Swiss and the Nazis

by Stephen Halbrook

  “Later, police were called to a scene where a man had been thrown into a well. It was believed that Frontists had discovered the informant who betrayed their associate and pushed him down the well. The story was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

  “Father was the Swiss agent for a sugar refinery and a malt factory in Czechoslovakia. Business was very good until 1938 when Czechoslovakia fell to the Nazis. The owners of these companies were Jews who vanished into the concentration camps, and the companies were taken over by the Germans. Papa refused to work together with the Nazis and so lost his business.”

  When the war began, Lucie Schaad-Denner joined the Frauenhilfsdienst (FHd, or Women’s auxiliary Service). “We were sworn in wearing civilian clothes and the armband with the Swiss cross.” She helped care for the military internees, including the allocation of warm-meal ration coupons and Schokoladecoupons—chocolate coupons. Most long-term internees were Poles, but they also helped Russians who escaped over the Rhine from German prisoner-of-war camps.

  Werner P. Auer was born in 1921. “My father came from Germany in 1895. He was anti-Nazi and had brothers still in Germany. My mother was Swiss and religious. When the war started, Father was 70 but still joined the Ortswehr. At my school, I had a Jewish teacher and two Jewish classmates. There was not one Nazi. We did not learn of the Holocaust until after the war.” Indeed, most ordinary people in the neutral and allied countries and even in Germany did not know about the extremes of the Holocaust until the war ended. What political elites may or may not have known about systematic extermination is the subject of numerous studies, but the fact of widespread Nazi persecution of Jews was no secret to the public. Switzerland faced a flood of refugees, and accepted the vast majority.

  “In 1939 my school closed and I was sent to guard the Landi, the Swiss national Exposition—a patriotic cultural exposition visited by most Swiss. I was 18 and in the fire brigade. In 1940 people thought Germany might use Switzerland as a back door [into France]. I was a Boy Scout and lived five kilometers from the Rhine. We sensed that something would happen. The road signs were removed. The military used us as messenger boys for the army. Since we had no insignia, we could have been shot had there been a war and we were captured! Later we got armbands. The Boy Scouts organized camps for French orphans. It was a great experience.13

  “I was in the army from September 1941 through the end of the war and later, in all 2,500 days of service. At the borders with France and Italy, the Germans had fences with bells. The Swiss would ring the bells as a prank, and the Germans would come running.

  “In the army we discussed German preparations. We did not distinguish the Germans and the Nazis—they were the same enemy. I never met anyone who would consider abandoning Switzerland. Passive cooperation was excluded. People would have disappeared into the woods and waged guerrilla warfare. The Réduit decision was not opposed and did not lead to discouragement. People never complained that they would be abandoned.”

  Konstanz is a border town, part of which is in Switzerland and part in Germany. In 1938, Peter Baumgartner-Jost’s mother took him across the border at Konstanz into Germany to see what it was like. He remembers: “Everyone was saying ‘Heil Hitler!’ We were on the train, and everyone looked at us when we did not ‘Heil’ in return. Their looks were as if to say, ‘You’re not with us? Who are these people?!’ We felt very uncomfortable.”14

  Col. Rudolf Ursprung remembers: “In 1939 I was studying law at the University of Bern. When the war began, I was staying in Grenoble for four weeks studying French so that I could continue my studies in Dijon or Geneva. But my active duty intervened. From 1939 to 1945, the year of my graduation, I served a total of about 23 months on duty.15

  “I spent most of my time as a lieutenant with a border protection unit in Etzgen, a small village on the Rhine. The company was composed of soldiers from the Mettau Valley and Bötzberg. Our quarters and sanitary installations were extremely primitive, and the local population was poor but willing to sacrifice to accommodate us. Every noncommissioned officer was given a bed, and the company office was for a time set up in a living room.

  “Most soldiers belonging to our company were farmers on the side, others were full-time farmers. Those who lived in the area were able to work at their farms in the evening, and those from outside the area had to be given leave so they could go home and help out. When harvest time came around, we had to set up a leave system for the farmers. At the same time we had to work with other self-employed soldiers, bakers, butchers and craftsmen who felt that they were at a disadvantage compared to the farmers.” Military units were typically from the same locales since they were a militia army composed of civilians who, when mobilized, grabbed their rifles and assembled at a nearby rendezvous. Once mobilized, however, they could be sent anywhere in Switzerland. Colonel Ursprung continues:

  “We didn’t really see what a dangerous situation we would be in if we were attacked from across the Rhine. We were calm. We would have fired at any German that we saw. Only the young platoon leader and the young company commander were concerned. They bought Signal [a German military periodical], which described things such as combat patrols, at the newspaper stand. I bought all of the German training materials I could find at the Stämpfli bookstore in Bern. We, the young leaders, recognized very early on that the border protection unit and the army in general had inferior training, and we did our best to improve the situation.

  “We were also very nervous, especially in 1940. Once a patrol unit in Rheinsulz heard noise on the other side of the Rhine where the embankment consisted of gravel. The patrol thought that the Germans might be crossing the river and immediately informed the brigade commander. Observers were sent over, but the next morning we saw that the noise was only some loose gravel sliding into the river.

  “In the summer of 1941 our young cadre conducted five training courses of about three to five weeks each for noncommissioned officers, and later conducted similar courses for privates. We trained in combat techniques our commanders had gotten from books. We practiced throwing live hand grenades and shooting over obstacles. Finally we began to feel more combat-ready, and that was an important psychological gain.

  “Being preoccupied with our daily work, we knew little about political events. We subscribed to a paper, but barely had time to read it. We listened to the radio news to follow the overall progress of the war, but at our place on the border we didn’t really know much. We recognized the problems connected to Switzerland’s neutrality. But in our border area we had confidence.” While not reflected in these comments, border troops were under orders to hold to the last cartridge without retreat to give chosen units in the interior time to assemble in the Réduit, where they could resist almost indefinitely.

  Felix P. Bentz was a member of the 500-strong delegation of Swiss Boy Scouts heading for the 5th World Scouting Jamboree in Vogelenzang, Holland, in 1937. Passing through Germany, they saw large red banners with black swastikas everywhere, in the streets, on the buildings, and even inside the immense youth hostel where they stayed. “In Köln [Cologne] we were the overnight guests of the Hitler Youth, presuming that they were nothing more than a German version of the Scouts. They did dress in shorts and brown shirts, not unlike our own uniforms. But that was where the similarity ended. They wore black neckties and swastika armbands, and gave the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute at every opportunity. And the way they acted, one had the uneasy feeling they thought their misplaced ‘German brothers’ in Switzerland would greatly benefit from an ‘Anschluss,’ the way they just had annexed the Rhineland.”16

  Bentz also recalled how, in 1938, the leaders of England and France signed the Munich agreement, sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Mussolini acted as intermediary. “How little the Swiss trusted Adolf Hitler’s solemn promises may have been expressed in my own skeptical reaction. The world events had inspired me to draw a cartoon showing the four European leaders gathered in a palace, pen in hand. The sign over the door re
ad: ‘Treaties and Peace agreements prepared here—CHEAP!’”17

  In late august 1939, a couple of days before the war broke out, Bentz participated in a tribute to the medieval battle at St. Jakob, where outnumbered Swiss fought to the death against invaders. “Dressed in my Boy Scout uniform, I was beating the drum loudly as we marched down the tree-shaded avenue toward a small chapel on the outskirts of Basel. There must have been hundreds of citizens in the parade… and there were thousands of people lining the streets, applauding and waving to friends they knew.”

  Five hundred years before, some 1,500 Swiss peasant warriors all perished in a bloody battle as they resisted the invasion of 15,000 knights and mercenaries from France. The Swiss defense was so fierce and costly that the French retreated and gave up their invasion.

  “Two days after our memorial march to St. Jakob, the President of the Swiss Confederation ordered a partial mobilization of the army. One could but wonder whether the example we had just celebrated, of a vastly outnumbered force trying to defend its freedom, would repeat itself in the near future.”18

  When the blitzkrieg hit Western Europe in 1940, young Felix Bentz noted in his diary: “We are neutral, we don’t care who is clobbering the Krauts.” “But,” he said, “our actions betrayed our anxiety. As soon as I left our apartment and turned the corner into one of the main arteries leading to the German border, only a mile away, I could notice the feverish activities. Pilings were driven into the pavement, and heavy chains stretched across the streets.”19

  The Boy Scouts were mobilized and issued armbands to identify them officially as auxiliaries. “I was assigned to one of the border crossings with France to assist with a stream of last-minute refugees. They came through a narrow gap in the rolls of barbed wire strung across the street, guarded by soldiers, while customs agents were scrutinizing these poor folks and their few belongings, piled on pushcarts.”

  Bentz found himself rushing across town on his bike, “delivering instructions and materials to blacked-out office buildings and hospitals. Preparations to minimize the effects of air attacks were high on the list for everybody. I was made a block warden in our street, which meant that, after just a few hours of instructions, I would be empowered to check on the air defense preparations of our neighbors.

  “One of the key requirements was to clear all of the accumulated junk and clutter from the typically vast attics. The only items that were required up there were a shovel and a box of sand, which, in theory, would be used to extinguish fires caused by incendiary bombs. During one of my lectures a lady asked me how one could be so sure that such a bomb would fall into the box? Actually, she was not too far off the mark concerning the usefulness of quite a few of our improvised preparations.20

  “Just to be on the safe side, we left the north-facing windows open as Mother began fixing breakfast. It was the morning of May 15, 1940…. The population of Basel had been advised that there could be an attack by the divisions the German High Command had been massing north of the border. This ‘leaked’ warning by the well-informed Swiss General Staff had triggered a panic in town.” Holland had collapsed the day before, France was routed at Sedan on the 15th, and Wehrmacht concentrations near the border convinced the Swiss that they were next. Bentz continues:

  “We had devised our own plan. Yesterday afternoon each one of us had stuffed a backpack with a few clothes, our passports, some money and a few imperishable food items. Then we carried this essential baggage across the bridge to Helli’s apartment on the left bank of the Rhine where, presumably, we could retrieve it leisurely in case of an attack. We then returned home, ate dinner, and listened to a recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘air.’ The irony of trying to calm our nerves with this sublime German masterpiece, while waiting for a devastating German attack, was not lost on us.”21

  The attack did not come at that time, but the Swiss continued to prepare to resist as the tense hours turned into days, which became months, then years. Bentz’s memoirs fast-forward two years. “a motley crew gathered in the barrack square of the basic training facilities in Thun on July 13, 1942. It was the beginning of boot camp for the Cannoneers of the Motorized anti-Tank troops. Not only did we come from all walks of life, we came from the whole spectrum of languages and dialects spoken in Switzerland. One could hear the genteel idiom of Basel, the guttural sounds from Zurich, the slow spoken words of the Bernese, the French of the Vaudois and Genevois, and the melodic Italian dialect from Ticino.

  “Fortunately, most of us could understand the other’s language to some degree, and even speak it a little, but the commands given by the Captain of this mixed company, whenever we exercised as a unit, were given in all three languages: German, French and Italian. And it sounded like this:

  Zwanzig Taktschritte—Vingt pas cadancés—Venti passi cadenzati

  (Twenty goose steps)

  Vorwaerts—En avant—Avanti—Marsch!

  (Forward, march!)”

  While this might sound like the Tower of Babel brigade, it reflected Switzerland’s linguistic diversity. The militia army was a primary institution that unified Swiss speaking different languages and a force for social cohesion. Indeed, the Swiss Confederation for centuries had been defended by warriors who learned each other’s languages sufficiently to fight together. Bentz continues:

  “One of the stunts a few of us excelled at was to somersault over a pyramid of rifles with fixed bayonets into a steep gravel pit. We were called on several times to perform for visiting brass, giving them the impression that all recruits nonchalantly did these aerial acrobatics. But the more interesting phase of our training started when we hit the road and began traveling the highways and byways of Switzerland. We learned to spend endless hours next to our guns exposed to the hot sun or torrential rains, and spent uncomfortable nights on straw, spread out on the classroom floors of commandeered school houses.

  “The main purpose of this exercise was to practice detaching our anti-tank cannons from the vehicles at a moment’s notice, and placing them into a firing position within seconds in any imaginable situation or location. We learned quickly that whenever the signal ‘Tank attack’ sounded in the middle of a village, by far the most strategic location for our position was as close as possible to a café or bakery.

  “But seriously, we loved these action-packed days, particularly, when we drove way up to a remote alp to lob some live shells into the snow fields across the valley. It was easy to determine the accuracy of our aim by the black smudges which each impact made in the pristine snow. After all the days of dismantling, lugging around and reassembling these monsters, it was good to see them work and to hear the ear-shattering booms echoing from peak to peak. For the first time we felt like real cannoneers.”22

  D-Day was launched on June 6, 1944, and is frozen in Bentz’s memory as if it were yesterday. “overnight the posters had appeared all over town, glued to walls and fences; their trilingual headlines called for mobilization! I had expected this would happen as soon as I heard the radio confirm that there had been a major landing by the allied forces in Normandy. But I first had to scrutinize the long columns of fine print to find out which units were being called and which had been spared. My motorized anti-tank gun company was on the list. We were to assemble at 7 a.m. on June 15, 1944, in Liestal, a small town which was a 20-minute train ride from Basel.” Unlike the overnight mobilizations of 1939 and 1940, when Switzerland might have been imminently attacked, this order allowed some soldiers a week to mobilize.

  “It was a strange column that drove through those low hills. Led by Captain Greub in his Mercedes convertible, there followed Cadillacs, Buicks and Lincolns pulling anti-tank guns. In between there were Fords and Chevys of lesser power which carried the other crew members, and at the tail end of the column were trucks full of ammunition and supplies. All of these vehicles had been commandeered early in the war. Their owners had to promise to make them available any time, at a moment’s notice.” Within the Nazi stranglehold,
Switzerland had no sources from which to purchase military vehicles. Bentz continued:

  “We were still wondering what was happening in France. At the beginning of the invasion the situation was rather confused. The Allies certainly did not announce what they were up to, and the Germans were told to say they were winning. And our unit up in the mountains was told nothing. But then General Guisan, the leader of the Swiss army, made an announcement. The gist was that very likely this was the last phase of the European war, and potentially the most dangerous period for Switzerland. We should be prepared to stay on the alert as long as was necessary, possibly till the war was over. But it turned out that, for a while at least, we would be spared, as the battle continued to rage in Normandy.

  “Our outfit was moved to another location, where we stayed about a month. During that time I was selected to be part of the squad which was to represent our company at the division Games in Luzern. This contest between all the units within the division consisted of a 300-meter swim in the cold lake, a four-kilometer cross country run, shooting at targets, and finally a monstrous obstacle course ending in a ditch, from which one had to hit a target with hand grenades. Our squad did not do too badly, winding up in fifth place.” Such endurance races were also excellent military training.

  “The next alert came in September 1944, when U.S. troops reached the Alsace…. One always had to contend with the irrational orders a desperate Hitler might give to his army. Our unit had been on leave for a month when this sudden call to arms sounded. My squad was one of the first on the scene, and as soon as we were equipped with our anti-tank gun and lots of ammunition, we hightailed it to the border as fast as we could drive. Our orders were to find a suitable position along the half-mile of road which led out of Riehen to the German frontier, to install and camouflage our gun and then wait for further orders, or German tanks, whichever came first.”23