Swiss Bunker Layout: Sperrstelle Sattelegg, An Entrance To The Redoubt 

Here's the coordinates: 46.686718, 7.632489 www.google.ch/maps/place/46°41'12.2"N+7°37'57.0"E/@46.6867171,7.6237342,2488m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d46.6867178!4d7.6324885 That comes out on the corner by the bridge.

Switzerland's defensive plans are essentially the plot of Home Alone on a countrywide scale, I love it.

Great video ! i do like the gun videos but this is almost better. there are plenty of gun vids and vids from inside old bunkers but your narration and explanation of the whole sytem and showing angels etc really brought it to life, more of this please.

A British view on German tactics and swiss defense. BRILLIANT!

I am Swiss but haven't served in the Swiss Armed Forces, and I approve of this content.

Thanks for the info on Swiss defenses. That was very interesting, please keep up the Swiss history programme.

When someone asks me why germany never invaded switzerland, i always compare it to a hedgehog....its bloody hard to get to the meat and even then there's barely any....so not worth the effort...also if left alone, the hedgehog sells you weapons!

That road resembles eastern Pennsylvania. Maryland has huge holes, cracks, and steel plates to keep out tanks. LOL!! If a road gets paved, the power company digs it up and puts down steel plates, almost immediately.

Note the three demolition shafts. Spaced, I presume, to produce a breach wide enough that you couldn't just trundle up an Armoured Vehicle Launched Bridge and drop summat across the gap. This is a key part of military demolitions intended to create an obstacle and why demolishing bridges for that purpose is a bit of an art. The Royal Engineers have a nice book, subtitled, IIRC, 'How to blow up just about anything' that teaches you this. As an MOD civilian I once (more than 20 years ago) had to read and internally digest it's contents as part of my job. I even got to go on the practical section of the Infantry Demolitions Course - happy days. :)

Thank you for showing us the Sperrstelle Sattelegg, Bloke! A very interesting Video. The Nahverteidigung (Close defence) or as you mentioned the "good News hole" near the Entrance would most likely be armed with an LMG25. There was the Schartenadapter (Firing hole Adapter) for the LMG and later for the StGw 57 in the Bunkers. Best Regards from a former Swiss Army Defensive Infrastructure Specialist. "Und steht der Teufel selbst vor'm Haus - hier beisst er sich die Zähne aus!"

I just read about Operation Tannenbaum and now this video shows up in my feed. The most interesting battle theater that fortunately never happened.

Great video. Good to see the interlocking aspects of the Swiss defences. REALLY love the hat!

Welcome to Bloke in the Bunker. Hehehe... As the computer in WarGames said, "the only winning move is not to play." I just love the use of the word 'inconvenience' when talking about blowing up tanks into tiny bits.

Being a bilingual french canadian with some knowledge of german, I really enjoy you switching with those three language around 19:36. And I totally understand forgetting words of one's langue maternelle.

This is a very nice example of the military concept in depth augmented by using the terrain to channel the attackers.

Great video, very informational. Thank you Sir. Bloke

I love this video. The national redoubt is an immensely interesting topic. I'd love to see more videos like this.

Thank you! That was very interesting, had no idea that Germany ever contemplated invasion of Switzerland. Thanks for the excellent info and tour!

Good work. I know you survived this, but it's kind of scary in spots with those slopes and cars. You've really gone above and beyond for us.

As a former member, of the Fest-Art Kp II/23 and the Réduit-Brigade 22, I am very surprised how non-Swiss people look at our fortifications today. Yes, we had a lot of fortifications, blocking positions and in the mountains of course ideal advance sites to intercept and stop an attacker. It would have worked for sure. How long, probably quite long in view of the supplies that were available to us. In 1976, I was trained as a gunner and later became a gunnery commander, depending on whether I had 6 or 12 men under me, depending on the gun. We were always very well trained. Per week during the training and supplementary courses were always during at least 3-4 days active shooting, ie trained. The mobilization always took place under so-called war conditions. Every two years, 3 weeks of refresher courses had to be completed. My last grenade was fired in 1995 at the Gotthard. As a former member of the Red-Br 22 I was allowed to keep my personal equipment. Uniform and assault rifle, so to speak as a souvenir. Today I live as a pensioner in Thailand, have taken the uniform with me, the rifle I had to leave to good friends for safekeeping for me, in Switzerland. - Yes we had a very good army, with very good soldiers. Well understood, that was at that time, still when I have been mandatory between 1976 and 1995.

I just have learned more from you about Swiss bunkers than in my one year military service in the swiss armed forces.

Nice job 👍 One of my favorite of your videos, thank you

Haven't seen someone this excited about bunkers since my days as a Hoxhaist

Good, interesting, video. Hope you do some more like this.

I found this fascinating! Good work

Cool history tidbit. Thanks.

Thank you very much for this great presentation in reality

Half of my family either died in that infernal war or ended up in concentration camps, so I mean what I say - well done, Switzerland. Your citizens should be proud of their government. I am glad somewhere in Europe there was an island without all the death and suffering.

A very interesting video. I have had a keen interest in the history of Switzerland during World War 2 going back at least a decade. My daughter and I are actually coming to Switzerland in May and one of our goals is to check out some of the bunkers you are talking about. One place we have a mind to check out is Full Reuenthal which wouldn't be part of the Reduit but rather part of the Swiss version of the Maginot Line. Very much apreciate your videos thought I have not often commented on them, this one is a gem given our up coming trip.

An absolutely fascinating video, Bloke! I've been interested in Swiss defensive structures for years, especially the smaller company-sized ones like Sperrstelle. You did a terrific job narrating the defensive thinking behind each fortification. Just a shame you couldn't get inside the main roadside bunker to show the actual fighting points. I know the Swiss have some restored bunkers open to the public. If you are looking for future video ideas, perhaps combine the restored fortification with your informed narrative storytelling--I know it'd be a great one to watch, especially from my office in the States, so far away from the Redoubt area.

Great job, fascinating!

Really nice vid. Love to see more.

Please do a video on how engineers accidentally made a gorge... I can't seem to find any clear info on what you were referencing, but I have to assume it could be presented in a highly humorous fashion. Assuming that the accident didn't involve a large number of causalities or something.

dam your ch in Reich sounds pretty swiss :) 1:24

Very interesting, i would enjoy seeing more like this 🖒 from oz

Great video

Love this footage, well done.

Well done, I'm liking the content like this Cheers!

Really interesting video. Cheers!

Even though you kept blabbering on and I already knew all this stuff, I enjoyed the video. Probably because of your obvious enthusiasm for the subject

More bunker videos, please!

Very nice camera work, single handed; you didn't start blithering until right there at the very end.

.The Swiss were in a very bad situation, something that some Americans did not understand in WWII, on another channel I heard how Germany held up her coal supply. As a neutral country Switzerland was free to trade with any country she wished. She did trade with the Germans bearings, Oerlikon cannons and other intricate equipment that the Germany needed for her war effort. In contrast to that she set up a deal with the British that allowed them to produce the Oerlikon cannon in the UK under licence prior to the fall of France. Schaffhausen, Switzerland was bombed by the Americans and killed 40 people and cost the U.S. $14 million in compensation at the end of the war. The plans to invade Switzerland by Germany were very real and just like the UK, it is surprising that it was not invaded, in the case of the UK the Germans could not gain air superiority. It would be interesting to find out when there was the most traction in Germany to invade. Switzerland did have BF109 fighters to defend herself however it was not enough and as the war progressed she was slowly acquiring a few damaged Allied aircraft that could not make it back to the UK or Southern Italy. Overflying Switzerland by allied aircraft from 1943 especially by the U.S. was causing some concern and a few allied aircraft were remorsefully shot down by the Swiss. Sadly in war things are not all in pure black and white and people must remember that Switzerland had three people groups those of French, Italian and German descent and that would influence their reactions to the Allies. I was surprised to learn that from 1944 onwards the U.S. would try to stop US aircrew from falling into Swiss hands were they would sit out the war. The U.S. ran an underground escape operation to get their pilots home and to better conditions. From a hindsight viewpoint it is interesting to note that Allied pilots who made it to Sweden would be better treated by the Swedes than the Swiss as they had more food and their interment conditions were more relaxed than in Switzerland. It would be interesting to find out whether allied bomber crews were instructed to make for Sweden as oppose to Switzerland when all else failed.

I learned a lot ! Thanks ;)

Passing the various bunkers when walking my doc also lends an interesting activity of thinking thru the design, lines of fire, defensive use of the landscape etc. My stopping group is Wollishofen / Sihltahl area. A new revenue stream in military landscape walks beckons? Following the rail line Zurich to Chur also has some interesting features. Always a joy your vids.

Very good video, thanks! Do the Swiss maintain any bunkers from this era or did they all become decommissioned by now?

you should check out the bunkers above the Gotthard pass on Gemsstock

Very interesting

I've have/had a few of those hats, could never find one that fit proper though...

You give a lot of credence to the idea that a 4.7cm (47mm) anti-tank gun could have done serious damage to German armour, but even at the ranges shown, later German armour would have had absolutely no problem with such defences. By mid 1943 Germany already had the Tiger I available and that could have taken a near point blank shot for a 47mm popgun. However, most people who think they know about tanks really know very little. Your 67Ton tank may have truly enormous tracks and infinitely deep frontal armour, but the top armour, even of the mighty Pzkw VI was limited, and the mined roadway would always have been an extraordinarily difficult route to traverse. I have been to Casino in Italy. The terrain is not dissimilar and the number of routes are also of a likeness. In that case, the German defenders didn't need to have fantastic AT weaponry, they just needed to defend. And the only defensive position that I have seen that is as easily defensible as Monte Casino, is the position you show us here. The Germans arrive after hand-to-hand fighting all the way from the border, They roll up with their tanks, the first of which are destroyed by the mined road, so they then spend weeks slowly rebuilding the road under intense fire from along the valley, across the valley and down the mountains. Under most situations, you'd just send in your specialist mountain troops to clear all the foot soldier out. But Finland had already shown that truly expert mountain troops could do a lot of damage, and I imagine that Swiss mountain troops would probably have been able to account for a 5:1 advantage, probably significantly more. I still have no doubt that Germany could have comfortably defeated Switzerland, but that victory would have been entirely pyrrhic. And then again, Nazi Germany would have lost its ability o ferret away all thise billions that they stole.

Very interesting video! A small map or diagram would have helped with the explanation though.

If the mountain of debris after the detonation of the charges would have been 3 meters high: where the weapons in the lower bunker high enough to reach any enemy?

Enjoyed this video! Would love to see more military installations like this if possible!

After the explosions, how much time would the German Pioniere troops have needed to put the debris away and clean the street?

Switzerland was a hostage, no need to harm it. And, it's like Afghanistan with trees.

The reason why Yugoslavia defended on the border was because it was a multinational country and defending in depth would leave the Slovenes and Croats basically undefended. These two nations, understandably, insisted on defending the borders and the politics got it's way instead of common military sense.

Werk... werk... what's the English word for... WORK. ITS A WORK, BLOKE. As in earthworks! Aarrrrgghhhh!

Is there some kind of over-looking fort covering all these positions ? Like Fort Dailly covering the smaller Forts Cindey and Scex in St-Maurice ?

Good video! :)

Do you know you we had somewhat simmilar stuff in the BRD (aka West Germany) and Austria in the cold war?

Thank you !

10:59 I genuinely thought Bloke said "that dogger". Bit harsh to take them on with a 7.5cm AT gun and a Maxim...

It worked for Leonidas!

Probably a stupid question but I'll ask anyway. What were the trees like during the war? Were they completely gone? Or were they thinned out so you could see through them? Or were they to be trimmed if the invasion was imminent? Surely they wouldn't have been kept like that.

An Alpine version of Thermopylae then?

Was the modern also stuffed with explosives during the cold war ?

I’d be interested to see more in this series, it’s very cool and pretty unique to Switzerland. Edit: I'd also be curious to know why they decommissioned all the defences, it would cost them more money to do that than to just leave them, they could've just locked all the doors and left them alone, its not like they are going anywhere anytime soon, and I can guarantee that at some point in the future they will have to use them again, or somthing similar.

very intresting

You should Take a look at fortress Heldsberg it was Able to Cover most of lake constance and could even hit constance itself it also has a very large collection of Swiss and foreign weapons and ammuniton

please more info about the Kanderschlucht! there's not much english language info about it

Great video and good explanations. I would highly appreciate more of it. - One question: you said Germany had 400’000 troops by the end of the war in Norway. I learned that they needed 120’000 troops to conquer Norway at the beginning. How do you explain the difference of 280’000? Was Norway a last resort to resist before losing it all?

At 10:00, the term you're looking for is Chokepoint.

Great video but did you steal that hat of a Swiss dude?

I like your gun videos of course, but I have to admit that I like these kinds of videos (non-gun/politics videos) by those who do them (you, Ian, Karl, etc). Ehem, btw, Switzerland did it right, based on where they were and what they had available at the time.

but where would germans hide the gold if they invaded?

my grandfather and great grandfather both served in ww2 one simplon and the other on gotthard. I wonder what it must have felt like serving in these huge bunker complexes way up in the mountains during ww2 with switzerland surounded. my grandfather told me that they used to be able to hear which trains carried ammunition to italy cause they were really heavy und would make this loud "clackclack" as they went over the tracks. they were both locals from the mountains (Adelboden) and expierienced mountaineers. pilots who got shot down or crash landed in switzerland were also interned until the ending of the war in Adelboden, mostly americans.

Hello! If you want to check how to defend around bunkers and make obstacles. You should take a look at FM 5-15 and FM 90-7. everyspec.com/ARMY/FM-Field-Manual/FM_90-7_14502/ and www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/FM/PDFs/FM5-15.pdf It will make clear a lot of things about defending positions, and that trenches alone wont do. You also want to put mines and barbed wire around the positions, and have entrance corridors. So not assault team can sneak up to your bunkers at night. Ive been watching your channel for a while now, and i think i like it. :) Greetings, Jeff

Riding near Zürich on a Sunday afternoon, anyone will roll over a couple of sections of road with numerous squarish covers in a checkerboard pattern. Hmmm .. You'll ride through a grassy swale, and suddenly there's a triple row of dragon's teeth (tank traps) crossing from the hill on one side to the hill on the other. Follow these rows with your eye, and you may see an embrasure up in the woods situated so as to enfilade the entire row. Ohh...kay. Near the summit, there's a discreet group of dish antennas tucked away under the trees. Yeah, they totally had satellite dishes in WWII. And once, when hiking along a trail above a river, I came upon a shielded embrasure. Huh? What's that doing HERE? Turning around, I saw that a field piece behind that embrasure would be firing straight down a whole length of road on the OPPOSITE SIDE of the river. Good luck to the infantry squad sent down one tangled slope, across the river and up the opposing slope to locate and neutralize that bunker. It could be done -- but it'd cost ya.

On reflection, I suggest the key to success or failure would have been the human factors more than the engineering. Eben Emael was a formidable fortification, but the attackers used shock action, surprise and their own determination to overcome the defenders. For this reason it would be interesting if you could speak to the Swiss will to fight.

Somebody buy this man a GoPro, that segment where he went down on the side of the road was hard to watch ;)

Iwo Jima dug in defence. Very expensive to invade.

This is very cool to see, there arn't many things like this in the states that are relatively modern (civil and mexican war eras don't really count as modern). So its interesting to see how these defenses were setup to fight a modern army by an organized country (terrorists in a cave dont have the same resources as an entire country). Can you show us more examples of things like this?

Assaulting that position would be horrible. I'll assume that the bunker across the gorge would hold fire initially. Permit the Germans to get stuck in before wreaking havoc. The moment they came around that corner they would be taking pre-zeroed fire at very short range (looks like about 150-200m). It would be a natural reaction to use a tank as mobile cover, protecting the infantry for a frontal assault. SURPRISE, explosive charges in the road. Now to call up some pioneers/engineers/sapper (depending on what you call them) to bridge the gaping hole in the road. While under fire. For good measure, I'll bet that some Swiss artillerymen would have finished their tea/coffee and begun tossing shells into the hapless Germans stuck on that road from the relative safety of their dug-in and camouflaged gun emplacements. A-ha! We can send an infantry platoon down into the gorge to flank that pesky bunker. Now the opposite bunker opens up, forcing the Germans even further back around that corner and killing any infantry in the gorge. Since that opposite bunker and its associated trench lines can sweep the entire gorge from edge to edge, there is no point trying to sneak in that way. Even if you can take out the bunker across the gorge and clear it, the bunker sitting on the road is almost impossible to break without being flanked and given a healthy dose of satchel charge. A most elegant design.

15:19 just waiting for his arm to be taken off by a passing car

One needs to have lots of combat engineers and mountain troops to invade Switzerland both in WW2 and cold war

Im surprised you didnt address the topography of Switzerland more.

I want to hunker in my bunker.

think Rorke's Drift...brb Sabaton.

One year :-)

Nice hat.

looking forward to the second world war project ;D

Nice hat where do I get one

I take it there was no hope that the allies would try and help in case of invasion? With the technology of the era and the limited lift capability of the air forces it doesn’t seem like it would have been practical and I guess by the time the allies could have attacked the attacker’s so to speak the war was far enough “done” that invasion was no longer a worry. Very interesting though, I’d like to see more videos like that, maybe even an overview of the various lines falling back to the redoubt.

It's been my understanding that Germany chose not to invade Switzerland partially because Switzerland is mountainous, with switchback roads that can easily be shot at from prepared hidden positions in the rock face, and roads easily destroyed. Thus the German army would have had to turn around and go back anyway. And as *BotR* mentioned, the Swiss were also keen to maintain their supply routes so they didn't starve or freeze. So, it was in everybody's interest to observe Switzerland's neutrality.

One day, if this plague pisses off, I'm going to take a tour of Europe just to see stuff like this.

It's obvious that the Germans thought the Swiss defense was extensive enough were they didn't even give it a go so all in all good job

That bunker... it would be shooting at forces blocked by the metal and blown up road. The mountain and gorge prevent going around. Fish in a barrel.

One of the main reasons why Swizerland was never invaded was money. Especially international currency. The Swedes wouldn't accept gold or Riechmarks and would accept Swiss francs for iron ore and ball bearings. Also Switzerland was the home to the bank of international exchange. So INVADE Switzerland you would then have to invade Sweden to shore up your raw material supplies.

Bring up the Bangalores!

Check out how the Swiss treated Allied prisoners captured during the war, very grim