforts related to the mobilizations, required great sacrifices on the part of Swiss citizenry during the war. When the average Swiss man was at his military post along with the farm’s pack animals, his wife and children had to do all of the grueling farm work alone. Urban workers likewise lost wages.
The National Defense Commission concluded at the end of the war that the SSV shooting federation would continue to promote rifle skills for the entire nation in the interest of national defense.65 The armed citizen had played a deterrent role against invasion and would remain the cornerstone of Switzerland’s democratic army.
The army demobilized in July 1945, and active service officially ended on August 20. In Bern, Guisan spoke of future defense as the nation celebrated.66
While the Allies had accepted Swiss neutrality through most of the war because it suited their interests, some became critical of Switzerland toward the end of the war and afterward. At the Swiss National Day on August 1, 1945, Foreign Minister Max Petitpierre responded to this criticism:
Those who reproach us today for our neutrality forget that this country, even when in mortal danger and practically alone as the representative of democratic ideals in the subjugated continent of Europe, resisted all pressure from the outside (Axis) and maintained that independence of which she is justly proud today.67
Petitpierre asked rhetorically: “As a belligerent state, invaded as the other countries of the continent, would we have been more useful than by remaining neutral?”68
On October 4, 1945, Federal Councillor Karl Kobelt gave an account of the Swiss perception of Nazi Germany’s wartime threat and revealed some wartime secrets to the Swiss public. Kobelt noted that Swiss intelligence “stretched right into the Führer’s headquarters” and kept the Military Department informed of Wehrmacht plans. The danger of invasion was greatest after the fall of France, after the Italian surrender, and as the war approached its end. The German General Headquarters also planned an invasion in March 1943, when 30 German divisions were massed on the Swiss frontier, but it was canceled at the last moment, according to Kobelt.69
Beginning almost immediately after Hitler’s rise to power, Switzerland expended large sums of money and human effort to arm herself and to have the capacity to resist a Nazi invasion. Most other European nations failed to make these expenditures or efforts and would become prey to Nazi military invasion and, afterward, economic exploitation and worse.
European nations that failed to resist or that were quickly defeated and occupied contributed to the Nazi war effort, albeit involuntarily— clearly far more than any neutral country that traded with Germany. The Nazis plundered every country they occupied. Production of goods, crops, slave labor—all was free. The Nazis extracted immense resources from the occupied countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, large portions of Russia and the Caucasus, Norway, Bulgaria and parts of North Africa.
Switzerland is now being criticized for not joining the war on the side of the Allies and for trading with Germany. Yet this relationship of trading partners required Germany to pay for what it purchased, instead of getting valuable resources at little or no cost. By sustaining her economy through trade, Switzerland maintained the strength to resist a Nazi takeover. Had Switzerland declared war on Germany, she would have been overrun from the borders to the Plateau, and the Swiss Jews and the Jewish refugees in Switzerland, as well as resisters in general, would have been exterminated. Nazi control of the Alpine transit routes, as well as the superb defensive terrain of the Swiss Alps, would also have greatly damaged the Allied cause.
As the war neared, Switzerland at first embargoed all arms exports, but lifted the embargo in April 1939 at the insistence of the Allies. The Swiss munitions industry then exported sizable amounts of matériel to France and Great Britain and virtually none to Germany, until the surrender of France in June 1940. The Swiss did supply some armaments to Germany after the fall of France, but for the duration of the war Swiss arms deliveries amounted to less than one percent of Germany’s total armaments. Albert Speer, the Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions, does not even mention Switzerland in his lengthy memoirs, although he wrote extensively on how Germany harnessed industry in France and other occupied countries to serve the Reich’s war needs.70
Speer also wrote of the importance of Germany’s trade for raw materials with other neutrals. In December 1943, Speer informed Hitler that, should supplies of chromium from Turkey be cut off, the manufacture of tanks, planes and U-boats would become impossible and that the war would end about ten months after the loss of the Balkans.71 His prediction came true. Iron ore from Sweden was just as important to Speer’s efforts, and keeping open Germany’s supply route from Sweden was an important factor in Hitler’s decision to invade and occupy Norway and Denmark.
In every country they occupied, the Nazis seized the gold in the national bank. They also imposed occupation costs on these countries, which by the end of the war amounted to a cumulative total of 60 billion marks ($15 billion). France paid over half. Banks were also forced to grant “credits” to the Nazis. The total occupation costs and credits extracted from all occ
upied countries totaled 104 billion marks ($26 billion). This does not include the value of crops, raw materials and products which were taken. From France alone, those amounted to about 185 billion francs.72 The Nazis stole no manufactured or agricultural products from the Swiss. Nor did the Swiss pay occupation costs.
At the end of September 1944, Germany held 7.5 million foreign slave laborers from occupied nations who were simply kidnapped and railroaded there. There were also two million prisoners of war, half a million of whom worked in munitions plants.73 Switzerland supplied no slave labor force to the Third Reich.
The Nazi arms industry could not have functioned without this human war booty. Even the subjects of the Final Solution were fodder for the Nazi war machine. Emmanuel Ringelblum of the Warsaw ghetto, writing in 1942, described the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe:
Only those Jews have a right to live who work to supply the German Army. . . . Never in history has there been a national tragedy of these dimensions. A people that hates the Germans with every fiber of its being can purchase its life only at the price of helping its foe to victory—the very victory that means the complete annihilation of Jewry from the face of Europe, if not of the whole world.74
Many of these workers were literally worked to death or died from starvation. It bears repeating that Switzerland was almost the only country in the whole of continental Europe where such horrors did not occur.
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