The tiny mountainous country of Switzerland
has been in a state of “perpetual neutrality” since the major European powers of the time
declared it as such during the Congress of Vienna after the end of the Napoleonic wars
in 1815. Why did they do this? The French conquered Switzerland in 1798,
establishing the Helvetic Republic in attempt to make Switzerland something of a strategically
positioned French satellite state. Not long after, Austrian and Russian forces
invaded the country in their war against France. The Swiss, rather than fighting alongside
their French overlords, largely refused. This ultimately led to the Act of Mediation,
giving the Swiss back much of their former independence. Twelve years later, they got the rest thanks
to the aforementioned Congress of Vienna in which their neutrality in the wars of their
neighbors was officially recognised. Beyond the Swiss themselves having long tried
to stay out of the conflicts of Europe (since the early 16th century after a devastating
loss at the Battle of Marignano), part of the reason Switzerland was granted neutrality
in perpetuity in 1815 is because the European powers of the time deemed that the country
was ideally located to function as a “a valuable buffer zone between France and Austria”. Thus, granting their neutrality in wars, so
long as they continued to stay out of them, would “contribute to stability in the region”. Since that time, with a few minor exceptions,
Switzerland has steadfastly refused to compromise its neutrality for any reason, though on the
war-front they did suffer an exceptionally brief civil war in the mid-19th century resulting
in only a handful of casualties. While minor in its scale, this civil war drastically
changed the political landscape of the Swiss government, including the establishment of
a constitution partially borrowing from the then less than a century old United States
constitution. In any event, as for those aforementioned
“minor exceptions”, Switzerland has occasionally taken part in some global peacekeeping missions
and prior to 1860 Swiss troops did sometimes take part in various skirmishes, despite their
neutrality. In more modern times, Switzerland needed to
defend its borders from both Allied and Axis (see: How Did the Axis and Allies Get Their
Names) air incursions during WW2. For instance, they shot down nearly a dozen
German planes in the spring of 1940 alone, as well as shot down some American bombers
and forced down countless others on both sides. This included grounding and detaining the
crews of over a hundred Allied bombers that tried to fly over the country. When Hitler tried to counter Swiss measures
at keeping the Luftwaffe from their skies by sending a sabotage team to destroy Swiss
airfields, the Swiss successfully captured the saboteurs before they could carry out
any bombings. You might think it a bit silly for the Swiss
to risk war with both sides by shooting or forcing down foreign aircraft from their skies,
but on several occasions Allied bombers accidentally attacked Swiss cities, mistaking them for
German ones. For instance, on April 1, 1944, American bombers,
thinking they were bombing Ludwigshafen am Rhein, bombed Schaffhausen, killing 40 Swiss
citizens and destroying over fifty buildings. This was not an isolated incident. So how exactly did Switzerland, surrounded
on all sides by Axis (or Central in WW1) and Allied powers during the wars to end all wars,
manage to keep enemy troops at bay without much in the way of any fighting? Officially Switzerland maintains a policy
of “Aggressive Neutrality” meaning that although it actively avoids taking part in
conflicts, as evidenced by their air-force activities during WW2, it will defend its
own interests with vigour. How vigorous? To ensure other countries respect its neutral
stance, Switzerland has long put itself into a terrifyingly over prepared position to fight,
and made sure every country around them was, and is, well aware of this fact. As for specifics, to begin with, a common
misconception about Switzerland is that because it doesn’t actively take part in global
military conflicts, that it doesn’t have a strong or well prepared military. In reality the Swiss military is a highly
trained and competent fighting force, and due to the country’s policy of compulsory
conscription of males (today women may volunteer for any position in the military, but are
not required to serve) is surprisingly large for a country of only around eight million
people. In fact, approximately two-thirds of all males
are ultimately deemed mentally and physically fit enough to serve in the Swiss military,
meaning a huge percentage of their population is ultimately military trained. (Those who are not, and aren’t exempt because
of a disability, are required to pay additional taxes until they are 30 to make up for not
serving.) As for what fighting force is actively maintained,
the Swiss military today is only around 140,000 men strong and just this year it has been
voted to reduce that to 100,000. This is a major downsize from just two decades
ago when it was estimated the Swiss military had some 750,000 soldiers. For reference, this latter total is about
half the size of the United States military today, despite Switzerland having only about
eight million people vs. the United States’ three hundred million. In addition to this, Switzerland has one of
the highest rates of gun ownership in the world and many Swiss people are highly competent
in handling said firearms due to both compulsory military service and a strong culture of recreational
shooting (half a million Swiss children are said to be part of a gun club of some kind). This said, in recent years the rate of gun
ownership has declined somewhat after a series of gun related incidents, such as one where
a man shot his estranged wife with his old military issued rifle. Prior to the shooting, military conscripts
would take their rifle home with them after their service ended and were expected to keep
it ready for use in defending the country should the need arise. After these incidents, the military curbed
this and implemented a new policy stating that any conscript wishing to keep their gun
after service must buy it and apply for a permit. As part of this new policy, the Swiss military
also no longer provides ammunition with the guns, instead keeping it in secure locations
that citizens must get to in the event of an emergency. Speaking of emergencies, generally speaking,
Switzerland is prepared for near any global catastrophe from nuclear fallout to a surprise
invasion from an enemy force thanks to a defensive plan it has been implementing since 1880,
but which was doubled-down upon during WW2 and later during the Cold War. Dubbed the Swiss National Redoubt, in a nutshell
Switzerland has taken advantage of it unique natural geography, which includes mountains
that surround it on nearly all sides, to build countless bunkers, fortifications and warehouses
across the country that can be accessed at a moment’s notice. The full scale of the fortifications is a
closely guarded secret, but some of them are kept in plain view as part of a comprehensive
campaign of deterrence. Initially the National Redoubt consisted of
tunnels bored into the many mountains of Switzerland in key strategic positions for retreating
troops and citizens to take shelter in, but over the years these have evolved to encompass
a host of ingenious defensive and offensive structures. Along with tunnels and bunkers (which are
fully stocked and contain everything from bakeries and hospitals to dormitories), the
mountains of Switzerland also hide countless tanks, aircraft, and hidden artillery guns
(some of which are pointed directly at Switzerland’s own roads to destroy them in the event of
invasion). Oddly for a landlocked country, Switzerland
does maintain an active navy of sorts, though they don’t store any boats in its mountains
as far as we could find. The naval branch of the Swiss forces’ primary
role is in patrolling the country’s lakes on the border and providing aid in search
and rescue operations. As for more specifically how they kept themselves
out of the world wars, during WW1, the Swiss military, under freshly appointed General
Ulrich Wille, mobilised well over 200,000 Swiss soldiers and deployed them across its
major entry points to deter any outside forces from considering waging war on the country. After it became apparent that Switzerland’s
neutrality would be recognised by all powers in the first Great War, the vast majority
of the Swiss troops were sent home. (In fact, in the final year of the war, the
Swiss military had shrunk its numbers to just 12,000.) Nothing further was required to keep the Swiss
out of WW1. WW2 was a different beast altogether with
Switzerland not banking on Hitler respecting their long-held neutral stance in European
conflicts. Thus, newly appointed Swiss General Henri
Guisan was given the unenviable task of trying to figure out a way to defend the small country
from their neighbors, Hitler and his allies, despite that said powers drastically outmatched
the Swiss army in a variety of ways. Towards this end, leading up to the war, the
Swiss withdrew from the League of Nations to help ensure their neutrality, began to
re-build their military (bringing the number up to 430,000 combat troops within three days
of the start of the war), and strongly encouraged its citizens to keep at minimum two months’
worth of supplies on hand at any given time. On top of that, they also began secret negotiations
with France to join forces against Germany, should Germany attack Switzerland (a risky
move that was discovered by the Germans after France fell to them). But even with all that, knowing the Swiss
couldn’t win if Hitler really wanted to invade, Guisan and co. made the decision to
drastically ramp up their WW1 era strategy of making invading Switzerland as unsavory
an option as possible. Guisan noted that by utilizing Switzerland’s
harsh terrain, a comparatively small amount of Swiss soldiers in a secure defensive position
could fight off a massive fighting force if the need ever arose. So the plan was essentially to perpetually
defend and retreat to some fortified position over and over again, ultimately conceding
the less defensible populated areas of the country once the government and citizens had
managed a retreat into secret fortified positions in the Alps. They’d then use the Alps as a base from
which to both launch guerrilla attacks to make life miserable for any successful invasion
force and to use highly defensible positions there to keep crucial supply lines from the
invaders. More controversially, Switzerland continued
to trade with Nazi Germany during the war in order to further de-incentivise Hitler
from invading. (There is some speculation that some of the
Allies’ “accidental” attacks on Switzerland were really not accidents at all, given that
some of the buildings that were blown up were factories supplying the Axis powers.) The multi-pronged plan worked and, while Hitler
did have a detailed plan in place to invade Switzerland eventually, the cost of doing
so was always too high given the Axis power’s troubles both on the Eastern and Western fronts. Thus, Switzerland was largely ignored by both
Allies and the Axis throughout WW2, despite its amazingly well placed location right next
to Germany, Italy, France, and Austria. Switzerland stepped up their level of defence
during the Cold War, again mostly out of a desire to deter any potential invaders. This time, however, the focus was on “aggressively”
defending Switzerland’s borders instead of defending them only long enough to cover
a retreat into the well fortified mountains. Towards this end, Switzerland’s roads, bridges
and train lines were rigged with explosives that could be detonated at any time. In many cases, the engineers who designed
the bridges were required to come up with the most efficient way, using explosives,
to ensure the complete destruction of those same bridges. Once the destruction plan was developed, hidden
explosives were installed at the appropriate locations in the bridges. On top of that, the military also lined hundreds
of mountains flanking major roads with explosives to create artificial rockslides. All total, over three thousand points of demolition
are publicly known to have been implemented throughout the small country. With ground attacks covered, the Swiss looked
to the skies. Unfortunately for them, attack by air is much
harder to defend against for a country so small that enemy air forces could penetrate
anywhere within its borders before an adequate defence could be mustered to defend its cities. To protect against this, the Swiss government
constructed thousands of bomb shelters in homes, towns and cities to such a degree that
it’s estimated that anywhere between 80 to 120 percent of the country’s population
could hide in them for extended periods. Many of these shelters also included small
hospitals and the necessary equipment to set up independent command centers. In fact, homes built after WW2 were often
made with over 40 cm (16 in.) thick concrete ceilings to help them survive
aerial bombings. If your home didn’t accommodate such a shelter,
you had to pay a tax to support places that did. It’s also rumoured that much of Switzerland’s
gold supply as well as vast supplies of food stores have been similarly squirreled away
somewhere in the Alps, which comprise just over half of the country’s total land area. As a further example of how ridiculously well
prepared the Swiss are for any and all threats, there are things like hidden hydroelectric
dams built inside of unmarked mountains so that in the event of mass bombings, they’ll
still have electricity from these secret facilities. And, remember, these are the things the Swiss
government has let us know about. It is thought that there are probably more
fortifications and hidden goodies scattered about the country’s landscape. Since the end of the Cold War (see How Did
the Cold War Start and End), similar to how the Swiss government has been slowly disarming
its population and reducing its standing army, decommissioning some of these fortifications
has begun in order to reduce government spending. The Swiss government is somewhat coy about
the extent of this disarming, but it has been reported that many of the more extreme defences,
such as the explosives that used to be hidden inside the country’s bridges and along its
road and railways, have been removed. As for the bunkers, unfortunately, simply
abandoning many of these facilities is not an option, and it’s fairly expensive to
decommission them. As such, as the head of security policy for
the federal Department of Defense, Christian Catrina, said “…in most cases we’d be
glad if someone would take them off our hands for no price”. In some cases, this has resulted in companies
using the ridiculously well protected and secure mountain facilities as data repositories
and server farms. In one such converted bunker, the servers
inside are even completely protected from outside electromagnetic impulses that result
from nuclear explosions. In another, detailed instructions on how to
build devices for reading all known data storage formats, even older formats like floppy disks,
are kept, so that if that knowledge is otherwise lost, future generations can still decode
our data storage devices to access the data within correctly. Essentially, the researchers involved in this
particular project have attempted to create a “Rosetta Stone” of data formats and
are using a ridiculously secure Swiss bunker as the storage point for that knowledge. As a result of military downsizing, the fate
of the rest of the fortifications is unclear and there are calls to decommission all of
them, despite the estimated billion dollar price tag to do so. There is even a growing minority of the Swiss
population who would like to see the entire military disbanded, including ceasing mandatory
conscription. But for now, at least, any country that wishes
to ignore Switzerland’s long-held neutrality in military conflicts will find the tiny country
an exceptionally difficult one to conquer and occupy. And presumably if war ever again threatens
Swiss’ borders, regardless of how small they make their military today, they’ll
likely keep themselves in a position to rapidly ramp back up their defences as they did for WW1 and WW2.
Switzerland: I'm gonna pay you 100$ to fuck off
They told the European oligarchs: "We have your money. And it sure would be a shame if the records that said we have your money were accidentally destroyed in a war."