Swiss and the Nazis Read online

  After all the excitement, in town a man hangs a poster notifying young men about recruit school. Then a class in Morse code is shown. “We need wireless transmitters; learn the Morse signals; they are essential.” This film has plenty of action, but the theme throughout is the importance of wireless telegraph to communicate threats and to prepare counterattacks. While the German newsreels were filled with the intimidating power of barrages, Swiss films emphasized good communications, precision firing and coordinated tactics.

  Another episode featured Swiss grenadiers—light infantry units like American rangers. The Swiss Army had made great strides in weapons and training since 1940. A map portrays a steep mountain valley where enemy forces must advance through the narrow fire zones; they are subjected to attacks from above; soldiers attempt to use ropes to climb down and cross the river as bullets crackle in the water around them; snipers hidden behind rocks on the mountainside take well-aimed shots; grenades are thrown from above; rubber floats are used to carry men and weapons downstream. These mock battles—with explosions, automatic weapon fire and flamethrowers—have the feel of real battle.79

  The newsreels produced intriguing episodes on Swiss antiaircraft defenses and the Swiss Air Force. It is night, and soldiers on duty hear aircraft, plot their course, and telephone the data to the antiaircraft center, where it is received by one of perhaps twenty uniformed women auxiliaries; the speed and direction of attacking aircraft are plotted on maps, and an air raid alarm sounds in the city; a soldier on watch cries “Alarm! Alarm!” to rows of soldiers sleeping in haylofts; they swarm to antiaircraft guns; gigantic spotlights search the skies; an aircraft is spotted! The observation and aiming instruments appear highly sophisticated. Fire! Shot after shot explodes around the attacking aircraft.80

  Another segment deals with Swiss defenses in the air. Pilots rev their motors while the control tower personnel look on; on the ground, they communicate by voice radio—which was unavailable in the air; the scene shifts to pilot school, where students learn air acrobatics in biplanes; then come Me-109s and a Swiss-made and -designed C-36, distinguished by its two vertical stabilizers with rudders; the fighters practice machine-gun fire at targets in a lake; an alarm sounds; pilots race to their planes while ground personnel plot coordinates; the Swiss fighters pursue and close in on a damaged American bomber, signaling it to land by dipping their wings. After an exchange of signals, the fighters guide the bomber to a safe landing at the military airfield at Dübendorf, where ground crews rush out to assist the damaged aircraft.81

  Features on the Swiss military also depicted the human side. In one, under torchlight, General Guisan addresses assembled troops on the fifth Christmas of the war; a band plays “Silent Night”; the mood is somber; the soldiers are not with their families, yet appear confident. In one scene, soldiers exchange gifts with their helmets on! Viewers would know that the militia army was ready for combat even during a Christmas ceremony.82

  “Open your doors for soldiers when off-duty” is a plea for solidarity with the army at the local level. In a small town in the Jura, where Swiss troops are concentrated in early 1945 across from the battle zone, soldiers throw snowballs and flirt with women. Morale is boosted when they are taken into homes, served bread and wine, and invited to play board games with the children. The snow begins to fall, and the soldiers again stand guard.83

  The War Ends

  The Wochenschau celebrated the end of the war along with the entire population. The capitulation of the Wehrmacht meant the end of a long nightmare. Thousands of Swiss, American, British, and French flags are waved by masses of rejoicing people in the streets. They sing “Heil Dir Helvetia,” which has the same melody as “My Country’ Tis of Thee” and “God Save the Queen.” A bell rings, celebrating the peace. There is a parade before the Parliament with General Guisan and the members of the Federal Council. The grand finale is a beautiful mountain scene with patriotic commentary: the Alpine democracy has survived.84

  Europe remained a chaotic and potentially dangerous place, and active duty had not yet ended. A mid-summer 1945 episode featured a day with General Guisan at Schloss Jegensdorf. After a friendly “bonjour” to the guards, the General must decide the punishment for cases of misconduct. He grants amnesty in a minor case and refuses it for a traitor. After a horse ride through farm and forest, the General hears reports of a crisis at the Italian border and meets with Chief of the General Staff Jakob Huber. After a flashback to the Rütli meeting of 1940 in which the General admonished all of the high officers to resist to the end, the episode shows Guisan observing war maneuvers, with explosions, machine-gun fire, and assaulting troops. When night falls, the General plays cards with officers of the General Staff and then is alone reviewing reports.85

  In August, Japan surrendered, and at last “Der Krieg ist Vorüber”—the war is over. The period of active service officially ended. The Wochenschau covered the jubilant celebration and parade in Bern. It was enormous.86 This was the end of an era—the newsreels thereafter addressed the postwar epoch, and with it the reconstruction of Europe and a return to normalcy.

  The newsreels of the Wochenschau and the Armeefilmdienst were significant ideological weapons that kept hope alive. The ability of the Swiss people to maintain their freedom and independence during World War II may be attributed in no small part to a fierce attitude of defiance against the New Order and confidence in their capacity to survive. It seems incredible that these newsreels of the tough-minded Swiss could be shown for the entire war right in the center of a Europe otherwise occupied by the Axis.

  The newsreels were limited to domestic affairs, particularly economic matters and military demonstrations. Neither political news nor “late-breaking” news items typical of television newscasts of today were included. War news was widely published in newspapers, leading to constant Axis protests of bias because the papers allegedly played up Allied victories and Axis defeats. However, the Wochenschau was funded by the government—which was officially neutral—and did not cover foreign affairs or the results of battles. The populace could keep informed of the progress of the war by watching the films made by both Allies and Axis at the cinemas and, on a daily basis, by tuning in to the BBC and to German radio. Further, names could be named and anything could be said against the Nazis in both written and oral communications within the military and among private civilian groups.

  The Swiss films instilled confidence that the people could and would survive economically and promoted the imperative that the armed Swiss populace would wage total war against any invader. The films were not “neutral” in that they embodied unquestioned normative premises. If Swiss political neutrality and encirclement by the Axis prohibited the naming of names of the only likely aggressor, film viewers hardly needed to ask “guess who.”

  Were the Swiss newsreels truly informative, as suggested by the authorities at the time, or were they mere propaganda? The Nazi version of “propaganda” contained little truthful information and many big lies. The Swiss newsreels contained no falsehoods, but did always encourage resistance.

  PART II

  PREPARING FOR INVASION

  CHAPTER 4

  I WAS A MILITIA SOLDIER THEN

  The reminiscences of Swiss who actually lived through the period of the Third Reich provide a rich source of information on life in those dark days, particularly concerning resistance to the fifth column within Switzer land and the ever-present threat of a German invasion.

  Listening to persons who actually experienced and survived an historical epoch presents a unique opportunity to understand how ordinary people reacted to larger events. Unfortunately, the Independent Commission of Experts, in preparing its recently published 25-volume report, decided not to interview World War II era Swiss citizens about their personal experiences and recollections. Chaired by Professor Jean-François Bergier, the Commission’s final report has been published in English as Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (2002). Many Swi
ss of the war time generation regard the negative picture painted therein as incomplete.

  This chapter is a small effort to allow survivors of that epoch to relate some of their experiences in their own words. While hardly comprehensive, such personal accounts often tell more than sterile documents. Rather than attempting to slice up the topics discussed under formal categories, the following permits the speakers to present the array of attitudes and experiences they found most important to relate.

  Hans Köfer-Richner, a Swiss who was born in 1927 and who went on to author two books on the depression and war years,1 shared his experiences in a 1999 interview. “We lived in the village of Mellingen, not far from the German border. We were a poor family with seven to nine mouths to feed at the table every day. Father was a mechanic and often unemployed. He was too proud to get welfare. Until 1942, I slept on straw in the cellar or the schoolroom, and never in a bed. I served at mass every morning at 6 or 7, and then went to school.”2

  Food was a constant concern for most Swiss families as cross-border trade diminished and strict rationing was imposed. Everyone tried to find ways to supplement rations. Hans was one. “I owned 220 rabbits. Rabbit meat was not rationed, and I supplied it to stores. One store was owned by an Italian named Moneta. At first I didn’t know that Moneta was a fascist. When I told my father I got the contract, he was furious, saying, ‘You’re not going to sell rabbits to a fascist!’ My father stormed off to see him and I was afraid there was going to be a terrible row. But Moneta announced: ‘I stopped being a fascist when Mussolini went with Hitler!’”

  Grown men were pulled away from farm work and factory lines for active duty, and boys were recruited to construct fortifications. “I was in the Ortswehr (Local defense). We built bunkers in 1939—even in rain and mud. We were always exhausted. I helped cook for my brother’s military unit and got leftovers to take home for Mother. General Guisan was like a god. I saw him three times at the Limmat Line when he came through to inspect bunkers.”

  Germans who resided in Switzerland were frequently shunned. “I knew two pro-Nazi Germans about my age. Both left Switzerland—one to fight in the East—and were never heard of again. My friends and I took it for granted that we would be killed, but we always said: ‘at least one German goes first!’”

  This was no idle boast. They trained to do just that. “In 1944, we were at the Limmat Line. This was a major defensive position south of the Rhine, the north side of which was occupied by Germany. Ortswehr members who knew the Limmat River planned to swim across and plant charges to blow up bunkers. I was a good athlete. In one practice run six of us attempted the swim. We all made it and planted dynamite. The regular Swiss soldiers positioned there moved back and we blew up all the practice targets.”

  Hans Köfer grimaced as he turned the subject to the enemies at home. “There were a dozen fifth columnists in town. They planned to set up a prison camp in Tigerfelden [for Swiss]. Their Gauleiter (head of a Nazi administrative unit) was named. In 1944, the Ortswehr commander gave me, a boy of 15, a list of five names, including a German named Disch. The commander ordered: ‘Take two names of the five. If I or my troops give the order, arrest your two and bring them to the commander of the Ortswehr or the battalion.’ I asked, ‘What if they start shooting?’ He replied, ‘You shoot first!’”

  Over a half-century later, Hans Köfer still seemed to relish the idea of a shootout with Nazis. He continued: “There were Nazis in Baden, Aarau, and Ortmarsingen. My father worked in the Luftschutz (auxiliary air defense) in Mellingen and was a member of Swiss intelligence. He kept close tabs on them and sent the information on to Bern.

  “When we heard about German V-1 and V-2 rockets reaching London, we were afraid Zurich and Bern could be the next targets, especially if the Germans started to invade.” The fear of some kind of terrible German super weapon did not abate until the war ended.

  Much Swiss wartime material remained secret until long after the end of the war. “In 1966, just after my father had a heart attack, he told me to go into the attic and find a box of his papers from the war years. The box was one foot high and two feet wide. He told me to read everything in the box and then burn the documents. One document, apparently written by someone in the fifth column, said that, if the Germans came, ‘Joseph Köfer and his son Hans should be killed immediately.’ There was also a list with 12 names. It said, ‘If the Germans come, as many as possible of them [these traitors] must be killed.’” Hans burned the contents of the box, but his education on the war years was not over. He described how, years later, he traveled to Germany and had a conversation with one of the highest-ranking officers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht: “I had moved up in the retail business, and in 1951 I got a letter from a Stuttgart department store offering me a job as department head. I went for an interview. That night I was at a bar, and none other than former Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt was there. We happened to strike up a conversation, which I later recorded in my diary.”

  Gerd von Rundstedt had been the leader of the blitzkrieg against France in 1940. He commanded the forces that made the unexpected attack through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes, while Guderian crossed the Meuse and Rommel drove through France. He then commanded army Group South in Russia. After a brief period falling out of Hitler’s favor, he took command of German armies in the West, presiding over Germany’s last great offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. All together, Rundstedt was quite a person for the young Swiss to run into.

  “That night he told me: ‘I always respected Switzerland. In the spring of 1943, we received an order to prepare for an invasion. We needed three weeks to work up a plan for Hitler. I and my staff recommended against it. We would have lost three to five hundred thousand men in such an attack. We knew that all bridges were mined and that everything would be blown up. It wasn’t worth the price we’d have to pay, and we needed every resource we could spare for Russia. We Germans knew every Swiss has a gun. How old were you when you got your first gun?’

  “I replied: ‘at age 12, when I became a Kadet.’ I had poor eyesight, so my father got me an air rifle, and I practiced every day. Finally I did become a good shot with the military rifle. I could shoot scores of 80 in competitions held by the Swiss Shooting Federation.

  “Von Rundstedt asked: ‘If you were 12 in 1939, would you have fired had we come?’

  “I replied: ‘as clear as water! our slogan was, for every Swiss, two Germans!’

  “The General laughed and said: ‘We were strong. But maybe we would have lost.’”

  This noteworthy encounter is also related in Hans Köfer’s book, where he wrote: “Von Rundstedt emphasized that he and a few of his generals had a very hard time convincing Hitler to abandon his military preparations for an attack on Switzerland. He said that he was convinced of the Swiss army’s willingness to defend its country and added: ‘By the spring of 1943 we were under tremendous pressure on all fronts and could not afford Hitler’s craziness.’”3

  Indeed, from the very beginning of the war the Swiss militia army could be mobilized quickly in the event of a German threat or incursion. Rudi Tschan, a boy at the time, remembers the outbreak of the war in 1939. “My father and five uncles were all called up. The schools closed down because most male teachers had to join their army units. The marching orders came over the radio, and every soldier knew where to go to join his unit. Each man already had his uniform and carried his personal carbine and food for the first two days. Units (companies of 100 to 120 men) assembled rapidly in villages or mustering grounds and picked up their heavy weapons and gear from local arsenals.

  “Except for units assigned to fortifications, there was far too little space in existing barracks to lodge the whole army. Each company was as signed to a village or small town for shelter. It was the responsibility of the company quartermaster to organize lodgings. By law, he could requisition space in hotels, restaurants, or schools where his men could be bivouacked on straw bedding. The dance hall or the school gy
m were the most often used locations. Very rarely did the quartermaster have to refer to the requisition law, because the population did everything they could to support the army. For food as well, the company quartermaster (with rank of sergeant) was on his own. By tradition, the army relied on food available in the area. Very little was centrally provided. The quartermaster would buy from the local butcher, baker and green grocer. This kind of decentralization down to the company level proved to be efficient, and occasionally the odd difficulties could be taken care of without the need for a top-heavy staff.”4 Such mobilizations, however, must have exacerbated local shortages of the two-day-old potato bread which was standard fare for everyone and of foods (such as meat) which were already strictly rationed.

  “In spring 1940, after the debacle in Western Europe, 43,000 French and Polish troops crossed into Switzerland from France, laid down their arms, and were interned in several villages and guarded by the army. They were actually allowed a great deal of freedom and enjoyed good relations with the local population. However, I was surprised to learn how poorly the French army was equipped. Often, a single unit had to make do with several different gun calibers!

  “We were lucky to have weekly comments on the progress of the war over the national radio network by the Swiss commentators—J.R. Von Salis in German and René Payot (of Geneva) in French. Payot was also a beacon of hope to the French, many of whom continued to listen to the Swiss station even after France was totally occupied, despite a Nazi ban. We regularly glued our ears to the radio for the BBC evening broadcast (which the Germans constantly tried to jam) to keep up with news from the war zones.