Gabriel Heim is a book and film author and exhibition organiser. He is principally concerned with research into topics of modern and contemporary history and lives in Basel.
During World War II, hundreds of Jews fled from France into Switzerland via Geneva. After the border was closed in August 1942 this escape route became more difficult to navigate, but not impossible, as the stories of Lilian Blumenstein and Lili Reckendorf show.
Rudolf Rössler was a mild-mannered journalist who ran a publishing firm in Lucerne. At the same time, he was supplying the Soviets with highly sensitive information straight from the Führer’s headquarters. The story of the master spy Lucie.
Jakob Leonhard spied for the Nazis. When they realised that the information he was feeding them had been rubber-stamped by Switzerland, his life hung by a thread.
In 1929, mountain film pioneer Arnold Fanck shot his global hit The White Hell of Piz Palü in southern Graubünden. The secret star of filming was the Bernina railway, a track system that could handle tough winter operation.
In 1925, the Schweizerische Maschinen- und Lokomotivfabrik in Winterthur was contracted to build ‘Krokodil’/‘Crocodile’ locomotives for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway.
Shortly before the war ended, the Nazis managed to spirit away a hoard of gold they had stashed in Bern. The trail of all this precious metal goes cold in the basement of the German embassy.
