Slight Touch of Nazi Fever Among Swiss Noted by Observer

Is there the danger of Switzerland’s coming under the Swastika’s sway?

Beyond a doubt the influence of Hitler’s victory on the German-speaking peoples in the bordering lands is very great. The youth of the Tyrol and Salzburg is flocking in droves to Hitler’s standard. The Germans in Czecho-Slovakia are similarly infected and even Switzerland seems not to be quite immune.

Until recently anti-Semitism was unknown in Switzerland. Only in Geneva has there been, for several years, a boulevard sheet which anathematized the Jews and the League of Nations alike and which peppered its pages with eroticism and thus gained circulation but no political influence. Recently, however, there has appeared a batch of periodical taking up the anti-Semitic cudgels. “Der Eidgenosse”, a bi-monthly, swears allegiance to Hitler and parades the Swastika. It preaches National Socialism unadulterated.

Worthy of more serious consideration in “Die Neue Schweiz” (New Switzerland), a weekly which has been appearing since April 1. It proclaims itself the “Journal for the Movement of National Resurgence”, represents the middle class and enjoys a large circulation.

The most poisonous of these mushroom organs is the national socialistic weekly, “Der Eiserne Besen” (The Iron Broom), which is zealously anti-Semitic. The following clarion call, “They Are Coming, They Are Coming”, is typical of its form and content:

“When will the Federal Parliament finally consider taking action to protect the Swiss people from this deluge and the danger of drowning in a Marxist flood financed by Jews? Or shall good Swiss citizens be sacrificed to hired murderers as hundreds of good Germans were victimized by Marxist terror and murder in Germany?! We demand that there be action now!!”

TRI-WEEKLY GOES NAZI

Everybody who knows the scrupulous reticence of the German emigrants in Switzerland in order that they may not lose this asylum as “undesirable aliens” finds the very idea that they may be responsible for “the sacrifice of Swiss nationals to hired gangsters” nothing short of grotesque. The “Iron Broom” adds to this sort of infamy its vulgar attack on Prof. Einstein in the guttersnipe style of the German Nazi press.

Another and perhaps even more serious symptom of the influence of Hitlerism in Switzerland is the fact that the “Steiner Grenzbote”, a triweekly published in Stein on the Rhone, has officially gone Nazi to serve the “National Front”.

But Switzerland has positive reasons to feel itself protected from an invasion of the Swastika. The elevation of the Swastika in Germany is due to a Gordian knot of circumstances which has never and will never strangle Switzerland. A unified national movement is impossible in Switzerland because each of three languages has its own rights there. Hitler is a “unitarian”, the Swiss are federalists, the most convinced in the world. The “states rights” of the cantons is an inextinguishable part of the Swiss folk consciousness.

Germany lost the war, is a “conquered people” with all the concomitant bitter hatred. Germany was imperialistic and militaristic. Switzerland, a neutral, experienced neither the trenches nor defeat. Switzerland and imperialism are a ludicrously impossible combination. The Swiss militia serves only as protection for its neutrality; it does not, as the “Volksrecht” said in a recent editorial, “form a state within a state as does the Reichswehr in Germany. The military in Switzerland is subordinate to the civil authorities.” Furthermore Swiss finances are the soundest in Europe today and a healthy national economy is poor soil for the Fascist Party.