How has Switzerland managed to stay in a neutral position during times of conflict like WWII?
It had to do with what it would cost and what would be gained in return.
There would have been a lot of difficulties. If Hitler had started to conquer Switzerland the Swiss army had the plan of going into the Réduit. This was basically giving up a large part of the country and going to hiding in the mountains. Sounds maybe stupid (giving up all your cities) but the strategically most important part of Switzerland are all the passes over and the tunnels going through the mountains (e.g. the Gotthard tunnel) These are very important passages to travel north - south in Europe. By hiding in bunkers throughout the Alps we could have still guarded these passages.
And to add to that there were plans to destroy these tunnels which would have basically made any conquering more or less meaningless.
Also it is rather difficult to fight an enemy in the mountains especially when that is their home territory.
The next point is that the axis powers wouldn't have gained that much from conquering Switzerland as they didn't really depend on having those geographical points.
Also noting the Swiss military was at that time quite large (proportional to the number of citizens) which has to do with our military system (every man has to do military service and is in sort of reserve after that service so if we would mobilize we could effectively more than double our numbers in rather a short time.)
And the last point (which some Swiss people dislike to admit) is that we also held diplomatic relations with all sides of the war. We did hold a lot of the money of all contenders and we also didn't (at least openly) support either side of the war. So no party had a reason to attack us. Last thing was that we also really held ourselves out of the war and just secured our country. Even though some of our cities were bombed we didn't threaten anyone nor did we declare war.
Add to that that we have always been rather a bit isolationist (like not joining any big country groups or alliances and thus didn't have any reason nor obligation to join the war.
I have to say I cannot guarantee that this is all 100% correct. I'm Swiss and this is also a topic that interests me a lot. And I've also discussed this a lot of times before.
I also have some other reasons but for those I'm really not sure if they are just speculation or have valid proof so I'll leave them out.
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