‘These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived’

WINSTON CHURCHILL  

1

On 13 July 1940 Hitler was once again entertaining at the Berghof. In addition to the generals whose exploits since the spring had so dazzled the world, he was attended by the head of the Kriegsmarine, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder. It was high summer in Berchtesgadener Land, and the Alps were perhaps at their most enchanting. Though the May flowers were over, the scent of mown hay wafted up from the meadows below the Berghof, there were drinks on the terrace overlooking Berchtesgaden under shady parasols and – beyond – the glories of the Untersberg tomb where Barbarossa dozed, vying for attention with Eva Braun in her summer dirndls. The skylarks sang. For Hitler, too, the world might have seemed at his feet. Poland, Norway, Denmark – now Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France – had fallen to his forces. Russia, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary had come to terms that were largely his own. Of England, Churchill would say of this July tsunami in European history, ‘We were done, almost disarmed, with triumphant Germany and Italy at our throats, with the whole of Europe open to Hitler’s powers.’1 For William Shirer, too, in Berlin, there was a sense of finality: ‘As I recall those summer days, everyone, especially in the Wilhelmstrasse and the Bendlerstrasse, was confident that the war was as good as over.’2 Soon the generals were taking wagers with him on when the swastika would be flying over Trafalgar Square.

Paradoxically, the warlords in their summer uniforms – the heavyweight Göring in pearl grey – at the Berghof found Hitler bemused and frustrated. Contrary to the forces of destiny shaping the new European order, two leaders with a combined age of 132 were defying his wrath and steel by attempting to rally their peoples to resist the onward march of the Reich: Winston Churchill in England and Henri Guisan in Switzerland.

The Führer had assumed that once France fell, England would have no appetite to continue the struggle. On 1 July 1940 he had remarked to the Italian ambassador in Berlin that he ‘could not conceive of anyone in England still seriously believing in victory’.3 Five weeks earlier on 20 May when Guderian’s Panzer spearheads had reached Abbeville on the Channel coast, Hitler had begun drafting a peace treaty with England. It was a labour of love, for the Führer was a great admirer of the British Empire. Daily in the last two weeks of June and in the early days of July he had expected a dove from Whitehall. Instead, all he got was an eagle. Nothing had changed since 4 June, when Churchill had spoken at length to the House of Commons – later to the nation – of the country’s desperate plight. He had summed up by saying,

we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.4

Hitler, second only to Churchill as an orator, doubtless appreciated the technical merits of the speech, the Prime Minister’s flair, chutzpah and showmanship, irrespective of its unpalatable contents. By 11 July, when Grossadmiral Raeder arrived in Berchtesgaden, it was nevertheless beginning to dawn on the Führer that the British Prime Minister meant what he said. The Admiral had been summoned to Obersalzberg to counsel on ferrying the land forces to England’s beaches to do battle. His colleague, Army Chief of Staff Generaloberst Franz Halder, arrived with his senior staff a couple of days later to advise – amongst other things – on the implications of the more equivocal policies of Switzerland. The Swiss people had been much stirred by Churchill’s speech. It had been reported in the republic and was echoed by Guisan himself in various speeches and orders, much to the annoyance of Hitler. Then, on 25 June, had come Federal President Marcel Pilet-Golaz’s speech which preached accommodation, indeed hinted of collaboration. Just what were the Swiss up to?

On these two matters and many others – not least Operation Barbarossa in the east – Hitler’s advisers advised. Raeder believed the invasion of England was neither desirable nor practicable. He thought the British could be made to come to heel by a U-boat blockade of their merchant shipping and by letting loose the Luftwaffe both on their Atlantic convoys and on their industrial heartland. Hitler wavered. It was lamentable that the matter had not been properly considered by OKW beforehand. As to the Swiss, they were a pimple on the face of Europe. Hitler pondered. When the meeting broke up on 13 July 1940 he wrote testily to Mussolini declining the Duce’s considerate proposal of Italian help for the invasion of England. ‘I have made to Britain so many offers of agreement, even of co-operation, and have been treated so shabbily that I am now convinced that any new appeal to reason would meet with a similar rejection. For in that country at present it is not reason that rules.’5 By 16 July the Führer’s mind was made up. On that day he issued Directive No. 16, ‘on the Preparation of a Landing Operation Against England’. He had finally registered Britain’s will to resist and acknowledged Churchill’s 18 June Commons statement of the country’s ‘inflexible resolve to continue the war’. Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), the invasion of England, was put in hand, and with it the requirement for the Luftwaffe to clear the skies of the RAF. The Battle of Britain – for Hermann Göring Operation Eagle (Adlerangriffe) – was at hand. In the time he could spare from building up a collection of the artistic treasures of Europe that he hoped would rival that of the Louvre, the fat man of the German air force would direct the destruction of its British counterpart, the RAF.

On the other matter of the invasion of Switzerland, Hitler remained ambivalent. Would the adherents of Pilet-Golaz or those of General Guisan hold sway? Switzerland was clearly divided. Invasions were a troublesome and uncertain business, greedy of blood and treasure. If the Swiss President triumphed, it might save the Wehrmacht a good deal. He had already rescinded the ban on Nazi newspapers and released interned Luftwaffe aircrew. In the case of both countries, Hitler was mindful that invasion was a seasonal sport. Snow in the Alps and storms in the Channel made winter the closed season.

With that thought, the warlords departed the sunny Berghof and made their way back to Berlin.

2

So to Davos, where lay the seeds of President Pilet-Golaz’s speech of two weeks earlier.

Davos was 230 miles south-west of the Berghof. It was a 5,120-foot resort in the Canton Graubünden in the south-east of Switzerland – right on the Italian and Austrian borders. It had established itself in the 1870s for the ‘Alpine cure’. The resort’s high valley set crosswise against the prevailing winds created a remarkably dry microclimate that proved a prophylactic against, sometimes even a cure for, tuberculosis. Drawn by this reputation, it had been patronised by scores of prominent writers including A. J. A. Symons, Robert Louis Stevenson, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, Erich Kästner and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was Doyle who introduced skis to Davos in 1895, the author prophetically remarking that ‘I am convinced the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the skiing season between March and April.’6 By the twenties his dreams had come true, and Davos had added to the tuberculosis sanatoria in which it abounded the facilities of an international skiing resort. In the early thirties Davos was one of the first resorts to pioneer cable railways – Seilbahnen – for hauling skiers up the slopes of the Jakobshorn, Weissfluhjoch and the Parsenn. Hitherto they had climbed. Less creditably, at much the same time the resort had become the centre of the Nazi Party in Switzerland.

It would have been strange if the Swiss had been entirely deaf to the call of National Socialism. The economic crisis epitomised by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, in Europe by the collapse of the Weimar Republic, reduced Swiss exports over the next five years by two-thirds. In 1936, in England the year of the Jarrow March, in the United States of the second New Deal, there was in Switzerland similarly drastic unemployment – 13.2 per cent. The Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) devalued the franc by 30 per cent and wages plummeted. All this caused unrest. Switzerland, traditionally liberal though she was, could not entirely rise above the tide of belief that parliamentary government had been foisted on central Europe as a result of defeat in the Great War; that the political and social order so clearly absent in – say – Weimar Germany and in the young Austrian republic could only be restored by the single-minded and autocratic state. Post-war Switzerland was very different – much more stable – from her immediate neighbours, fractious places that teetered on the brink of revolution; yet she was not an island. As the largest language group in Switzerland was German, the Swiss could also hardly avoid the story of the rise of Hitler and its implications.

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.

3

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

4

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:

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 six 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’.

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.

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.