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

willing to kill its own citizens for any kind of collaboration whatever, it was likely to resist an invasion.
    Indeed, the foremost military question was whether the country as a whole would resist. Hence the army’s most significant battle of the war was precisely against those whose commitment to resist was shaky, as well as against outright subversion.

Subversion and Politics
    The greatest threat to a besieged army is subversion of morale and policy by uncertain high-ranking officers and civilian authorities. 26 This is the kind of treason that none dare call by its name because it so often prospers. Next to it, the subversive activities of foreign agents is small stuff. Not surprisingly, before the defeat of France foreign agents had little luck because Switzerland’s leadership was resolute and its national unity was greater. 26 But in 1940 the danger came from the weakness of domestic leadership. Switzerland’s battle against subversion then became a military campaign for the country’s soul. 27

    The Nazis set about subverting Switzerland as they had subverted Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the rest. They organized a core of semi-professional party toughs who would intimidate ordinary people through threatening marches, street violence, and fiery rallies. At the highest political levels, Nazi leaders worked to convince the Establishment that it was futile to resist. In Switzerland the first part of the plan failed miserably. The second nearly succeeded as a result of Germany’s preponderance in 1940–1942.
    Switzerland’s Nazi Party, which had been active since 1934, was under orders from Berlin to agitate for an Anschluss to unite the German Swiss with the Reich.
    Several things went wrong. First, the Swiss authorities made it impossible for the Nazis to commit the acts of intimidation that had served them so well elsewhere. Second, and most important, very few German Swiss joined the organization; in fact, Nazism was less distasteful to the French-speaking cantons than to the German-speaking ones. Finally, on February 4, 1936, Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of Switzerland’s Nazis, was assassinated, and the Swiss government refused to allow any Swiss citizen to succeed him. 28 A year later, the Swiss government officially made the German Embassy responsible for the party’s actions. Under this scrutiny the party vanished into insignificance. Its members were tracked by the Swiss police, and by 1940 the party had dissolved.
    During the mid-1930s the entire Swiss establishment, including the trade unions, recognized that Nazism discredited the very idea of a multiethnic state, of democracy and economic liberalism, as well as of centuries-old civil liberties—everything that Switzerland stood for. Nevertheless, there were narrow limits to what a liberal government could do to counter massive propaganda from a totalitarian neighbor. Plans for a Swiss
propaganda ministry came to nothing. But the government established a private foundation, Pro Helvetia , to drum up Swiss patriotism. It sponsored movies, speakers, and the successful Zurich National Exposition of 1939. Almost as an afterthought, the organization established a military branch, Army and Hearth. This was to mean nothing until the outbreak of war, and nearly everything thereafter. During the late 1930s, as country after country was falling under the Nazi spell, Switzerland enjoyed an outburst of patriotism. In March 1939 Swiss Economics Minister Hermann Obrecht pledged that, in contrast to other European appeasers, no one from the Swiss government would “go to Berchtesgaden” on pilgrimage to Hitler. His statement was widely applauded. 29
    So, until the fall of France, worries about fifth columns were vastly overblown. On May 14, 1940, when a German invasion seemed imminent, the Federal Council ordered the arrest of every politically active German, plus all prominent Swiss Nazis. It’s a tribute to Swiss