I have to agree. I had a very good Swiss friend and we discussed this at some length. He thought that even the German speaking Swiss hated the Nazis and the French, Italian, and Romantsch speakers even more so. Some above said that the German speaking Swiss were ethnically German, but I find this claim meaningless. The Swiss Confederation had formed in opposition to a German Duke in 1291 and remain committed to not being German. According to my friend, the languages were not even mutually comprehensible. My colleague who was born and lived in Germany until he was 16 told me that it took him nearly a year in Switzerland before he could understand Schwyzerdutsch.
It would have been very costly for the Germans to have invaded. They could eventually have worn them down, but it would have taken a lot of resources and there was not much for them to gain.
Nazi plans for a possible invasion of Switzerland did apparently include maybe divvying up the place between them and their Fascist Italian little buddies. There was apparently no plan to give any part of Switzerland to France, but on the other hand it’s not totally impossible to imagine a victorious Third Reich changing its mind and letting a German-dominated French puppet state have a little slice from the purple part to compensate for Germany having taken Alsace-Lorraine again.
I understand that at the easternmost extremity of Belgium – the Eupen and Malmedy areas – the majority language is (fairly standard) German: this region having been taken from Germany and awarded to Belgium as part of the sorting-out of things after World War I, I believe largely to compensate Belgium re sufferings in that war at German hands. If I have things rightly, in Luxembourg “next door”, the vernacular language is related to German; but every bit as unlike normal German, as Schwyzerdutsch is.
Interesting that this was a might-have-been for real life, not just a fancy on Mr. Sansom’s part. On the map accompanying his novel, Alsace-Lorraine is indeed shown as having been annexed from France, and fully integrated into Germany.
Not sure if it’s already been linked, but **here’s an interesting Wiki article **describing Hitler’s and the Nazi’s plans for the rest of the world (including Africa and North & South America) once they won the war. Hitler planed on leaving most of the Pacific to Japan (including Australia and New Zealand), although he also felt that, eventually, the Aryan race would still dominate the Asians.
IANAH (it’s usually a bad sign in a debate if you have to point this out).
Anyway, my previous post on the subject does not represent my views, the views of the Swiss people, or the views of anyone else in the contemporary world. I was explaining what Hitler’s views were, which was something Europeans had to take into account during that unfortunate era. He regarded many Swiss people as being ethnically German even if they didn’t regard themselves as such. And therefore he felt these “Germans” should be living inside his Deutsches Reich, just like the Osterreichers, the Sudentanlanders, the Elsassers, the Lothringers, the Flamingers, the Baltendeutsche, the Wolgadeutsche, and all the other supposed Volksdeutsche. Except for the Sudtirolers of course.
I thought Hitler was working on his own version of a nuke and that the US was racing the clock to be the first but it just happened to win the war in Europe before final development by anyone?
(Of course, losing all those Jewish scientists no doubt did hinder him a bit.)
The Nazis did have a nuclear weapons program but it was operating at a pretty leisurely pace. The scientists in charge of it was mostly theoreticians rather than experimenters and most of the top-rated engineers were assigned to other development programs. The German scientists figured that it would take at least ten years for their program to produce a working bomb - by which time everyone in Germany expected they would have already won the war.
The Germans also had a touch of arrogance. They assumed if it would take them a decade to build a bomb then it would take anyone else even longer. That’s why they were astonished in 1945 when they were told that the United States had just used a bomb against Japan. They had been taken in custody by the Americans at the end of the war and they felt could make a deal because they assumed the Americans wanted their knowledge. So it was a shock to realize they had been literally years behind the Americans.
Here’s a key scene from the great 1993 TV movie Day One about the bomb. Although it compresses things a little it’s facts are essentially correct in regards to the reasons the German scientists give for not having made a bomb.
If you’ve never seen this film I highly recommend watching it. Much, much better than the Paul Newman theatrical film Fat Man & Little Boy…
