The Lovely Swiss Villas That Could Destroy An Army

hello and bonjour it is july 2020 i'm in a field in the french-speaking bit of switzerland and i've been told there is a secret military fortress somewhere around here now it's obviously going to be camouflaged so maybe it's hiding in those trees over there or maybe it's underground somewhere deep below this field or maybe it's right here and it's a lovely shade of pink this harmless two-story home if it wanted to could destroy you and your army in minutes and what's worse so could that minty green one over there that you didn't even notice this is the story of the surprisingly deadly fake villas of switzerland [Music] this is the lovely town of nyon on the northern shores of lake geneva it is home to a 13th century castle the headquarters of uefa and a beautiful old town centre full of historic buildings and of course we're not here to see any of that what we've come here to see is a 10 kilometer line made of suburban family homes and toblerone bars that defended switzerland from nazi invasion and by the end of this video i promise that what i've just said will actually make sense but first a quick geography lesson this is where nyon is on a map of switzerland and yes this is switzerland so that means there are mountains here here here and here and also all over here but those are less important right now the point is that nearly all of switzerland's borders are mountainous which means if you want to invade switzerland by land with tanks and so on you've only really got two possible routes here or here therefore if switzerland builds a defensive line across the small gap between the juror mountains and lake geneva they've basically cut off one of the two routes so the swiss army went ahead and built a line of 12 fearsome fortresses with thick concrete walls and yes this lovely pink two-story house is one of them those tasteful dark green garage doors could open to reveal two huge cannons and a third gun was hidden behind the shutters of a ground floor window the windows on the second floor by the way are not real they've just been painted onto the concrete but there is another floor underground which means there's space inside the building for a dormitory toilet and a generator enough to make the fort completely autonomous so while it may look like a suburban family home this is one family you did not want to mess with but hang on it's 1939 why are the swiss worried about being invaded from this direction and not for example this direction well of course they'd already started building defenses on the northern border in 1936 but switzerland has a long-standing policy of strict neutrality and neutrality means it would be wrong to protect yourself against the worst person in history without also protecting yourself against some moderate french guy called albert i'd never heard of before making this video of course in hindsight it turned out to be a very good idea anyway it's only a short walk through the trees to get to the pink villas minty green twin so we're heading over there now to take a closer look but as we do we find ourselves walking alongside this a long line of strangely shaped concrete blocks they are all part of the same defensive system the blocks form a 10 kilometer string connecting all 12 forts and they were shaped like this to stop tanks or at least slow tanks down to make it easier for someone in the fort to shoot at them together the blocks and the forts became what was officially named the promentos fortification line but obviously you can't build something that looks like this in switzerland without everyone just calling it the toblerone line unfortunately it turns out the green villa is on private land and this seems to be about as close as you can get without an invitation but you can see from here that it's almost identical to the pink one apart from the colour and that does leave one question if there were 12 faults why did the swiss army go to such lengths to disguise these two when they didn't bother about the other ten well that road i was walking along at the start used to be the main route for french tourists coming into switzerland the only forts that you'd be able to see from the road are these two the reason they were disguised as houses is not to hide them from enemies but to avoid scaring off the tourists and that is how switzerland ended up defending itself from nazi invasion with a couple of family homes and a bar of chocolate if you'd like to see the pink villa it's a few kilometers north of new york on the old main road between geneva and lausanne there's a local bus that comes along here while the nearest railway station is in glen about 20 minutes walk away the villa is usually closed to the public but there are a few open days when you can go inside the next one is scheduled for september the 7th and it looks like they have full disabled access meanwhile the toblerone line is now a hiking route and these days you can usually walk the whole thing without being peppered by anti-tank guns anyway thank you very much for watching and i will see you soon you

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 3,237,341

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Id: tPL9-L2gwzo

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020