Тема та же. Стратегические и идеологические цели Гитлера.
Hitler told the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, in a speech marking his first year in
power, that what was happening in Germany “will not halt at the frontier posts of a land which is German not only in its people but in its history as well, and which was for many centuries an integral part of the German Empire.”
Switzerland would be Hitler’s goal after he conquered Austria, argued G.E.W. Johnson in the June 1934 issue of North American Review. He wrote that a “slugging contest that is now being waged between the two Austrian-born Chancellors: Hitler, the ‘little corporal’ of Berlin, and Dollfuss, the ‘Millimetternich’ of Vienna, to decide whether
or not Germany is to eat Austria for breakfast.”
The Swiss feared that if Austria were “served up for breakfast, it will be Switzerland’s turn to furnish the lunch.” After all, the Nazis claimed to “voice the aspirations not alone of the sixty-five million Germans who live in Deutschland, but of
the eighty million ‘Germans’ who comprise Deutschtum [the greater German Empire].”
Like a “restless swarm of termites,” wrote Johnson, the Nazis “bored from within,” to subvert regions with a German-speaking majority: Danzig, the Saar, Austria and Switzerland. Their intentions, based on kinship of blood and speech, were to incorporate Switzerland within a Greater Germany by an appeal to the historic past. During the Middle Ages, Switzerland had been part of the Holy Roman Empire, the “First Reich” in Nazi terminology, of which Hitler’s was the Third.
The Nazis now were proclaiming that they intended to “expand Germany’s boundaries to the farthest limits of the old Holy Empire, and even beyond. None other than Professor Ewald Banse, responding to Swiss criticism of his geographical textbook expounding German claims to Switzerland, stated:
Quite naturally we count you Swiss as offshoots of the German nation (along with the Dutch, the Flemings, the Lorrainers, the Alsatians, the Austrians and the Bohemians). . . . Patience: one day we will group ourselves around a single banner, and whosoever shall wish to separate us, we will exterminate!
TARGET SWITZERLAND
Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II
By STEPHEN P. HALBROO
