Swiss Criminal Police

The Swiss Criminal Police are the Swiss police force that monitors Xavier March during his visit to Zürich. The novel gives them a tightly bounded but consequential role: they enforce the conditions imposed on a German investigator outside the Reich, while also protecting him and Charlie when the situation becomes dangerous. Their watch turns travel across a national border into an extension of political control, even as their conduct is not simply hostile.

Mandate and Cross-Border Control

March’s trip is permitted on explicit terms. Artur Nebe arranges a twenty-four-hour exit visa, beginning at six that evening and expiring at six the following day, and tells March that the head of the Swiss Criminal Police, Herr Streuli, is his friend. From the moment March leaves the aircraft until he boards again, Swiss officers will watch him. March must not evade them, attempt to reach Bern, or enter a foreign embassy; if he fails to return, Nebe warns, he will be arrested and deported. March agrees to report what he discovers after his return.

The arrangement is therefore surveillance backed by the possibility of detention and deportation, not freedom of movement. Yet Nebe also insists that the Swiss police will see March back in one piece. The dual mandate—preventing defection and protecting the visitor—makes the officers part of an uneasy accommodation between German authority and Swiss jurisdiction. The Swiss setting offers March no uncomplicated refuge: his movements remain legible to the Reich through the terms of his permitted visit.

Following March in Zürich

At the airport, March sees two men waiting near the baggage carousel. They are bulky, close-cropped, and dressed in belted raincoats; he recognizes them as the officers assigned to follow him. He walks past without acknowledging them, but senses them falling in behind. He passes through the green customs channel and into the concourse, with the police presence already shaping the journey.

The officers’ work is not limited to keeping March under observation. After March and Charlie leave the grounds of the banker Zaugg’s house, a Swiss police car carries them toward Zürich; Zaugg’s bodyguards have disappeared, and the gates are closing behind them. One officer asks whether March is planning further adventures and says that advance warning would help. March challenges the apparent shift from following to guarding. The officer explains that their orders are to follow and protect as necessary, and identifies the colleague in the car behind as his partner. The exchange establishes that the police have both maintained surveillance and intervened to get the pair away safely.

Charlie and the Limits of Protection

Charlie asks who the men are. March tells her that they are Swiss police officers assigned to ensure that he does not attempt to defect outside the Reich and that he returns in one piece. A voice from the front of the car responds that assisting German colleagues is always a pleasure. When Charlie asks whether March might not return, he says that this is apparently a danger. Her notebook is open on her lap as she records the explanation.

The scene makes the arrangement’s personal stakes explicit without resolving its tension. The officers are not simply pursuing March as an escapee: their stated instructions include his safety. But the protection is inseparable from monitoring, and the trip’s brief permission to cross the border does not give him the freedom to choose what happens next. The police car carries March and Charlie toward the city under Swiss supervision, while the German demand that March return remains in force.

Surveillance as a Political System

The Swiss officers’ assignment forms one border-level part of the novel’s wider account of state surveillance. Earlier, Nebe reads aloud from March’s police file: reports record his refusal to contribute to Winter Relief and join the NSDAP, disparaging remarks about Himmler, and questions about Jewish former residents of his apartment. Party officials, informants, and workplace or public witnesses have turned conduct and conversation into material for a dossier. The Swiss officers’ watch over March abroad echoes this system of observation, but operates under a distinct immediate instruction: follow and protect him while ensuring that he does not defect.

The novel contrasts that close supervision with the international business of finding and coercing holders of Swiss accounts. In 1934, Gestapo agent Georg Hannes Thomae went to Switzerland on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders to discover German account holders. He cultivated bank employees and officials, then used a suspected account to trigger an inquiry; once the Gestapo identified its holder, arrest and coercion followed, and a formal request sought the assets’ repatriation. The Swiss response was a banking code making disclosure of clients’ holdings punishable by imprisonment. Against this history, the Swiss Criminal Police’s watch over March belongs to a larger landscape of contested borders, intelligence, and competing claims to control information. The officers’ role is narrower than that of the German security apparatus, but the trip they police shows how easily personal movement becomes a matter of state security.

Narrative Significance

The Swiss Criminal Police embody the ambiguity of March’s temporary passage through Zürich. Their officers are visible from the airport onward, accompany his movements, and place a partner in a second car; their presence confirms that his freedom is conditional. Yet when March and Charlie need to leave Zaugg’s property, the police also provide transport and respond with practical, even wry, concern about the day’s events. In this episode, protection does not cancel surveillance, and surveillance does not prevent assistance. That unresolved combination gives the force its significance: it marks the edge of the Reich’s reach without making the border a safe or neutral space.