The Swiss Army tries to buy German fighter planes during World War II. In vain. Only a lost and secret aviator brings the Germans to the negotiating table in 1944.
Ascension 1944, ten o'clock at night. An explosion can be heard far and wide from the Dübendorf airfield. What has happened? "Military exercises," the army lets the investigating local press know. And why do twelve German planes land at Dübendorf over the next five days? The questions are not answered satisfactorily, SP party president and National Councilor Hans Oprecht even submits an interpellation on the matter in parliament on June 15.
Over a hundred four-engine Allied aircraft landed in Switzerland in 1944 alone, and more than thirty crashed. They were part of the huge fleets of several hundred bombers that at times flew into Germany almost every night to destroy cities and industrial plants. The decimated German air force can't do much against them, but it does have one insidious trump card: the night fighter. It is equipped with state-of-the-art radar. This enables it to locate an Allied bomber in the dark and sneak up on it from below without being seen. He shoots it down with the "oblique music", a cannon installed steeply upwards. The crews of the crashing bombers don't know what's happening to them - suddenly their wings and engines are on fire. This does little to change the Allies' oppressive air superiority; the Germans don't have enough of these special aircraft for that.
On April 28, 1944, a night fighter that had shot down nineteen British bombers since June 1943 was fighting over a thousand Allied planes near Friedrichshafen. The majority of these fly back over Switzerland, and two bombers are shot down by Swiss anti-aircraft fire and crash. The night fighter gets lost and lands at Dübendorf at 2:15. The radio operator still tries to hide a thick black folder, but then surrenders together with the pilot and the gunner to the rushing Swiss officer Emile Pelster. The Germans are then fed in the middle of the night, with the pilot later describing the food as "almost too rich for our not spoiled war stomachs".
It was only a few days later that the Swiss realized what a rare aircraft had landed there. The Messerschmitt Me-110 C9+EN has a conspicuous "stag antler" antenna mounted in front, which belongs to the two radars; one of them, the wide-angle target locator FuG 220 (Lichtenstein SN-2) developed by Telefunken, has been in service since October 1943. But the secret weapon night fighter also includes the "oblique music", whose inventor Paul Mahle is part of the crew that landed in Dübendorf. Although similar installations were already known in Germany and Japan in 1938, Mahle transfers them to the Nachtjäger: instead of pointing straight ahead as usual, here the twin twenty-millimeter guns fire upward at an angle of seventy degrees. This enables the aforementioned tactics, which are relatively hazard-free for the attacker. However, the almost guaranteed success is ensured only as long as the night sighting and shooting devices used remain secret. The black folder, by the way, contains interesting codes, tables and maps and should never, ever have been taken on an enemy flight.
In Germany, meanwhile, there are hysterical outbursts of rage at the Führer's headquarters. It was suspected that the night fighter crew had deserted, and their relatives were arrested by the Gestapo. They are only released after ten days. Adolf Hitler allegedly demands that the three airmen be killed in Dübendorf, so great is his fear that Switzerland would allow the Allies to learn details about the night fighter from them (this is reported by a German air force general, as Ernst Wetter writes in his study of the night fighter). Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, however, puts himself before his airmen and demands due process.
In any case, the head of the SS special unit Friedenthal, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, is ordered to plan a commando action to destroy the Nachtjäger. Skorzeny had been involved in Operation Oak on September 12, 1943, in which Benito Mussolini was kidnapped from the Gran Sasso by Italian partisans. At Dübendorf, Skorzeny's initial plan is to use fighter-bombers to knock out antiaircraft defenses, then paratroopers from transport planes are to land and either take or blow up the night fighter.
At first, however, the Germans still try to resolve the matter by negotiation. To do so, they use a line of communication between Roger Masson, head of Swiss Army Intelligence, and SS General Walter Schellenberg, an associate of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and head of foreign espionage, which only became known after the war. The Federal Council considers contacts with SS men problematic; he is also very displeased when he learns by chance that General Henri Guisan and Masson met with Schellenberg at the "Bären" in Biglen on March 3, 1943, and three days later in Arosa.
In the Nachtjäger case, too, he is informed late and then reacts angrily. Thus the "aircraft affair", as Federal Councillor Eduard Steiger, who represents the absent head of the military department Karl Kobelt, calls it, drags on. In the meantime, Guisan takes a look at the mysterious aircraft in Dübendorf. And a German representative on the airfield is convinced that the aircraft and its equipment are well secured.
Finally, a deal is struck: Switzerland is allowed to buy twelve coveted Messerschmitt Me-109 G fighter planes (called Gustav) from Germany for 500,000 Swiss francs each, in return for which the secret night fighter is blown up.
After the German representatives did not allow the Swiss to remove the two engines and replace the new tires with old ones, the Me-110 C9+EN was destroyed on May 18 with three explosive devices brought by a German specialist. German military pilots in civilian clothes fly the twelve Gustavs to Dübendorf. The pilots, whose boss is a cousin of Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmüller, are taken back to the border in a bus with the windows covered.
Switzerland settles the bill with two checks of three million francs each. The night fighter crew is allowed home to Germany, has to be court-martialed there, is
but were already back in action against British bombers on May 23. Unlike in 1940 (see main article), the release of the three interned pilots is not contrary to neutrality, since three British officers are sent home at the same time.
The Federal Council does not answer Oprecht's interpellation until August 18; it conceals the contact with SS man Schellenberg, but otherwise sticks to the facts. "The machines are already in use today and have proven themselves in every respect," he writes in conclusion. This, however, is not true. The Gustavs are hardly the reinforcements desired by the air force, even if the historian Edgar Bonjour, employed by the Federal Council, still claimed the opposite in his 1970 history of Swiss neutrality and portrayed the "dangerous incident for Switzerland as a stroke of luck". Indeed, from August 4, after a few hours of flight, a series of emergency landings due to engine malfunctions begins.
This is not very surprising: the Germans produce under the greatest pressure - and use concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war. At this time, the Me-109s are built primarily in the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen concentration camps, as Georg Hoch writes in his monograph on the Me-109 in the Swiss Air Force. There are "acts of sabotage such as sand in the oil tank, filed hydraulic lines, covered screw connections and slit gasoline tanks." Cyrillic letters are found on the aircraft engines, the real problem part.
On January 10, 1947, a final flight ban is imposed on the Gustav, and the last aircraft is scrapped in May 1948. Three years later, Messerschmitt and engine manufacturer Daimler-Benz are ordered to pay compensation to Switzerland.
For the Germans, too, all the fuss about the night fighter is hardly worth it. On July 13, 1944, eight weeks after it was blown up, a German plane with the highly secret radar equipment on board lands in Britain by mistake.
Source: The Weekly, Roman Schürmann
Katzenjammer Musik
