Swiss and the Nazis

by Stephen Halbrook

  Despite the intransigence on both sides to prevent the surrender of the German forces in Italy, on April 26 the Joint Chiefs of Staff relented and directed that German envoys could proceed to Allied Force Headquarters in Caserta to surrender. A Soviet representative would be present. On May 2, the Wehrmacht forces in Italy surrendered.

  Instead of concentrating available German forces in a redoubt, Hitler remained in Berlin, where he committed suicide two days before the above surrender. The Third Reich unconditionally surrendered on May 8. The war in Europe was over.

  Despite its strict official neutrality, Switzerland clearly played a role in the defeat of Nazism. The above represents only a sampling of Allen Dulles’ OSS dispatches. These have never been so much as mentioned in studies of the role of Switzerland during World War II, much less in the two recent critical yet heavily publicized Swiss and U.S. Government reports. Neither the U.S. Eizenstat-Slany report (1997) nor Switzerland’s Bergier Commission report (2002)64 make mention of Allen Dulles, the OSS, or Switzerland’s role as America’s window on the Reich. Perhaps in the future the full documentation of Swiss involvement with American intelligence will be brought to light.

  CONCLUSION

  Are the lessons offered by Switzerland during World War II relevant today? Once more, after a brief period of peace, the world is enmeshed in conflict based on religious, racial and other ideologies. The slow breakup of the old European balance of power of the nineteenth century culminated in the First and Second World Wars. Today the breakup of the Soviet empire and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have produced new challenges for U.S. foreign policy that are still being debated. In a world wracked by new waves of turbulence, the example of a small state that stood fast in the face of tyranny is well worth remembering.

  The Nazi threat to Switzerland began on Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, greatly accelerated with the Nazi takeover of neighboring Austria in 1938, and reached its zenith with the fall of France in 1940. The prospect of a Nazi attack could not be discounted until the end of the war in 1945. The United States managed to retain her neutrality until the end of 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared that Germany would wage war on the United States. America responded and, with the sacrifice of almost half a million lives, met and defeated her enemies. Around the globe, scores of millions of people, the majority of them civilians, were left dead. The United States, separated from her enemies by oceans on each side, and defended by people of courage, was spared invasion in World War II. So was Switzerland, albeit without any oceans and despite her encirclement by larger Axis powers.

  Switzerland was—and remains—a harmonious model of ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity with deep traditions of democracy, local autonomy and individual rights. During the wartime years when Switzer land, surrounded by Axis armies and economically isolated, continued to function as a free and open society, she maintained her peace only through a tough-minded armed neutrality—being fully and seriously prepared for war. And she skillfully used diplomacy and negotiation to maintain herself against large and powerful enemies.

  The Swiss did not make distinctions among their citizens on the basis of race, language or religion. They embodied the hard-won values of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the European Enlightenment—tolerance, equality before the law, and individual human rights.

  The Swiss aversion to centralized authority derived in part from their mountain culture and the enduring legacy of the Reformation doctrines of Calvin and Zwingli. This proved to be a powerful bulwark against the Führer principle just as, in more recent times, the Swiss rejected integration into the sprawling bureaucracies of the European Union. Referenda, local control and democratic consensus are core values in Switzerland. Indeed, the Swiss are more opposed to statism than the parliamentary democracies Hitler sought to destroy.

  It would be a mistake to equate neutrality—or at least Swiss armed neutrality—with lack of willpower. To the Swiss, strict armed neutrality meant that they would not participate in external wars. They would fight only defensively and only if attacked. They were not—and are not—pacifists, and during World War II held their ground hunkered down in bunkers and mountain passes with the enemy in their sights should he have dared to attack.

  Because she energetically prepared for a Nazi invasion, Switzerland did not suffer the cruel fate of the neutrals that were quickly overrun by the Wehrmacht. At the peak of its mobilization, the Swiss Confederation mustered an astonishing 850,000 men under arms—out of a population of only 4.2 million! That was the highest per-capita mobilization of any country in the world. By contrast, for example, Denmark had a population of 3.8 million, and in 1939 shrunk her tiny force from 36,000 to 14,000 troops.1 When Nazi Germany attacked in April 1940, the King of Denmark surrendered an hour later with virtually no resistance. Thereafter the workers and factories were saddled with Nazi war production. When orders came for the deportation of Jews in 1943, the Danes were able to rescue most, but not all, of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews by putting them on boats to Sweden.2

  There was never any need to rescue or hide Switzerland’s Jews. The Swiss openly protected their Jewish compatriots, and armed them just as they did virtually every citizen—with both rifles and a determination to fight. Moreover, unlike the occupied European countries, Switzerland rescued many thousands of refugees fleeing from those countries—indeed, far more proportionately than any unoccupied country, including the United States.

  There was no Holocaust in Switzerland. The architects of the Final Solution failed to kill any of Switzerland’s Jews or to cause their exodus. Nor did the German war machine seize Swiss industry and impose forced labor in Switzerland, as it did in the countries it overran.

  Being weak, being overrun, being a victim, and being relentlessly exploited are not virtues, although they may give rise to acts of heroism. Successfully refusing to be a victim by being strong—by making the cost in blood of invasion unacceptably high—is not blameworthy.3

  To be sure, Switzerland also depended on economic and political factors to achieve the balancing act that kept her out of the war. But Switzerland’s large allocation of resources to defense—to say nothing of her people’s will to resist—shows how seriously the Swiss took their armed neutrality. In addition, despite their official political neutrality, the Swiss man and woman in the street was typically strongly anti-Nazi for the entire period of the German domination of Europe. The Germans were constantly protesting Swiss “provocations” and retaliating against Switzerland with the powerful economic leverage they possessed—the ability to starve the country by restricting supplies of fuel and food.

  Switzerland’s defense capability, moreover, did not consist of hidden resistance cells or guerrilla fighters—it was represented by a public army on the local and national level, supported by massive fortifications along the border and in the Alps, and constant efforts to upgrade weaponry and training. The Swiss could not have emerged victorious if the Nazis had devoted all their resources to an invasion; however, their efforts were sufficient to convince the Germans that a conquest of Switzerland would have required a concerted, lengthy effort of the kind that—as we only know in retrospect—the course of the war did not allow.

  The Swiss survived in the very shadow of the Third Reich, and when the evidence is assessed and balanced, it is clear they not only managed to protect themselves in terrible times, they made solid contributions to the Allied cause. Of course it is possible to point out individual actions that can be questioned. But the Swiss have been open about their history and have encouraged investigation. None of the Allies, including the United States—not to mention other neutrals—have subjected their wartime decisions to such intense scrutiny.

  Switzerland and the U.S. share a common heritage. Both have been from their beginnings independent republics. The births of the Swiss Confederation in 1291 and the United States in 1776 are extraordinary episodes in history in which peoples banded together to win their fre
edom. Despite today’s vast difference in size and population, Swiss local democracy is a kind of template of American local democracy. That is why Switzerland and the United States, despite occasional bumps on the road, will inalterably remain Sister Republics.

  Massive state terrorism during World War II had to be confronted and resisted by any means at hand. Like the Americans, the Swiss had their own “Greatest Generation,” and it included all of those who were ready to lay down their lives had the Nazi armies come over the border. How exactly tiny Switzerland stood down the Nazi monolith is a lesson worth remembering in the annals of history.

  SOURCE NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassel, 1954), VI, 616.

  2. Eisenhower to Col. Albert Zublin, July 23, 1955, in Robert Gubler, Felddivision 6: Von der Zürcher Miliz zur Felddivision, 1815–1991 (Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1991), 309.

  3. Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (London: Harper & Rowe, 1966), 25.

  4. Final Report on the Work of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland (October 5, 2001). The Tribunal was the outgrowth of the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons chaired by Paul A. Volcker.

  5. Halbrook, Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (Rockville Center, NY: Sarpedon Publishers, 1998).

  6. Halbrook, Die Schweiz im Visier: Die bewaffnete Neutralität im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Verlage Novalis Schaffhausen/Rothenhäusler Stäfa, 1999); Halbrook, La Suisse encerclée: La neutralité armée suisse durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (Editions Slatkine Genève, 2000); Halbrook, La Svizzera nel mirino: La neutralità aramata della Svizzera nella seconda guerra mondiale (Coedizione Pedrazzini–Locarno/Alberti–Verbania, 2002); Halbrook, Cel: Szwajcaria (Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Bellona, 2003).

  7. “Auszeichnung für Stephen P. Halbrook: Überreichung des Preises der Max-Geilinger-Stiftung,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 31. Mai 2000, S. 47; “‘Kontrapunkt zur Diffamierung der Schweiz’: Preisverleihung an Stephen Halbrook und Angelo Codevilla,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11. Nov. 2002, S. 27.

  8. The Bergier Commission publications are described in http://www.uek.ch/en/index.htm.

  9. See Leo Schelbert, ed., Switzerland Under Siege, 1939–1945: A Neutral Nation’s Struggle for Survival (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 2000); Donald P. Hilty, ed., Retrospectives on Switzerland in World War Two (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 2001); Angelo M. Codevilla, Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000); Klaus Urner, Let’s Swallow Switzerland: Hitler’s Plans Against the Swiss Confederation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2002); Willi Gautschi, General Henri Guisan: Commander-in-Chief of the Swiss Army during World War Two (Rockville Centre, NY: Front Street Press, 2003); Georges-André Chevallaz, The Challenge of Neutrality: Diplomacy and the Defense of Switzerland (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2001); Pierre Th. Braunschweig, Secret Channel to Berlin: The Masson–Schellenberg Connection and Swiss Intelligence in World War II (Philadelphia: Casemate Publishers, 2004).

  Chapter 1: THE EYES OF GERMAN INTELLIGENCE

  1. The documents herein are from the Bundesärchiv/Militärchiv, Freiburg am Breisgau, Germany. Documents related to Nazi subversion in Switzerland are also located in other archives. See, e.g., the excellent study Hans Rudolf Fuhrer, Spionage gegen die Schweiz (Frauenfeld: Huber & Co., 1982).

  2. BA/MA RW 5/415, Deutsche Gesandtschaft, Das gegenwärtige Verhältnis der Schweiz zu Deutschland, 24.4.1934. “BA/MA” refers to Bundesärchiv/Militärchiv, Freiburg am Breisgau, Germany.

  3. “Un plan d’invasion de la Suisse?” Journal de Genève, Sept. 27, 1933, 1. See Halbrook, Target Switzerland, 28–29.

  4. BA/MA RW 5/415, Deutsche Gesandtschaft, Annexion der deutschen Schweiz, 20.6.1934.

  5. BA/MA RW 5/415, Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militär-Attaché, Bericht Nr. 3/34 (Schweiz), 16.7.1934. For an almost identical report to the Armed Forces High Command, see BA/MA RW 5/415, Vortragsnotiz über Bericht Nr. 3/34 des Militärattachés Wien, 1.8.1934.

  6. BA/MA RW 5/415, Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militär-Attaché, Bericht Nr. 4/34/ Schweiz, 27.9.1934.

  7. E.g., BA/MA RW 6/77, Wehrmachtsamt Nr. 4107/36 J III b v. 30. Juni 1936, 23.7.1936.

  8. BA/MA RW 6/81, Wehrmacht, Übersicht Nr. 46, 11.3.1937.

  9. BA/MA RW 6/78, Deutsche Gesandtschaft, Schweizerische Pressehetze gegen Deutschland, 13.4.1937. The report attached a copy of the article, “La guerre? Hitler la prépare,” Le Travail, No. 82, 9 April 1937.

  10. See Halbrook, Target Switzerland, 45–63.

  11. BA/MA RH2 2923, Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militär- und Luftattaché, Hochverehrter Herr General, 24.10.1938.

  12. “Hetze der Eidgenossen gegen Deutschland,” Völkische Beobachter, 18 December 1938.

  13. BA/MA RH 26-260/48 Nachrichtendienst Ic: Schweiz. Lierin: Karten schweizer Befestigungen. 18.8 bis 28.12.1939.

  14. BA/MA RW5/352, AUSL, Außen- und militärpolitische Nachrichten, 26.8.1939.

  15. BA/MA RW5/352, AUSL, Außen- und militärpolitische Nachrichten, 12, (Ohne Funk- und Pressemeldungen), 2.9.1939.

  16. BA/MA RW5/352, AUSL, Außen- und militärpolitische Nachrichten, 12 Uhr. (Ohne Funk- und Pressemeldungen), 5.9.1939.

  17. BA/MA RW5/352, AUSL, Außen- und militärpolitische Nachrichten, 14, 7.9.1939.

  18. BA/MA RW5/352, AUSL, Außen- und militärpolitische Nachrichten, 9 Uhr., 18.9.1939.

  19. BA/MA RH 2/739 K-5. Lage: Schweiz am 12.10.39. Anlage 2, zum Lagebericht Nr. 86 vom 13.10.39. Updated through 16.11.39.

  20. BA/MA RW 5/373, Abt. Landesverteidigung, Lagebericht Nr. 107, 14.10.1939.

  21. BA/MA RW 5/357, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Laufende Informationen Nr. 1, 30.10.1939.

  22. BA/MA RH2 2923 Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militärattaché, Hochverehrter Herr General, 3.11.1939. The report cited “Kleines Kriegsmosaik,” National Zeitung (Abendausgabe), 2 Nov. 1939.

  23. BA/MA RH2/1739 K-1, 11.11.39–26.11.39.

  24. BA/MA RW 5/537, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Laufende Informationen Nr. 11, 11.11.1939.

  25. BA/MA RW 5/357, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, An Auswärtiges Amt (Informationsabteilung) über Inf.A.A. (mit I Nebenabdruck), 17.11.1939.

  26. Halbrook, Target Switzerland, 166.

  27. Bruno Grimm, Gau Schweiz? Dokumente über die nationalsozialistischen Umtriebe in der Schweiz (Druck der Unionsdruckerei Bern, 1939), 9–13.

  28. BA/MA RW 5/358, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Laufende Informationen Nr. 24, 29.11.1939.

  29. BA/MA RW 4/315, Stimmungsbericht gem, An das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Abwehrabteilung III (N) z.Hd.v.Herrn Obstlt.Jacobsen, 10.1.1940.

  30. BA/MA RH 2/2923, H.Qu. O.K.H., Lieber Herr v. Ilsemann, 13.1.1940.

  31. BA/MA RH 19III/344, Oberkommando des Heeres, Heeresgruppe C, Taschenbuch Schweizerisches Heer, 14.1.1940. The 95th Infantry Division was listed, then changed to the 212nd, and then crossed out.

  32. BA/MA RH 19III/344, Heeresgruppenkommando C, Taschenbuch “Schweizerisches Heer” (N.f.D.), 29.1.1940.

  33. BA/MA RH 20-7/164, Sondermeldung der 260. Div. Am 31.1.1940, 19.55 Uhr (Oblt.Schmückle), 31.1.1940.

  34. BA/MA RH 19III/366, Heeresgruppenkommando C. Abt. Ic, Sondermeldung, 1.2.1940.

  35. BA/MA RH 20-7/2, Armeehauptquartier, Fall Schweiz, 9.2.1940.

  36. BA/MA RH 2/1739 K-6, 5.2.40.

  37. BA/MA RW 4/312/1, Amt Ausl/Abw, Bericht des deutschen Militärattachés in Bern vom 23.2.40, 2.3.1940.

  38. BA/MA RW 5/357, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Laufende Informationen Nr. 15, 16.2.1940.

  39. BA/MA RW 5/357, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Laufende Informationen Nr. 15, 16.2.1940.

  40. BA/MA RH 2/2923, Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militarattaché, Hochzuverehrter Herr General, 17.2.1940.

  41. BA/MA RH 20-7/2, Armeehauptquartier, Betr. T. Massnahmen, Heeres gruppenkommando C!, 22.2.1940.

  42. BA/MA RH 20-7/2, Geheime Kommandefache,
An H.Gr.Kdo. C, 28.2.1940.

  43. BA/MA RH 20-7/166, Aufnahme: Oblt. Weick, 8.3.1940.

  44. BA/MA RH 20-7/166, Aufnahme: Oblt. Weick, 8.3.1940.

  45. BA/MA RH 19 III/348, Abschnitts-Kommandeur Bodensee, Die Lage im Schweizer Grenzgebiet, Allgemeine Übersicht, 26.3.1940.

  46. BA/MA RH 2/2923, Deutsche Gesandtschaft Der Militärattaché, Hochzuverehrter Herr General, 8.4.1940.

  Chapter 2: HANGING HITLER IN SATIRE

  1. Gegen Rote und Braune Fäuste: Das Weltgeschehen von 1932–1948 in 342 Karikaturen aus dem Nebelspalter (Nebelspalter-Verlag Rorschach, 1949). The pages are not numbered but are in chronological order.

  2. Werner Rings, Schweiz in Krieg, 1933–1945 (Verlag Ex Libris Zurich, 1974), 274.

  3. Letter to author from Hedi K. Moore, Delmar, New York, March 21, 2001.

  4. Elsie Attenhofer, Cornichon: Erinnerungen an ein Cabaret (Benteli Verlag Bern, 1975); Elsie Attenhofer, Réserve du Patron: Im Gespräch mit K. (Rothenhäusler VerlagStäfa: Stäfa, 1989). Elisabeth Sauter-Frey, a friend of Attenhofer, has an unpublished autobiographical manuscript of her life. For a recent appreciation, see Peter Michael Keller, “Staatskritisch, staatstragend. Das Cabaret Cornichon und seine Legende: nach 50 Jahren,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17. Juli 2001, 38.

  5. Attenhofer, Cornichon, 6–7.

  6. See Werner Rings, Schweiz in Krieg, 1933–1945 (Verlag Ex Libris Zurich, 1974), 27–29.