Some private companies and banks did collude with the Nazis, but they did so without government knowledge. Meanwhile, many private Swiss citizens also opened bank accounts for Jews in order to help them protect their money from confiscation by the Nazis. Yes, there were many instances when Jews were turned away, but there were also many instances where they were given sanctuary. Switzerland wasn't a poster child for perfection during World War 2, but they certainly behaved more civilized than most other countries who were killing people by the millions.

"World War II - Swiss secrecy helped persecuted Jews hide money from the Nazis"

swiss banks change (27.4.82, updated 30.1.08)

I haven't seen anyone able to provide credible proof that the Swiss policy for Jewish refugees was more strict than for other races. Therefore, one cannot condemn them for that. Europe was engrossed in war and they had to use every means possible to survive. That includes limiting the number of refugees. Would you want your country to accept 200,000 people during a war if you knew it would drain your resources to the point that they would be invaded and defeated? Again, if the Jews will not stand up and fight for themselves, people should criticize them first instead of condemning other people for not saving them when they won't even fight for their own lives. That's the real issue.

Regardless, many private Swiss citizens did help numerous Jews escape from the Nazis:

"Carl LUTZ (1964)
Gertrud LUTZ, née FRANKHAUSER (1964)
Carl Lutz (1895-1975) deserves very particular mention. As the first Swiss national who was elevated to the rank of Righteous among the Nations in 1964, he – aided by his wife and his helpers – saved about 62,000 Hungarian Jews after the German occupation of March 1944.

Jeanne LAVERGNAT (1998)
Arthur LAVERGNAT (1998)
Arthur and Jeanne Lavergnat let numerous groups of Jewish children and other refugees use their market-gardening farm near the French/Swiss border as a half-way house during their escape."

The list continues at:

The "Righteous among the Nations" of Swiss Nationality. Switzerland Task Force.

Here's another one. Most of the Jews on this list found safety in Switzerland:

"They also arranged the release of children from internment camps, and then smuggled them to safety in Switzerland or Spain. On a local level in France, similar activities were carried out by the Comite rue Amelot, the Jewish Communist "Solidarite" organization in Paris, the Service Andres group in Marseille, and the Groupe Maurice Cachoud in Nice, which specialized in secretly transporting children to refuge in Switzerland. Thanks to these efforts, as many as 12,000-15,000 Jewish children were saved from deportation and almost certain death."

Rest of the info at:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php...uleId=10005519

And how much did the trade and profit from private American business exchanges and the U.S. government contribute to the Nazis being able to murder more people? We'll likely never know... Don't forget, Roosevelt was freely trading with Hitler's Germany up until Pearl Harbor.

Not expensive, but I doubt the extend of the impact. Insurgency might be a nasty thing but a cold winter is nastier. After all the armies did not care too much for the civlians or their safety anyway, and its hard to cut down huge army on its way through your territory by some insurgency. Compared to the extreme over the top defensive structures on French territory it would not have mattered what the Belgians would have done, it would have always been the better choice for Germany.

Sure, nice for them. But thats not the reason the Nazis never invaded. They absolutely had no interest in invading it.

I addressed that already above, the situation is entirely different. The insurgency is causing large substantial problems in creating stability and prosperity in Iraq, or even safety, but the US army does not risk military defeat in their own camps against the insurgents. The armies in WWI did not care much about civlians, and if a few soldiers had to loose their lifes to insurgents, that didn't matter either, as they fell to the thousands at the front anyway.
Oh, we are talking about WWII, not WWI? Well than the insurgents are even less of a point, because with the Blitzkrieg the tanks were already have out of Belgians before much insurgence could have been planned at all...

Probably they could have overrun it, but what for? And thats the major point.

It doesn't matter who knew and who was responsible. The money was there, and after the war it remained to unknown but certainly very substantial amounts there and the entire Switzerland profited from that.

I wouldn't say I'm as historically savvy as many of you, but I thought the Nazi goal was to dominate the entire world eventually. Isn't that so? Wouldn't that simply mean that a neutral, well-defended, banking, mountainous country would be invaded last?

Lol very good point and not to forget the Swiss had those impressive Army knives more than a match for the mighty Whermacht .

__________________
"One must never forget that monetary union, which the two of us were the first to propose more than a decade ago is ultimately a political project. It aims to give a new impulse to the historic movement towards union of the European states. Monetary union is a federative project that needs to be accompanied and followed by other steps." — Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt

You do have good points here, but they still don't refute some key points that remain. The Nazis certainly had no problem with genocide, and brutal genocide at that. But........one fact remains: As an army occupies more space, it becomes less concentrated, and therefore weaker. The Germans were all but officially defeated after the Russian winter. Hitler made a huge strategic blunder there, which I'll go into more below.


Ah yes, the mighty Maginot line... One of the most foolish strategic mistakes in history.

Now this isn't true. Hitler wanted all of Europe. He could have never successfully occupied it all, but he wanted it. And he despised the Swiss:

"Hitler himself denounced the Swiss repeatedly as "despicable and wretched", "misbegotten", "renegades", "repugnant", "a pimple on the face of Europe" which "cannot be allowed to continue". (Stalin couldn't stand them either.)

The Fuehrer despised their purely defensive military philosophy: "An army whose only goal is to secure peace" is craven, he said. "In addition to all the other characteristics of the Swiss that Hitler disliked," Halbrook adds, "he hated them because of their free market capitalism, which he associated with Judaism." The ever-abusive Voelkischer Beobachter resorted to the epithet "Berg-Semiten": mountain Jews."

Link

After receiving threats from Germany, the Swiss government actually invited in several Nazi generals to view their defenses. They told them they would never surrender and were prepared to repel any invasion. The generals reported back to Hitler stating they should "leave the little porcupine alone."

I will agree with that point, BUT that still doesn't change the fact that the Nazis were not a true threat to control all of Europe for decades, or to control the world.

Hitler could have never conquered the world. Why? Because...NO NATION HAS THE ECONOMIC CAPABILITY OF SUSTAINING A WORLD-WIDE OCCUPATION. No population would work under the taxes to fund such a "machine". Also, the superiority of the German army was based on several myths. The facts are that Hitler was being routed on the Eastern front after the beginning on 1942. German factories couldn't meet the demands of the troops with equipment and supplies, as they were running low on almost everything due mainly to the severe Russian winter. Hitler had been so confident of his ability to defeat the Russians he had ordered cutbacks in war production in 1941, this from a supposedly brilliant leader.

The following quotes are from "World War 2, The Rest of the Story" by Richard Maybury: "A little known fact is that the Germans actually had two armies. One was the high tech mechanized force you have seen so often in movies. The aircraft, tanks, and artilleries are impressive, no doubt about it. But this force was small. It was only the tip of the spear. The rest of the spear, the main body of the army, was foot soldiers and horses. Yes, horses. When Hitler's massive invasion force was poised on the Soviet frontier in June 1941, it was at its peak. Lined up ready to strike at Stalin were 3,350 tanks. And 650,000 horses. Hollywood devotes a lot of film to the tanks, but how often have you seen the thousands of horses? Most of the horses were used as substitutes for trucks, but the Germans did have a horse cavalry division that was thrown against the Russians. (In contrast) when the British and Americans invaded Normandy in June 1944, they were fully mechanized, while the German army was still dependent on 1,250,000 horses."

No one has ever truly conquered the world. Taking it and holding it are two different things. Even the Roman Empire didn't control the entire world. The "Pax Romana" was a myth--there was actually no such thing. There were constant insurrections, revolutions, uprisings, assassinations, and all manner of violence. There was never any true lasting peace or freedom. It's an historical illusion. To say that the Romans ruled the world is false and it never really happened that way. That's why I say no one can conquer the world in a complete and lasting way--especially a centralized or socialized economy.


The fact is, many under-manned, under-equipped insurgencies were having success against the Nazis.


Because Hitler despised them and wanted to conquer all of Europe. He wanted all of Europe and he wanted to turn Berlin into Germania - the capital of Europe.

I have to disagree here. Can you produce and present evidence from an unbiased source that "entire Switzerland profited from (this)?"

Here is evidence to the contrary:

The Swiss in the 1940s Were No Worse Than the Rest of Us

By Walter J. Rockler - International Herald Tribune

"The current wave of vilification of Switzerland, most recently abetted by a U.S. government report, is overblown and basically warped. A public image is being created of the Swiss as virtual Nazi collaborators. This is false.

In writing these views, I should note that I was the Nuremberg war crimes trial prosecutor directly responsible for cases against German bankers, and I spent two years at that work. My cases had no Swiss components or angles.

Switzerland has maintained a policy of neutrality and nonalignment in European and world affairs for hundreds of years. That was its official policy also in World War II. I do not know where the sympathies of most Swiss were directed during the war, but the country is the oldest democracy in the world and has a pluralistic population of German, French and Italian background.

Were some Swiss pro-Nazi? Probably. But the United States had its German American Bund, Britain its Cliveden set and Mosleyites, and France the Vichy government."

Rest of article at:

The Swiss in the 1940s Were No Worse Than the Rest of Us - International Herald Tribune

This is from a U.S. government report which is condemning the Swiss:

"The study said the Swiss National Bank (SNB) did not know the source of the gold, but that it also made no attempt to find out if victim gold was being deposited."

My question is "how exactly were they supposed to find this out?" They had no legal authority to investigate the Germans, and no means to send bank investigators into a war zone. All they had to go by was the information provided to them by the depositors.

Again, there are some black spots on their record, they were far from perfect, but to say this is what kept the Nazis at bay is false.

Link

I will end with the words of a non-neutral figure from World War 2, Winston Churchill, who said:

"I put this down for the record," wrote Churchill to Anthony Eden in a December 1944 memo reprinted in Triumph and Tragedy. "Of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction. What does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial advantages we desire or has given too many to the Germans to keep herself alive? She has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defense among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side."

See my above posts. Yes, they did want to dominate the world, but they never could have done so. The "brilliant" Nazis weren't even able to manufacture a single aircraft carrier and they weren't even fully mechanized. Even if the U.S. had never entered the war, they would have eventually collapsed and could have never taken Russia.

Well it would have to be federalized, but given some restrictions, it could economically be done I think, or at least I don't see why not. The real problem would be culture. Culture is the glue that holds nations together and while you may militarily occupy a country, that doesn't really make that country German in the long-run. That's why undermanned and underarmed insurgencies can have any impact. The Germans would have needed to exterminate most of the world and start producing lots of babies. It would have been hell on earth and probably not worth it to the Germans either.

Well, the Romans are overrated (only 5.9 million km^2), though they had a much larger and lasting empire than Germany did (3.6 million km^2 during WWII), heh. Kublai Khan had the largest empire in Medieval times (33.2 million km^2), the Persians under Darius were number 1 in ancient times (7.5 million km^2), and the British did best of all in modern times (36.6 million km^2). My point is that both Germany and Rome fell far shorter than others.

I was stating their goal, not its feasibility, to indicate that the Swiss were not actually immune, just not a priority.

Probably

Well, that might be all true, but it does not change my point that conquering Switzerland was of pretty little to no strategical value for the Germans. They might have made it a task after WWII. But even then I doubt it would have paid of to make a mountain war where little can be gained and only much can be lost in such a bad terrain that can be defended so efficiently. It just did not pay off.

Well, why talking about reigning the world? Lets start with Europe. I think that was principally a possible task. Even though excluding Russia from this task would have helped a lot.

The support units where largely horse based indeed, due to a lack of resources to support a fully motorized Wehrmacht. At the very front all the modern stuff was used. For fighting Partisans it would have been stupid to waste ultra modern units, as you did not need heavy arms to fight them, they were of rather little use in fact against them.

Anyway, I am not sure what you argument is here. The German Reich was without any doubt the militarily most powerful country in Europe. The fact that it could lead a war for about 6 years against such a large number of not small enemy countries, should prove this. Of course much of this power was aquired by sufferage and death of others, but I dont want to defend the German Reich anyway. It was the best thing that happened in the 20th century that it lost this war.

My Grandfather who fought himself on the east Front said to himself during the war, that if there is a god in heave, Germany has to loose this war.... and he fought for the Wehrmacht.

Who claims that the Romans ruled the world? They did however rule their empire. Those ancient empires where of course no monolithic blooks of course. But its quite telling when even 1500 years after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, one can clearly see their heritage in those regions they ruled, at least in Europe.


Of course they could succeed in certain things and of course they could weaken them and be a pain in the ass. But they could not stop a large army in full move.

Also Hitler did not act free from any ration. He might have liked to have seen Switzerland being part of the Reich at some point in the future, but that clearly had time and was no priority at all as Switzerland did pose not much strategical worth at all.