Same thing Spain and all the other neutral countries.
Quite a lot and very quickly. Anschluss. The High Command had plans ready to move into Switzerland.
Surely, nice climate, beautiful girls.
The Swiss had plans too. They would have burned their bridges and the army would have retreated into well-stocked caves. Anyway, the Germans would have been too busy occupying Washington and the rest of the US to worry about Switzerland.
Well that opens up another question. If Europe had fallen to Germany, I can’t imagine them taking over the US. A US retreat would have been more in line.
Sort of like the underlying setting of “Fatherland”?
C.J. Sansom’s quite recent (2012) alternative-history thriller Dominion – which I found compulsive reading – assigns an interestingly odd fate to Switzerland in a World-War-II-German-victory scenario. The novel is set in the UK in 1952: premise, Germany won in 1940, with a negotiated peace after the surrender of France (but still went on to attack the USSR in 1941). In 1952 the UK, and France, are in theory independent: in fact, are ruled at German behest, by far-right-wing despotic regimes.
The book’s endpapers show fascinating maps of its 1952 geopolitical situation in Europe, and worldwide – the majority of this information irrelevant to the novel’s action, but still entertaining “to conjure with”. Among such (also mentioned in passing in the text), is that one of the few pre-1939 European countries to have been completely obliterated, is Switzerland. The country is shown as having been split up, annexing-wise: Germany gets markedly the largest part, with smaller sections going to Italy, and France. IIRC, no particularly strong reason is given for this having been done. One is prompted to wonder what the author has against Switzerland – maybe one time, he was overcharged for a plate of Zurcher geschnetzeltes 
…
I am sure that the citizens of der Schweize would have voted to be absorbed into the Reich…just like Austria did.
Switzerland would have been invaded if it has suited Germany’s purpose.
I’m not clear how it would have, though. Switzerland was no threat to Germany and economically cooperated with the Nazis to whatever extent was necessary to forestall a war. It served no strategic purpose to invade it, and would have been costly to do so. Switzerland’s plans to force Germany into a bloody war of attrition and its ferocious defense of its airspace were quite deliberate shows of force.
A Swisschluss was also very unlikely, inasmuch as history demonstrates Switzerland’s little Nazi party never really got anywhere. The Swiss, despite their military neutrality, were not morally neutral about Nazism; it was largely despised. Switzerland and Austria weren’t at all comparable.
Except, in Fatherland, IIRC Switzerland was still neutral (or nominally so) as Germany found it useful for negotiations (among other things) with other nations not in the Axis, like Joseph Kennedy’s US.
Didn’t the heroine at the end drive into Switzerland in order to spread the word about the concentration camps?
But you’re ignoring the Hitler factor. He made strategic decisions for irrational reasons.
And Hitler hated the existence of Switzerland. He had his warped beliefs about the racial identity of Germans as a race of master warriors. And Switzerland was messing that up. A large number of Swiss were undeniably ethnically German - but they showed no warlike spirit. So in Hitler’s mind, Switzerland as a country was harming all these Germans by holding them back from their true destiny. Hitler wanted to invade Switzerland, destroy the Swiss government, and “rescue” the Swiss Germans so they could rejoin the Reich and become true Germans. Other Nazi leaders and generals convinced Hitler to postpone the invasion of Switzerland until other operations like the defeat of Britain and Russia were completed. But Switzerland was definitely on Hitler’s list.
I presume you mean Schweiz. As has been said, they probably would not. The citizens of Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra certainly would not.
Not quite: she was going to catch a flight from Zürich to New York, then spread the word. However:
Lacking a US visa, she couldn’t use the name and passport she used to get out of Germany. And given Nebe’s cozy relation with the Swiss police, it would only take a phone call to have her apprehended when she reverted to Charlotte/Charlie Maguire.
I was (trying) to be sarcastic-the nazis would have faked a plebiscite, like they did previously in other countries they occupied. Plus, Switzerland was surrounded-even if they balked, Hitler could shut their economy down overnight.:smack:
You can accuse the Swiss of a lot of things, but you’d think even Hitler would have a hard time making that claim stick.
Well… no, not really. Every strategic decision they made was in support of the overarching military goal of conquering the East and exterminating the Slavic people. Evil it was, but it wasn’t “irrational” to a Nazi. Germany never invaded a country just for the hell of it. Every country they invaded, there was some sort of strategic reason to do so.
Well, of course, and he didn’t like Switzerland, but it still wasn’t invaded. And it would not have been for quite some time, possibly his entire life. The subjugation of the East would have taken far longer still.
A German victory likely just means a more compliant Switzerland, probably as part of a peace treaty with the West.
Germany’s plans (never carried out).
But have you heard Schweizerdeutsch? You’d be hard pressed to call that German. One people divided by one language.
I spoke at length with a Belgian who was a customer at the library, and had an on going fight concerning Belgium during the First World War with Barbara Tuchman.
He told me that French and German is spoken in Belgium.
“What kind of German?”
“Why, good German!” he responded indignantly.
They weren’t warlike by Nazi standards. They saw war as a form of natural competition. It wasn’t enough that you be willing to defend yourself; you were expected to attack your neighbors if they were weaker. Warfare was a means by which the strong took control over the weak. Voluntary pacifism was not seen as a moral virtue.
How was attacking the Soviet Union a rational goal? I’m not saying Nazi plans made no sense. I’m saying their goals were irrational even if they attempted to pursue them in a rational manner.
If I decide my neighbor is a vampire, I might then decide I need to kill him because he’s a threat to me. So I’ll go out and acquire garlic and a cross and a wooden stake. And I’ll make plans to attack him at noon when vampire powers are at their weakest. And I’ll bring a gun in case he has human minions defending his coffin. As you can see, I’m making plans in a rational fashion - it’s only the belief that motivates my plans that is irrational.