What would have happened to Switzerland if Germany had won WWII?

[Giles]

@Siam_Sam

Plus it’s die Schweiz, not der.

But “der Schweiz” is also correct in German: it means “of Switzerland”, so is more-or-less correct in the context of “the citizens of der Schweiz”, given the mingling there of English and German.

[carnivorousplant]

@MEBuckner

Was he certain, though?

Apparently so. He was using paraffin as a moderator, and vying with the luftwaffe for radium.

[Scumpup]

A victrious Nazi Germany need not have invaded Switzerland. The destruction of a few key railway tunnels and a focused policy of starving Switzerland of any imported goods woul have readjusted the Swiss attitude fairly quickly and with few German casualties.

[ralph124c]

@Little_Nemo

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.

The Germans got nowhere-they never had a sustained chain reaction-so they could never make plutonium. Their “reactor” was a laugh (blocks of uranium strung on chains, lowered into a vat of heavy water). Had it gone critical, it would have killed everybody in the building. They were never even close to a bomb.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

The top Nazi leaders didn’t really want to conquer Switzerland – they all had their secret numbered bank accounts there, and didn’t want the German Tax people looking into that.