(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.