When one today reads contemporary reports of Switzerland's concert life from the first half of 1945, it seems almost as if nothing untoward was happening in the world. But the world outside was rapidly collapsing. Warsaw fell to the Red Army in mid-January, the Americans and British crossed the Rhine into Germany in March, and by mid-April the Soviets had occupied Vienna. Fearful of his future in the splintering Nazi state, Wilhelm Furtwängler sneaked across the Austrian border into Switzerland in late January and was soon conducting as a guest in Winterthur. On 11 April Robert Heger conducted a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic that Furtwängler had left behind. Appropriately enough, it included the final scene from Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Hitler celebrated his birthday on 20 April in his bunker in Berlin, surrounded by the Red Army. He committed suicide on 30 April, and on 8 May Germany at last capitulated.

Switzerland had for some five years lived in fear of a German invasion, and the removal of that threat now sparked off reprisals, both against German nationals who were Nazi sympathizers and against Swiss nationals who were thought to have been too friendly toward the Axis powers. The Swiss authorities—cautious to the last—did not close the German Embassy in Bern until 7 May. By 9 May the newspapers were reporting that the Nazi Party was now banned in the country and that the police were raiding the houses of its members and confiscating all propaganda material.