The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities lodged a complaint with authorities that a newly-published anti-Semitic book violated the Swiss Civil Code. The Federation demanded that the book be banned.
The book, “The Past, the Present and the Jewish Question,” by a J.A. Mathes, was published in Vevey. The book contains liberal quotations from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Semitic slanders. The book also summarizes the anti-Semitic charges made by the late Henry Ford but does not indicate that the auto magnate later publicly repudiated them. It refers to Jewish “ritual murder” and blames the Jews for the outbreak of the two world wars.
Other items in the book include the assertion that the established total of 6,000,000 as the number of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide were a deliberate falsification and that Jews were guilty of dual loyalty. The Mathes volume is the first anti-Semitic book published in Switzerland in more than 20 years.
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