17. The Nazis Didn’t Invade Switzerland Not Because They Couldn’t, but Because they Didn’t Need to
A common myth about Switzerland in WWII is that the Nazis feared a massive guerrilla war up in the Alps if they invaded. However, there is little reason to assume that such a war would have been waged. Bad as Nazi rule was in Western Europe, the Germans did not treat Western European – unless they were Jews – as atrociously as they did the Eastern European Slavs. Western Europeans thus never felt that their backs were to the wall and that they had nothing to lose. Not to the same extent as did, say, the Soviets or Yugoslavs, who responded with a fierce and widespread partisan resistance that had no equivalent in Western Europe. Despite Hitler’s dislike of the Swiss, he and the Nazis nonetheless saw them as Germans, to be incorporated into the Reich as fellow citizens.
It is thus unlikely that the Swiss would have been treated with the wanton cruelty that triggered widespread resistance in the East. Instead, the Nazis would probably have treated them better than they did other Western Europeans. Fortunately, the order to execute Operation Tannenbaum was never given. While it would have been emotionally gratifying for Hitler to invade, there was no need to do so. The Swiss had no aggressive designs and were surrounded on all sides by Axis territory, there was no security threat of occupation by the Allies to use it as a base for attacking Germany. Switzerland had no resources that were not readily available to the Germans via trade. Also, the Swiss banking system, combined with Swiss neutrality, made the country a convenient center for currency exchange and other international financial transactions that were useful to the Germans.
