Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  Hitler’s policy from the beginning of his ten-year rampage was always to attack both from without and within: in Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland and Danzig he had fomented internal unrest and then used this as a pretext for intervention. So too in Switzerland. Fascism had taken root here as early as 1918 with the foundation of the Schweizerischer Vaterländischer Verband – the Switzerland Fatherland Association or SVV. By the 1930s more than thirty-six fascist ‘fronts’ were established, all enthusiasts to a lesser or greater degree for the Reich’s National Socialism. Their membership was around 40,000. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, ‘Few other countries have had such a great number of extreme right-wing associations per capita and size of their geographical territory as had Switzerland during the Hitlerian era.’7 They were festering in Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux, Zurich, Schaffhausen and the capital Berne – in all the major centres of industry and population in Switzerland’s twenty-one cantons. They were also in the high Alps: in Interlaken in the Bernese Oberland, in Leysin in Canton Vaud, together with Arosa, St Moritz and Davos itself in Canton Graubünden.

  Amongst these fronts was the Swiss branch of the Nazi Party for German residents in the country – the Landesgruppe Switzerland. It had been founded in 1932 by a German, Wilhelm Gustloff, whose wife Hedwig had once apparently been Hitler’s secretary. Born in Schwerin in Mecklenburg in 1895, Gustloff had moved to Davos in 1917 as a tuberculosis patient, joining the large (four-figure) German colony in the resort. He was less an adherent of the Nazi movement than a fanatic, once remarking brightly to his doctor, ‘I would murder my wife if Hitler commanded.’8 Hedwig’s response is not recorded. All the Swiss branches of the Nazi Party paid homage to Davos, and it was tasked by Berlin to agitate for Anschluss with the Reich. Soon Gustloff was working as a meteorologist. In the time he could spare from keeping an eye on the weather – like St Moritz, Davos was a very good place for winter sun – Gustloff staged debates, organised cultural programmes and screened Goebbels’s propaganda films. These included Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph des Willens, her lyrical chronicle of the Nazi congress in Nuremberg. Gustloff also inflamed anti-Semitism by energetically distributing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fabrication that purported to be a plan for Jewish global domination.

  Then, on 4 February 1936 – right at the height of the skiing season – Gustloff received a visitor in his apartment in Davos Platz. The door was opened by Frau Gustloff, the caller announcing himself as David Frankfurter. As her husband was on the phone in the corridor, Hedwig Gustloff asked Frankfurter to wait. He took a seat. When Gustloff hung up, Frankfurter rose to his feet, produced a small 6.35 mm pistol, aimed it at him and pulled the trigger. It failed once before wounding Gustloff fatally in the neck and chest. Frankfurter, a twenty-seven-year-old Jew from Daruvar in Yugoslavia who was studying medicine in Berne, then thought better of his notion of turning the gun on himself. Instead he surrendered himself to the police. He acted, he later said, to ‘avenge persecution of Jews in Germany’.9

  The assassination at once became an international cause célèbre. On 11 February 1936 a special train took Gustloff’s body on a progress from Davos back to Schwerin via Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg and Wittenberg. The state funeral the following day was attended by the galaxy of Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Bormann, Ribbentrop and Hitler. The Führer himself gave the funeral oration: ‘behind every murder stood the same power which is responsible for this murder … the hate-filled power of our Jewish foe, a foe to whom we have done no harm, but who nonetheless sought to subjugate the German people and make of it its slave’.10 Gustloff became a Blutzeuge, a martyr, for the Nazis. Reichsminister Goebbels pressed for the death sentence for Frankfurter, at the time proscribed in Switzerland. Put on trial on 9 December 1936 in Canton Graubünden’s capital of Chur, the assassin was sentenced to the maximum possible term of eighteen years in jail.

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  The assassination of Gustloff crystallised the choices facing the Swiss people. The Federal Council had already taken the opportunity – on 18 February 1936 – to ban the Swiss Nazi Party. Yet the government could scarcely control the influence of its pernicious neighbour, not least because of the readership in Switzerland of the German press, and because of what the British post-war Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly called ‘Events, dear boy, events’. After all, some of the Swiss found there was something to admire in Germany’s economic renaissance under Hitler; even in Hitler’s legerdemain in acquiring the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland without a shot – or not too many shots anyway – being fired. After war was declared and the events of the autumn of 1939 unfolded with the Sitzkrieg (for the British, the ‘Phoney War’), the following year with Operation Weserübung and the fall of Denmark and Norway, Fall Gelb and Fall Rot, a sense of fatalism had emerged in the Swiss people. As her great neighbours fell to the Reich, as she was hemmed in on all sides by the fascists, even the staunchest critics of the Nazis began to wonder what point there was in resistance. As the confidence of the German community in Davos and elsewhere grew with each Reich victory, so too did Swiss morale fall. The conundrum for the villagers was whether to prepare for resistance or inevitable defeat.11

  This was precisely the issue faced by Federal President Marcel Pilet-Golaz, and exactly the issue he addressed in his speech to the Swiss nation on 25 June 1940.

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  It was fortunate that General Henri Guisan, though by training a soldier, was by instinct a politician.

  No sooner had Guisan heard Pilet-Golaz’s speech than he seized his pen. The following day – it was 26 June 1940 – the Federal Council received the General’s request to confirm that his mission remained as originally drafted on the occasion of his appointment ten months previously: ‘de sauvegarder l’indépendance du Pays et de maintenir l’intégrité du territoire’.12 This adeptly put the equivocators on the defensive. It was a question that they could not judiciously answer no. The consequences would have been Guisan’s resignation, a loss the Council knew that neither country nor Council could afford. Early on the evening of 4 July a courier arrived at Guisan’s Gümligen Castle HQ bearing a letter. It was the Council’s necessary affirmation. The General smiled. He now had the laissez-passer to a radical plan. This he had been incubating since his appointment, and had been brought to fruition as Reynaud’s and Weygand’s France collapsed. It was for the Alpenfestung, the Réduit National for the country’s speakers of French, or for the many Anglophiles the Alpine Redoubt.

  There was little that was entirely novel about the idea, but the implications of the Redoubt strategy were explosive, and its ultimate manifestation breathtaking.

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  When Guisan was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Swiss forces on 30 August 1939 he was astounded to discover that there existed no overall plan for Switzerland’s defence. Not a draft of any nature, nor any contingency plans for the likelihood of a German invasion – let alone one from Italy in the south; conceivably an attack from France to the west. There was no systematic doctrine manifested in a pattern of defence, tank traps, machine-gun nests, pillboxes, earthworks or strongpoints. In terms of armament there was a collection of nineteenth-century 84 mm and 120 mm museum pieces, together with – in all – eight antiquated and thirty-four modern Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. In the dawning age of motorised warfare, the Swiss army boasted 50,000 horses borrowed from the civilian population, and the facility to requisition civilian motorised transport. Contemporary photographs show small pieces of field artillery towed by taxis. The Swiss professional army amounted to a fraction of the total of around 500,000. Of this militia, the Elite were aged between twenty and thirty-six, the Reserve thirty-six and forty-eight, the Home Guard forty-eight and sixty. They were good marksmen, for tradition maintained that each man kept his arms at home and practised regularly. These were the tools with which Guisan was to fight the blitzkrieg.

  The events of May and June 1940, of Fall Gelb and Fall Rot and
the spinelessness of Marshal Pétain, showed Guisan all too clearly the fragility of his position. It was natural enough for a country to defend its own borders. Yet despite the Maginot Line, France had discovered that its frontiers were indefensible to the Wehrmacht’s combination of infantry supported by a motorised army and the Luftwaffe. Given that Switzerland’s northern frontier with Germany was at least as porous as that of France, Guisan realised that it was similarly impossible to defend. He noted the aphorism of Frederick the Great: ‘He who defends everything defends nothing.’

  So Guisan’s first move as the country’s military leader was to withdraw troops from the 1,200-mile border to any feature of the terrain that could be an ally. A river, canal, lake, wood, hill – or indeed a mountain. Yet if May 1940 had lowered his hopes, June in some respects raised them. On the Franco-Italian Alpine border he had been given the clearest conceivable demonstration of Switzerland’s salvation. His staff summarised the French performance in the Alps: ‘Un chef décidé, des troupes de qualité, un terrain alpestre extrêmement bien fortifié, une météorologie détestable, sont parvenus à arrêter un ennemi.’13 The Alps were indeed the country’s natural – as opposed to political – frontiers. They constituted a lozenge-shaped block dropping down to the Italian border from a line heading north-east-east from the eastern tip of Lake Geneva to the eastern end of Lake Zurich. This was an area intrinsically defensible – and indeed had been long recognised as such before the heady days of Stukas and Panzers. It was akin to England, a fortress built by Nature for herself.

  Like the Alps on the Franco-Italian border, the Swiss massif needed additional fortification only at the doors into the higher ground: the passes. For such purposes, fortresses had been constructed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They guarded the St Gotthard railway, the Oberalp, and the Furka and Grimsel passes in the central Alps. Guisan’s plan – developed in a series of meetings with his general staff as France was falling – was to lightly defend the border and more heavily defend what he called the army line. This ran from west to east in the middle of the country, following natural features of the terrain. These positions were merely to delay the invading force sufficiently to allow the main body of the army to retreat to the Alps. It was a strategy that attracted the name Verzögerungskrieg or delaying war. Beyond would be established an impregnable zone in the high Alps. There – as both the Swiss and the Germans recognised – the defending force would be a much tougher nut to crack. The army would also control the country’s key strategic assets of the St Gotthard and Simplon transalpine railway tunnels. In their absence – should they be mined – the incentive to invade evaporated.

  However, the Redoubt strategy had profound implications. On the day on which the German–French armistice came into effect, Guisan met with members of his general staff to finalise the strategy. Later he wrote, ‘I had to be clear now … to what extreme degrees we must be prepared for all possible consequences of the reduit policy’.14

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  The most obvious of these was logistical. The framework or infrastructure of the Redoubt was already – albeit very lightly – in place. It took the form of three great fortresses at the perimeter of the massif: at Sargans in Canton St Gallen in the east in the Rhine valley; at St Gotthard in the south on the main route between Zurich and Milan; and at St Maurice in the far west, guarding the entrance to the upper Rhône valley. St Gotthard – Fort Airolo – dated from 1887; St Maurice – the subterranean Fort Dailly – was started in 1892; Sargans was begun in the immediate aftermath of Anschluss in the late spring of 1938. Each was designed for a garrison of about 1,000 soldiers, and had to be duly stockpiled with victuals and ammunition.

  These, though, were merely the foundations of a ring of citadels that would need to be built on the fringes of the Redoubt. At this stage Guisan’s staff could not detail what would be required. They had an agreed outline and the three key fortresses. Until a survey had been completed, it was impossible to say precisely what strongpoints would be required where. In the end, the réduit would comprise no fewer than seventy medium-sized fortresses and around 10,000 smaller bunkers, command posts, observation positions and pillboxes. One of the medium emplacements – the Vitznau Artillery – was quarried into the side of 5,896-foot Mount Rigi, overlooking Lake Lucerne and the Rütli meadow. As the New York Times reported in 1999 when – for the first time – this swarm of secret emplacements was thrown open to the public, ‘It has a kitchen, with spotlessly clean oversized pots and pans to feed large numbers, an infirmary, toilets modern by 1940 standards and separate sleeping quarters for officers. It also has a radio room, war room, huge water tank, disinfection area in case of a chemical attack, generator, ammunition storage areas and two 105-millimeter cannons.’15

  As the French discovered when building the Maginot Line, a chain on a comparable scale to the Swiss redoubt, emplacements like these were immensely greedy of resources. The Maginot Line cost 2–3 billion French francs, and took nine years to construct. If it was to be of any value to the Swiss, their own Redoubt needed to be completed in months not years. It also needed to be constructed in secret so that the precise location of the emplacements was hidden. Arthur Joller was a boy at the time of the construction of the Vitznau Artillery. ‘When I was young we would hear dynamite, and we’d see the earth move down from the mountains. The work was always guarded, and we never dared come. It was absolutely forbidden.’ When construction was completed, the fortresses still needed to be concealed. Festung Gütsch on the Oberalp Pass had its turrets camouflaged as boulders. At Magletsch in Canton St Gallen the fort dug into the mountainside had its 105 mm gun turrets disguised as Alpine chalets. There was also a story – unverified – about an airstrip built into a mountain face with an opening in the rock large enough for planes to fly in and fly out. Time, materials, skill, men, money were needed just to build the redoubt, let alone provide it with a stockpile of war materiel and food for the fortress guard corps – the Festungswachtkorps. According to some estimates the cost in today’s terms was $13 billion. All this in a country of 4.2 million souls. It was as though Switzerland had planned to put a man on the moon.

  The second problem was also logistical in one sense, but human and political too. There was every logic in Guisan and the army defending only what could be defended. Yet it meant leaving to the good offices and tender mercies of the Nazis all the country’s major cities – Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Berne, Lausanne, Winterthur, St Gallen, Lucerne and Lugano. That is, the vast majority of the country’s industrial assets, and just about four-fifths of her population. It was as if the British army had proposed, in the face of Operation Sea Lion, withdrawing to the Scottish Highlands and so leaving London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol to fend for themselves. In a sense, this was a counsel of despair that might reasonably have been expected to have fallen on stony ground with the country’s politicians and the public.

  Guisan judiciously described the Redoubt to his political masters less as a practical strategy than as a deterrent. Rather like the Western nuclear deterrent in the Cold War, if the strategy had been executed it would already have failed. As Guisan put it to the Federal Council on 12 July, just as Hitler, Raeder and Halder were meeting at the sunny Berghof:

  Switzerland cannot escape the threat of a direct German attack unless the German high command, while preparing such an attack, becomes convinced that a war against us would be long and expensive, would uselessly and dangerously create a new battleground in the heart of Europe, and this would jeopardize the execution of its other plans … If we must be dragged into this struggle, we will sell our skins as dearly as possible.16

  The Federal Council was duly persuaded of this argument. On 17 July 1940, it gave its stamp of approval.

  Here again Guisan was adroit. The plan was presented not as his own but as the brainchild of the head of the Military Department, Rudolf Minger. The equivalent of Britain’s secretary of state for defence was well regarded by the s
ix other members of the Federal Council. They were reluctant to gainsay a senior colleague. They might well have contradicted a mere soldier. Whether even the Council was aware of the full implications of the plan is still not clear, even today.

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  The public of course could not be kept ignorant of the strategy, for its essence was that it was a deterrent of which the Germans were made entirely aware and of which they were constantly reminded. Guisan was far from insensitive to this issue and to the point that the army itself needed persuading. What exactly would his men be fighting for in the Redoubt if their wives and daughters in Zurich, Basel and Schaffhausen were already in the hands of the Nazis? As Jon Kimche puts it in Spying for Peace: General Guisan and Swiss Neutrality, ‘it had become clear to Guisan that the reduit would be little more than a hollow shell if it were not filled with the spirit of a people united, determined and prepared to resist’.