Ok... leaving out any conspiracy type stuff and just thinking militarily I can find no reason for Germany to want to invade Switzerland. There are other easier ways to get to southern Europe without having to wage mountain warfare. What would they have gained in the '30's?
Rail lines that would have been sabotaged easily. No major highways running completely across the country. No major tunnels for direct access. The big ones have been completed relatively recently. In fact the tunnels would have been a major choke point to hold up any German advance. The mountain passes are high, narrow, rocky and snow covered for a large part of the year. Rivers rage with runoff for spring and early summer. The roads in the valley's would have been easily closed with snipers, rock-slides, forced avalanches etc. As far as I know Switzerland has no major natural resources that would have been necessary for the German war machine. The population was not large or centralized enough to be a good source of forced labor. Much easier to get the slave labor from larger cities in flatter, more easily traversed areas. In my opinion, it would be MUCH easier to go to the west through France and then down into Italy or to the east and through the Adriatic (did I get that one right?). In fact as a route to get forces to the fight in the south, Switzerland was more of an obstacle than anything else. If I were doing it, I would let Switzerland alone and then encircle it. Hitler could have succeeded in this easily but being the strategic genuis that he was he decided to try to take on England and the USSR at the same time. In fact, he could have probably beaten either but never both. If he could have diverted forces from East to West or from West to East he probably could have taken either foe.
On a separate note... He was an idiot.
His Navy was woefully short on major combatants EXCEPT for submarines. Of course, they almost won the conflict with England but Hitler cut funding at a critical point. Smart huh?
His Air Force was almost completely devoid of heavy bombers. Nothing like the Lancaster, B-17, B-29 or anything like that.
He threw away entire armies at Stalingrad.
He failed to see the game changing promise of jet aviation until too late in the war.
If Hitler had continued to build his machine another year or two before getting totally stupid, the war might have been drastically different. If he had developed heavy bombers, and pushed the jet fighter development harder the air war would have been vastly different. If he had funded the building of scores of more submarines, the sea war and the effect on England would have been devastating.
In the end, we still would have won conventionally. The only catch was whether Germany would get the bomb working before we did. Thank goodness Hitler was a military genius and we were able to sweep us some of his secrets and scientists before the Soviets got them all.
Anyone ever wonder WHY our airplanes are just as fast now as in the sixties? Ever wonder why they don't go any higher? Why can't we go any faster than the SR-71 which was designed with slide-rules in the '50's? I say it is entirely due to the German engineers and scientists that came over to the West in the aftermath of WWII. They would have been in their 30's and 40's at that time. By the mid-60's to mid-70's they would have been retired or dead. We sort of stagnated at that point in the development of new aircraft. Oh we were doing some really crazy stealth stuff but basically the aircraft weren't any faster, bigger or better than before. It wasn't like we got a quantum leap until now with the F-22, F-35, B2 and arguably the 1970's designed F117.
Something to think about...
NGH
(sorry got WAY off topic)
