Holocaust: Introducing How Gestapo Started

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

         David Frankfurter (Hebrew: דוד פרנקפורטר; 9 July 1909 – 19 July 1982) in the British Mandate of Palestine, 1945.  His father was a rabbi in Daruvar, Switzerland and later the chief rabbi in Vinkovci, where the Frankfurter family relocated in 1914.

Wilhelm Gustloff was not assassinated in Germany. He was murdered on February 4, 1936, in Davos, Switzerland. David Frankfurter, a Croatian Jewish medical student, shot Gustloff, the leader of the Swiss branch of the Nazi Party, in his home in Davos, Switzerland. He surrendered and confessed, telling the police that "I fired the shots because I am a Jew."

Frankfurter was sentenced to 18 years in prison for murder. Shortly after V-E Day, he was granted a parliamentary pardon and released. As he left prison, sympathetic crowds cheered him as a hero.

Six Days after an assassination of Gustloff,  on February 10, 1936, the unification of the police and the SS, the Gestapo became the supreme police agency of Nazi Germany.  The Gestapo now could make arrests anywhere in Germany without using the courts of law.  

While studying in Germany, Frankfurter witnessed the Nazis coming to power and their imposition of anti-semitic measures. The rise of Nazism in Germany and the banning of Jews from German universities compelled him to move to Switzerland to continue his studies, and he settled in Bern in 1934. There among the Germans and German-speaking Swiss, the Nazi movement gained ground, led by Wilhelm Gustloff. Having become convinced of the danger posed by the Nazis, Frankfurter kept an eye on Gustloff, head of the Foreign Section of the Nazi Party in Switzerland (NSDAP). The latter man ordered the propaganda piece Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) written by Hitler, to be published there for distribution.

Motivated by such insults and attacks on Jewish people, Frankfurter bought a gun in Bern in 1936 and resolved to assassinate Gustloff. Frankfurter found Gustloff's address, which was listed in the phone book. On 4 February 1936, he went to the Gustloff home; Gustloff's wife Hedwig received him and showed him into the study, asking him to wait since her husband was on the telephone.

When Gustloff, who was in the adjoining room, entered his office where Frankfurter was sitting opposite a picture of Adolf Hitler, the young man pulled out his revolver and shot Gustloff five times: in the head, neck and chest. He left the premises and prepared to commit suicide. However, he was unable to follow through, and instead turned himself in to the police.

The assassination of Gustloff was widely publicized throughout Europe, especially due to Nazi propaganda directed by Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler prohibited an immediate retaliation against the Jews of Germany at the time, fearing an international boycott of the winter and summer Olympics that were due to be held in Germany. He wanted to use the Games to promote propaganda on the world stage about the size, power and ideology of the Nazi movement. Nevertheless, an editorial on the front page of Völkischer Beobachter demanded Frankfurter's execution.

Gustloff was declared a Blutzeuge/Blood Martyr of the Nazi cause. His assassination was later used in propaganda, serving as pretext, along with Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, for the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. While most people in Switzerland were sympathetic towards Frankfurter, the Swiss government prosecuted the case strictly. It wanted to maintain its position of neutrality. Frankfurter was convicted of murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison and subsequent expulsion from the country. His father visited his son in prison and asked him, "Who actually needed this?"

In 1941, as the Nazis occupied Vinkovci, Frankfurter's father was forced to stand on a table while the German soldiers spat in his face, pulled out hair from his long beard, and struck him with their rifle butts. Frankfurter's father was later killed by Ustaše in the Jasenovac concentration camp during the Holocaust.

After his release from prison, Frankfurter had to leave Switzerland, and he migrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and eventually became an officer in IDF.Frankfurter died in Israel, in the city of Ramat Gan on 19 July 1982, aged 73.

Resource: 

Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, p.50-51  After the Nuremberg Laws...