Stephen P. Halbrook - The Swiss & the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich
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The Swiss & the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich: summary, description and annotation
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Halbrook succeeds not only in achieving a thorough analysis of Switzerlands armed neutrality, but also in revealing through their own voices the willingness of ordinary citizens to accept total war in order to preserve their freedom.Swiss American Historical Society Review
This book tells the long misunderstood story of Switzerland in World War II with emphasis on two voices rarely heard. One is that of scores of Swiss who lived in those dark years, as they repeatedly mobilized to defend the country and helped refugees. The other voice is that of Nazi Intelligence, which spied on the Swiss and planned subversion and invasion. Exhaustive documents from the German military archives reveal a chilling rendition of attack plans.
When Switzerland became surrounded by the Axis Powers, it first mobilized a spiritual defense, using the press, cabarets, and newsreels as weapons against totalitarianism, even at the risk of provoking the Nazis. Swiss soldiers recall an epoch when every day could have been the day when all hell would break loose and they would meet the enemy. Blitzkrieg plans against Switzerland devised by the Wehrmacht in 1940 are described, as is how Switzerland became an armed camp with countless fortifications, against which the Axis could have attempted access only with extreme costs in blood.
The book goes on to describe Swiss life during the war with its shortages, alarms, and rumors. A chapter investigates whether Swiss officials played a role in Germanys adoption of the J stamp on Jewish passports, and how Switzerland became a lifeboat for refugees. Another chapter focuses on Davos, where the Swiss struggled against a Fifth Column, and which became a safe haven for American airmen whose crippled bombers made it to Swiss territory. The last chapter profiles Switzerland as Americas window on the Reichhow Allen Dulles and his OSS spied on the Nazis, at times with help from Swiss Intelligence.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: A WAR OF WORDS AND NERVES
1. The Spirit of Resistance
2. The Eyes of German Intelligence
3. Hanging Hitler in Satire
4. Counterattack of the Newsreels
Part II: PREPARING FOR INVASION
5. I Was a Militia Soldier Then
6. Blitzkrieg 1940
7. Switzerland Is a Porcupine
Part III: STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL: FOOD, FUEL, AND FEAR
8. Gas Masks and Potato Bread: An Oral History
9. The J Stamp, the Lifeboat, and Refugees
Part IV: ESPIONAGE AND SUBVERSION
10. The Consequences of Encirclement
11. Intruders in Our Midst
12. Americas Window on the Reich: Allen Dulles in Bern
Conclusion
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
This book tells the long misunderstood story of Switzerland in World War II with emphasis on two voices rarely heard. One is that of scores of Swiss who lived in those dark years, as they repeatedly mobilized to defend the country and helped refugees. The other voice is that of Nazi Intelligence, which spied on the Swiss and planned subversion and invasion. Exhaustive documents from the German military archives reveal a chilling rendition of attack plans.
When Switzerland became surrounded by the Axis Powers, it first mobilized a spiritual defense, using the press, cabarets, and newsreels as weapons against totalitarianism, even at the risk of provoking the Nazis. Swiss soldiers recall an epoch when every day could have been the day when all hell would break loose and they would meet the enemy. Blitzkrieg plans against Switzerland devised by the Wehrmacht in 1940 are described, as is how Switzerland became an armed camp with countless fortifications, against which the Axis could have attempted access only with extreme costs in blood.
The book goes on to describe Swiss life during the war with its shortages, alarms, and rumors. A chapter investigates whether Swiss officials played a role in Germanys adoption of the J stamp on Jewish passports, and how Switzerland became a lifeboat for refugees. Another chapter focuses on Davos, where the Swiss struggled against a Fifth Column, and which became a safe haven for American airmen whose crippled bombers made it to Swiss territory. The last chapter profiles Switzerland as Americas window on the Reichhow Allen Dulles and his OSS spied on the Nazis, at times with help from Swiss Intelligence.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: A WAR OF WORDS AND NERVES
1. The Spirit of Resistance
2. The Eyes of German Intelligence
3. Hanging Hitler in Satire
4. Counterattack of the Newsreels
Part II: PREPARING FOR INVASION
5. I Was a Militia Soldier Then
6. Blitzkrieg 1940
7. Switzerland Is a Porcupine
Part III: STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL: FOOD, FUEL, AND FEAR
8. Gas Masks and Potato Bread: An Oral History
9. The J Stamp, the Lifeboat, and Refugees
Part IV: ESPIONAGE AND SUBVERSION
10. The Consequences of Encirclement
11. Intruders in Our Midst
12. Americas Window on the Reich: Allen Dulles in Bern
Conclusion
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
Stephen P. Halbrook: author's other books
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Stephen P. Halbrook
Cathryn J Prince
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Heath Elizabeth
Bewes
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Published by
CASEMATE
CASEMATE
Copyright 2006 Stephen P. Halbrook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. For additional information contact Casemate Publishers, 908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083.
ISBN 1-932033-42-4
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I NTRODUCTION
By every strategic rationale, Switzerland should have fallen to the Nazis in World War II. She lies directly exposed on the German border, and during the course of the war became completely surrounded by the Axis powers. The majority of her people are ethnically German, and her population was outnumbered by the Axis at least thirty to one. While the Swiss Alps were eminently defensible, the north of the country, containing most of its population and industry, was relatively flat and easily accessible to mechanized forces. As a landlocked nation in the heart of Europe, Switzerland was beyond the reach of potential allies.
Further, to Adolf Hitler, political neutrality meant nothing, and national borders were no obstacle to his Wehrmacht. Pre-war Nazi theorists drew up maps that depicted Switzerlands obliteration, most of it incorporated into Germany with smaller parts designated for client states along ethnic lines. By 1940, every country surrounding Switzerland was either a member of the Axis or under Nazi rule. The Wehrmacht finalized plans for blitzkrieg attacks against Switzerland.
But Switzerland was not overrun. Its army hunkered down at the border and in its Alpine fortresses, swearing to exact a high price in blood from any invader. The Nazis constantly sought opportunities to subvert and to strike, but dissuaded by Swiss resistance and skillful Swiss diplomacy, and with overwhelming distractions elsewhere, the opportune time to wreak destruction never came.
The reasons for Switzerlands survival in World War II are several, and in the final analysis the gigantic scale of the Nazi war in Russia, which began in June 1941, holds first place. If Hitler had achieved the quick victory over the Soviet Union that he expected, traditional Swiss courage, along with the countrys elaborate defensive preparations, would have been overwhelmed by brute force. Instead, as the war seesawed back and forth in the East, and later in the West, the Swiss were left with a waiting game, their mobilizations timed against each rise of Axis fortunes, the Swiss themselves never knowing when a Wehrmacht onslaught would finally be launched.
Switzerlands policy of deterrence took three major forms. The first consisted of its unique military system, in which every able-bodied man served in the army and was well trained in firearms. This allowed Switzerland to field a greater percentage of its population than other countries, and far more than the other small states that had fallen to Hitler. Second, and less well known, is the fact that the Swiss wired their infrastructure, particularly their transportation systembridges, rails, and their strategically vital Alpine tunnelsinforming the Germans that it would be destroyed the minute an invasion began. Though the cost of such destruction would have been incalculable to the country itself, the Germans were left with no doubt that the Swiss would go to any lengths to defy an invader, even to the point of devastating their own country.
The third primary form of deterrence was improvised during the war by commander-in-chief of the Swiss Army Henri Guisan, after the fall of France resulted in German panzers arrayed along the countrys exposed western border. In 1940 Guisan decided to negate the tactics and machinery of Nazi blitzkrieg by moving the bulk of Swiss forces to a fortified zone in the Alps called the Rduit National (National Redoubt). Involving a massive movement of troops as well as a colossal construction enterprise, this strategy meant that, henceforth, German armor and airpower would be useless against Switzerlands main forces. Instead of a quick war using mobile tactics, the Wehrmacht would be faced with a protracted struggle amid the Alps, with Swiss marksmen and hidden artillery emplacements pre-targeting every narrow approach.
These measures, along with others taken by the Swiss, both spiritual and material, succeeded in deterring Hitler in his desire to absorb the Alpine Republic, until in the end the Nazis themselves were destroyed by more powerful outside forces.
The result was that there was no Holocaust in Switzerland, no slave labor, and no seizure of Swiss machinery or transit systems for unrestrained Nazi use. The thousands of refugees who found shelter in Switzer land were never stigmatized, much less deported to the death camps of the Reich. Switzerland was and is a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious democracy with a tradition of tolerance. Nazi Ger many, with its institutional racism and leadership cult, represented everything the Swiss abhorred.
Given her geographical location at the heart of central Europe, as well as her multilinguistic composition, Switzerlands neutrality had been codified in European councils as early as 1515. Once considered the foremost warriors of Europe (and drawn upon for centuries afterward as mercenaries) the Swiss received ratification by the international Treaty of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars as comprising an independent confederation that should take no part in future European wars. Thus, Switzer land adopted political neutrality as the primary principle of her foreign policy, through the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, until her concept of armed neutrality was put to the ultimate test in the 1940s, when she found herself surrounded by Axis forces. During this period the Swiss, standing fast to their independence, were called upon to duplicate the courage of their forebears.
In a December 1944 memo to Anthony Eden, a supremely circumspect Winston churchill wrote: of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction. She has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defense among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side.
Led by General Henri Guisan, the Swiss armed forces spent the war prepared to resist invasion at any cost. When General Guisan died in 1960, the largest and most magnificent wreath was sent by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was then President of the United States. Five years earlier, Eisenhower had occasion to review a company of Swiss troops and wrote: Rarely in my military experience have I had the opportunity to see a more perfectly trained unit. Switzerland was the centuries-old Sister Republic of the United States, and her ubiquitous military forcein which every male was armed and trained as a marksmanenjoyed a unique reputation.
Allen Dulles, head of Americas spy network operating against Germany from his base in Switzerland during World War II, wrote: At the peak of its mobilization Switzerland had 850,000 men under arms or standing in reserve, a fifth of the total population. That Switzerland did not have to fight was thanks to its will to resist and its large investment of men and equipment in its own defense. The cost to Germany of an invasion of Switzer land would certainly have been very high. German intelligence reports indicate with grim clarity that Switzerland would not roll over and capitulate like other neutrals, and even some of the Allies. The Swiss, as in the tradition of their famed mercenary regiments, would fight to the death.
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