(film reeling)
(dramatic music)
- I want you to say something.
(upbeat music)
You ready?
This is a giant map of Switzerland.
(choir like music)
I love Switzerland.
And one thing I have learned about Switzerland
is that the Swiss like to be neutral.
(somber music)
This country does not like conflict.
They avoid it at all costs,
which is strange because they're really good at fighting.
Other European countries used to hire Swiss men
to fight their wars for them.
But back home in Switzerland, they don't fight.
They don't take sides.
That's partly because they lost a few wars of expansion
and kind of just decided it was probably better
to just stay put.
But it's also because back when Europe was full of empires,
the big European powers thought it would be a good idea
to have a mountainous small buffer country
in between some of the big rival powers.
And so Switzerland was kind of deemed this neutral power,
but the result is that today Switzerland doesn't take sides.
They don't send their troops to fight another other wars.
They rarely join alliances.
I mean, they're not a part of the EU.
They're not a part of NATO.
And they reluctantly barely joined the UN
as recently as 2002, a decade after North Korea.
And the only countries that joined after them
didn't exist before then.
Meaning they came into existence after 2002.
So they couldn't have joined before then.
Switzerland is serious about neutrality,
no conflict, no alliances.
Leave us alone.
(somber music)
When you're right here,
right at the crossroads of people
trying to take over Europe,
staying out of conflict has big benefits for your country
and its economy.
But it also means staying neutral is really hard,
but the Swiss have done it.
Using their mountains, some exceptional engineering,
obsessive commitment,
and a healthy amount of explosives.
The Swiss have kept empires out of their country,
sticking to their guns
and staying neutral
even when Europe was tearing itself apart.
(somber music)
So you're Switzerland in the 1940s.
Here's your situation.
You're surrounded by Nazi Germany to your North
and Fascist Italy to your South
and quickly are becoming engulfed
with all the countries that are now in the sphere
of influence of these countries.
You're surrounded and Hitler is winning everywhere,
but you're Switzerland.
And so you're like, don't invade us.
We're not going to fight, we're not taking sides.
We'll just keep trading with whoever wants to trade with us,
but we're not going to fight
or be invaded.
And no, that's not how Europe was in the 1940s.
You couldn't just sit it out.
And yet the Swiss were committed to doing so.
The fact is that even with this commitment to neutrality
an invasion from their next door neighbor,
the Third Reich, was it very real possibility.
So Switzerland devised, what I argue
is just the most Swiss plan ever.
To stay neutral during World War II
and future global conflicts.
It's a plan that still lives on today
that you can still see when you go to Switzerland.
Here's what it looks like.
(upbeat music)
First up, hey looked around their country
at any linkages to the outside.
They choose key points around the country
that would give invading armies access to the country
like roads, bridges, tunnels,
any access point.
And then they packed it full of explosives.
(explosion noise)
Dynamite, TNT, whatever.
Anything that would just completely destroy that linkage.
They got really inventive with this stuff.
Sometimes they would wire a bridge with dynamite,
but they also would put secret canons in mountains
that would pop out
and point at a major road
and demolish it if needed,
making it unusable.
Or sometimes they would go to their long tunnels
like this 10 kilometer tunnel down here
at the border with Italy.
And they would rig it with TNT
so that they could quickly seal off this part
of their mountainous Southern border.
(ominous music)
Up on mountain passes they even rigged
the sides of mountains with explosives
to create artificial landslides to block the road.
The thinking here is that if an invading army
were marching into Switzerland,
they could pull the trigger on all this stuff.
Igniting dynamite or shelling
or otherwise destroying all the ways
to get into the country,
making it a lot harder to invade
and giving them time to retreat to the mountains.
There's a wonderful, strange irony going on here.
The Swiss are really good at transportation.
The trains are immaculate and efficient
and go up crazy mountains
and are always on time.
Roam around the country and you'll see this.
These are the little doors in the streets
where they would pack explosives.
So it's kind of ironic that all of this infrastructure
was packed with explosives,
but I guess that makes it even more functional
because now it's a defense mechanism.
In addition to being infrastructure for transportation.
I love Switzerland.
(jet engines)
(somber music)
There's this one bridge that connects Switzerland to Germany
that was built in 2006.
And when it was built, it was packed with explosives.
This bridge was built in conjunction with Germany.
Germany paved half of the bridge,
and yet they didn't even know that it was rigged
with explosives.
It's very aggressive Switzerland.
Okay, so anyway.
Blowing up their borders and sealing themselves off
was one major strategy for aggressively staying neutral.
Let's get onto the next one.
(dramatic music)
Zoom into the lower half of Switzerland.
And you'll be struck by one massive thing
that Switzerland has.
Mountains.
Big, giant mountains that flank across
the South part of the country.
(dramatic music)
Another thing Swiss was have
is an unmatched ability to drill holes into mountains.
The country has over a thousand tunnels.
One of which is 57 kilometers long.
These people know how to build holes in mountains.
And that skill becomes very useful
when your situation looks like this.
Most of the population lives here,
meaning not in the mountains.
And so there wasn't much of a separation
between these population centers
and Nazi Germany.
After the Swiss saw Hitler march into Paris
and take over huge portions of France,
they got serious about figuring out
what they would do if Hitler invaded.
So they had their plan to blow up the borders
and slow down an invasion.
But where could they retreat to
that would allow them to stay neutral
and stay alive during the fighting?
In the mountains, they were building giant fortresses
and bunkers and tunnels
that work literally inside of the Alps.
They built thousands of these things
in the side of mountains,
and they rigged them with guns,
and cannons,
as well as full on bases
that were equipped with supplies and beds
and living space.
Sometimes they'd be hidden in steep mountain passes,
disguised as a barn,
but really it would be a bunker
with hidden explosives, supplies,
and men ready to fight.
All over the Alps, the Swiss built these secret bunkers
mainly during World War II
in preparation for any sort of invasion.
Once the war ended, the idea of putting bunkers
in the mountains for defense
and neutrality became pretty embedded
in the Swiss security doctrine,
as well as just Swiss culture.
(upbeat music)
So I did a call out on Instagram stories
to see if this bunker culture was still a thing.
And I caught a lot of responses that showed me
that it's not just World War II in the mountains.
Swiss bunkers are all over the country.
(upbeat music)
Geez.
That's a lot of bunkers.
Thank you to all of those
who sent me pictures of your bunkers.
After World War II, the new threat was the Soviet Union
and the Cold War
and nuclear destruction.
Bunkers were now built into homes, apartment buildings,
hospitals, public infrastructure of all kind
had bunkers underneath it.
By the 1960s, Switzerland had built enough
underground bunkers and shelters
to protect the entire population
and with a healthy surplus.
Something that no other country's ever done.
Okay.
So let's talk about the last step here,
which is kind of the dark side of Swiss neutrality
and the one that no one really wants to talk about,
but gotta talk about it.
(ominous music)
So let me reiterate here
that staying neutral and safe
when this is your situation is a very difficult thing.
I mean, World War II was an incredible tragedy
where millions of people lost their lives.
During World War II,
Switzerland had an official policy of neutrality.
This meant that they would trade with whomever.
Whether it was the Axis and Hitler,
or it was the Allies and Churchill.
But in reality, Switzerland traded a lot more with Germany,
providing them with anti-aircraft guns
and other military supplies and ammunition
that was used in the war.
In addition, Switzerland allowed the Nazi regime
to store lots of gold and art
and other valuables that were looted from victims
of the war.
And specifically the Holocaust.
Not a super good look.
Defenders of this will tell you that Switzerland
was doing what it needed to do to stay out of the war,
to stay neutral
and just like blowing up your borders
or making bunkers in the mountains.
This pandering to Hitler
and being kind of on decent terms with the Third Reich
was a way of making it more costly
and more implausible that Germany
would just pop right down South from where they are
to take over this small country.
Neutrality does not mean holding hands
and singing kumbaya.
Neutrality in the Swiss foreign policy doctrine
means deterrence and defense.
There's a Swiss military saying that says,
"In order to remain in peace, you have to have cannons."
(artillery fire)
This kind of sums it up.
Not only did they have cannons and weaponry,
but they also played by whatever rules they needed to
in order to stay out of the war.
And it worked.
Hitler had a pretty developed plan to take over Switzerland,
but in the end it didn't make strategic sense.
It was too costly and implausible for them
to take over their neighbor to the South.
Even though he had taken over the majority
of the European continent at that point.
I would bet a large sum of money
that the top comment on this video
is someone badmouthing the Swiss
for all of this World War II stuff.
Which, whatever.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
If that's how you feel, that's how you feel.
(somber music)
Okay.
So these two massive global wars are over
and Switzerland is still neutral,
but they don't have to take as extreme measures
to remain so.
So what do you do with all these bunkers?
First, the bombing the borders thing,
where they packed explosives in all of these bridges
and roads and tunnels.
It turns out that the military slowly started to dismantle
all of this a few years ago.
And by 2014, the military says
that all of the mines and bombs and TNT
have been removed from public infrastructure.
Good for you military.
No more bombs at bridges.
So for the household bunkers
that were built during the Cold War,
those are still there.
And my friends on Instagram tell me
that they're just kind of used for like storage rooms
or sometimes like as a laundry room.
Extra space, I guess,
with really fortified doors
that will withstand the radioactivity of a nuclear weapon.
I mean, it's not bad to have.
But what I'm really interested in
is all of the mountain fortresses
and tunnels,
and like bunkers that were in the Swiss Alps.
What happened to those?
Those were really expensive to build
and were expensive to maintain.
And the military is honestly kind of eager
to get rid of them.
Some of them have been sold off
and turned into like fancy hotels
in the side of a mountain.
Others are used as cheese sellers
to make delicious Swiss cheese.
And then you've got this one,
which was purchased by like a tech security company
that specializes in keeping your data safe.
So you can store your Bitcoin
or whatever else you need
on these super secure servers
in the side of a Swiss mountain.
They claim these servers are so protected
that they are impervious even to an electromagnetic shock
from an atom bomb.
It seems to me like a little bit overkill,
but if you have some really important documents
and files that you need to save,
this is your place.
But the majority of these mountain bunkers
and fortresses lie completely abandoned.
If you hike around Switzerland,
you will see these things everywhere,
which is something I've never done.
And really now want to do.
Go like bunker hunting in Switzerland.
It sounds kind of amazing.
All right, so the Swiss stayed neutral.
They've continued to stay neutral.
They will probably continue to stay neutral
and it turns out that we'll use whatever means necessary
to do so.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)
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(upbeat music)
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Thank you all for watching.
I've got a lot of really cool videos coming up
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Alright, have a good day.
(calm music)