Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why Switzerland has low crime

If you guys want to know why the Nazis didn't attack Switzerland here's the book to read. Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II by Stephen P. Halbrook. Basically Switzerland was too tough a nut to crack. As the war went on Switzerland became even a tougher nut to crack. Hitler had the Wehrmacht and the SS do feasibility studies on taking out Switzerland and both groups said by the time they got done with Switzerland there would not be much of a Germany left.

It is an interesting book on what a militia can do when they are fighting for their home land and people.

I worked with a Swiss guy maybe 30 years ago and he
told me about the army giving him his military
weapon and a can of cartridges. He said occassionally
an army guy would come to inspect it and it had better
be clean and oiled.

There was an old saying
"Switzerland doesn't have an army. Switzerland is an army"

We could learn something from them.

Doc

I have that book. Read it years ago. I agree with it, but SteveNo says it's BS.

There were far stronger reasons.....Switzerland was an ally of the Reich in all but name. Why fight for what you can get for free, and have a window through which you can access the world. The Swiss defense and intel apparatus were full of Nazis, they were their bankers, and their factories fed the Reich's needs, safe from bombing.

If they had wanted Switzerland, it's passes, military formations, and public property would have been handed over by collaborators, and any resistance would have been crushed by the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht in days. The armed populace might have mounted a guerrilla war from the mountains for a while, but when the Germans started executing their families in reprisals , that probably would have petered out soon.

Yugoslavia is a good case study....just as rough, well armed populace, far more people and land mass, and they weren't infiltrated with Nazis like Switzerland (although there were pro-fascist groups in some areas). Yugoslav army crushed in a few weeks, although they partisans managed to tie down a lot of troops till the end of the war.

But it's kind of academic.....the Nazis and the Swiss were partners, not enemies. That's why Allied airmen were interned, while Luftwaffe pilots were sent back to their squadrons.

No, the term, in context of the time it was written meant 'properly equipped and trained'. That's what 200+ years will do.

Germany could probably occupied Switzerland. Conquered? Debatable. Consider how many great powers have failed to conquer Afghanistan.

Jeez,....I thought it was about SWASILAND, I was sitting back and admiring all your philosphistry applying thereto.

This ain't Africa,......

Tod.

You just might be seriously screwed.

By ALL and any means,....expand and develop your train of thought.

Language,.....speach, communicated,....

light it up, and explain how badly outta' touch 200 years has placed us.

SPEAK,......now


GTC

dunno' maybe it's because they don't have any of these.......

That, unfortunately, is probably the truth. Just as unfortunate, is that it will never even see speculation in a meaningful public forum in the U.S.A. By the way - the guy in center back of the photo looks a lot like Obama. Man, he has half brothers everywhere!

reason #1
.008% of the population is black.

Yes, they do. And the fight's heating up.

Interesting video. The rifle range with it's tube sound suppressors were neat but did you notice it looks like they attach a small chain to the rifle when in the firing position. Wonder if that's simply to ensure that a loaded rifle stays pointed down range? Saw no such rig in the handgun range.

There is crime in Switzerland and a coworker of mine had a watch stolen off his arm while we were in Geneva last year. He was alone, it was late and he was standing out in front of the hotel smoking. A couple guys across the street at a cafe/newstand started a ""fight" to distract him and their partner bumped him from behind and slid the watch right off his arm. It was dumb of him to even be there and we had had warned him all week to not to put himself in this position. By the way, it was a shawarma stand and these guys were likely Lebanese. All stereotypes are not inaccurate.

That is my understanding too although I'm not suggesting that the Swiss having a well armed population didn't help. In fact it probably "encouraged" the Germans to see the Swiss as partners rather than as a potential target...

I believe it is...I think those "tubes" are also to ensure that all the bullets hit the backstop, so the range doesn't have to have a huge safety area behind it...

Here's another range design which used to be popular in Germany. This is a 300m range and again is designed so that a large safety area isn't needed.

No, they just meant that they were well-drilled and could perform maneuvers on order.

IIRC, somebody took out his wife or girlfriend with his militia rifle several years ago and caused a Sarah Bradyesque stink from the liberal elites in Switzerland, to get those ugly black rifles out of everyone's closets. Don't think anything came of it, but they'll keep trying.

As amoral as the Nazis were, I'm sure they did a cost/benefit analysis on allowing Switzerland to survive as a neutral, and the cost of taking it by force figured in their calculations. But a neutral but compliant Switzerland with access to the outside world was far more useful than another occupied slave state.


And Dude, don't put too much importance in examining the Nazi's decision making on the fact that the general staff had plans for the invasion.....we had plans for invading England and Canada, it's what staff officers do. Germany had no political advantage to be gained by invading Switzerland, so they didn't. If they'd chosen to, they would have and it would have been over quickly, both because Germany had overwhelming land and air power, and because the Swiss army and government were full of Nazi sympathizers who would have sabotaged any attempt to resist.

According to Target Switzerland, Nazi sympathizers were treated very harshly under Swiss law.

They were the enforcers and judges of Swiss law, to a large extent. Like, illegal immigration is illegal in the US, if you read our laws, but.....

The problem with Target Swizerland is that he started with a premise, and built a book to fit the premise....gun laws bad, militias good, modern armies quake at the thought of sturdy farmers with their rifles. All good enough, but a twelve year old with google can find tens of thousands of contradictory pieces of evidence. The fact is the Swiss were largely collaborators, and did very well off the war. The Nazis had nothing to gain by invading them....if they'd wanted to, a bunch of Swiss militia weren't going to intimidate a Wehrmacht that crushed millions of Russkis in weeks. That's just fantasy.

Russkis didn't have a tradition of liberty to defend.