Only a transit country

Traditionally, there has been the notion that the generation that experienced World War II in Switzerland - the so-called active service generation - was a homogeneous unit: ready for defense and united. But was this really the case? The present study demonstrates through an analysis of interviews, memoirs, military theoretical literature, propaganda texts, and archival sources that the traditional image of the active service generation was essentially shaped by the propaganda of spiritual national defense. The increasingly polarized gender order towards the end of the 1930s played a central role in this. The image of the soldier, who protects the family left at home with a rifle in hand, as well as the image of the Swiss woman as a housewife and selfless supporter of her conscripted husband, became normative ideals.