not known whether this plan was endorsed by any high-level members of the German government. After the Second Armistice at Compiègne in June 1940, the German Interior Ministry produced a memorandum on the annexation of a strip of eastern France from the mouth of the Somme river to Lake Geneva, intended as a reserve for post-war German colonisation. The planned dissection of Switzerland would have accorded with this new French-German border, annexing the French-speaking region of Romandy into the Reich despite the linguistic difference. Italian involvement Germany's wartime ally Italy, under the rule of Benito Mussolini, desired the Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland as part of its irredentist claims in Europe, particularly the Swiss canton of Ticino. In a tour of the Italian alpine regions, Mussolini stated to his entourage that "the New Europe ... could not have more than four or five large states; the small ones [would] have no further raison d'être and [would] have to disappear". Switzerland's future in an Axis-dominated Europe was further discussed in a 1940 round-table conference between Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, also attended by Hitler. Ciano proposed that in the event of Switzerland's dissolution, it should be divided along the central chain of the Western Alps, since Italy desired the areas to the south of this demarcation line as part of its own war aims. This would have left Italy in control of Ticino, Valais, and Graubünden. See also Switzerland during the World Wars History of Switzerland National Redoubt (Switzerland) Italian Empire References Sources Codevilla, Angelo. Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and Moral Blackmail Today Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000. Halbrook, Stephen P. The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Casemate, 2006. Halbrook, Stephen P. Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II. Rockville Centre, N.Y.: Sarpedon, 1998. Karsh, Efraim. Neutrality and Small States: The European Experience in World War Two and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 1988. Kreis, Georg, ed. Switzerland and the Second World War. Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2000. Resultate der Wahlen des Bundesrats, der Bundeskanzler, und des Generals Seite. Bern: Schweizer Bundesversammlungsdienst, n.d. Steinberg, Jonathan. Why Switzerland? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tagesbefehle des Generals, 1939–1945. Bern: Eidg. Militärbibliothek, n.d. Tanner, Stephen. Refuge from the Reich: American Airmen and Switzerland during World War II.