Neutral Switzerland played a pivotal role in the Second World War, as daily decisions in one small nation shaped Armageddon across a continent.
Hidden Front: Switzerland in World War Two explores how Switzerland became a crossroads for Europe’s crosscurrents. It was a place where European officials could conduct diplomacy in secret and where spies from all sides ran rampant, including the United States’s OSS operation run by Allen Dulles. The Swiss Franc offered both the Allies and Axis access to hard currency with which they could buy raw materials. Switzerland was a military junction, where clashing countries intersected at Alps and faced a formidable conundrum. In recent years, Switzerland has faced critique over the role of its banks in securing Holocaust gold and looted art. It turned away thousands of Jewish refugees from its borders, accepting only 30,000 during the war, and initiated the infamous “J stamp” on passports.
This book will provide a deeper understanding of the circumstances and assumptions that undergirded Switzerland’s actions, and how Swiss neutrality was the geopolitical result of incremental actions. This was a curious country where people of different cultures lived peaceably side by side. Swiss Germans, French, Italians negotiated motley identities and vocalized openly pro-Nazi, pro-Allies, pro-nationalist, pro-fascist, and pro-neutral sympathies even in the same towns and circles. These conflicting loyalties played out in different ways across the country in everyday life—including the highest echelons of government and military—and shaped national policy. At the same time, Swiss policies and actions were decisive in the course of war, and may have even prolonged it. All the while, as carnage raged throughout Europe, Switzerland remained virtually unscathed, at the eye of the storm.
