Between the Alps and a Hard Place (10 page)

For most of the war, however, the primary job of forces outside the redoubt, other than sacrificing their lives, was to mine and destroy infrastructure, and indeed to protect the destructive devices against German commandos who might try to disable them. Most important of the minings were those of the Gotthard and Simplon tunnels. Once destroyed, these twenty-and twelve-kilometer (respectively) tunnels and their viaducts would take a decade and enormous resources to rebuild. Protecting the multiple dynamite charges in the tunnels was especially difficult since every day between one hundred and two hundred German and Italian trains lawfully traversed them.

To make sure that the trains did not stop near the mined points, Swiss troops had to be inside the tunnels as they passed. (There are amusing accounts of the tunnel troops being sprayed with the effusions of latrines.) Just as important, Swiss troops had to inspect the trains before they entered the tunnels to make sure no men were in them who could overpower the Swiss
guards. At the same time the Swiss made sure that the trains carried no weapons or troops. Indeed, the only Axis troops who ever transited the tunnels did so lying down, having been certified as sick or wounded.

In sum, by the end of the war the new Swiss army would have been able to put up better resistance in the open field. But its leadership had concluded that because no amount of
absolute
improvements could ever erase the Swiss army's
relative
inferiority, the country would forever have to base its military strategy on the assumption that it would have to stand alone, and on taking advantage of its terrain. Guisan wrote: “Our militia army . . . will never be up to successfully confronting the first impetus of a foreign professional army in the open field, unless the terrain on which we rely has been reinforced.”
²¹

Sometimes, superior intelligence operations can make up for other kinds of military inferiority. Swiss intelligence enjoys a mythic reputation, as does the role of intelligence gathered in Switzerland. But while it is as true as it is natural that much information and intrigue flowed through Switzerland because that nation offered sojourn in the middle of Europe to refugees, spies, and diplomats from all sides—and especially because Switzerland was a convenient drain for leaks from Germany—it is by no means true that the Swiss were terribly well informed or that the information and intrigue that flowed through their country played more than a marginal role in the outcome of World War II.

Prior to 1938 the Swiss intelligence service—over and above the units in each division that sent out scouting parties and interrogated prisoners—consisted of two officers. In 1938 the number grew to three and then five. By the outbreak of war
there were ten people, including clerks. At the height of the war Swiss intelligence employed 120 people. By the end of the war the number was down to sixty-six.
²²
The original service provided the army with a very basic cryptologic system. To this were quickly added officers with good connections to foreign sources of facts and rumors. Then came people who kept up order-of-battle information on foreign armies on maps of the world. More specialized officers kept up with reports on the technical features of foreign weapons. Other than a section of officers who kept in contact with the corps of foreign military attachés accredited to Bern—and indeed with the network of Swiss attachés and diplomats abroad—the collection side of Swiss intelligence consisted of five offices, in Basel, Zurich, Schaffhausen, Lucerne, and Lugano, from which officers met their contacts, who were overwhelmingly walk-ins. This sort of passive collection was more effective in Switzerland than elsewhere because foreign intelligence services and their “facts” ceaselessly flowed through the country. Swiss intelligence did not consist of Swiss spies who infiltrated enemy organizations. Indeed, the parts of Swiss intelligence that are most often written about are the semi-official outfits established by individuals that got their information by taking what their anti-Hitler friends in Germany would give them. It is worthwhile to examine the worth of all this for Switzerland and for the Allies, and the lessons that can be drawn.

The first lesson is that if an intelligence service fails to give its government what it needs most, that government would likely be better off without intelligence—regardless of what else intelligence might do. The flood of information about the war's various theaters flowing through the country made Swiss officials perhaps the war's best-informed spectators.
But, insofar as Switzerland was a participant, it really needed the answer to one
question: When and where would Germany attack, if at all?
In this regard, Swiss intelligence twice did its army almost the worst that any intelligence service can—it passed on reports of possible impending attack that turned out to be wrong. In mid-May 1940 it reported German saber-rattling south of the Black Forest. It should have noted that the Germans were making uncharacteristically open moves southward while actually preparing to move northwest. Worse, in March 1943 Swiss intelligence passed on as real an unsubstantiated rumor that Germany was preparing to invade Switzerland. In reality, the German High Command had no such agenda. The ploy led Swiss intelligence chief Roger Masson to foolishly ask his friend SS General Walter Schellenberg about the agenda, thereby confirming that someone in the German High Command had been passing information to the Swiss.

Worst of all, in 1940 Masson gave secret briefings to members of the Federal Council warning that Germany might invade if the Swiss government did not curb the country's anti-Nazi press. Thus he unwittingly lent himself to Germany's subversion of his country.

Nor was Masson the worst mishandler of intelligence in Switzerland. In 1941 Masson sent the government a report from a variety of foreign sources showing that the Germans were reading communications between the Political Department (Foreign Office) in Bern and Swiss diplomatic missions abroad. Instead of being grateful, the head of the Political Department complained that military intelligence was complicating his delicate relationship with Germany!

The second lesson is that when a government fails to establish a serious intelligence service of its own prior to war, it must then rely on whatever arrangements and networks private
citizens may have. Note that America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began as an extension of Colonel William Donovan's private contacts. Since the Swiss had no real service prior to the war, their wartime intelligence was dominated by the private contacts of Hans Hausamann and Max Weibel. Because they were reserve officers, General Guisan simply assigned them to run their own networks in loose coordination with Roger Masson's official intelligence shop. Hausamann's operation, known as the
Büro Ha
, received information from long-standing contacts in Germany, some of whom were high in the government and opposed Hitler. In addition, the
Büro Ha
funneled to Guisan the well-informed reports of Rudolf Roessler, a refugee German journalist who had become a major anti-Nazi political commentator under the name Hermes. Roessler shared with the Swiss some of the apparently timely and valuable information on German plans that he communicated to the Soviet Union, where he was code-named
Lucy
. In sum, both for the sake of Switzerland's own intelligence and for that of the Allies, Swiss authorities had to be quite permissive of foreign intelligence within their borders—with the exception of espionage against Switzerland.

As a businessman who spent much time in Germany, Hausamann had been so shocked by the rise of Hitler that he had turned to journalism to warn his country. He wrote and published a book on the need for defense against Germany and produced movies on the same theme, at one time buying up every projector in the country. A man of the political right, he spent so much effort preaching rearmament to Swiss Socialists that he acquired friends and sympathy on the left. His rightist friends in Germany transmitted to him—by nonelectronic means—information from a variety of high-level contacts,
including one of their number who worked in Hitler's communications office.

But note well: Hausamann's dynamism did not cause information to flow. That cause was high-level, anti-Hitler sentiment in Germany. The
ReichsicherheitHauptamt
(headquarters of Reich security) was aware of this network of conservative high-ranking anti-Hitler officers and dubbed it the “Black Orchestra.” Hausamann called his network into the right-wing anti-Hitler underground “the Viking Line.”

Then in 1942, one of Hausamann's leftist friends put him in contact with Roessler, whose information apparently also came from former military colleagues who had risen in the
Wehrmacht
. So, Hausamann was the recipient of two excellent military networks. Although the political coloration of Roessler's sources was unclear, Roessler himself also transmitted his intelligence through Sandor Rado, a Hungarian Communist living in Switzerland as a cartographer and running an intelligence radio relay service from Lausanne to Moscow. At the beginning of the war, Rado's organization, known as the Dora ring, was the main part of Moscow's intelligence in Western Europe that had not been shut down by the Stalin-Hitler Pact. After mid-1942 Dora was functioning as the last surviving piece of the famed German Communist spy organization, Leopold Trepper's “Red Orchestra.” Thus Switzerland in general and Hausamann in particular were at the crossroads of the two main lines of espionage coming out of Germany.

In addition, Max Weibel was receiving information from the anti-Hitler element of
his
former classmates in Germany's war college, while the
Abwehr's
chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was passing information to the Swiss as well as to the Allies through the German vice consul in Zurich, Hans Gisevius, as well as through a young Polish refugee, Halina Zymanska.
Then, beginning after the great German defeats of 1943, a panoply of German officials, ranging from the plotters who would eventually try to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, to emissaries from Himmler himself, were contacting the Allies in Switzerland.

The German government was aware of an intelligence hemorrhage through Switzerland. Direction-finding radio receivers had established that nightly encrypted traffic was emanating from the Geneva area. Cryptological analysis showed that the messages were from Dora to Moscow, and that the information was important. Germany pushed the Swiss government hard to shut down Dora. But this did not happen until the ring was betrayed from within, leaving the cantonal police no choice.

The relevant question must be: To what extent did Swiss intelligence, and its provision of a permissive environment for intelligence favorable to the Allies, make up for the weaknesses of the Swiss army? Some of the information that went from Roessler through to Moscow about the
Wehrmacht
's plans at Stalingrad and Kursk was of the highest importance, as was a lot of data on German war production. One
Büro Ha
runner would sometimes bring to the British Embassy material from Roessler about German U-boats. Yet none of this made the difference between victory and defeat at Stalingrad, Kursk, the Atlantic, or anywhere else.

Nothing that Switzerland did or allowed in the field of intelligence made up for the fact that it was a tiny country. Hence the answer must be that intelligence by and through Switzerland played more or less the role that one might have expected given the country's geographic position and the circumstances. The pressure of events—rather than anything that Swiss intelligence or America's spymaster in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, did—was what increased the flow of intelligence. After all, the greatest
flow of intelligence out of Germany began after the Battle of Stalingrad, when not only anti-Hitler Germans but Nazis as well became anxious about how to avoid the worst for their country and themselves. One of the timeless lessons regarding the role of intelligence is that information tends to flow to the side that is believed to be winning.

Counterespionage, however, helped the Swiss military cause considerably. We have no way of knowing what percentage of German agents the Swiss managed to catch or what percentage of Switzerland's military secrets Germany was able to get. Given the extent of the German network, Germany must have done very well. Nor is it clear how or to what extent Germany's knowledge of Swiss military preparations would have helped it in case of invasion. But beyond doubt, German intelligence feared Swiss counterespionage. A German officer summed it up this way: “After a certain point the Swiss counterespionage organization was considered as by far the most dangerous. It is in Switzerland that the proportion of agents put out of action was highest. Our painstakingly built networks were constantly disorganized by timely interventions of Swiss counterespionage.”
²³
Over the course of the war the Swiss arrested approximately 1,400 persons for espionage, of whom 328 were sentenced to long prison terms, while 33 were condemned to death for spying for Germany; 15 of these men were executed, including three Swiss officers.

The respect for Switzerland that these executions engendered among Germans was less important than the favorable impression they made on the Swiss population in general and the army in particular. The country felt put upon, robbed, humiliated, frightened by the Germans. Killing spies working for Germany was a small yet concrete way of affirming the country's integrity
and will to independence. The first death sentence was against a sergeant who sold the Germans, among other things, sketches of some minor fortifications along one of the roads leading to the redoubt. Historian Hans Ulrich Jost, in his book
Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses
, argues that the Swiss establishment agreed to the executions “as if to expiate the feeling of guilt that permeated the highest ruling circles.”
^24
25
Certainly some of the businessmen who were making money dealing with the Germans, or some government officials who cowered before Nazis, were more reprehensible and more consequential than petty spies. But the willingness to kill spies signified to these very businessmen and officials that collaboration had better be kept within limits. Above all, if the country was willing to kill its own citizens for any kind of collaboration whatever, it was likely to resist an invasion.