The leader of a group known as the Universal Church has been found guilty of publishing an anti-Semitic brochure that claimed that Jewish greed was responsible for causing World War II.
Reimers Peters was fined $4,000 last week by a Swiss court and ordered to pay $6,800 in legal costs after being found guilty of breaching a law that makes it a crime to discriminate against ethnic groups or incite racial hatred.
The law, passed by Swiss legislators in 1993, was approved the next year in a national referendum.
The law has enabled the courts to handle a series of complaints of alleged anti-Semitism, including one against a library in Basel charged with distributing a book already banned in Germany that minimized the extent of Nazi war crimes and that espoused the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
Another complaint filed against four record dealers charges them with distributing a neo-Nazi propaganda record that was also previously banned in Germany.
Prior to the Swiss law’s enactment, neo-Nazis in France and Germany had avoided those countries’ anti-racist laws by traveling to Switzerland to promote their views.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
