As a businessman who spent much time in Germany, Hausamann had been so shocked by the rise of Hitler that he had turned to journalism to warn his country. He wrote and published a book on the need for defense against Germany and produced movies on the same theme, at one time buying up every projector in the country. A man of the political right, he spent so much effort preaching rearmament to Swiss Socialists that he acquired friends and sympathy on the left. His rightist friends in Germany transmitted to him—by nonelectronic means—information from a variety of high-level contacts, including one of their number who worked in Hitler’s communications office.
But note well: Hausamann’s dynamism did not cause information to flow. That cause was high-level, anti-Hitler sentiment in Germany. The ReichsicherheitHauptamt (headquarters of Reich security) was aware of this network of conservative high-ranking anti-Hitler officers and dubbed it the “Black Orchestra.” Hausamann called his network into the right-wing anti-Hitler underground “the Viking Line.”
Then in 1942, one of Hausamann’s leftist friends put him in contact with Roessler, whose information apparently also came from former military colleagues who had risen in the Wehrmacht . So, Hausamann was the recipient of two excellent military networks. Although the political coloration of Roessler’s sources was unclear, Roessler himself also transmitted his intelligence through Sandor Rado, a Hungarian Communist living in Switzerland as a cartographer and running an intelligence radio relay service from Lausanne to Moscow. At the beginning of the war, Rado’s organization, known as the Dora ring, was the main part of Moscow’s intelligence in Western Europe that had not been shut down by the Stalin-Hitler Pact. After mid-1942 Dora was functioning as the last surviving piece of the famed German Communist spy organization, Leopold Trepper’s “Red Orchestra.” Thus Switzerland in general and Hausamann in particular were at the crossroads of the two main lines of espionage coming out of Germany.
In addition, Max Weibel was receiving information from the anti-Hitler element of his former classmates in Germany’s war college, while the Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was passing information to the Swiss as well as to the Allies through the German vice consul in Zurich, Hans Gisevius, as well as through a young Polish refugee, Halina Zymanska. Then, beginning after the great German defeats of 1943, a panoply of German officials, ranging from the plotters who would eventually try to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, to emissaries from Himmler himself, were contacting the Allies in Switzerland.
The German government was aware of an intelligence hemorrhage through Switzerland. Direction-finding radio receivers had established that nightly encrypted traffic was emanating from the Geneva area. Cryptological analysis showed that the messages were from Dora to Moscow, and that the information was important. Germany pushed the Swiss government hard to shut down Dora. But this did not happen until the ring was betrayed from within, leaving the cantonal police no choice.
The relevant question must be: To what extent did Swiss intelligence, and its provision of a permissive environment for intelligence favorable to the Allies, make up for the weaknesses of the Swiss army? Some of the information that went from Roessler through to Moscow about the Wehrmacht’s plans at Stalingrad and Kursk was of the highest importance, as was a lot of data on German war production. One Büro Ha runner would sometimes bring to the British Embassy material from Roessler about German U-boats. Yet none of this made the difference between victory and defeat at Stalingrad, Kursk, the Atlantic, or anywhere else.
Nothing that Switzerland did or allowed in the field of intelligence made up for the fact that it was a tiny country. Hence the answer must be that intelligence by and through Switzerland played more or less the role that one might have expected given the country’s geographic position and the circumstances. The pressure of events—rather than anything that Swiss intelligence or America’s spymaster in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, did—was what increased the flow of intelligence. After all, the greatest flow of intelligence out of Germany began after the Battle of Stalingrad, when not only anti-Hitler Germans but Nazis as well became anxious about how to avoid the worst for their country and themselves. One of the timeless lessons regarding the role of intelligence is that information tends to flow to the side that is believed to be winning.
Counterespionage, however, helped the Swiss military cause considerably. We have no way of knowing what percentage of German agents the Swiss managed to catch or what percentage of Switzerland’s military secrets Germany was able to get. Given the extent of the German network, Germany must have done very well. Nor is it clear how or to what extent Germany’s knowledge of Swiss military preparations would have helped it in case of invasion. But beyond doubt, German intelligence feared Swiss counterespionage. A German officer summed it up this way: “After a certain point the Swiss counterespionage organization was considered as by far the most dangerous. It is in Switzerland that the proportion of agents put out of action was highest. Our painstakingly built networks were constantly disorganized by timely interventions of Swiss counterespionage.” 23 Over the course of the war the Swiss arrested approximately 1,400 persons for espionage, of whom 328 were sentenced to long prison terms, while 33 were condemned to death for spying for Germany; 15 of these men were executed, including three Swiss officers.
The respect for Switzerland that these executions engendered among Germans was less important than the favorable impression they made on the Swiss population in general and the army in particular. The country felt put upon, robbed, humiliated, frightened by the Germans. Killing spies working for Germany was a small yet concrete way of affirming the country’s integrity and will to independence. The first death sentence was against a sergeant who sold the Germans, among other things, sketches of some minor fortifications along one of the roads leading to the redoubt. Historian Hans Ulrich Jost, in his book Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses, argues that the Swiss establishment agreed to the executions “as if to expiate the feeling of guilt that permeated the highest ruling circles.”24 25 Certainly some of the businessmen who were making money dealing with the Germans, or some government officials who cowered before Nazis, were more reprehensible and more consequential than petty spies. But the willingness to kill spies signified to these very businessmen and officials that collaboration had better be kept within limits. Above all, if the country was willing to kill its own citizens for any kind of collaboration whatever, it was likely to resist an invasion.
Indeed, the foremost military question was whether the country as a whole would resist. Hence the army’s most significant battle of the war was precisely against those whose commitment to resist was shaky, as well as against outright subversion.
Subversion and Politics
The greatest threat to a besieged army is subversion of morale and policy by uncertain high-ranking officers and civilian authorities.26 This is the kind of treason that none dare call by its name because it so often prospers. Next to it, the subversive activities of foreign agents is small stuff. Not surprisingly, before the defeat of France foreign agents had little luck because Switzerland’s leadership was resolute and its national unity was greater.26 But in 1940 the danger came from the weakness of domestic leadership. Switzerland’s battle against subversion then became a military campaign for the country’s soul.27
The Nazis set about subverting Switzerland as they had subverted Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the rest. They organized a core of semi-professional party toughs who would intimidate ordinary people through threatening marches, street violence, and fiery rallies. At the highest political levels, Nazi leaders worked to convince the Establishment that it was futile to resist. In Switzerland the first part of the plan failed miserably. The second nearly succeeded as a result of Germany’s preponderance in 1940–1942.
Switzerland’s Nazi Party, which had been active since 1934, was under orders from Berlin to agitate for an Anschluss to unite the German Swiss with the Reich.
Several things went wrong
. First, the Swiss authorities made it impossible for the Nazis to commit the acts of intimidation that had served them so well elsewhere. Second, and most important, very few German Swiss joined the organization; in fact, Nazism was less distasteful to the French-speaking cantons than to the German-speaking ones. Finally, on February 4, 1936, Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of Switzerland’s Nazis, was assassinated, and the Swiss government refused to allow any Swiss citizen to succeed him.28 A year later, the Swiss government officially made the German Embassy responsible for the party’s actions. Under this scrutiny the party vanished into insignificance. Its members were tracked by the Swiss police, and by 1940 the party had dissolved.
During the mid-1930s the entire Swiss establishment, including the trade unions, recognized that Nazism discredited the very idea of a multiethnic state, of democracy and economic liberalism, as well as of centuries-old civil liberties—everything that Switzerland stood for. Nevertheless, there were narrow limits to what a liberal government could do to counter massive propaganda from a totalitarian neighbor. Plans for a Swiss propaganda ministry came to nothing. But the government established a private foundation, Pro Helvetia, to drum up Swiss patriotism. It sponsored movies, speakers, and the successful Zurich National Exposition of 1939. Almost as an afterthought, the organization established a military branch, Army and Hearth. This was to mean nothing until the outbreak of war, and nearly everything thereafter. During the late 1930s, as country after country was falling under the Nazi spell, Switzerland enjoyed an outburst of patriotism. In March 1939 Swiss Economics Minister Hermann Obrecht pledged that, in contrast to other European appeasers, no one from the Swiss government would “go to Berchtesgaden” on pilgrimage to Hitler. His statement was widely applauded.29
So, until the fall of France, worries about fifth columns were vastly overblown. On May 14, 1940, when a German invasion seemed imminent, the Federal Council ordered the arrest of every politically active German, plus all prominent Swiss Nazis. It’s a tribute to Swiss liberty that the order was countermanded when the invasion did not come.30 In short, in patriotic Switzerland traditional Nazi subversion failed as nowhere else.
Germany’s military successes in 1940, however, undermined Swiss confidence. Germany’s defeat of France, and its apparent defeat of Britain, seemed to validate every bit of the Nazi critique of European liberalism and to augur a collectivist future controlled by Germany (together with the Soviet Union). Nazi Germany’s New European Order offered rebirth through peace, order, work, social security. “What’s the point,” asked some sophisticated Swiss, “of being the only ones to resist the New Europe with utter futility and disregard for our safety—for the sake of what has failed?” Patriotic defiance, and the Alpine redoubt, seemed a thin answer.
To forbid Switzerland from saying out loud that Germany was its enemy, the Reich combined the threatening reality of its overwhelming force with the blandishment of a parent toward its mischievous child. The German Embassy and the German press were accusing Switzerland of violating its neutrality by allowing expressions of dismay at Germany’s victories, and by insufficiently appreciating the virtues of the Nazi political system. Moreover the Swiss press was introducing into German discourse all sorts of mockery of Nazism. For example, it parodied the Nazi claim of crusade, kreuzal, into hakenkreuzal—twisted cross-ade. By so doing, the Germans maintained, Switzerland was contributing to the loss of German blood (Blutschuld). Germany threatened to reevaluate its respect of Swiss neutrality if Switzerland did not fix the problem. The Swiss Establishment’s preference for complex, fuzzy ways of looking at a challenge whose face was too fearsome, and its inability publicly to identify the enemy who threatened the country, undermined cohesion in the armed forces and society.
By July 1940 the Swiss troops believed that, regardless of what their general was saying, neither the government nor even their own senior officers would give the order to fight. When they went home, they absorbed the civilian environment’s tendency to accommodation. Above all, it was not clear that accommodation with Germany or even with Nazism was any longer wrong. Perhaps those who were opposing collaboration were mere extremists who were endangering the country. Maybe they were the real enemy. In a phenomenon all too familiar to Americans who lived through the Cold War, anti-totalitarianism became suspect. Consequently, to hold its own soldiers together, the army had to face basic political questions—and set the tone of discourse in the country at large.
On July 25, 1940, General Guisan gathered the army’s 650 field grade officers to the spot where the Swiss Confederation had been founded in 1291—the Rütli meadow above Lake Lucerne. There, on sacred ground, speaking solemnly and switching occasionally to heavily accented German, he reiterated the army’s duty to defend the country, explained the redoubt plan, and ordered the officers to convey to the troops their own determination and confidence. Although he did not mention the words “Germany” or “Nazi,” Guisan condemned faint hearts who would not stand against aggression. The Reich expressed outrage. After the Rütli speech, General Guisan toured the country, spreading the same message. One observer described the general’s speeches as subtly “recalling to divine law those who had forgotten the prayers of their youth.”31 For General Guisan Swiss patriotism was next to godliness, and the army was its embodiment.32
The army, however, was anything but united. Nor is it fair to characterize the Federal Council as unpatriotic. Yes, it took a softer line than Guisan. But none of its members had Nazi sympathies. Still, public opinion quickly contrasted the Rütli speech, and Guisan’s endless tours of the country plus the programs of Army and Hearth, with President Pilet Golaz’s uninspiring speech of June 26. The general was on his way to becoming the national hero, credited with everything that went well, while Pilet Golaz and the Federal Council were doomed to be cast as the goats.
Still, the popular perception has an element of truth. Although only a handful of marginalized Swiss were as ready to celebrate their country’s defeat as many mainstream Americans ended up being willing to celebrate America’s failure to stop Communism in Vietnam, nevertheless army leadership is the reason why many Swiss refused to go along with the Nazi enterprise.
Three of the army’s most prominent officers—Hans Hausamann, Oscar Frey, and Max Weibel, friends of the general to a man—had been so shocked by Swiss President Pilet Golaz’s June 26 radio address that they formed a secret cell pledged to resist Nazism to the death, regardless of any orders to the contrary. General Guisan discovered the amateurish plot, shook the ringleaders’ hands, and sentenced them to punishments that amounted to brief vacations. He did not hesitate to use these officers as the intellectual core of Army and Hearth’s programs.
Those programs succeeded in giving audiences what they could not get anywhere else—namely, large amounts of factual information. Army and Hearth provided troop commanders with Wehrbriefe, sets of talking points on the evolution of the war and of Swiss defense preparations, explanations of Germany’s role in the Swiss economy, discussions of refugee policy, the rationing system—in short, the sort of things that would have come through a free press. In addition, the organization sent professional speakers around to the troops and trained promising troops to be speakers. These speakers were provided with talking points on basic subjects, usually laid out in Thomistic format: propositions (generally those of the accommodationists) followed by objections to the propositions and then discussion. For example, Speech Plan #22, titled “The Jewish Question,” set out the basic theses of anti-Semitism and then refuted each one with facts, statistical analyses, and ethical argument.33 Soldiers were encouraged to tell the folks back home what they had learned.
In the days following France’s disaster, many officers became convinced that a direct effort was needed to rescue civilian public opinion. At the end of July the bulletin of Army and Hearth said, “At this time, the officer must become the educator of our people.” On three occasions during the summer Guisan asked the Federal Council to lead pub
lic opinion to support the army’s mission. By the fall the army had taken matters into its own hands. On October 21 Guisan established a civilian section of Army and Hearth, which in the end conducted 328 courses and delivered some 4,000 lectures. The Federal Council tried to starve it for funds, but no matter. The section got its materials, ably written (and gratis), from a group called Aktion Nationaler Widerstand (National Resistance Movement), which included the general’s friends in the army as well as backbench members of parliament. It, in turn, got its authority from the general.
The Federal Council was upset. The Germans objected, especially to Swiss Colonel Oscar Frey’s anti-Nazi speeches, given in uniform, to civilian audiences on the border. The Federal Council forced Frey to desist, even as it allowed Nazi Gauleiter (party official) Fritz Sauckel to address the German community in Basel. But recall, this was 1941; Germany seemed sure to win, and it was easy to view people like Colonel Frey as loose cannons who would bring nothing but harm on their country. Yet in October 1942, after a speech by Gauleiter Bohle, chief of all Nazis abroad, to Germans in Switzerland at the Zurich Hallenstadion, the Swiss government banned all large gatherings by foreigners. By then, the balance of power was shifting and the Reich’s triumph no longer looked so sure.
Between the Alps and a Hard Place Page 8
