I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ “The War”. During last night’s episode, they showed a map of Europe with red indicating the Nazi-controlled areas. The entire map was red, except for a “hole” in the middle being Switzerland (and the British Isles off to the side, of course).
I’ve always heard of Switzerland being neutral during the war, but how did they manage that? I mean, they say “Hey, we’re neutral” and Hitler says, “Oh, ok, we’ll stay out of your country”? Doesn’t make much sense. Was there some actual agreement between the Swiss and Germany wherein the Swiss agreed to stay out of the war, not help the Allies, and Germany agreed to not invade them? And if so, why did Germany agree? Surely, Hitler wouldn’t be content to take over all of Europe, but leave Switzerland out of his control forever. Was he just saving it for later?
Why would Hitler bother invading a country that was not threatening him, where the terrain would nullify his tanks and cause him to waste several more divisions holding the land once it had been conquered when he could leave tham alone and call on the Swiss bankers for fianacial support for his war?
Belgium and the Netherlands might have been left alone if their land was not needed for the updated/modified Schlieffen plan that the Germans used to conquer France.
The usual answers (which I think are correct) are:
Hitler would have wanted to do it eventually, but it was too much trouble for too little gain at the time;
The Swiss did some things to appease the Axis powers (e.g. allowing weapons trains to go from Germany to Italy through Switzerland, selling some items to Germany)
Switzerland would have been a tough nut to invade, and Hitler always had better targets…Poland, Norway, France, Britain, Russia. There wasn’t any short-term point to invading Switzerland.
If Germany had beaten Russia eventually Switzerland would have been in trouble…either invaded, or in a situation like Sweden…nominally independent, but practically under the thumb of the Germans.
I forgot to say that, in the same way that Austria voluntarily joined the German Reich, there was a (small) movement in German-speaking Switzerland of people advocating a voluntary reunification with Germany. But Switzerland was too diverse from the point of view of language, culture, religion, and had too long of a history of neutrality, to make this idea popular amongst more than a small group of Germanophiles.
Switzerland provided a third party conduit to send messages to the Allies (like “do you give up yet?”).
Switzerland provided a handy way to transfer money to other parties. (For example, say they had a spy in New York. You put money in an account in Switzerland. That money (minus a handling fee) gets wired to an account in Mexico. You spy in New York draws his operating cash from the Banqo de Mexico branch in New York.)
Switzerland is a rugged country, slightly more easy to defend than Belgium. Critical mountain passes and train tunnels can be blocked with a low amount of work. Invading Switzerland may not be seen as worth the investment in men and material.
Culturally, Switzerland is closer to Austria than Italy or France, I think. (Although I could be wrong…) Generally, it seems that countries and peoples of a similar culture or political philosophy get cut more slack than those that don’t. (Hitler believed strongly in that Germano-Aryan cultural superiority stuff.)
Yes, but I don’t know if would have been able to partition the Fr. and It. parts out from the German part. They are kinda intermixed, right?
If so, then he might have lumped them all under one generic stereotype, one that suited his purposes. (He would have emphasized the German parts of Swiss culture, and downplayed or ignored the others.)
Kind of like he thought of the British. He thought that both the British and German peoples shared a common (though possibly distant) Aryan heritage. As such, he was willing to be more lenient with the UK, especially early on, in his war aims/demands with them than he was with Poland or France, or especially Russia.
Switzerland made some economic concessions to Germany to forestall invasion, but largely the independance of the Swiss Confederation was due to very strong deterrance including an active popular militia and widespread ownership of military-grade firearms. This, in combination with the readily-defensible, mountainous terrain of the highlands, would have made an invasion of Switzerland for any material purpose (i.e. money) very costly, and in combination with the Eastern Front and the Allied Fronts in Southern and (later) Western Europe there just weren’t the resources for it.
It’s also the case that there was essentially no local support for Nazism and fascism in Switzerland. While the popular view is that Germany invaded the helpless and opposing nations of Europe, it was in fact the case that most of the nation that Germany annexed already had very powerful or vocal fascist movements, including Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and most famously Austria. (Sweden also had a substantial fascist political presence and despite neutrality aided Germany economically during the war, but was significantly protective of its Jewish population and granted asylum to Jews and others deported or persecuted in other Scandinavian countries.) On the other hand, Switzerland had a very small fascist presence which was vigorously criticized by both leaders and the media. An attempted Anschluss was rapidly aborted, and Switzerland put itself on a defensive footing. Orson Welles (in the character of Harry Lime) might have famously decried Switzerland for having “had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,” but post-war Switzerland was riding high (having been the banking center for most of the wealthy European Jews who had the foresight to stash their money and treasures) while the all-too-cooperative Austria was, as depicted in that film, a bombed out shell, and many of the other annexed nations shortly to be ensconced behind the Iron Curtain.
No doubt Hitler planned to one day take Switzerland (actually extensive plans were drawn up but never executed owing to more pressing matters) but then, he also planned to build “master race” of people with recessive characteristics, so what he planned and what may or may not have ever transpired hypothetically speaking are two distinct lines of thought. Aside from banking, chocolate, and merceneries (the latter of which the Swiss are prohibited from exporting except to the Vatican) there isn’t much in the way of great natural resources in Switzerland, and a German campaign to annex Switzerland against a determined resistance would have been more costly than any benefit achieved.
Does the Burns documentary not cover this? Don’t tell me he’s doing the same thing for WWII that he did for jazz. Popular coverage of a topic is all good and well, but one should at least aspire to cover more than just the superficial happenings. History is nothing but factoids without meaning and motivation.
No. They are actually quite distinct. See this map of languages spoken in Switzerland. As you could expect, the French speakers are close to France, the German speakers are close to Germany and Austria (and Liechtenstein), and the Italian speakers are in the only part of Switzerland south of the Alps and on the Italian border. Romansh speakers can be lumped in with German speakers because virtually all Romansh speakers will know German to communicate with anyone else outside of their small corner of Switzerland.
I must admit to, so far, being somewhat disappointed with Burns’ “The War”. It isn’t really covering any of “the big picture”, it’s focusing on indivuduals, both in the war and at home. It was made clear in the documentary itself as well as in some of the articles I’ve read about it that this is the intent, that plenty of other works have told the story of the war from the perspective of the generals and the leaders.
Sometimes, this documentary is absolutely riviting, mostly when the people who were there are just talking to the camera, telling about their experiences. But the narration tends to go on and on about the smallest of minutia, and doesn’t give any insight into whys or backgrounds or anything. It will go on at length about how black shipyard workers were subjected to Jim Crow laws or even physically attacked, but then it barely mentions the Tuskegee airmen.
Anyway, back to a GQ: Thanks for the informative replies on why Germany left Switzerland alone, that all makes sense.
But that leads me to ask, why did Switzerland remain neutral? I can see why they would want to stay out of the war in the beginning, but looking at the map that the documentary put up, all Nazi-occupied red surrounding this little bit of neutral Switzerland, almost made me shudder. It couldn’t have been a foregone conclusion that the Allies would win, and I would think it would be seen as inevitable that Hitler would want to eventually control Switzerland as well.
So why didn’t they ever throw in with the Allies? Or go the other way and decide that it would be better to side with Germany voluntarily, rather than be invaded by force sometime down the road? Was it just that the war didn’t go on long enough to force that, and no one was far-sighted enough to contemplate a post-war German-controlled Europe?
Because Switzerland successfully remained neutral in many large European wars (World War I just as an example) and thought that they would manage to remain neutral during this war also. Joining either side makes you subjet to bombing from the air and invasion. Why would you want to do that?
Do you mean specifically the statement about widespread ownership of military-grade firearms? I’ll repeat what I said in [post=8999377]this post[/post]:
The rifles are to be used only for military service. When you have them at home you are supposed to lock them up in a secure location and remove some piece of the rifle to prevent it from discharging (I want to say firing pin but I obviously don’t know a lot about weapons - I left Switzerland before boot camp.) When I lived there, the rifle remained your property after your final discharge from the army at age 55 or whatever it was - I remember a friend of my father going to the local military barracks on discharge day to try to buy rifles off of people who were done with their military service.
The reason you keep your rifle at home is so the army can be mobilized quickly. I remember taking the train early one morning with my sister-in-law (an American) when we both there on vacation at the same time, and a bunch of reserves came into our compartment to report for their regular two-week tour of duty. They were all dressed in military uniforms and all carrying their assault rifles that they tossed into the luggage racks above their heads. My sister-in-law asked “what’s happening? Is there a public emergency of some kind?” I told her that Switzerland had probably declare war against Austria.
My information may be out of date, what I’m relating here would have been in the 1980s.
Sorry, my question should’ve been stated more succinctly. Let me try again.
Is there any evidence that the Swiss militia, coupled with the terrain, was actively in the minds of German military planners when they “passed” on taking on Switzerland?
Or was it more a matter of “common knowledge” that Switzerland was a tough nut to crack, and so no one paid the notion any serious thought?
Hmmm…no, I don’t have a specific cite, now that you ask. The general consensus of thought is that it just would have been too expensive, but obviously the orignial planning was done before a two front war opened up; I think initially the Swiss appeased and provided industrial support to Germany, making an invasion less appealing. (Ditto for Sweden.) Later, it would have just taken too much resources.
The Wikipedia page on Operation Tannenbaum suggests that the Germans could have taken Switzerland with blitzkrieg tactics, but I question that assertion; the entire idea of a blitzkrieg is to soften up a defender with an aerial bombing campaign followed by a self-sufficient lightning thrust to breech the front lines, then move behind and cut off or disrupt logistical chains. and often going overland or avoiding normal corridors of travel that would choke movement. These are great tactics when using mobile armor and artillery against relatively fixed emplacements; it’s not so good at dealing with light infantry militia and partisan forces operating in difficult and easily choked terrain, and of course it does nothing for you in terms of keeping an unhappy populace under control, as we’ve learned with our “shock and awe” tactics in Iraq (and before that, in Vietnam). In most European nations the Germans came in so hard and so fast, bypassing normal defensive lines, that they had occupied the nation’s capitol, displaced or executed the existing government, and established their own puppet regime of sympathetic nationals that there was never any organized resistance. The population of Switzerland, on the other hand, was largely and vocally critical of the increasing fascist movements in their neighbors, was well aware of the threat they posed, and actively organized to resist invasion. I think any blitz of Switzerland would have been met by retreat-and-pinshcer tactics of the same type that the Israelis used to great effect against Syria and Egypt in those later conflicts, and that occupation would have been untenable.
Whether the German High Command shared this view or not I can’t say. They may have had other rationales for leaving Switzerland alone (though the fact that they did do extensive invasion planning indicates that it was certainly on the table, and that objections based on neutrality were probably not foremost in their minds). But as noted they invaded every nation around Switzerland, persecuting not just Jews but Roma and other ethnic minorities that are represented in Switzerland, and as a half-predominately German-speaking alpine nation it should have been part of the pan-European Germanic/'Aryan" state that Hitler envisioned.
I’ll poke around a bit and see if I can find some credible cite that derives from actual German High Command records, but I don’t know that I’ll come up with anything. The hypothetical invasion of Switzerland is generally treated as a footnote in most histories of WWII.
To exapnd on the note above: the situation in Switxerland maybe the single worst pound-for pound of any nation in history. You do NOT want to invade. The Swiss can easily abandon the lowlands (relativel lolands) and sit atop mountain passes. They can move about on horseback and skis over rough terrain much faster than any conventional force. And they are all snipers. The entire army is trained, equipped, and prepared to act as a mass sniper force. You’re soldiers would be dropping like flies - or like the Russians in the Finnish War.
