by Jim Ring
When Guisan talked of the consequences of the Redoubt strategy, this was the most important that he had in mind. Had his troops the will to resist the Reich?
Here, Guisan again had to hand an object lesson from recent events all too close to home. France fell for many reasons, not least the courage, skill and tactics of the Wehrmacht. Yet it also collapsed because of the absence among a good deal of the French army of the will to resist. In the course of the ‘Sitzkrieg’ there was a good deal of contact between General Gort’s British Expeditionary Force and the French, then still led by General Gamelin. The British high command – at the time headed by the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside – was perturbed by what it discovered. Some French units were excellent, others less so. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, later to become Churchill’s Chief of Staff, recalled a march past of a French unit in November 1939: ‘Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, vehicles dirty and complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks … although ordered to give the “eyes left”, hardly a man bothered to do so.’ In the eyes of some of the British commanders, this was less than surprising, given the quality of the leadership of the French. Air Marshal Arthur Barratt, the commander of the RAF in France, thought Gamelin a ‘button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied little grocer’.17
Vividly aware of the threat to morale, when the Germans crossed the Meuse on 15 May 1940, Guisan issued an order in which he observed that if the French had resolved to stop the Wehrmacht, they would have done precisely that. Guisan told his troops that they themselves were never to surrender.
Everywhere, where the order is to hold, it is the duty of conscience of each fighter, even if he depends on himself alone, to fight at his assigned position. The riflemen, if overtaken or surrounded, fight in their position until no more ammunition exists. Then cold steel is next … As long as a man has another cartridge or hand weapons to use, he does not yield.18
Once France had actually fallen, morale in Switzerland became ever more critical. Defeatism was commonplace both in the general population and the army. In these circumstances Guisan decided to stage a rally for the benefit of his officers, their subordinates and – ultimately – the Swiss people. He chose a location of great symbolic significance for the Swiss: the Rütli meadow on the eastern shore of Lake Lucerne. Here, in 1291, tradition placed the foundation of Switzerland on the occasion of the forging of the alliance between the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. On 25 July 1940 there was to be a repeat performance. There the General mustered his Chiefs of Staff and the entire 650-strong officer corps. Grouped in a semicircle facing the silver lake in which were reflected the glories of the surrounding peaks of Mount Pilatus and Mount Rigi, Guisan told his officers, ‘We are at a turning point of our history. The survival of Switzerland is at stake.’19 Excerpts from the speech were printed and broadcast on that day, and it was announced that the Redoubt was to be manned by eight infantry divisions and three mountain brigades.
After the Rütli speech Guisan toured the whole country, becoming just the sort of national hero that politicians deplore: a Nelson, Wellington or a Bonaparte. As Swiss historians remark, the battle had begun between Guisan and the political classes for the Swiss soul. Through the blissfully hot summer of 1940, as the fate of Switzerland hung in the balance, the General became the human embodiment of the resistance spirit, the Widerstandsgeist.
5
Six days after the Rütli rally, on 31 July 1940, Hitler once again gathered his warlords at the Berghof. It was just a fortnight after their last meeting. By this time they were used to the tiresome journey from Berlin: either a flight from the capital’s Tempelhof airfield to Salzburg, or an eight-hour train journey via Munich. Raeder was present once again to report on the developing plans for invading England, with the army leaders – Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel and Jodl – to advise on the land war in all its aspects. Army Commander-in-Chief Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch was earmarked as Churchill’s successor, the man who would take the Prime Minister’s seat in Downing Street, though probably not in the House of Commons.
Invasion was certainly the order of the day, with plans afoot to invade Germany’s new ally, the Soviet Union, as well as England and Switzerland. On Operation Sea Lion, Raeder was pessimistic about the weather prospects for the early autumn, the lack of German shipping – which could restrict the landings to the fairly well-defended coast between Dover and Eastbourne – and the efficacy of the Luftwaffe. In these circumstances he proposed May 1941 as the best time for the adventure. Hitler, mindful of the time this would allow Britain to re-equip Gort’s Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, was in more of a hurry. In the end the conference agreed to aim for 15 September 1940, subject to the efforts of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe and the success of Unternehmen Adlerangriffe. On 1 August Hitler issued Directive No. 17. This required preparations for this invasion to be completed by 15 September 1940, with the invasion itself to be set for a day between 19 and 26 September.
The first of August 1940 – the date of the Berghof meeting – was also the Swiss National Day, the 649th anniversary of the Rütli accord in 1291. It was marked by thousands of beacons set blazing on the country’s Alpine peaks, so sending a message of defiance to would-be invaders. This was timely, for the OKW had been reviewing its plans for invading Switzerland; Captain Otto von Menges had been busy once again. On 12 August 1940 his staff submitted a revised plan to Generaloberst Franz Halder. The Chief of Staff was himself busy overseeing the first-draft plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Menges proposed a simultaneous attack on Switzerland from both Germany and occupied France. Halder thought a feint, much like that carried out in May by the Seventh Army, would be more effective. An infantry attack in the Jura would draw in the Swiss army, and then a second attack in the south would attempt to cut off the army’s line of retreat to the Alps. Halder allotted eleven divisions for the attack, some 150,000 men. Yet when he came to undertake a reconnaissance of the Swiss operation by driving along the French and German sections of the border, he had second thoughts. ‘The Jura frontier offers no favourable base for an attack. Switzerland rises, in successive waves of wood-covered terrain, across the axis of an attack. The crossing points on the river Doubs and the border are few; the Swiss frontier position is strong.’20
Captain von Menges’s plan for the invasion of Switzerland
In any case, Operation Sea Lion was proving a distraction. In the absence of what the Führer himself called ‘complete air superiority’, on 14 September 1940 Raeder, Halder and the Führer had been obliged to meet again – for once in the Berlin Chancellery rather than the Berghof. Hitler conceded, ‘The enemy recovers again and again.’21 Three days later he postponed the invasion. The German Naval War Diary drily records, ‘The enemy Air Force is by no means defeated.’22 Reluctantly, Hitler ordered the dispersal of the shipping gathered in the Channel ports to transport the invading Heeresgruppe A and B (Army Groups A and B). They had been subjected to persistent RAF attacks. On 4 October, Hitler and Mussolini again met at the Brenner Pass. Ciano was again in attendance, the Italian foreign minister noting, ‘There is no longer any talk of landing into the British Isles’. After his humiliation of three months earlier over the fiasco in the Alpes-Maritimes, this put Mussolini into a transport of delight. Ciano commented, ‘Rarely have I seen the Duce in such good humour as after the Brenner Pass today.’23
*
On 19 October 1940, Guisan announced that home defence soldiers aged between forty-two and sixty were being recalled to relieve younger troops who had been on duty since the war began. This was tacit acceptance that, with winter drawing in, the threat of invasion was over for the year. After the breathtaking successes of the early summer, Hitler had met with failure over the Channel and frustration in the Alps. The German historian Joachim Fest commented, ‘In Churchill Hitler found something more than an
antagonist. To a panic-stricken Europe the German dictator had appeared almost like invincible fate. Churchill reduced him to a conquerable power.’24 As many reflected, it was a strange, paradoxical, quixotic turn of events. Hitler had written to Mussolini that ‘in that country at present it is not reason that rules’.
Henri Guisan in Switzerland had taken a similar line, albeit in a lower key. ‘It’s not their war,’ reflected Shirer. ‘But they’re ready to fight to defend their way of life. I asked a fat businessman in my [train] compartment whether he wouldn’t prefer peace at any price … “Not the kind of peace that Hitler offers,” he said. “Or the kind of peace we’ve been having the last five years.”’25 In Zermatt, shortly after the Fall of France, the mountain guide Bernard Biner had been sheltering in the Schönbühl Hut on the old trade route between the Swiss resort and Sion in the Rhône valley. Hearing a tremendous roar, he rushed outside, thinking the chimney was on fire. He saw, low over the Theodule Pass, a lone British bomber heading south towards Milan. ‘I knew then that England would fight back. I was happier than I’d been for weeks.’26
Notes
1. Churchill, Second World War, Volume II.
2. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
3. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
4. www.winstonchurchill.org/
learnspeeches/speeches-of-winstonchurchill/
128-we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches.
5. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
6. Strand Magazine, 1894.
7. Alan Morris Schom, A Survey of Nazi and Pro-Nazi Groups in Switzerland: 1930–1945 (Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1998).
8. Shirer, Berlin Diary.
9. Stephen P. Halbrook, The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2006).
10. ‘Schwerin, Gustloff’s Funeral: Speech of February 12, 1936’. www.hitler.org/speeches/02-12-36.html.
11. Peter Bollier, quoted in Halbrook, Swiss and the Nazis.
12. Kimche.
13. Jean-Jacques Langendorf and Pierre Streit, Le Général Guisan et l’esprit de résistance (Bière: Cabédita, 2010).
14. Kimche.
15. New York Times, 25 July 1999.
16. Halbrook, Target Switzerland.
17. Halbrook, Target Switzerland.
18. Halbrook, Target Switzerland.
19. Kimche.
20. Kimche.
21. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
22. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
23. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
24. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, tr. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).
25. Shirer, Berlin Diary.
26. Cicely Williams, Zermatt Saga.
FOUR
The Alps under the Swastika
All during the last months they [the Nazis] had in the most shameful manner persecuted, killed and imprisoned thousands of Jews from all over the country.
MARIA VON TRAPP
1
By mid-October 1940 it had become clear to Shirer in Berlin that the invasions of both Great Britain and Switzerland had indeed been postponed for the remainder of the year. When the spring snows melted, General Guisan might have to remobilise his army. In the meantime, most of his troops could revert to their normal occupations as – in Hitler’s eyes – herdsmen and cheese-makers with some armaments manufacture and spying thrown in. It was a stay of execution, and Shirer won his bets with the Wehrmacht top brass who had been so confident of flying the swastika in Trafalgar Square before the clocks went back. ‘I shall – or should – receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter.’1 The reprieve, though, had consequences. On 15 October 1940 Shirer noted, ‘This winter the Germans, to show their power to discipline the sturdy, democratic Swiss, are refusing to send Switzerland even the small amount of coal necessary for the Swiss people to heat their homes. The Germans are also allowing very little food into Switzerland, for the same shabby reason. Life in Switzerland this winter will be hard.’2
It was the same throughout the Alps. Six years hence Churchill would remark in his epochal speech in Fulton, Ohio, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ For the present just such a totalitarian pall had fallen on the Alps from Mont Blanc to the Grossglockner, the highest peaks in France to the west and in Austria to the east. Only the Alps in Switzerland remained politically free – but they were scarcely unfettered. On 24 October 1940, Shirer was himself in Switzerland on a visit to Berne. ‘A sad, gloomy trip up from Geneva this afternoon. I gazed heavy-hearted through the window of the train at the Swiss Lake Geneva, the mountains, Mont Blanc, the green hills and the marble palace of the League that perished.’3 Darkness had fallen on the Alps, the ‘visible throne of God’.
*
The shadow had fallen over Switzerland’s neighbouring Alpine republic of Austria two and a half years previously. In the Alpine city of Salzburg overlooked by Hitler’s Berghof, a member of the Austrian gentry recalled:
It was March 11, 1938. After supper we went over to the library to celebrate Agathe’s birthday. Someone turned on the radio, and we heard the voice of Chancellor Schuschnigg say:
‘I am yielding to force. My Austria – God bless you!’ followed by the national anthem.
We didn’t understand, and looked at each other blankly.
The door opened and in came Hans, our butler. He went straight to my husband and, strangely pale, said:
‘Herr Korvettenkapitän, Austria is invaded by Germany, and I want to inform you that I am a member of the [Nazi] Party. I have been for quite some time.’
Austria invaded. But that was impossible … At this moment the silence on the radio was broken by a hard, Prussian-sounding voice, saying: ‘Austria is dead: Long live the Third Reich!’.4
So the breaking news of Anschluss was remembered by Maria von Trapp in the city of Mozart.
As the film The Sound of Music portrays with, for Hollywood, surprising fidelity to fact, the von Trapp family was aghast at this turn of events. At first the singers were in a tiny minority. One reason for the invasion was a referendum on Austria’s independence planned by Chancellor Schuschnigg for 13 March 1938. Fearing a pro-Austrian result, Hitler sent in his troops. But when on 15 March the Führer spoke from the balcony of the Hofburg Palace, the seat of the old Habsburg monarchy in Vienna, he was fêted by around a seventh of the country’s population – perhaps a quarter of a million people; when the plebiscite on Anschluss was held three weeks later on 10 April, 4,453,000 of an electorate of 4,481,000 turned out. Of those, 99.73 per cent supported the dissolution of their nineteen-year-old republic.
There were various mitigating circumstances. Not least amongst these was the absence of any opposition party, or indeed support for Austria’s independence from neighbouring Italy or the mother of democracies, Great Britain. It is also more than doubtful as to whether the vote was ‘free and fair’ – as the Austrian resistance leader Fritz Molden later pointed out in his memoirs.5 Still, 99.73 per cent is 99.73 per cent.
The Nazis – both German and Austrian – then began to put the lamentable affairs of the new Alpine province of the German Reich into order. First came the arrest and imprisonment of those deemed by the new chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart as unsympathetic to the Nazi cause. Around 20,000 were seized on the night after Anschluss. Some of these enemies of the Reich would eventually find their way to Dachau in Bavaria. As this was 300 miles away from Vienna, that very month Heinrich Himmler – in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS – had the idea of establishing something comparable on Austrian soil. Since 1934 the SS had managed the concentration camp system under a formation known – after their skull-and-crossbones insignia – as the ‘death’s head unit’: SS-Totenkopfverbände. A granite quarry at the confluence of the Danube and Enns was identified as a possible site. The quarry could usefully provide the raw materials for the rebuilding of the Reich along the grandiose lines envisaged by
Hitler and his tame architect Albert Speer. The city fathers in Vienna duly endorsed the idea of a camp to accommodate up to 5,000 prisoners. The one proviso was that it would provide cobblestones for the streets of the city of Mahler, Strauss, Wittgenstein and Freud. Work proceeded apace and the site received its first 300 inmates on 8 August 1938. The camp was Mauthausen, which would spawn a series of subcamps all over the Alps of Austria and Bavaria.
Many of their inmates were of course Jews. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had deprived Semites of their citizenship, banned marriage between Jews and other Germans, and forbidden them to practise various professions, so preventing many of them from earning a living. With Anschluss, these laws applied in Austria. Here there was a Jewish population of around 192,000. Shirer recalled their treatment in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of Anschluss:
There was an orgy of sadism. Day after day large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbing Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While they worked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrines and the toilets of the barracks where the S.A. and the S.S. were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen.6
At this stage in its gestation, Nazi policy on the Jewish question was to encourage emigration. The focus of this programme was the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration). This was set up on 22 August 1938 by the notorious architect of the Holocaust, the thirty-two-year-old Adolf Eichmann, suitably located in the former Rothschild Palace in Vienna, home of the Jewish banking dynasty. In Salzburg, 250 miles west of the capital, the matriarch Maria von Trapp remarked of that summer, ‘All during the last months they [the Nazis] had in the most shameful manner persecuted, killed and imprisoned thousands of Jews from all over the country.’7