Why didn't the Nazis invade Switzerland?

Great Debates
1

…and how would it have looked if they had?

Wiki gives an overview of the planned German invasion of Switzerland, Operation Tannenbaum and says “Hitler never gave the go-ahead, for reasons still uncertain today.”

What do you think those reasons were? Why wasn’t Switzerland incorporated into the Greater German Reich, as volksdeutsche? Sure they were neutral, but that didn’t protect Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium or Luxembourg. Hitler also had no love for the Swiss either, saying “Switzerland possessed the most disgusting and miserable people and political system. The Swiss were the mortal enemies of the new Germany.”

According to the Wiki somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Axis troops would have been involved in the operation, had it gone ahead. What would our history books say about it today if it had? Would it have been a cakewalk or a serious drain on the German military?

Is there anything to the idea that Switzerland was so different to the other European nations Germany had invaded that the Nazis decided it would be worth the casualties? For one thing, the Swiss had several hundred thousand of these, and knew how to use them. They also knew the mountainous terrain, terrain which favoured the defender and was harsh country for panzers. Henri Guisan is remembered today as the man who prepared to face the Nazis behind a ‘national redoubt’, and told the population to disregard any official surrender as nobody in Switzerland had the power to capitulate on behalf of all the Cantons.

TL;DR - why didn’t Adolf invade Switzerland and what would it have looked like if he had?

2

three reasons.

first, Hitler always had more urgent needs and places he needed to send whatever troops he had.

second, casualties would have been high, and, having conquered Switzerland, what had they gained, militarily? nothing, actually. Switzerland never was a threat to Germany either as an ‘enemy force’, nor as a place from which the allies could launch attacks.

finally, Switzerland said they were neutral, but, actually, they were Germany and Italy’s ally for all practical purposes.
That is just my read of the history, plus having been a business associate of a Swiss businessman and engineer who spent the war in Switzerland, devising ways of turning waste charcoal dust into pellets that could be used to power his car and avoid the onerous restrictions on fuel purchases. He did not think the Swiss would have resisted much a takeover, but Germany had no reason to bother with them.

3

crucible nails it. It basically amounts to the fact that Hitler had no reason to.

It is easy to simply assume Hitler’s aim was to invade everyone and everything, but if one carefully reads a detailed history of the war, it clearly was not. He had specific short and long term goals, and Germany picked its wars based on its needs. It’s not just Switzerland that got a pass - they didn’t invade Sweden, for much the same reason; it would have been costly and there wasn’t any pressing need to do it, since the Swedes were cooperative anyway. Hitler didn’t invade Spain, because Spain was sort of a friend and, again, there was nothing in it for him. Many of the places the Nazis DID invade were places they would rather have not have invaded, but the war simply spread and forced their hand, as with Norway, Greece, and others.

Hell, Hitler would quite happily have left France alone if France and the UK had said “hey, do anything you want to Eastern Europe.” Germanys ultimate plan, as least as far ahead as Hitler had thought about it, was to create a new expanded Reich in Poland and Russia and to wipe out the populations there.

4

And Hitler all but begged England to leave Germany alone.

Concur with all above. Left to his own whims, Hitler would have focused all of his energy to the East. Would he have ever gone after France? Perhaps to probably. But England? Never.

5

Switzerland was also a convenient place for Nazi banking (official and unofficial), diplomacy and espionage.

Previous threads about the Nazis and the Swiss:

6

Well, the defeat of France at least reversed the humiliation of Versailles, Hitler accepted the French surrender in the same train carriage as the German surrender in WW1. However what I don’t get is with how important pan-German nationalism and Heim isn Reich was to the Nazis - Anschluss with Austria, taking the Sudetenland; every German should be under the Fuhrer’s command “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer”. But then when the war breaks out they ignore Swiss Germans?

I can accept invading Belgium and Luxembourg to take out France, but for what reason did they invade the Netherlands (neutral during WW1), Denmark and Norway then leave the Swiss alone?

Agree with your other points, but I think this one is a tad harsh - the Swiss weren’t stupid after all, they would likely have figured out that a world in which the Axis were victorious would be decidedly more unpleasant (especially for small states in Europe) than one where the Allies were.

7

The Swiss happily did business with the Nazis, and the terrain is difficult to invade, so why would they?

8

all of Switzerland’s petroleum fuels came up the Rhine, the Swiss and Germans and French having cooperated to create the lock system that permitted it year around.

So, no real need to invade. Just tell the ambassador that “we want Switzerland to do _____; oh, did I forget to mention that we might need to divert all your fuel barges for the war effort?”

9

Keep something else in mind: For centuries, Switzerland has been heavily fortified and its citizens armed. The Swiss military can blow up any bridge, tunnel, or highway leading into the country. Between that and the terrain, attacking Switzerland would be as foolhardy as attacking Russia–and Hitler probably knew it.

10

Again, there was no military or political reason to do it.

You’re assuming a number of things that are not really true,

  1. That Hitler, the Nazi Party, and Germans are the same group and had the same aims, and
  2. That Hitler/the Nazis were the slightest bit consistent in their positions regarding race and all that crap.

With regards to (1) it’s important to bear in mind Nazis were politicians, like any, and Hitler was a politician to had to control his fellow politicians. Babbling about rescuing the Sudetenland had political and strategic advantages that exceeded the costs. Invading Switzerland did not.

With regards to (2) the Nazis were not pure of heart in a devotion to an evil cause; they were as cynical and as capable of doublethink as anyone. If “Let’s help our fellow Germans” was a useful reason to take over the Sudetenland, great. They came up with excuses for invading non-German places, too.

Again, because there were military reasons to invade those countries. The Nazis felt they needed the Netherlands, or at least its southern areas, for their advance into France, and to operate against the United Kingdom, especially for the sake of airbases, a concern that did not exist in World War I. The possibility of leaving the Dutch alone, or just taking the slice needed to advance into Belgium, was one that was strongly considered but abandoned as being too risky, in part because the Germans feared the Allies would not respect Dutch neutrality and they would use it against Germany.

Norway was invaded for that very reason; the Allies did not respect Norwegian neutrality, and had openly spoke of invading and occupying it, an unacceptable situation for Germany, which needed Scandinavian materials. Germany just got there first, and needed to take Denmark to do it.

A study of the various German invasions of small countries is interesting in that it’s clear that in many cases it wasn’t really something Germany was super happy to have to do to achieve their true final aim, which was occupation of Eastern Europe and the extermination of its people. The war they started, in a very real sense, flew apart on them, and necessitated Germany fighting in a lot of places it probably would rather not have because the Allies, and sometimes the Axis, had their own agendas.

11

Much more importantly, the Swiss were going to blow up any tunnel going **through ** Switzerland. This includes a number of rail tunnels connecting Germany and Italy that were miles long under mountains and had taken years to construct; their loss would have an immediate and noticeable effect on the Axis war effort. For example the Gottard Tunnel is 9 miles long and took 10 years to dig out from 1871-81. There was no reason to invade Switzerland, and no upside to doing it.

12

Hmm. Maybe Hitler was more pragmatic, or more likely cynical, than I give him credit for. Thanks for the info (and the links to past discussions).

13

Conceivably Hitler might have planned to take Switzerland, for those reasons, after defeating the Russians and the British. But he had no reason to hurry. The Swiss were no threat to his war efforts elsewhere. Hitler’s main war-aim was based on Ostpolitik, which in his case meant, to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia and colonize their lands with Germans, and thereby turn Germany into a continental power comparable to the United States. Switzerland could have been no more than an afterthought in that scheme.

14

Destroy Russia? He must have thought he could do in 1940 what the Japanese did in 1905. I don’t think the Russians were THAT stupid.

15

The Allies’ own “agendas” included mutual-defense treaties of which Hitler was well aware beforehand - but he waged cruel, aggressive war just the same:

16

There was nothing special about Switzerland that protected it. Hitler invaded plenty of other countries for minimal reasons. And he made it clear that Switzerland was on his “to do” list. This is especially true because Switzerland contained “Germans” that Hitler felt belonged under his rule.

But there was never a time when a Swiss invasion was convenient for Germany. There was always something else going on or being planned that required the troops that would have been needed to invade and occupy Switzerland. Switzerland encouraged this by making it clear they would not be an easy conquest. So the invasion of Switzerland was postponed until after the bigger invasions like France and Britain and Russia were settled. And of course, Germany never reached the end of that list.

17

No. The Japanese only wanted to defeat Russia, in their own immediate neighborhood. Hitler wanted to destroy Russia as a nation, utterly and forever. Any Russians or Poles who survived the war would have been either reduced to slavery or second-class noncitizenship, or assimilated into the German settler-population.

From Modern Times, by Paul Johnson:

18

You came so close to the truth, but missed it. The bolded part explains the Anschluss and the Sudetenland’s significance to Hitler: they were portions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire torn out of Greater Germany (Großdeutschland) by the peace imposed by the victors.

The Nazis took those territories because they believed they were historically entitled to them but had been robbed of them after World War I.

The Swiss weren’t part of the historical Großdeutschland. Maybe later, they’d be “invited” to join. But the first priority would have been “rectifying the injustices” of Versailles and Paris Peace Conference.

The Swiss weren’t a critical access path to importing Swedish iron ore, and under immediate threat of being either captured or interdicted by the British. Like Denmark and Norway were.

Well, they certainly did pretty well for themselves while the Reich controlled most of Western Europe. Certainly, even if they thought the entire world under the boot of the Nazis would have been hell on earth, I’m sure they realized they had no way of opposing them, so making the best of a bad situation would have been their only real recourse.

19

You might want to google “Banking with Hitler” documentary.

20

These references don’t seem to address the OP’s question, since the invasion of Poland and resulting declarations of war by the UK and France are not the matter being discussed.

My point about Allied “Agendas” is not that there was anything wrong with them, but simply that they existed. Hitler unleashed war, but in doing so unleashed forces he could ultimately not contain; his enemies, surprise surprise, refused to do things Hitler found convenient. So the Nazis either had to do things they wouldn’t otherwise have been willing to do (e.g. invade Norway, wasting troops and resources better used elsewhere) or didn’t get what they wanted (e.g. British acquiescence.) Hell, *their own *allies did things they didn’t want to do; Mussolini had to be bailed out several times, while Spain refused to help him at all.

That’s the answer to the OP, really; much of the Nazi “War plan” was a succession of reactions to events that were unfolding in ways they hadn’t anticipated.