Between the Alps and a Hard Place by Angelo M. Codevilla Page A

pushed the Swiss government hard to shut down Dora. But this did not happen until the ring was betrayed from within, leaving the cantonal police no choice.
    The relevant question must be: To what extent did Swiss intelligence, and its provision of a permissive environment for intelligence favorable to the Allies, make up for the weaknesses of the Swiss army? Some of the information that went from Roessler through to Moscow about the Wehrmacht ’s plans at Stalingrad and Kursk was of the highest importance, as was a lot of data on German war production. One Büro Ha runner would sometimes bring to the British Embassy material from Roessler about German U-boats. Yet none of this made the difference between victory and defeat at Stalingrad, Kursk, the Atlantic, or anywhere else.
    Nothing that Switzerland did or allowed in the field of intelligence made up for the fact that it was a tiny country. Hence the answer must be that intelligence by and through Switzerland played more or less the role that one might have expected given the country’s geographic position and the circumstances. The pressure of events—rather than anything that Swiss intelligence or America’s spymaster in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, did—was what increased the flow of intelligence. After all, the greatest
flow of intelligence out of Germany began after the Battle of Stalingrad, when not only anti-Hitler Germans but Nazis as well became anxious about how to avoid the worst for their country and themselves. One of the timeless lessons regarding the role of intelligence is that information tends to flow to the side that is believed to be winning.
    Counterespionage, however, helped the Swiss military cause considerably. We have no way of knowing what percentage of German agents the Swiss managed to catch or what percentage of Switzerland’s military secrets Germany was able to get. Given the extent of the German network, Germany must have done very well. Nor is it clear how or to what extent Germany’s knowledge of Swiss military preparations would have helped it in case of invasion. But beyond doubt, German intelligence feared Swiss counterespionage. A German officer summed it up this way: “After a certain point the Swiss counterespionage organization was considered as by far the most dangerous. It is in Switzerland that the proportion of agents put out of action was highest. Our painstakingly built networks were constantly disorganized by timely interventions of Swiss counterespionage.” 23 Over the course of the war the Swiss arrested approximately 1,400 persons for espionage, of whom 328 were sentenced to long prison terms, while 33 were condemned to death for spying for Germany; 15 of these men were executed, including three Swiss officers.
    The respect for Switzerland that these executions engendered among Germans was less important than the favorable impression they made on the Swiss population in general and the army in particular. The country felt put upon, robbed, humiliated, frightened by the Germans. Killing spies working for Germany was a small yet concrete way of affirming the country’s integrity
and will to independence. The first death sentence was against a sergeant who sold the Germans, among other things, sketches of some minor fortifications along one of the roads leading to the redoubt. Historian Hans Ulrich Jost, in his book Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses , argues that the Swiss establishment agreed to the executions “as if to expiate the feeling of guilt that permeated the highest ruling circles.” 24 25 Certainly some of the businessmen who were making money dealing with the Germans, or some government officials who cowered before Nazis, were more reprehensible and more consequential than petty spies. But the willingness to kill spies signified to these very businessmen and officials that collaboration had better be kept within limits. Above all, if the country was