Swiss citizen soldiers and the enemy from within

Defence of democracy and neutrality

In respect of General Henri Guisan (1874-1960) and the revision of the Swiss Constitution in 1874

Honorable mentions and diploma from the Swiss Shooting Festival of 1924, awarded to the Swiss Military Gunclub of Bendel, a hamlet in the Swiss valley Toggenburg. For 100 years, until 1996, every Swiss man in compulsory military service was obliged by law to be a member of a gunclub.
 

In the Middle Ages, the Alpine country of Switzerland couldn't produce enough food for her population and thus exported people: soldiers, expert workers in factories and on large farms. In Germany, farm employees responsible for dairy cow management and milking are still called Schweizer (Swiss). Swiss mercenaries, named Reisläufer, who served in foreign armies in the Middle Ages, had contracts that obliged for them to be sent back to their homeland if the country were attacked. Thus, the Swiss Confederacy had Europe's best army of the time, without having to pay for its maintenance. The Pope's Swiss Garde of elite soldiers is a remnant. The Swiss Confederacy invented neutrality, because it was situated in the middle of Europe and guarded the passage through the Alps. During World War II, Switzerland defended successfully armed neutrality, sovereignity and democracy against totalitarians from across and within its borders, by mobilizing its citizen soldiers and social cohesion.

In former times, foreign armies fighting each other would have constantly marched through from north to south, from east to west, looting and destroying what came along their way. That was the way how soldiers fed and paid for themselves back then. During World War II, after the fall of France in 1940, Switzerland was surrounded by fascist and nationalsocialist armies and remained the only country on the European continent without totalitarianism. Swiss defence forces of citizen soldiers maintained armed and fortified neutrality, domestic peace among those aligned to different political parties. General Henri Guisan was Symbol of Swiss resistence  and preserverance during World War II, whose 150th Birthday is being commemorated in 2024.

Gunclubs, Confederacy and Swiss citizen soldiers

For deterrence and defence against foreign powers that would try to attack and insurgencies from within, men who stayed at home in the old Eidgenossenschaft were required to get military training and continued shooting practice, which was why they had gun clubs, whose members were farmers, craftsmen, merchants and tradesmen, all equal without regard to their social standing. Be they poor or wealthy, they stood together to defend their homeland. In the 19th century, with the building of nations and democracy, after the service in foreign armies was banned for Swiss nationals, the tradition of the gunning clubs was revived. For one hundred years, until 1996 Swiss militia men from the Swiss Defence Army were required to be members of a gunclub. Apart from the military gun clubs, there were workers gun clubs and local ones. As the Chief Commander of the Swiss Defence Forces stated on LinkedIn recently:

"The Swiss Armed Forces are Swiss citizens who perform a special duty for the security of us all. The Swiss Armed Forces defend our country and its people. Ready at all times to help and protect."

The philosophy of the Swiss citizen soldier derives from the customary legal concept of the Eidgenossenschaft, translated to Swiss Confederation, first mentioned around 1350 and meaning complex alliances between regions and cities, based upon an oath between equal members in contrast to the hierarchical feudal system of allegiance that required submission to superior lords and authorities. 

"Swiss confederations as an abstract legal term were alliances between equal members through an oath sworn to God as the highest form of self-commitment."

Scource: Dictionary of Swiss History (HLS), 2012

Men, women and children giving the Swiss oath of self-commitment at the legendary founding place of the Swiss Confederacy Rütli during World War II.

The feudal system was based on the institutionalized Christian belief that political power was given by God. It was hierarchical and often might over right.  The Swiss Confederation on the other hand was more of a system of equal rights, connecting regional and central powers of the Eidgenossenschaft with the great European powers of the time. This type of foreign policy of a state situated between powers, connecting different cultures, political systems and allowing trade between them, was also in place in the Nasrid Emerite of Granada, the last Muslim western European state in southern Spain, before it was conquered by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. The Sultans of the landmark fortress Alhambra in Granada were vassals of the Christian rulers to the North and at the same time connected to Muslim North Africa. Thus, they enforced a tolerant co-existance of Muslims, Jews and Christians. 

The complex alliances of old-time Swiss confederacies between Cantons with peoples of different languages included great European powers. Members were aligned to other members and not to the confederacy as a whole. The case of the Swiss Confederacy has been brought up just recently in an essay in Foreign Affairs, on how such a concept could be realized for an Israeli-Palestine Confederation. This however is a completely different topic and it must be said that in western oriented thought and theory there have been many mistakes made, such as for example the Conderacy of the Southern States during the Civil War (1861-1865). Rivalries between the central powers and subordinate government agencies in confederacies can be and are especially now in Switzerland a cause of much harm to democracy and cohesion in society.

Citizen soldiers and spiritual national defense

During Enlightment and the movements for freedom and democracy in the 18th and 19th century, the ideal of the Swiss Confederacy was revived in literature, intellectual debates and politics. Take as an example the drama William Tell (1804) by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). During World War II Switzerland was not only prepared for military defence against the fascist dictatorships' armies all around her borders, but also had socalled geistige Landesverteidigung (spiritual national defense), a call to swear in the Swiss peoples to the cause of defending Switzerland and her democracy against totalitarianism from the outside and from sympathizers of Nazism, miltarism and totalitarianism in politics and economics within the country. In this sense, the Swiss Defence Force of citizen soldiers defend the people and their livelihoods and are not the type of militia who fight and stand for the mighty or the military as an organization of itself. The concept of spiritual national defense during World War II grounded on the understanding of the totalitarian nature of modern war after World War I and the infiltration of totalitarian ideologies into politics of the nations surrounding Switzerland speaking the same languages as the Swiss: Fascism in Italy, Nationalsocialism in Germany and after 1940 Nazi German occupied France. 

Spiritual national defense was also directed against totalitarianist socialist and communist ideology, which however, was never really present in Switzerland. The workers movement and socialdemocracy were integrated into the Swiss political system from after World War I and a general strike in 1918. During World War II, in 1943, Ernst Nobs (1886-1957) became the first socialdemocrat to take office as Swiss Federal Counciler. Spiritual national defense was about implementing cultural values, taking in diverting political views, rather than propaganda and psychological warfare. Spiritual national defense was also rooted in the Swiss culture of liberalism that founded the modern Swiss nation in 1848, as stated in the preamble of the Swiss Federal Constitution today:

"The Swiss People and the Cantons ... resolved to renew their alliance so as to strengthen liberty, democracy, independence and peace in a spirit of solidarity and openess towards the world, determined to live together with mutual consideration and respect for their diversity, concious of their achievements... and in the knowledge that the strength of a people is measured by the wellbeing of their weakest member."

Swiss Federal Constition, revision adopted by the popular vote April 18th 1999

In 2023 Switzerland commemorated the founding constitution of 1848. This year, in 2024, there are three anniverseries commemorating Swiss resistance and defence of neutrality:

• 150 years since the fundamental revision of the Swiss constitution in 1874.
  
  
• 150th birthday of the legendary General Henri Guisan (1874-1960), who created and led Switzerland's strategic deterrence of Nazi-Germany and fascist Italy during World War II, also keeping allied powers from using Switzerland as a base for combat, thus maintaining armed neutrality according to the Hague Convention of 1907.
  
  
• 125th birtday of Friedrich Traugott Wahlen (1899-1985), agricultural scientist, father of Swiss self-sufficiency in food production during World War II, leader of food security. After that war, Wahlen was Deputy Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (1958-1959) and Swiss Federal Counciler (1959-1965). Wahlen was also a strong proponent of human rights as the base for the world order after World War II and Holocaust, with Switzerland taking a leading role in the Council of Europe, of which now former socialdemocratic Swiss Federal Counciler Alain Berset is the General Secretary.

The Swiss Federal Constitution -Revision in 1874

The thorough overhaul of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1874 was about installing more centralist powers for the federal government concerning the Swiss army and monetary policy, both being very controversial at the time. In order to appease those against such centralization, the constitutional reform of 1874 introduced the optional popular referendums, giving the people the last say in democratic decision-making. The Cantons didn't want to give up sovereignty, so it took some time and political debate for the revision to be passed and further decades for the changes to be implemented into Swiss law. The new military law only came into effect in 1907. Today, the Swiss legal and political system requires more generally formulated constitutional law to be put into subordinate executive and cantonal law. The exception to this rule are the fundamental rights. These have to be followed by all parts of government and authority rule as well as by contractors who take on government tasks. For a long time, Switzerland had a classical liberal economic and political system with low state quota and outscourced government tasks to contractors and paragovernmental organisations. In contrast to most other democracies, the Swiss Federal Constitution can be changed if necessary, either by referendum or reform. The highest Swiss federal court can also make corrections in order to aligne constitutional law with the legal system. The optional referendum was introduced with the revision of the Swiss constitution in 1874, in order to get conservative catholics on board for more centralization. They demanded that the people should have the last say over those in power. At first, militarists tried to build the federal Swiss army after the model of the Prussian army, with discipline from the top down. The Swiss people paid a heavy price because of this during World War I. 

The catastrophies of  World War I

Conscripts mobilized to guard the borders during World War I received no pay, leaving many families without the breadwinner and prone to poverty and hunger. Women, children and the elderly were left at home to work on the family farms whose horses had also often been drafted to military service. Food prices soared. Also, there was a lot of war profiteering from speculation. I once found an old Swiss-German newspaper from 1917 with articles of praise for the armies of the German Kaiserreich, as if neutral Switzerland was waging war on the side of the Germans. In this post, I want to write about history, but it must be mentioned that in what I call my involuntary investigative victim research during the last few years, and being particularily victimized in Switzerland after 2022, some of the bureaucratic correspondence included openly copied legal statements from evictions of farmers at the end of World War I. The speculants dumped their foul debt on them, leaving them in the slavery of forced debt and eviction. All in all, Switzerland was lucky during World War I that none of the warfaring parties had an interest in invading and conquering Switzerland. That was different during World War II. Totalitarian dictatorships at that time hated small, independent countries in general.

Economic dispair for farmers and workers after WWI

It was women and men in dispair who went on general strike of 1918 in Switzerland. Among those protesting peacefully were many women, demanding the price of milk for feeding their children to be lowered. Later on, in the 1930s, it turned out that those who had tried and failed to bring in the Swiss army to shoot at what they propagandized as communists and agitators during the general strike of 1918, were in fact militarists and sympathisers of German nationalsocialism and totalitarian rule in Switzerland. Rudolf Minger (1881-1985), farmer and activist in the cooperative movement of Raiffeisen, founded the political party of farmers in 1917. Before, farmers had been aligned to the ruling liberal party FDP. The new farmers' party was first of the Canton of Bern, then on the national level in 1919.  Minger took the small business owners on board and collaborated with the socialdemocrats representing the workers, uniting constituencies affected by speculation and poverty at the end of World War I. In 1930 Minger became federal counciler. Together with General Henri Guisan and the agricultural scientist Friedrich Traugott Wahlen he was the leading man of resistance during World War II. Resistance was the term used to ward of feinds of society and democracy from the outside and from within, foreign armies and domestic totalitarian insurgents. Minger's party of farmers and small businesses over time became today's Swiss Peoples Party SVP/UDC, often accused of right-wing populism, even though they have had excellent Federal Councilers, many outstanding members with high tenure in academics and business and are now the party with the highest popular vote in recent elections to the Swiss Parliament. General Guisan was from the Canton of Vaud, where classical liberals of the longtime ruling political Swiss Freedom Party (FDP), stood apart from the mainstream liberals and bankers of Zürich's Paradeplatz of that political party and took sides with the farmers' and small business party, maintaining classical liberal values. The Swiss Farmers Union that had been founded in 1897 also came on board and together they brought the Vaudois FDP politician Ernest Chuard (1857-1942) into the Federal Council in 1920. He was an agricultural economist and chemical engineer. That liberal Vaudoise movement took up the slogan of 1860 implemented in the Swiss Constitution of 1874:

"Un droit! Une armée!"

 

One judiciary and one army for the Swiss Confederation of cantons, implying it to be the army of citizen soldiers and officers and not a military that could be sent in by a centralized government against the own peoples. The leading figure of World War II, General Guisan was from the Canton of Vaud and that liberal movement of Swiss patriotism. The current Swiss Federal Counciler  for  Economic Affairs, Education and Research Guy Parmelin, winegrower by profession, is also from the Canton of Vaud and the Swiss People's Party, representing the values alluded to.

Coat of arms of the military club of arms from its 30-year-anniversary in 1909.

The sportsmanship and social cohesion in the gunclubs worked against social dislocation and resurrection, mitigated the danger of war from within, especially during times of economic dispair. 

Switzerland used to be a poor country

Switzerland is a small country whose landbase consists to a large extent of grasslands, often very productive for dairy cows and cattle, a large part being permanent pastures in the Alpine and Jurassic regions.  Therefore, Swiss agriculture and food industry has traditionally produced high quality cheese for export. Arable farming in Switzerland is only economically viable when extraordinarily large subsidies or direct payments for farmers are granted. Such government transfers are also necessary to keep farmers on the land, as there are well-paid job opportunities for the skilled and educated in other economic sectors in Switzerland. Therefore, the main objective of Swiss farm policy has always been to maintain family farms, a strategy partially abandonned after 2012, when Swiss agriculture and food policy was suspended by the Swiss Parliament. The country needs to import food and other things that need to be paid for, requiring her to produce specialized industrial products for export. This system was implemented with high wages, incentivizing the sector of manufacturing to be innovative and specialized niche market leaders in international markets. 

Before industrialization, Switzerland was one of the poorest regions of Europe. The large families of the mountain farmers could hardly feed themselves, even though until the 1960s they mostly produced for self-sufficiency, often only bringing fattened calves, butter and cheese to market from remote Alpine farms and pastures in order to buy items for daily use that they couldn't produce themselves. Therefore many had to leave the country and seek their fortune elsewhere. Sometimes the poor were even sent abroad by local authorities, as was explained at a tourist tour of the Alpine village of Elm in the Canton of Glarus. In that mountain town, a slate quarry collapsed in 1881, leaving many families without the breadwinner and without work and wages. There were not enough funds to fix the quarry and care for so many people without the means to support themselves, so the town council sent out a scout to claim land in the United States. Nothing was ever heard of him. The ones picked out to leave, had their passage paid for, but had to go into an uncertain future in a foreign country. 

Swiss nationals from abroad value their Swiss heritage

In the 1990s when I was taking my coffee in the hotel restaurant close to my home, there was a bus load of Americans waiting in the hotel lobby to start on a trip up into the mountains to visit an old farmhouse where their ancestor had lived before emigrating to the US during the crisises of the pre-industrialization outscourced weaving and embroidery industries in the late 19th to early 20th century in my region of Toggenburg. Those American tourists had name tags with all the americanized last names of Giezendanner., a widespread surname in the region of Toggenburg. The local newspaper I worked for as a journalist had subscribers from all over the world, whose ancestors had emigrated long ago. Their descendants still wanted to know what was going on in their original homeland, maybe also, because Swiss citizenship had been passed on to them and they wanted to get information on the political issues they voted on. Swiss citizens who settle in other countries and get naturalized there, can keep their Swiss citizenship and pass it on to their children. The foreign Swiss, the Auslandsschweizer are an important group of voters in Switzerland. They can apply for retirement payments from Swiss social service AHV and come back to Switzerland and receive social assistance, or get taken care of in old age in a public senior residency. 

Foreign Swiss stay in touch

Once, when I wasn't at home, my husband said there was a family standing on the other side of the road, looking at our farmhouse. He went up to them and started a conversation. They said that they had done research to find out about their ancestors who had emigrated from Europe and had found out that one of them had lived in our old house. My husband said, it was so bad that I hadn't been there, because his English wasn't good enough to explain to the American family that another descendent of their Swiss ancestor, living in the neighboring village, still held a very small mortage on our farm and refused to have it paid back, because he wanted to keep it as a piece of remembrance of the same ancestors of the Americans now travelling to find out about their family heritage. This type of story is why I like living in old houses that haven't been renovated fully to meet modern design standards, where you can imagine and find out about the people who lived there even centuries ago, eating in the same kitchen, going up to the same bedroom at night. Little holes in the ceiling of my workroom show that there used to be an embroidering machine there. So I can imagine childrens' small hands threading the needles, women and men sitting at the machine. My house also has a cellar with narrow windows and a clay soil basement for weaving of flax, which was the cottage industry of earlier times before the embroidery. Newspapers plastered to the walls in the upper story that were subscribed to by a Dr. Wendelin Lufi. I don't know if this Dr. Lufi was a guest, a boarder or someone from the familiy. My farmhouse has an additional story, compared to other traditional Toggenburg farmhouses. Apart from this also being a reason that my farmhouse attracts greedy speculants, as Swiss law allows for rebuilding according to number and size of rooms, this upper story is a recycled other house, attached to the existing smaller house in 1918, when my farm changed ownership. People were thrifty and inventive, what was no longer needed for one purpose, was used for something else, even if it were a house. 

Maybe even Dr. Lufi, whose newspapers were glued to the walls in my upper story, was a returned emigrant enjoying Swiss pension and coziness as a boarder or family member. After World War II, Western Germany didn't accept dual citizenship, until Minister Otto Schilly changed the law in the 1990s. Communist Eastern Germany did. A man on a German TV show demanded more say of the people, referendums in the German political system. He said that he was Auslandsschweizer and even during the Communist dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic, when the voting papers from Switzerland had arrived by mail, the whole family would sit down at the dinner table. Together they would open the envelope with the voting papers sent by the Swiss government. They would read all the information on the election or referendum and discuss all political positions concerning the voting. Then the family would decide on how the father should vote. The majority vote of Switzerland's foreign citizens is usually for socialdemokratic positions and politicians.

Due to this specialty in the Swiss political system, there is a large community of Swiss citizens outside of Switzerland. During bad times, such as in World War II, the well integrated foreign Swiss dual citizens could be relied on by Swiss leaders and population, to support Swiss interests. I suspect the Oerlikon Bührle Becker Canons exported to Nazi-Germany that were situated south of Munich were operated and maintained by dual Swiss citizens. According to a TV documentation they shot at Allied bombers if they headed towards Switzerland instead of flying back to their Allied airbases. In the exposition on Nationalsocialism in Munich of the 1990s in the Munich Stadtmuseum that I visited often at the time, there was a Gestapo paper on an incident in a Munich manufacturing company. A worker named Mettler had been spied on and denounced for telling his co-workers to be disobedient to Nazi-Laws. The paper by the Nazi secret police Gestapo remarked that the case against him was to be dropped because he was a Swiss citizen. 

Drills at night by the Swiss anti-aircraft defense during World War II.

In order to complete the story of Swiss emigration, it needs to be said that in the early times, it was not only the elite version of the mercenary, the Reisläufer, mentioned in the beginning of this article, but there were also crude men from the mountains that joined foreign armies for the fun of looting and killing and many were recruited into foreign military service not of their own free will.

The Poor Man of the Toggenburg

Poor young Swiss men, who had no means of finding work to support themselves, whose families were often indebted, were spirited away by racketeers and recruiters from foreign military powers, such as the diarist and writer of social history to become known as the Poor Man of the Tockenburg, Ulrich Bräker (1735-1798), from my Swiss home region.

Ulrich Bräker (1793), The Poor Man of the Toggenburg in the Toggenburg Museum in Lichtensteig, Swiss Canton of St. Gallen.

Ulrich Bräker was pressured into foreign military service by a recruiter of the Prussian Army that was at that time fighting the Seven Years' War (1756- 1798), a global conflict involving European great powers of the time. Bräker succeeded to desert from the Prussian Army in the year of the Battle of Lobositz 1756. He returned home, married Salome Ambühl, from a better-off family and tried trading cotton, but without success. Since he had been allowed to go to school during winter and thus had learned to read and write during childhood, he documented his life experiences in diaries. After little success as a businessman, Bräker became a self-taught hobbyist of philosophy and fine arts, preaching morality, commenting on Shakespeare, while never really being accepted by the elites of his times. 

Symbol of exclusion and extortion

Bräker's most famous work The Poor Man of the Tockenburg (1785), is still being used as a symbol of diminishing educated, normal middle-class people like me into forced poverty by extortion. It was probably not only the fault of Bräker, his lack of business skills, but also others, who hindered his success as a businessman in order to use him, as his father for passing on their own debt from illicit and noneconomical business transactions, what is now against the law:

"You get nothing."

For a long time, I didn't take such remarks seriously. I grew up in a liberal, educated family in the liberal postwar society. The pages of an old copy from a library in Zürich are now glued to a shop window in a building that is being renovated.

Pages of Bräker's The Poor Man of the Toggenburg glued to the shopwindow of a building under construction.

Of course, those book pages could also have been glued to the shop window because the building being renovated also houses the Toggenburg Museum of Lichtensteig that has the portrait of the author. Ulrich Bräker.

Front view of the building where a former furniture store is being renovated. It also houses the Toggenburger Museum that documents local history, including the portrait of the diarist, writer and self-trained philosopher Ulrich Bräker.

The house where Ulrich Bräker, grew up in the remote landscape of harsh climate Dreyschlatt, belonging to the town of Lichtensteig in the region of the Toggenburg, Canton St. Gallen. 

The father of The Poor Man of the Tockenburg, Johann Bräker was a notoriously indebted farmer and nitrous boiler, who scrubbed walls and tore out parts of barns and old toilets saturated with nitrate, of which the liquid solution was boiled down for making blackpowder. This was not only a gruesom type of craftsmanship, but also stigmatized and often in conflict with local law and farmers, as the salpetremen were commissioned by superior feudal authorities. At the age of 19, his son Ulrich Bräker, the later diary writer, also was forced into the profession of salpetreman. He probably didn't have to tear out floors and parts of walls from farmhouses or barns, as other salpetremen did at the time, because there were many abandoned old farm buildings around in the Toggenburg then. Landowners and farmers in the Toggenburg of the 18th century often became impoverished and lost their holdings, according to the old records of the Ortsbürgergemeinde Wattwil that I once got to read when working as a local journalist.

Bräker comes home still wearing the uniform of the Prussian army. His brothers and sisters don't recognize him, are afraid. One of his older brothers grabs a hayfork for defence. 

The valley Dreischlatt, where Bräker spent his childhood, is a northern, narrow pathway to higher mountain pastures where there is hardly any sunshine. I did organic farm inspection there in 2000, when there was an eldery couple living in the Bräker home during Spring, Winter and Autumn. In Summer, they herded cattle in the higher located Alpine pasture owned then by the local community council Ortsbürgergemeinde of the next larger town of Wattwil. 

Ruins and large farm buildings

In Switzerland the traditional local communities were divided between the political council, the educational council and the socalled local citizens community Ortsbürgergemeinde. When I drove up the road in order to take the picture of the Bräkerhaus, I drove past the ruins of buildings, one probably a barn, but the other a former home or farmhouse and three large, modern farm buildings. In this area of minor agricultural opportunities with long winters and sparse sunlight, there used to be heifers grazing, smallholdings of farmer-factory workers and simple holiday homes belonging to families whose forebearers had generations ago sought their furtunes in the metropolitan areas of Switzerland.

Ruins of a house in the surroundings of my Swiss home and probably what my two properties in Germany and Switzerland are going to look like, if I reach very old age. 

Modern barn in the same area that is not very favourable for intensive agriculture, most likely financed with debt, with the farmers passing on their direct payments to undisclosed recepients. 

I passed three such barns driving up the short way to the Bräkerhaus. The elderly woman who lived in the Bräker home some twenty years ago, told me that without a greenhouse, she could hardly even grow beans in summer because of the harsh climate and environment. 

Direct payments in Swiss farm policy

In Switzerland direct payments are granted to farmers for maintaining agriculture, safeguarding the environment, caretaking biodiversity such as by tending to hedges and fruit trees, keeping landscapes open, implementing animal welfare measures, mowing steep slopes. Direct payments are the principle instrument of Swiss farm policy since the 1990s and are paid out by the Swiss federal government to farmers meeting the requirements, with the cantonal agriculture departments as intermediaries. All requirements for receiving such government income transfers are coded in the Swiss constitution and agricultural law without any possible misinterpretation. Switzerland is a free market country, so farmers can spend their direct payments according to their own decisions and in many cases it's okay to use them for investment in modern buildings and machinery. However, investment bankers and other money changers have taken to sucking up direct payments and driving smallholders out of existence by invented forced debt, putting the sensitive ecology of Alpine landscapes and social cohesion at risk, apart from  discriminated expropriation and wrecking of life being an atrocious breach of law and cause of great suffering.

In Bräker's year of death, 1798 revolutionary France invaded Switzerland,  when there were already battles going on between more centralized government and sovereignity of the Cantons, emancipation of submissioned areas (Untertanengebiete). The conflict within, for more or less centralization was also between the rights and livlihoods of the peoples against the powers of elites, be they political or economic. This diverse battle determines the history and political landscape of Swiss neutrality, the political system of Confederacy and the army of citizen soldiers. 

Military gunclubs and citizen army for social cohesion

When I first saw the honorable mentions of the military gunclub on the walls of the auditorium belonging to the restaurant on the mountain side, I was impressed by the paper flowers. The pretty arrangements reminded me of the Munich Bürgerwehr in the aftermath of World War I, when unmoral soldiers and their commanders went after their own German citizens, because the militarists and soldiers of that terrible first modern war had been told by undemocratic elites that Germany hadn't really lost the war, but had been betrayed by the working class and labour-movement. That ideology of militarists of the time was called the stab in the back legend (Dolchstosslegende). In modern war, the situation when one of the battling armies has suffered military defeat and doesn't surrender, is a very difficult one, especially, when the war is about ideology or geopolitics. Not only is there continued suffering and death on both sides, but the losing war party can be inclined to turn against its own people, as was the case of Nazi Germany and Japan towards the end of World War II. The soldiers of the winning war party can also turn to immoral crimes of war, because they take revenge on their fallen comrades, if the army that lost the military cause doesn't surrender. In the historical context of World War II, it should be remembered that after surrendering, the loosing war parties of Germany and Japan gained post war democracy, economic and social prosperity never before seen, even though both had  committed unmentionable war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II, which they had started. 

In Germany after World War I, besides the citizen's militia Bürgerwehr there were also right-wing fascist Freikorps. The citizens militias were often called in by the socialdemocrat government and consisted of veterans, men with military training and qualifications in leadership, officers, who stood in the way of those maroding hords of the disorganized, disolving army of the Kaiserreich, persuaded them to give in their weapons and go home. In my house in Munich, there was a long list of guns my grandfather who was a member of the Munich Bürgerwehr and his men had collected and handed in to the authorities. From the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, the dispute and fighting was from within, between militarists, undemocratic elite, dishonest looting and speculation in the financial sector and the proponents of democracy, prosperity and peace. It was a battle of ideas and ideologies, which today is called societal divide. In Switzerland during World War II there were also such defenders of the citizens and peace against insurgents and invaders, consisting of men who were not conscripted to the citizen's army, either because they were too old or in civil positions needed. They were called Ortswehr.

Territorial defense forces Ortswehr giving oath in Zürich during World War II, on July 4, 1940.

Preparing for defense

In the German Weimar Republic the citizen militias turned into veteran clubs for the defense of democracy. Some were prepared for armed resistance to totalitarian powers. Most, including the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold engaged in political dispute, but were organized in a military way in order to give structure to the lives of the many veterans of World War I whose reintegration into civilian life and society was still on the hold. The camps of the New Deal in the United States (US) for work  paid for by the government for the unemployed men during the Great Depression in the 1930s who built lodges and campgrounds in national and state parks was also organized in a military way, with discipline and hierarchy. For people living now, after decades of prosperity, it must be said, that  times were very hard in the first half of the 20th century. There was poverty, violence in the streets between political opponents, speculation and racketeering, so that even middle class families lost everything they had, breadwinners committed suicide for loss of job or business, people dying in the streets of hunger because of hyperinflation.  

In Switzerland before and during World War I, the ideologies of free market trade and liberalism had switched Swiss agriculture from more or less self-suffiency to large-scale dairy for cheese production for export. The grain required for the bread and animal feed was imported at a lower price than the cost of producing wheat in Switzerland. The traditional region for import to Switzerland was Ukraine, where there was civil war towards the end of World War I. The traditional black soil areas that had fed Europe's cities for generations, were no longer properly managed and thus only very little could be harvested, which was not even enough to feed the populations in former Tsarist Russia. When World War II came around however, Switzerland was prepared. With the socalled battle of cultivation, Swiss agriculture was restructured to maximum food production for self-sufficiency. On top of the mobilization of well-trained citizen-militia, there was moral resistance, called Geistige Landesverteidigung, swearing in all parts of Swiss society against sympathy with Nazi-Germany and fascist ideology from within. In 1939 Henri Guisan was elected general by the Swiss Parliament, receiving more votes than his militarist opponent in that election, Ulrich Wille junior (1877-1959), the son of the General of World War I, Ulrich Wille (1848-1925).

Commemorating General Guian, Swiss leader in Word War II

In Switzerland, the rank of general is only used during times of war or other national emergencies. The military commander of World War II, General Guisan was a gentleman farmer from the French speaking part of Switzerland who was also fluent in German and understood the cultures and traditions of the populations of Switzerland speaking French, Swiss-German, Italian and Romansh, the language derived from Latin of the Alpine Canton of Grisons. Guisan studied agriculture in Germany, at the University of Hohenheim near Stuttgart. He belonged to the already mentioned classical liberal movement of the Canton of Vaud and was against the militarism of General Wille before and during World War I. Guisan was elected General by the Swiss Parlament in 1939.

General Guisan (1874 - 1960), Commander of the Swiss Armed Forces during World War II on the slide during the conference commemorating his 150th birthday in June 2024.

Guisan was known simply as Der General. At the commemorative festivities this year, his grandson explained with an anectode the position and doings of Général Guisan: A schoolteacher had heard that there was a maneuver  going on in a forest near the village of her school and that the General would be there. She wrote him a letter asking him to come for a short visit to the school. Her argument was:

"The little boys in the schoolclass I teach, will be the future soldiers defending Switzerland. Maybe you could find the time to visit our school so that you could be a model for them and they will aspire to become good Swiss soldiers from an early age on."

 

The people in the village where the school was thought that the woman was crazy to write such a letter to the Commander in Chief of the Swiss Army in the middle of such a perilous war. It wasn't said if she had just been a simple schoolteacher who didn't heed conventional submission to authority, or if she had been informed of the personal values and attitudes of the General for which he had been picked for the job of Commander in Chief of the Swiss Army during such difficult times. 

The General from the people

A few days later, towards the end of recess, when the children were going back into their classrooms, one of the little boys first glanced down the road leading to the school, then stormed into the classroom and yelled:

"The General, the General! He is arriving!"

That type of story had been told to him over and over again by contempory witnesses of World War II in his early youth, said the grandson of Général Guisan, now a very old man, at the festivities commemorating the 150th birthday of the Général. The General wore a simple uniform of the citizen soldier and a hat with a wreath with leaves and berries, generally considered to be a laurel wreath for victory. It could however, also symbolize the branches of an olive tree for peace. Victory for peace in order to stop the war going on on the other side of the Swiss border, but also to avoid war within the society of the neutral country fighting for its sovereignty when surrounded by Nazi German and its fascist allies Italy and the collaborating Vichy regime of German occupied France, while at the same time using diplomacy and military deterrence against allied powers who would have liked to use the air bases and land corridors in the middle of Europe when Switzerland was the only non-totalitarian country in continental Europe. 

Military hat of Général Guisan with wreath in the Swiss Army Museum

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All three men who stood out in overcoming World War II, Rudolf Minger, Henri Guisan and Friedrich Traugott Wahlen had a background in agriculture. The economics of agriculture, efficiency and food security were another important aspect of Swiss persistance during World War II. Swiss law for agriculture, property rights and land use up to today includes a special legal framework for times of disturbed supply.

Commemoration festivities for national defense and food security in WWII

The festivities in June of 2024 in Appenberg, Canton Bern, also commemorated the 125th birthday of another great man of resistance and for food security in general: Friedrich Traugott Wahlen (1899-1985), scientist in agriculture, designer of the Anbauwerk, the restructuring of Swiss agriculture production during World War II for maximum self-sufficiency. Originally an internationally recognized scientist, Wahlen later became politician, Swiss Federal Council and Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO. After talks by the grandson of General Guisan and former Swiss Federal Counciler Adolf Ogi commemorating the two great men in the morning, there was a discussion with young scientists and politicians on the question of food-security, environmental issues today, such as climate change mitigation and if and how to augment production change in Swiss agriculture for more self-suffiency in order to have to import less foodstuffs into Switzerland and at the same time lower the environmental impact. Imports of agricultural produce into Switzerland today  are often produced in countries with lower environmental and labour standards than are mandatory in Swiss agriculture. However, it appears that younger people in Switzerland can't identify themselves with General Guisan and the resistence against fascism and Nationalsocialism, but in fact even have more understanding for the totalitarian insurgents of former times.

The audience to this conference in Appenberg BE consisted almost completely of elderly men and women, who in their youth had met with contemporary witnesses, had seen the portrait of General Guisan hanging in their parents and grandparents homes, experienced the Swiss traditions for community of the people guarding Swiss Alpine landscapes and sovereignty with the philosophy of General Guisan and the Swiss Armed Forces of citizen soldiers. At the commemoration of General Guisan's 150th birthday on the Gotthard with its forts of military resistance, deterrence and defense against expected invasions of German nationalsocialist and Italien fascist armies during World War II, there were many young people. Swiss soldiers in uniforms stood by, foreign tourists took a break in their holiday travels at the top of the Gotthard passage for a tour of the legendary Swiss Alpine Fortress, symbol of resistance and fortified neutrality, the socalled reduit, a strategy implemented by General Guisan, calling on the Swiss military to retreat into the mountains. 

Swiss fortified and armed neutrality in World War II - symbol of resistance

The tunnels inside the Alpine mountaintops at the Gotthard and in the Swiss Rhine Valley were started in 1940, when after the fall of France, Switzerland was entirely surrounded by the troops of fascist and nationalsocialist armies. Before then, Switzerland had expected the French army to rush to its aid in case of an attack by Nazi-Germany or Italy. By 1943, the fortifications in the mountains were armed and ready to shoot. The tunnels, barracks and shooting racks were finished in 1945 and remained in use by the Swiss army and top secret until 1998. During this summer, part of the fortifications underneath the mountain top overlooking the Gotthard passage were open to the public with expositions about General Guisan and the Swiss strategy of deterrence, armed and fortified neutrality of Switzerland during World War II. As the framework of world geopolitics has changed and there are new threats to Swiss security, there should be more awareness and remembrence of Swiss resistance during World War II. Just recently, there were pictures in the newspapers of the current Chief Commander of the Swiss Defence forces wearing uniform and hat of General Guisan.

Looking through an embrasure for a maschine gun from the inside of the Gotthard fortifications.

Military installments built into the rocks of the Alpine fortress.

Tunnel on the inside, leading to an escalator that today brings tourists to have a look at the inside of the Alpine fortress on the Gotthard.

The fortifications  Gotthard towards fascist Italy and those in Sargans close to the Austrian-German border are symbols of fortified military resistance of a small neutral country against greater powers that are at war with each other. General Guisan said to his officers in 1940:

"The Federal Council has assigned our army the task of protecting our independence that has lasted for hundreds of years. This independence has always been respected by our neighbors and we will make ourselves be respected to the very end. . . We can now be attacked from all sides and the army must adapt itself to this new situation and take a stand where she can defend efficiently on all battle lines. "

General Henri Guisan 1940

Guisan was clearly the man for resistance, democracy and wellbeing for all, whome Parliament elected instead of his military counterpart Ulrich Wille, the man for war econonomics, militarist oppression, totalitarianism. Resistance was resisting great powers, not only defined by geopolitics and military strength, but also by economic actors, politicians, bankers, businessmen and mighty corporate trusts from other countries and from within. 

Totalitarian economics

Democracies and and judiciaries were not up to protecting the people from what we now consider to be fraud and corruption. Totalitarian economics impoverishes people and groups of people first, then makes them superfluous, a lesson learned from World War II and the Holocaust. Totalitarian economics is fueled by war speculation, but also causes continous wars for war profiteering. Measures against totalitarianism are implementing rule of law (Friedrich August von Hayek, 1944) and what was called spiritual defense in Switzerland during World War II. Guisan faced opposition even from within military circles and others in higher or lower positions. Some were defeatists who saw Switzerland already beaten by the mighty German army. Others had sympathies with fascism and German nationalsocialism. And there were traitors who saw ways of making profit. Two very young men were caught passing on plans and maps of the Gotthard fortress to the Germans during its construction, sentenced to death and executed. They were interns in the office of the construction site and had permission to enter into classified areas of construction of the Alpine Fortress, even though that was not necessary for the work they had been assigned to do. In a film shown at the exposition, Guisan is shown saying:

"I feel nothing for traitors."

The two young men, however were most likely intrigued into their wrong-doings by more powerful older sympathizers of Nazism, militarists and Swiss fascists from the Front movement. These home grown fascists are now considered to have been not very numerous or successful, as they were politically divided and not very much liked by the German Nazis.

Swiss newspaper illustration from World War II depicting Swiss Nazi sympathizers as pathological cowards, connected to organized crime and fraud.

The enemy from within

The enemies from within were from the right wing extremist National Front political parties, war profiteers and Nazi collaborators and sympathizers, dispisers of democracy, but also the unsatisfied (Zukurzgekommene), antisemites and others who supported exclusion and discrimination, who fall for making a gain with someone else having the loss. One of the characteristics of the extreme right is that they are well financed and feed on times of uncertainty and social disruption, which they in turn augment in uneducated people, by use  of terror, force and propaganda. The latter is often strewing rumours, defamation, libel and fake news of all sorts. They can to come to power very quickly, often by pushing out those who stand for honesty, democracy and free will. Friedrich Traugott Wahlen said in 1975:

" After three decades of cotinuous growth and getting richer, while at the same time constantly becoming dissatisfied, the question arises, if we could meet our obligations now, if we were in the same situation as in 1940."

Wahlen mentioned uncertainty in the political world order, which was the 1970s energy crisis and economic stagnation. He also noted that there were still no models in science that could predict the behavoir of humans and their interactions. Economics is about the complex relationships between people, them buying and selling to each other, their behavior that is not always rational or based on generally recognized knowledge. The Chief Commander of the Swiss Defence Forces of today said that he faced the same situation as General Guisan in 1940, with an army not well exquipped, while new threats of cybercriminality and hybrid war loom. Guisan solved the problem by developing strategies and actions for resistance. He ordered the fortress on the Gotthard passage to be built and modernized the Swiss air force. German Messerschmidt fighter planes were ordered and delivered in 1940. The Swiss also had license production for French Morane planes that were somewhat funny looking, but probably served their purpose. While Gemeral Guisan was a General of the people, he was very relentless when it came to secrecy in the military. 

 

French Saultier airplane manufactured in license by Switzerland, nick-named the flying potato.

Before the fall of France in 1944, after which the Swiss soldiers came out of reduit in the Alps and back to the borders, these planes were top secret, because in case of an attack by Italy and Germany, the Messerschmidts would have dashed out of hiding from inside the mountains to attack the invading armies before they had reached the Swiss border, while bombing them in the south with special canons commissioned in neutral Sweden that fired over the Alpine mountain tops from the alpine fortress into the Italian Leventina. Sweden had experience with ships weaponry, as the canons had to be fired from inside the mountain. Only small, camouflaged holes were on the outside of the Gotthard fortress.  The Messerschmidt fighter planes had been commissioned to Dornier in Frierichshafen with a mix of sly collaboration and diplomacy, which is in fact privilege and moral burden at the same for the neutral country, if one of the waring countries is one with a terrible ideology and committing atrocieties. Switzerland's neutrality depended on it giving access to both sides of the conflict concerning the passage through the Gotthard tunnel. In case Italy and Germany had attacked, the Swiss would have blown up the Gotthard tunnel close to the Italien border, so Swiss trains could still have gone through, but not from Germany to Italy. Fascist Italy's war industry was dependent on German raw materials.

Messerschmidt 109 fighter planes for warding off the enemy invasions from the air.

Invasions from the air could have come from fascist Italy in the south and Nazi-Germany in the north. After the war, documents were found that there had been such plans by Hitler and Mussolini. Both countries had experienced and well equiped air forces. However, it was also the Allies, parts of their milititary leadership with militarist, totalitarian ideas, that would have liked to use neutral Switzerland in the middle of Europe as an airbase. Wahlen reminded his fellow citizens in the crisises of the 1970s that as in World War II, overcoming such a crisis depended on the the mental attitude of each and every person and that citizens as well as authorities must aim for the same goal, while disregarding group and personal interests. 

Swiss strategy of deterrence during World War II

The Alpine fortresses of World War II symbolise military deterrence against Italy and Nazi-Germany. Coping with forces and powers from within is different and has to take the social disruptions of times of war between armies and ideologies into account. As Guisan wasn't the distanced military officer, but the General from among us, the statue of the citizen soldier from the national Swiss exposition of 1939 symbolizes the citizen soldier, who gets up from work and family and puts on his military appareil.

Statue of the Swiss citizen soldier named Prepared for Defense by Hans Brandenberger (1939) in the Museum of the Swiss Charters of Confederation in Schwyz, Switzerland, photograph by Paebi.

Learning from the past: Situation today

Some say, Switzerland only perservered during World War II. However, as the former US-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) once said: It's all about deterrence. At the beginning of World War II, Switzerland was prepared. With the backing of the socialdemocrats, government spending for defense was increased as early as in  in 1935.  Then the Swiss government issued defense bonds that very quickly over-subscribed. 

There has been a societal change, especially in western countries, including Switzerland and Germany that has lead to disruption in society and what is called hybrid war, lawlessness, cybercriminality, surveillance methods and psychological warfare that is not from another country. That has been brought about by:

• technical progress (computers, commercialized internet, automation in industry and finance) without proper education, digital illiteracy (Edward Snowdon).
  
  
• demographics and irregular migration, including weaponized immigration.
  
  
• Fear of change resulting from an error code in the area of the brain responsible for belief, religion, causing irrational and uncontrolled hate and violence against others, such as in progroms, hate speach on social media and media overreach.

• more free time in western societies to spend with digital devices that ordinary people don't really understand.

• online gambling, speculation for war profiteering, failed debt management by individuals and governments (strategic corruption).

While psychiatric diagnosises such as depression come from the fear of being abandonned, fear of change, leading to becoming irrationally violent against others, is thought to come from an error code in the area of the brain that is associated with religion, spiritual belief, which is naturally situated in the human brain. Covert and during Nazi-times open warfare research by eugenisists, concentration camp doctors and right wing terrorists used these neurological findings.

Fear of change, the anxiety resulting from economic and societal change has been described as the error code of the Jewish religion as waiting for the Messias while at the same time not wanting him to come because of not knowing if the Antichrist will come instead. The German journalist Peter Hahne who is a Christian, says that a society without belief in something making life worth living, causes people to believe in demons and false religion such as the irrational fear of climate change. I have done a lot of scholarly research into these aspects in the context of the offenses of finance industry, bureaucracy and antisemitism of which I have been personally affected and posted some articles on this blog, mainly in German. I had to remove all earlier posts on this personal blog, because they have been hampered with. Backup files, journals with notes were taken, or changed. This has left me with bewilderment and I have thus included some of this work into this lengthy article, which I had written at first to commerate Swiss resistance during World War II and the anniverseries listed in the beginning of this article, after having visited the opening of the exposition in the Gotthard fortress in September 2024.

Abuse and sexual harrassment

One of the main ingredients of the societal change that led to the atrocities by the nationalsocialist German regime is abuse for diminishment and humiliation. Some of the victims of that perish, others in turn become perpetrators. As of now, a recent study on sexual harrassment in the Swiss Army shocked Switzerland as to the unexpected extent of that problem, which is for a militia army especially alarming, because sexual abuse as means of discriminatation, exclusion and abuse of power could infiltrate into society. The hierarchy of a militia army is often replicated at the work place, with officers engaging in using force and might up to the atrocieties of abuse also being leaders in companies and authorities. Sexual harassment and abuse also hinders women, for whome military service is voluntary in Switzerland, from entering the military.  More honorable female citizens soldiers passionate on defending the country's enemies from outside and within on all fronts would probably do a lot to solve the problem. The old problem of sexual abuse and abuse of power in men dominated groups, is one of the main ingredients in fraud and moneylaundering. This type of abuse, such as also reported on from the paramilitary German Nazi group SA among men is not about homosexuality, but a means of implementing submission and turning victims into perpetrators. Sexual harrassment and abuse has been sigmatized, often not reported. Therefore, perpertators take into account that there will be no criminal charges and they tend to put the blame on the victim. There is the belief and blackmail that if others help the victim, or report the misconduct, that the same will happen those who stand up for the victim. The same is true for totalitarian economic schemes that are the result of unchecked debt taken up by governments and passed on as subsidies. 

The world of digital communication from early childhood on, unchecked hate speach, harrassment on social media, mis- and disinformation on the internet and by media is in itself an environment of abuse. It must be mentioned that the Swiss Defence Forces in this context has already taken measures by providing a mandatory course in computerscience for combatting cybercriminality for every conscript and continued further education during the recurring times of service. They have gathered expertise in the field of cybercriminality, as it has been recognized that warfare has changed, and cybercriminality is one of the aspcts of hybrid war, based on harming an enemy's society, or in the case of radical right wing insurgents, the own society, in order to gain profit for groups and individuals over the common good. Citizen soldiers who have been trained in computerscience and combat against cybercriminality can use this experience in their civilian jobs. Apparently, it is considered to be better to implement a turn around in society over the criminal prosecution of offenders.

Definitions of warfare

War has often been about ideologies and ressources, such as energy scources and materials. There are wars going on right now, but neither in Switzerland, Germany or the US. Some experts speak of the Wars Russia against Ukraine and in the Middle East as being World Wars, because of the world-wide public attention they are getting through media and internet, with other countries governments sending weapons, advice and putting on political pressure. But still, there is nothing near the political, economic, military and humanitarian catastrophes of before and during World War II in Switzerland, Germany and most other European and western societies. As a political economist, I mention the following terms:

• economic and financial warfare
  
  
• strategic corruption
  
  
• political and economic exclusion, censorship

Not entities such as countries, governments, businesses or banks are responsible for illegal practices, but always humans interacting with other humans, be it in business between companies or geopolitical tensions and conflicts. The Chief Commander of the Swiss Army said that there is a lack of playing by the rules. He named some countries, but personally and from following publicly available information, I couldn't make out any evidence of Russian or Chinese participation in what affected me on the ground. Both countries have more or less free market economies, so they also can have people not going by the rules, engaging in predatory lending, fraudulous and criminal practice. Weakening the economy of a country, ravaging its farms, recruitment of traitors, has happened since the beginning of human civilization. In contrast to economic crisis, economic war is done on purpose and harms ordinary people apart from the losses of revenue and wealth for a country's economy. From the point of view as an economist in agriculture, I use the term operational risk. In banking, in enterprises, corporations and government agencies, operational risk is a type of risk that is caused by people, be they employees, managers or others associated with the particular organisation. Those can be from suppliers, customers, bureaucrats from government agencies and authorities, politicians or others that are in some way connected. In contrast to other sorts of risks, such as for example financial risk, where gains from taking risks have to be weighed against possible losses, operational risk has to be zero and precautions need to be taken. For that we normally have governance and compliance rules. Most of operational risk is against the law. In Switzerland, Germany and the United States, measures and documentation of governance and compliance are mandatory and written into law, for private enterprises, government authorities and non-government organisations. 

Fear of change, debt economics and hybrid war

The term hybrid war has been heavily criticized as being abstract, vague and distorted. It includes almost everything that is irregular and the word war suggests that its about geopolitical enemies, countries and their governments and military fighting each other, making it easy to blame other countries and governments, when in fact it is a phenomenon from within a society. However, if the once economic powerhouse of Germany is in decline, other economies profit, such as US businesses taking over contracts and relations, for example with Swiss high tech export oriented industry, as has happened. Switzerland's main export market with 60 % of all destinations of Swiss over all export is now the US, when it used to be Germany.

What we witness now, is the intrusion of harmful practices we generally associate with warfare into almost every aspects of everyday life, such as with surveillance, theft of name and identity, impairment of real and tangible property rights, blacklisting, cybercriminality. Moral hazard from the economic point of view is associated with assymetric information, meaning the perpetrator knows more than the victim, hides the information he is using to trick and harm that victim. Moral hazard often arises from regulation when those evading controles turn to more immoral practices. The extreme rise in antisemitism now shows that there is a huge problem. Defamation has always been an important part of antisemitism. When the type of economics of debt, gambling, buying on margin that results in scapegoating is implemented again, decades after the Holocaust, obviously the same ones become the victims, Jews and others discriminated against in former times, considered unworthy of life and existence then, especially since the lists of eugenisists and Nazis survived in archives and family records. 

Neu challenges for security forces in the neutral state

In Switzerland there is now much debate on meeting the new challenges for military security and some new measures have been taken, as mentioned before. Most urgently, there is a deficiency of equipment for all soldiers in case of an emergency mobilization which is a problem of government finance. At the onset of World War II, the Swiss Army was in fact quite well equipped. The Swiss government had issued defense bonds, asking Swiss people to put their savings into defending the country. 

In Swiss democracy it is Parliament that has to decide on finances and therefore investment into the military competes with other expenditures of government. There are so far three suggestions to solve this dilemma. However, in the ongoing debate, there is also incertitude on how to meet the new challenges of what has been defined as hybrid war and the threat of conventional war because of the ongoing wars and the possiblity of them expanding. One point of dissent within Swiss politicians and people is on the collaboration and alignment with Nato and the contracts with the European Union that are currently under negotiation. Switzerland has been a participant of the European Common Market, is a full member of the Schengen Agreement and was a founding member of the Council of Europe whose main purpose is the guarding of human rights. In the aftermath of World War II, Switzerland was an ardent campaigner for human rights, as the international standard for a new world order after the Nazi and fascist atrocities. Garanteeing human rights and implementing rule of law was considered to be the best form of international cooperation for the neutral state whose economy is dependent on international trade.

Today however, there are even actors speaking publicly of abandonning neutrality, as the formerly neutral states Sweden and Finland have done since the attack of Russia on Ukraine. Therefore it seems necessary to look into the aspects of neutrality. As the quote from General Guisan concerning the situation during World War II suggests, neutrality is a question of respect of others. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) once wrote in an essay that self-esteem of a person primarily depends on what others think of them. Despite there being many self-help guides and advice from psychology, we can't always make others respect us by the way we behave and present ourselves, the worst possible case for wrecking self-esteem of the individual being antisemitism and racism. 

What German Nazis and their Swiss sympathizers thought

Neutrality is often considered to be a type of weakness to be imposed on a country so it can't defend itself. In the exposition in the Gotthard fortress concerning General Guisan and Switzerland during World War II, there are several quotes from Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), other Nazi leaders poking fun at Swiss neutrality and military measures during World War II, and even from Guisans opponent in military strategy of the time, Ulrich Wille junior (1877-1959), the son of Ulrich Wille (1848-1925), Swiss general during World War I. He said in 1940 when Switzerland was surrounded by Italien fascist and German nationalsocialist troops:

"Anyway, it would be best for our country to demobilize now. Then the General wouldn't be able to stay in power, because his position and function would expire automatically."

Worst even from the Nazi German head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) on Switzerland:

"A cold-blooded people, stubbornly self-centered to savagery, constantly using the same tactics: bartering, putting off, evading, blackmailing. A strategy of war that is not for victory, but for survival. . . in short, their heart is with the Allies, the Germans will get their bowels."

Goebbels only came into contact with Swiss traitors, antidemocratic sympathants of fascism and totalitarianism, antisemites and extreme rightwingers, who had conspired against the Swiss government and secretly taken up negotiations with Nazi-Germany. After World War II, Ulrich Wille junior became the founder and longtime president of the organisation Pro Juventute which until the 1970s for reasons of eugenics took children of the Yenish from their parents. 

General Guisan responded to the attacks of totalitarian enemy propagandists with the following:

"Whoever enters our country will be our enemy. The enemy will encounter an absolutely united army and a peoples spirited by one determination. There will be only one Switzerland and one power of will to battle against such an enemy."

Dispite their harsh propaganda, the Germans and the Italiens in World War II didn't attack, even though detailed plans to do so were found after the war. 

Neutrality

Neutrality is not a single concept. It can be considered to be a type of insurance policy against domestic threats against democracy and wellbeing of the people and from foreign powers against a small neutral state (Foreign Affairs, 2022). Being neutral can be understood in different ways, but it is not about taking sides.

" Being neutral does not include the privilege of being between right or wrong, or decency or indecency."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Swiss neutrality is based on international humanitarian law of the Haag Conventions of 1907, ratified by Switzerland in 1910. According to the treaties of Haag, a neutral country is not allowed to become a member of an international alliance and in times of peace it has to keep from engaging in legal contracts that would undermine its neutrality in case of war. Switzerland has a number of laws in place such as regulations for the export of weapons in order to respect the treaties of the Haag Conventions on neutrality. Only once was weak neutrality prescribed to Switzerland, which was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, in order to keep the French army from regenerating and attacking from behind lines. Up to today, Switzerland doesn't  acknowledge this treaty. 

Swiss neutrality derives from the philosophy and political system of the confederacy, as described in the beginning of this article, of maintaining complex ties, obligations and liabilities between subordinate governments of the Cantons, federal institutions and other countries, including great powers. In general, neutrality is considered to be an option for a nation state, if it has resources that potential enemies would want to conquer and profit from, but don't do so, because it would lead to war between those greater powers. In Switzerland, this is still the Alpine passage, but also the asset of having a neutral country in the middle of Europe, respected for its negotiating powers, peace-making efforts, where international organisations have set up their institutions, a country with stable democracy and safe and powerful finance and banking system, where other countries can bring in their wealth and have their pension funds managed. Alot of this has been impaired, because the Swiss have forgotten their past. The former Swiss counciler of finance, Ueli Maurer has said that Switzerland seems to be suffering from dementia, comparing with what he had experienced with a close relative who actually did have the medical condition of dementia and became typically aggressive in the beginning when noticing that his mental capacity was impaired. When I first came to Switzerland, they celebrated, probably as the only country, the beginning of World War II. What at the seemed to me and almost all of my Swiss friends born after World War II to be very peculiar. I understand now. 

Armed and fortified neutrality

The Swiss call their neutrality armed, when experts say, it is fortified. Armed neutrality means that in case of other countries fighting a war, the neutral country is prepared to battle both adversaries. This was the case during World War II. It would have been of great advantage to Allied forces to have airbases in Switzerland and a number of US bomber planes were forced to turn back by Swiss fighter planes that were stationed inside mountains with short runways, so foreign planes couldn't land. At the very end, Swiss anti-aircraft defense even had to shoot some allied planes down, a very difficult decision, as one report stated. 

Swiss soldiers guarding a captured US "Flying Fortress" B-17 Bomber.

US American U24 bomber airplanes forced to land at the airfield Dübendorf by Swiss fighter plane pilots. 

The number of these for the Swiss airforce useless planes, was subject of jokes and caricatures in the newspapers, complaining that there was no more runway left for the Swiss fighter planes to land.

It must be noted that Allied military, especially the US, also had officers and soldiers with militarist ideology. One of the aspects of that being the hate for small, strong democratic countries. That, I believe is the lesson that needs to be learned in Switzerland: Stop making yourself look small and weak and rebuild the values and soft powers you used to have.