Word: switzerland
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bigger nations than Switzerland have been consumed by Nazi fury for fewer sins. Switzerland is democratic; she is "polyglot"; her largest racial group is German. Her culture is incurably liberal and her biggest political party is Social Democratic. She is home and symbol of the world's greatest experiments in the internationalism which the Nazis detest: the League of Nations and the Red Cross. Now, with war in the Mediterranean, Switzerland has automatically become guilty of the cardinal sin: being in Hitler...
Though no proposal to alter these circumstances had yet been made by her Axis neighbors, the Swiss last week were worried. German troops, completing the occupation of France, had closed Switzerland's last corridor to the outside world: the land was now an isolated little democratic anomaly deep inside totalitarian Europe. The intensification of German propaganda inside Switzerland led many Swiss to believe that Germany might like to fill the last lacuna in this Pan-Germanic ideal sooner rather than later. German propaganda was attacking Switzerland with a regularity that suggested a conscious campaign. The Swiss Nazi paper...
...Axis had two other pressure weapons. One was economic strangulation. Switzerland's main economic life line, through the Mediterranean and north Italy, had become a very thin thread susceptible to being pinched off at half a dozen points. Her secondary life line, overland from Lisbon through France, could be cut at any moment. Finally, with troops on every frontier, the Germans had the weapon of military invasion...
Less doggedly independent lands would have toppled long ago, but Switzerland's reaction to the new situation was to answer the obvious question before it was asked. Said the democratic Volksrecht: "It is of the greatest importance that we leave no doubt in anybody's mind that not even the most hopeless situation will make us capitulate voluntarily, and before we can be commanded we have got to be beaten. . . ." These were no hollow words. Switzerland, too, had some trumps...
...German Cardinal von Faulhaber has never concealed his hatred of Naziism, and hence has long been under close surveillance in Munich. Smuggled into Switzerland last week was a statement he issued after the bombing of Munich on Sept. 19. In it the uncowed Cardinal declared that, despite Nazi propaganda that the victims of the air raid were buried without crosses, he personally had erected crosses over the graves. He urged all Roman Catholics to insist upon the "unassailable personal right of burial under the cross." Of the bombing itself, Cardinal von Faulhaber said: "What happened eight days ago over Munich...