Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

“Heinrich was a man of contradictions. He was very much opposed to the notion of celibacy. I think my continued… presence was a help for Theodora’s grandmother, who had a lot to put up with.”

“But staying married to a Nazi… that was something you were not prepared to tolerate… and so you divorced,” Dirk persisted.

“Yes, so it must have appeared.”

Aunt Ursel was not in fact answering Dirk, she was prefacing the remarks she had decided to make. We needed, she stressed, to know what she and Louie Lessinger had found out about the Fortezza file forty years before.

“With war looming as a possibility when the thirties were ending there was a lot of posturing and hand-wringing and even the most preposterous strategies were taken seriously.”

The Swiss plan for the defence of the nation might have seemed mad to many. The idea involved giving up to invading Germans the low-lying areas of the country and retreating to the impregnable fastness of the high Alps. The Réduit strategy meant the reduction of Swiss territory to what amounted to the natural fortress of the highest mountains, invulnerable to attack with miles of underground tunnels and caverns, from which guerilla style actions could be launched to wear down the presumed occupier.

Bea nodded, impatient, all of this well known to her from her conflict studies in Texas.

There had been many other ploys mooted which were in a bewildering variety of ways crazy. The gravity of the condition of the proponents ranged from mildly deluded to almost certifiably mad.

The authors of the Fortezza scheme? Perhaps schizoid, unswerving in their belief in the tenets of National Socialism but also sure that Hitler Germany would suffer defeat.

“Already in ’39 predicting that the Germans would lose?” Bea wondered.

“Nazis, yes, but they were also calculating and pragmatic Swiss,” Ursel Lange emphasized.

The Swiss have lived for centuries in peace and have thus been permitted to think in the longer term, not limited like many of their neighbours to measuring time in terms of the periods between intervening hostilities.

“A ‘Thousand Year Reich’… but vanquished by 1943, that was what they foresaw and they worried a lot about the consequences for Switzerland.

“Call me dumb if you like, but if Germany was going to be beaten how could the consequences for the Swiss be bad?” Dirk asked.

“The gold, of course, the pile of gold accumulating here but arriving from Germany, stolen from Jews, looted from the exchequers of occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Nazi-governed Danzig.”

Wiki confirmed that these three sources boosted German official gold reserves by seventy-one million dollars between 1937 and 1939. The pile was growing to become a mountain.

Aunt Ursel pointed out that the Réduit plan had been conceived by an authoritarian Swiss general who at one time had even been an admirer of Benito Mussolini. But his idea was one which involved taking the high ground not only topographically but also morally. It was patriotic, virtuous and high-minded and most assuredly did not include the evacuation of tons of tainted booty from the bank vaults in Bern, Zurich or Basel.

“And so the Fortezza file was about providing a home for that gold, even if the authors were betting on a German defeat?” I suggested.

“Yes. With Germany beaten, all that treasure moved by the Nazis to a neutral country like ours could become a huge embarrassment, no?”

“My recollection is that it did… and indeed still does,” said Bea, waiting until the uniformed conductor had finished checking their tickets and left the compartment.

“Fortezza was intended to spare Swiss blushes.”

That had been the conclusion reached by Ursel Lange and Louie Lessinger in 1972.

At the time, in ’38 and ’39, there seemed to be little probability that Mussolini and Hitler would make common cause, there was no mighty Axis on the horizon. In retrospect the two dictatorships may seem logically and irrevocably linked, but at the time very different flavours of authoritarianism were in play. Italian Fascism rooted in the presumed glories of ancient Rome was very different from a Nazi dogma which repurposed Nordic mythology and derived from it a justification of Aryan supremacy, the entitlement, even the sacred duty to rule the world. Mussolini had even signed up to a treaty with the British and the French which had been meant to thwart German territorial expansion. Then came the annexation of Austria and Il Duce’s campaign to bring Abyssinia back into the Roman embrace. And Britain and France were still believing armed conflict could be avoided.

“Chamberlain… after his meeting with Hitler,” Bea said to herself.

“We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

“But for our clever Swiss conspirators at the time, Italian territory had the allure that an off-shore island has these days for financial tricksters, offering not so much concealment as deniability.”

“The idea was to park the gold with the fucking Italians?” Bea blurted out, casting serious aspirations on the probity of an entire citizenry.

Fortezza was as good as moth-balled, reduced to use as stabling for what remained of the Italian cavalry. The gold would have been guarded by troops who appeared to be Italian but who were in reality fiercely loyal Swiss soldiers from the canton of Ticino.

“Aha!” said Bea, impressed by the subterfuge contemplated seven decades earlier.

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