I’ve been reading about Hitler and Switzerland and learned how much he despised the Swiss people, except, of course, for the German speaking Swiss which he considered part of greater Germany.
While Hitler had promised to respect Swiss neutrality, once France fell to Germany plans were drawn up to invade Switzerland. But Hitler never did attack Switzerland even though it seems it would have been relatively easy to take, the Alps not withstanding.
According to this Wiki article “Hitler never gave the go-ahead, for reasons still uncertain today. Some people think that a neutral Switzerland would have been useful to hide Axis gold and to escape for war criminals in case of defeat. This was also the reason for maintaining Sweden’s neutrality. Although the Wehrmacht feigned moves toward Switzerland in its offensives, it never attempted to invade. After D-Day, the operation was put on hold, and Switzerland remained neutral for the duration of the war.”
I can understand why Hitler would have been focused on the Allied invasion, but I don’t buy that high ranking German’s saw Switzerland as a safe haven in case things went south. I don’t think Hitler thought at the time that he could possibly lose the war. It seems there were plenty of opportunities to take Switzerland prior to D-Day and Hitler just never pulled the trigger.
Is there a new understanding of why Hitler didn’t invade Switzerland when he had the chance? It seems that he could simply bomb them into submission, invade and take their gold and other assets. Perhaps it just wasn’t worth the bother?
Getting caught up in Switzerland would have been too petty for his longterm vision of himself and his historical standing - he’d reversed the defeat in WW1 by the blitzkrieg in France, after which his main focus was the defeat of Bolshevism and the destruction of the Jews, and acquisition of Lebensraum to the east. As long as Switzerland and Sweden didn’t make trouble for him, they could be left alone, with the prospect of something more repressive later once Russia was dealt with, if need be. That was rather the position that he thought he’d achieved in respect of Britain, when he didn’t bother with an invasion in 1940.
It would have been easy, the Alps not withstanding is pretty much saying other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Switzerland planned to cede the country and form a national redoubt, making the cost of conquering Switzerland not worth the price:
There’s also the matter of those rail tunnels that the Swiss National Redoubt was going to retain control of. They were prepared to blow them if they were in danger of being captured, which would be a serious blow to the German and Italian economies for no good reason, costing them direct rail connection for no gain. Most rail traffic between Germany and Italy went through these tunnels, which if blown, could not be reopened until long after the war would be over. The Simplon Tunnels took 8 and 9 years to build and are 19,803 m and 19,824 m long.
I see your point PatrickLondon, but then why put together invasion plans if you don’t ever intend to use them? Did Hitler put together detailed plans to invade Britain and simply put them on the shelf?
I could understand it if Hitler just ignored Switzerland since they were not a credible threat to the Axis, but why waste the time and effort to plan an invasion? I’m more inclined to believe that Hitler hated the Swiss and would like to have subdued them, but either decided it wasn’t worth the effort, or had bigger fish to fry and just never got around to it.
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the rail tunnels and the impact it could have on Axis logistics and commerce. I assumed that there were rail lines in France that could bypass Switzerland… but would have taken longer to move things around for both Germany and Italy and would be vulnerable to Allied bombing.
Part of the answer is that planning is what war departments do.
It wasn’t worth the man power and time required to take and hold Switzerland. They in aided the Germans economically by being neutral. The train tunnels mentioned **Dissonance **is another good reason.
Priorities. Hitler never got around to invading the rest of the world because the Allied Forces had begun kicking Nazi ass. After reaching the English Channel, Hitler began fortifying the European coast. The air battle over England didn’t turn out as planned so the follow up invasion was put on hold. Hitler then decide to attack his former ally, the hated communist Stalin. After a pretty good start, Russian resitance, and Russian winter, brought that gamble to a halt. British, and U.S. aerial bombing hindered Hitler’s attempts to resupply his troops.
Would Hitler have, eventually, invaded Switzerland? Probably. Unless the Swiss chose to surrender first. If the Nazis had captured Russian oil fields, even if they hadn’t captured all of Russia, Hitler would have been in a much stronger position to strangle Switzerland into submission.
Historians have documented that throughout the first half of the 20th Century, the United States drew up war plans to respond to open warfare against almost every world power of the time, and some of the up-and-comers and strategically valuable. Including our likely allies. Plus one for internal insurgency.
Most of them were never used. A few were dusted off and used when war finally broke.
We probably still have plans like the Rainbow plans documented above, but that’d be classified so we wouldn’t really know for sure. Military operations staffs make plans. Full time. The last thing you want to tell a commander-in-chief is “We don’t have a plan to fight those guys.”
The plan was called Operation Tannenbaum. Hitler would probably have gotten around to it eventually, if intimidation didn’t work, but meanwhile the Swiss were intimidated and cooperative enough.
There was nothing to be gained at the time in invading Switzerland. And a lot to lose.
Note that invading Switzerland would more or less automatically mean that it would join the Allies. The thought of Allied air bases suddenly turning up in Switzerland would have sent a lot of discussion down the drain.
Once Hitler had defeated the big enemies, he probably could have persuaded Switzerland to form an alliance of sorts.
Note that planning to invade nations, as noted, is just flat out routine. Before WWII the US planned a war with the UK that involved invading Canada. Canada made contingency plans against a US invasion.
One of the sayings in the wartime German army: " Und die Schweiz, das Stachelschwein, das nehmen wir auf dem Rückweg ein" - and Switzerland, this porcupine, we’ll take on our way back. Of course, thanks to the allies, they never got to this point.
Yeah, launching an airborne invasion across hostile territory that is under protection of the only nuclear power in the world into mountainous terrain after you’ve just gotten done with a war where you took so many casualties that you have to draf 16-year-olds to keep units at around 60% strength sounds like a brilliant idea. Seriously, just look at a map - the USSR never even had a land border with Switzerland.
I think it needs said that Switzerland was at the mercy of Germany because the Swiss could only get fuel and other imports by barge up the Rhine to Basel. Nothing prevented Hitler from forcing them to surrender without an invasion. The simple conclusion is that there was no need to ‘conquer’ them, they were prisoners already. I had the fortune in the past to know well a Swiss fellow who helped invent a way of converting charcoal dust to pellets during the war and to use those pellets for fuel in
vehicles. Later, he used this technology to make fireplace logs from sawdust and wax. He was married and had children with a daughter of Red Adair, the oil well fire guy.
Well I was wrong. I was looking at europe in 1945 and your right, the Russians invaded Germany and other countries but didnt end up right at the Swiss border. I was thinking they had.