23. Fortunately, Operation Tannenbaum Was Never Carried Out
Cutoff up in the mountains, one can only guess how long Swiss soldiers might have been able to offer sustained resistance if the Germans had invaded. Partisan and guerrilla warfare would have been an option. However, that would have required the Swiss to be markedly different from other Western Europeans whose countries were occupied during the war, but who exhibited little willingness to risk the massive reprisals and atrocities the Nazis were willing to inflict on restive conquered subjects. Bad as Nazi rule was, the Germans did not treat Western Europeans 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, to the same extent as did, e.g.; the Soviets or Yugoslavs, who responded with a fierce and widespread partisan resistance that had no equivalent in Western Europe.
It is unlikely that the Germans would have treated the Swiss, whom they viewed as fellow Germans to be incorporated into their Reich as fellow citizens, with anything approaching the severity that triggered widespread resistance in the East. More likely, the Swiss would have received even better treatment than that meted out to other Western Europeans. Fortunately, the order to invade was never given. While it would have been emotionally gratifying for Hitler to invade, there was no immediate necessity: Switzerland had no aggressive designs and was 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 also had no resources that were not readily available to the Germans via trade, and the Swiss banking system, combined with Swiss neutrality, made the country a convenient center for currency exchange and other international financial transactions.
