So why didn't he invade Switzerland?
He had the means and resources to do so. Switzerland sticks out like a blot on the map.
--Michael D. Clarke
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MovieChat Forums > Adolf Hitler Discussion > So why didn't he invade Switzerland?
I don't know about Switzerland, but I did hear about why Sweden was allowed to stay neutral.
You see, the Nazis did initially try to invade Sweden, but the Swedes were very clever about sabotaging them. They outwitted the Nazis by having people ski in white sheets silently into villages at night and mess up the Nazi soldiers' efforts in setting up a beachhead, and the Germans taking away their food did no good because the Swedes can make bread out of tree bark. So the Nazis gave up and left them alone for the rest of the war.
Germans couldn't even handle the Russian winter.
How the hell you expect them to handle THE SWISS ALPS?
If a little bit of snow is too much for them...
I've been to a Swiss dairy farm in foothills. Every farmer had his military rifle. WW2 Concrete bunkers and lookouts along the mountain ridge. No way tanks and troops could travel across them.
shareGermany could have pretty easily crushed Switzerland if it wanted to. There were a few reasons that they didn't though:
1) Swiss neutrality was useful for the Germans as they could use the banks there to keep their valuables safe from bombing, sanctions, etc.
2) Switzerland was surrounded by axis and occupied countries so there wasn't much the Swiss could really do anyway. There wasn't an easy way to funnel spies into Europe via Switzerland, and of course its trade was practically exclusively with Axis countries. I believe Swiss trade is a net negative anyway (meaning it imports more than it exports), so Switzerland would have merely weighed down the Axis economy more than contribute to it.
3) Switzerland detained all crashed pilots and escaped prisoners, so even if Steve McQueen really did get away in his motorcycle, he'd have simply lived out the war in a Swiss prison rather than a German one.
4) The Swiss shot down more American planes than German ones, plus the allies accidentally bombed Swiss cities way more than Germany did (practically not at all). The Germans probably viewed the Swiss as sympathetic to them, if not de facto allies.
5) As stated above, even though the Germans would have rolled the Swiss up, it would have cost them a lot of completely unnecessary casualties.
He was lactose intolerant.
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