Hello and bonjour!
It’s 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.
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.
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 10km 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 Jura
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 twelve fearsome fortresses with thick concrete walls
and yes, this lovely pink two-storey 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, toilets, 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
that 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 Villa’s minty green twin,
so we’re heading over there 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 10km 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 forts became what was officially named
the Promentouse 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 forts,
why did the Swiss Army go to such lengths to disguise these two
when they didn’t bother about the other 10?
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 kilometres north of Nyon,
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 Gland about twenty minutes’ walk away.
The villa is usually closed to the public but there a few open days when you can go inside
– the next one is scheduled for September 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.