The evening of February 4, 1936 promises promise in the small, snow-covered Swiss health resort Davos to become calm. Some of the residents in the house had already gone to bed shortly before 8 p.m. when the Gustloff family’s doorbell rang on the third floor.
Hedwig Gustloff opens the door and when the young male visitor asks if he can speak to her husband, she leads him into his study and asks him to wait there. He is still on the phone, but will take care of the visitor straight away.
It is not unusual for foreign visitors to ask to speak to Wilhelm Gustloff so late, as the 41-year-old German is the leader of an organization that is causing a lot of attention and criticism in Switzerland: the foreign organization the NSDAPwhose task is to spread Nazi ideology among Germans living abroad.
Gustloff, born in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, has lived in Davos since 1915 and pursues his task in the Alpine republic with great enthusiasm.
When he entered his study at around 7:55 p.m., this unknown young man was waiting for him, pointed a pistol at him and, without hesitation, fired four times. Three bullets hit the owner of the house, who collapsed bleeding. The perpetrator then flees the apartment. Doctors called can no longer save the victim’s life.
Why was he shot?
A short time later, the perpetrator voluntarily turned himself in to the police and was arrested. During the first interrogation it becomes clear who this man is. His name is David Frankfurter. He is a medical student, living in Basel, with Yugoslavian nationality. When he is confronted with the new widow that same evening to identify him, he answers her question as to why he shot her husband: “Because I’m Jewish bin.“
In the course of the following interrogations, it becomes clear that Frankfurter is extremely outraged by the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime in Germany, which have reached a new peak with the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935. He decides to do something about it by killing the official representative of the NSDAP in Switzerland. He never denies his actions and declares that he does not regret them.
Gustloff’s murder caused a worldwide stir. The government in Bern is trying to appease Adolf Hitler. But his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, is actually rejoicing. A representative of the Third Reich, shot by a Jew – nothing better could happen to the Nazi regime, which sees itself in a war against “international Jewry”.
Gustloff, who is completely unknown to the German population, is stylized as a “martyr of the movement,” a “martyr” in the fight against Judaism. He receives a state funeral in his hometown, attended by Hitler and Goebbels as well as other leading representatives of the regime. The most famous cruise ship of the leisure organization “Strength through Joy” will soon bear his name.
The Frankfurter/Gustloff case has great similarities with the case of the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan, who, almost three years later, on November 7, 1938, carried out an assassination attempt on the German embassy secretary Ernst vom Rath in Paris, thereby inadvertently giving Goebbels a welcome excuse for Kristallnacht two days later.
Perfide Propagandawelle
In 1938, the Nazi regime rolled out a wave of perfidious propaganda against the Jews. On the night of November 9th to 10th alone and in the days that followed, around 1,000 Jews died and around 30,000 were deported to concentration camps. Synagogues burn, shops and homes of Jewish citizens are looted.
But now, at the beginning of February 1936, there are no such riots directed from above, even though Goebbels would only be happy to use the Davos murder as an opportunity to take targeted action against the German Jews. The question is why he doesn’t do that.
A look at the calendar shows it. Two days after Frankfurter’s act in Davos, the Winter Olympics begin around 180 kilometers northeast in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. They are an important propaganda event for the Third Reich that cannot be disturbed by anything. They are actually overshadowed by the Summer Games, which are scheduled to take place in Berlin from August 1st to 15th. But since Hitler came to power, there has been a broad international boycott movement in several countries, especially the USA.
Their goal is to prevent their own nation from taking part in the games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin. The Winter Games are intended to show that Nazi Germany has a friendly face and that Jews supposedly do not face any discrimination here.
There is therefore also a clear instruction from Berlin to remove any possible indications of this – such as widespread signs saying “Jews are not welcome here” – for the duration of the games. There were problems in this regard at the venue in the weeks before February 6th. And what is particularly annoying from the leadership’s point of view is that in the area around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, isolated comrades took action against Jewish citizens after the news of Gustloff’s murder became known.
These are the spirits that propaganda itself has summoned, but this time they still have to keep quiet. Only a strict order from Reich Interior Minister Frick can stop this. From the Nazi perspective, the games were a great success and then the international protest movement collapsed.
Resistance against the Nazis was possible early on
Knowing the events of 1938, it becomes clear that the Winter Olympics in February 1936 may have saved the lives of many German Jews.
David Frankfurter was sentenced to 18 years in prison in Chur in December 1936. Even back then, many Swiss people were rumoring that of these 18 years he would only have to serve the 1,000 years of the Third Reich. This is how it happened: Frankfurter was released from prison and expelled from Switzerland on June 1, 1945, a few weeks after the German surrender.
He moved to Palestine, later worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, died in 1982. Before his death, he said, referring to his crime in 1936: “I would probably do it again.”
No matter how you feel about Frankfurter’s crime, it is still a murder: the young Jew shows – just like Herschel Grynszpan or the worker Georg Elser – that resistance against National Socialism was possible much earlier than only in the face of the fall of the Third Reich.
Perhaps Frankfurter, like Grynszpan and Elser, is quickly forgotten after the war because hardly anyone in Germany wants to be remembered for it.