I’m going to dispute the implications above that the Germans would have invaded Switzerland, except they evaluated the task and decided it was too tough. Having by mid-1940 knocked off Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, beaten the British at every turn, and allied with the USSR (thus removing the only remaining threat), their self-confidence was high and if they’d wanted to go in and saw a reason to do so they would have. The army was doing nothing else aside from shoring up the Romanians from a perceived Russian threat and was huge in comparison, Switzerland was entirely surrounded and would certainly have lost and been successfully occupied. No doubt the occupation would have proved as troublesome as did that of, say, Yugoslavia, but that’s not the question at issue here.
Rather, it was simply they had no reason to do so. Every other country they invaded they did so for a reason, perfectly clear and rational to themselves at the time. They had no quarrel with Switzerland, it was no threat, it was more co-operative than not up until near the end, there was no “oppressed” German minority there, and so on.
When you look at the very hard time that Germany had trying to hold down Norway, and the resources they had to expend, you have to imagine that taking and holding Switzerland was not going to be any easier, if anything it would have been harder.
Germany took Norway because of pressing strategic concerns, not least because of a long coastline that had to be defended, but also because it was a route for importing raw materials.
Switzerland doesn’t really have such an attraction, so why tie up large reserves for so little gain.
Switzerland as a free neutral nation was just so convienant for Germany. The swiss were supplying banking and other economic help without any fuss. So in addition to being a tough nut to crack, Switzerland was a pointless conquest since the Reich was getting the milk for free, as it were.
And like others have said, it’s great to have a third party to handle negotiations. “Switzerland, please tell England we are not talking to it until it takes back what it said about our Reichstag.”
The Swiss weren’t all that neutral. They worked hand-in-glove financially with the Germans. They interned (i.e. imprisoned) any shot-down Allied aircrews or escaped POW’s, while allowing Germans airmen and escapees to return to Germany.
The Germans never invaded Switzerland because they were a valued “neutral” partner.
Cite? I don’t believe they are organized in that way at all. They are organized along the combined-arms model that all modern militaries use.
Well, they are moving that way now. But in WW2 they didn’t have much in thw way of hefty military hardware. Instead, they went for extremem marksmanship. But I should have used the past tense, and I don’t think they emphasize that as much now.
No, even in WWII they used the combined arms model, albeit oriented more toward alpine defense tactics and light on armor and concentrating more on artillery and sapping as befitting the terrain. Swiss army personnel are required to qualify annually with their weapons, but only to nominal standars of infantry marksmanship. Neither the average soldier nor his assigned weapon is suitable for long distance sniping.
I’m not sure what “extreme marksmanship” is, but I’m going to guess that it means something along the lines of sniping at 500+ meters. This is fine as a tool of harassment, but it’s not going to be a serious threat against an invading force, particularly one with armor and air power.
Burns is covering, very specifically, only the American experience, as witnessed by ordinary people (military and non) from four towns/cities in the US. The other, big-picture stuff is generally given only in doses big enough to provide general context.
This documentary is NOT meant to be the definitive piece of coverage of the entire war. Just a tiny slice (which still takes 14 hours).
Neutral countries are REQUIRED to intern combatants from both sides. If they release combatants then they aren’t neutral any more. If they let allied soldiers go home (assuming they could), then they aren’t neutral but a member of the allies.
But you’re right, interning allied soldiers is a different matter than interning axis soldiers. The axis soldiers just have to cross the border and they are repatriated. The allied soldiers have to somehow fight their way back to friendly territory.
Switzerland can be compared to Ireland, another neutral country. While Switzerland wasn’t ideologically sympathetic to the fascists, they certainly cooperated with Germany in order to preserve their “neutrality”. And while Ireland couldn’t bring itself to ally with the UK, they certainly provided a lot of help for the allies…all unofficially, while trying to maintain neutral status. Plenty of British pilots who crashed in Ireland somehow made it back to the UK, despite the fact that Ireland was obligated to intern them. The Germanys could have responded by treating Ireland as an enemy country rather than a neutral country, but at what cost, and for what gain? How would dropping bombs on Ireland as well as England help them win the war? It was better to keep Ireland neutral but pro-Allies rather than explicitly a member of the Allies.
Or take the opposite example of Finland. They were officially a member of the Axis, and Britain officially declared war against Finland. But the western allies never conducted more than token operations against Finland. Finland was fighting against the Russians, but not for the Germans.
I’ve no idea how independent or authorative it is, but this gives some context to what was going on in switzerland. The Axis had the Swiss economy by the short and curlies by virtue of totally controlling external access, but on the other hand the swiss could supply badly needed arms, machinery, chemicals and materials as well as communications between Germany, Italy, Austria and France.
Given that a surprise attack wasn’t really possible after the Germans had tipped their hand in the Low Countries, the choice presented to the Germans was:
[ul]
[li]An expensive and difficult war to capture Switzerland, in the process of which all the things that made Switzerland significant (industry, railways, tunnels, etc.) would be destroyed or significantly damaged and large portions of the Wermacht would be broken[/li][li]Lean on the Swiss for loans and easy payment terms, buy everything they could supply, focus their efforts on first bailing out Benito and then go after The Bolshevik Menace™[/li][/ul]
So both sides (very sensibly) decided to not rock the boat too much
Everyone nowadays gets all hoity-toity about Swiss behaviour in WWII, but I honestly don’t see what else they could have done. The threat of cutting off all supplies of food, fuel and raw materials was all the leverag the Axis needed, and more.
I do not actually recall very many people complaining about Swiss neutrality. (Perhaps four people in the last 30 years? Thomas Friedman would be the only one I could name.)
The action for which the Swiss have come under increasing fire in the last fifteen years has been their conversion of funds and properties sent to them for safekeeping by Jews and others whom the Nazis murdered. In different cases, they have set up impossible barriers of identification for survivors to claim the funds of their parents and grandparents (and in some cases, themselves). The major Swiss banks have been shown to have been complicit in accepting money, art, and other property from the Nazis and never returning it to the proper owners, even when provenance could be demonstrated. They have even denied having ever held the funds. In fact, it was only in the last decade, or so, that the Swiss even admitted that the problem existed.
Beginning with a discovery in 1996 documenting some of that complicity, the Swiss have done more to settle the issues, even setting up an independent fund that is supposed to move things along for people who cannot provide documentation. How much of that is real or PR is part of the debate.
Of course you know the Germans did bomb Dublin, using navigational error as plausible deniability, but with an implied threat that there’d be more such errors in the future unless Eire behaved as a neurtral more to the German’s liking. And unlike the Swiss, the Irish had to watch both sides: Churchill would have loved to re-conquer Ireland under the pretext of defending Great Britain.
First off, you’re making a mistake in equating the army with the antions’s defense. Every male in the country could have immediately gone active as guerrillas. And while the army standards were one thing, shooting was effectively the national sport, and virtually everybody practiced it. Aside from which, all that German armor would have been very nearly useless outside of the Lowlands.
The idea it was not a serious threat to an invading force is ridiculous. You don’t hold ground with armor and air power. You hold it with men, and Germany would have been seriously bloodied int he attempt. Would they have succeeded? probably. The sheer body count would have favored them in the long run. But it would have been a disaster for the German military.
Well, in my high school history classes, it is mentioned as being self-evident that the Germans were afraid of the Swiss. But I’ve never seen any primary sources (quotes from higher German staff) that this was the case.
I did see a documentary many years ago on Swiss television about the case of a Swiss soldier that was executed for being a traitor in World War II (giving information to Germany.) The thesis of the documentary was that the poor Swiss guy was more stupid than evil and his execution was at least partly for propaganda reasons. Anyway, the documentary touched on the following points:
A small number of trains carried weapons from Germany to Italy through Switzerland (the official explanation for this is that these weapons belonged to private individuals or companies and were not part of the German war effort - this explanation seems very thin to me.)
Some German officers were on record as advising against the invasion of Switzerland because of the losses that would be incurred by Germany. I don’t know how significant this really is, I’m sure that if he had asked around Hitler would have found plenty of people to advise him not to engage Mother Russia.
But inspired by your question I looked around for recent research and found this book (in French and German) by Klaus Urner, which seems to be well regarded:
We still need to swallow Switzerland (literal translation of the title)
From the summary: Klaus Urner has gone to primary sources to examine the German plans of invasion of Switzerland. Germany commissioned, from an officer of the general staff of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), an operational concept of the invasion of Switzerland on 24 June 1940. The 12th German army was assigned with a mission whose ultimate goal would be attacking Switzerland. This was not just an exercise, but a full plan ready to be quickly put into effect, calling for 10 divisions, 2 regiments, and 12 support battalions, invading the country in the plain that extends from the Lake of Geneva (Lac Leman) and the Lake of Constance. The principal author of operation Tannenbaum, a captain Von Menges, would be the same person that came up with the first version of the plan for managing an occupied France.
If you want to recall more, you should read this book by well-known Swiss critic (left-wing writer from Geneva) Jean Ziegler: The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine. Jean Ziegler mentions Switzerland turning away Jewish refugees, German slave trains going through Switzerland with forced Italian labor and maybe even Jews being shipped from Italy to concentration camps in Northern Europe, in addition to the issue you mention, the stolen gold from World War II victims.
Many left-wing groups in Switzerland were critical of Swiss government actions during the war before this issue of “disappeared” bank accounts came to the forefront.
Oh, and another thing - let’s not forget that Switzerland also had to fear invasion from Italy to the South, though the Italians would have run into the problems as soon as they hit the Alps. Only one canton of Switzerland (Ticino) is south of the Alps. The story they tell in Swiss schools is that Mussolini had spent time as a young man in Switzerland, as an elementary school teacher (this is fact) and that his fond memories for the time spent in Switzerland was one of the factors that stopped him from trying to gain additional territory by attacking Italy’s neighbour to the north.
The Germans did not have a particularly hard time holding down Norway (no more so than, say, Yugoslavia) after the Allies had withdrawn. Certainly there was a resistance, but Hitler had a particular obsession with Norway and actually kept far more troops there than were required to hold it, IIRC there were still 250,000 at the end of the war and he was still raving on about how Norway would be the decisive theatre. This was due to access to Swedish iron ore but of course was quite irrelevant by 1945, rationally he should have abandoned the place and withdrawn them for the defense of the homeland.
But I’ve never seen any primary sources (quotes from higher German staff) that this was the case.