Meh. The French had no experience of political violence or revolution (well, there’s 1789, I suppose. Not exactly “experience”), nor widely available weapons yet they formed adequate militias and saboteurs (thanks to Brit support and airdrops). The Germans slaughtered innocents in France as well as in Eastern Europe, but that didn’t stop the French resistants, nor the Russian/Polish/etc partisans. There were French and Russian Quislings, as well, in fact the French resistance was looked down upon by the grand majority of the French, despite later whitewashings - the police, the army, the religious and the political body all worked hand in hand with the occupying force.
There was actually a fairly strong, widespread Swiss far-right and pro-nazi movement in Switzerland at the time, primarily among the Swiss German population. It was important enough that the Swiss government actively tried to suppress it, and pro-Nazi sympathies influenced Swiss/German relationships during the war.
Here’s a Weisenthal Center survey of Nazi and pro-Nazi groups in Switzerland from 1930-1945:
http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4441317
They definitely prepared for that, with strategic supplies. In addition, light infantry can survive on very little, unlike heavy mechanized forces.
It would be rather difficult to conscript people who shoot you on sight. You don’t seem to comprehend that the “few diehards” in the mountains included every able-bodied male in the country. We’re talking about a whole population of resistors armed and ready to kill.
Yes they did. Some would argue that partisan resistance, not the Red Army, was the ultimate cause of German defeat in the east! Poland held the fourth largest army in the field during the entire war, and it was all partisans. The Germans faced constant uprisings.
Partisans were a problem in the east, but not the west. There were no French, Dutch, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian or Austrian partisans. Once the governments collapsed, organized resistance collapsed. Sure, there was sabotage and so on, but there were no units of the French army holding out in the Pyrenees and causing trouble. And there were lots more Western Europeans fighting with the Germans on the Eastern front than there were in the resistance movements.
It’s one thing to talk about resistance to the last man standing, it’s another thing to actually do it. And given that the Swiss would have been treated like fellow Aryans rather than untermenschen, most would have given up when the government surrendered, just like the rest of western europe. What would be the point of fighting to the last man? The point of the preparations is to convince the Germans that it wouldn’t be worth it to invade. Once the Germans have occupied your country there’s not much point in continuing a suicidal fight unless the alternative is to end up in a camp anyway.
Well, there also weren’t partisans because there weren’t atrocities because there weren’t partisans. There weren’t plans for partisan-like resistance in Western countries, whereas there were for Switzerland.
If the Swiss had actually carried out them to a degree, the Nazis would have inevitably started to randomly kill people. Which wouldn’t exactly convince the armed populace to give up. When has it? Mass murders only help when the populace is almost unarmed or wasn’t really resisting anyway.
Are you sure?
Some of these guys seem to be defining “partisan” differently, but FWIW, accounts I’ve hear of at least the French Resistance show that they had limited success (not only because of the “Resistance apres le guerre” effect, but because well the Germans were pretty brutally effective in punishing partisans).
Wow. How many AA batteries does a light bomber take, anyway? 
As for supplies for Swiss partisans, I imagine that they could get supplies the way the French Resistance did - from Britain via covert means or airdrops (although Switzerland is a long way from the UK over enemy territory). I’m sure the Allies would have happily supported a local partisan movement as yet another way to sap and divert Germany’s military strength.
It would have taken the Germans a long time to even get to that stage. Switzerland, despite its small size, was no pushover in convential military power, either, and pushing up the mountains would have been rpetty rough. Had they thrown enough bodies into it, yes, they could have done it. Eventually, and at the risk of losing everything in the east. It would have been another D-Day in terms of cost to them.
It depends on what you define by success, I suppose.
They didn’t slaughter divisions or blow tanks up guerilla style past early and very harshly punished efforts, but they were pretty efficient in clogging up the works - delaying supplies, sabotaging infrastructure (even inside the Reich - thanks to the French government’s STO, a million young French were shipped off to Germany to work in heavy industries. Guess what happens when you make potential saboteurs work as slaves at the heart of your war effort ? Yup, it proved as brilliant an idea as it sounds :D), ferrying POWs and downed pilots back to England and providing extensive intel for the allied forces. Churchill himself said the French resistance had been capital in the D-Day landings and following invasion. Now, of course he could have said that out of political needs and so on, and there were certainly way more resistants post-war than there had been during the war :rolleyes:.
But be that as it may, and even if all they did was make the Germans stand on their toes and send more troops to keep the occupied lands quiet, then they did their part.
Have I read accurately that all of the tunnels that cross the Swiss border are still mined and all it takes is an order and Switzerland goes from being a country with adjacent neighbors to being a virtual island surrounded by impassable mountains?
Then there was that. And the Swiss, in turn, saw what would happen if they didn’t play ball.
Switzerland isn’t “surrounded by mountains” as such - for example the northwest half is mainly pretty moderate terrain (can be well seen on this Google map view). Stuttgart to Zürich or Bern is a drive much like Stuttgart to Frankfurt.
I’d doubt that the infrastructure is actively mined either - for example even at the height of the Cold War bridges and tunnels here in Germany were planned for easy demolition but the charges were never in place, just prepositioned in depots somewhere in the region. It would have been much too dangerous else.
The Germans got lots of ammo from Switzerland so the incentive to attack them was very low.
Switzerland is fairly decentralized with no one big city that’s loss would cause the nation to collapse.
Most of the population is Germanic with a large Italian minority so Germany’s insane ethnic prejudices didn’t warrant an invasion.
The Swiss air force was especially adept at a flying close over their mountainous terrain, or so I am told.
The Germans would have found themselves going uphill all over the place through likely mined terrain.
Eventually they could have knocked out the Swiss, no doubt about it, but at a high cost and without any obvious motive.
The Germans would’ve easily taken over most of Switzerland, despite what has been said.
The Swiss Army could’ve delayed the Germans for a few days but like the Dutch with their “Fortress Holland,” it wouldn’t have held.
We’ve discussed this a lot at the Axis Forums and the consensus is always the Germans could’ve but why bother.
First of all Germans got all the co-operation they wanted. The Germans pretty much left the Danes alone too. They wouldn’t have invaded if they could’ve got to Norway without going through Denmark.
Second Italy wasn’t too keen on having Hitler on it’s border. Even though Hitler was beginning to treat Mussolini like a junior parter, he didn’t want to make trouble for him.
Third the Swiss provided an exellent place for spys to hang out and get information. The next best place was Lisbon, that was far from Hitler’s center.
The mountians never stopped Hitler in Yugoslavia and they would’ve at best slowed them down. The Swiss were too urban by the time WWII broke out to pull the mountain defense we see in Afghanistan.
The bottom line is Hitler had no reason to invade Switzerland as long as they toed the mark, which they did. He had reason namely Mussolini NOT to invade it.
It wsan’t till after it became apparent that Germany wouldn’t reach Moscow by winter that Hitler had to think twice about invading Switzerland. It was after that he realized he couldn’t afford the expense of a Swiss invasion if the Swizz continued to fall in line.
So much so that a few years back American internees in Switzerland were reclassified as POWs by the Veterans Administration, same as if they had been held by an official German ally.
It’s time…
It’s time…
It’s time to hate the Swiss.
In fairness to the dutch, they did have a good war plan-the idea was to open the dikes and flood most of the southern plains-this would have blocked a panzer assault quite well, as most of the german tanks were not submersible. However, the plan went awry-when the Germans abandoned all restrainsts and bombed Rotterdam (which was an “open” city). The message from the germans was “you resist, we eill raze your cities to the ground”.
Under these circumstances, the only option was surrender.
The Germans had a plan to invade Switzerland - called operation Tannenbaum.
Obviously, they never executed.
While there are many differences (The Russians had poorly trained troops, and limited talent leadership) the Winter War shows that a sniper army in difficult terrain can be a real obstacle.
I think the Germans could’ve ultimately succeeded, but the fact that they didn’t even try indicates that they, for one, thought it a bad idea.
It seems many people have trouble with this. I think they are used to the U.S. and other Western nations having trouble occupying countries.
However, if you lose several soldiers in an occupied area and you go in and kill and burn every living thing and structure in sight this will seriously diminish the occupied peoples ability to resist.
Their ultimate defense is that the Swiss don’t have anything anyone would want. There are no strategic objectives, no valuable natural resources to speak of, no massive transportation hubs.