Son recounts father's fight against Nazis
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Moshe Frankfurter can imagine his father as a young medical student, walking purposefully down a dark, snow-covered street in Davos, Switzerland.
It was a winter night in 1936, and Moshe’s father, David Frankfurter, wore a long black coat. In his pocket was a pistol.
What he did next — climbing the steps to a second-floor apartment and assassinating the head of the Nazi Party in Switzerland — has led Moshe all the way to St. Catharines, where he spoke at Congregation B’nai Israel for Holocaust Education Week Monday. And while his father’s choices have led to tough questions during his talks, the Israeli lawyer said he is proud of his father’s decision.
David Frankfurter was born in 1909 in what is now Croatia. He noticed quickly upon moving to Germany to attend medical school the racism of the Nazi regime in the early 1930s, Moshe said. Jews were forced to give up their seats on buses and excluded from public events. The popular Nazi Party made laws mandating the burning of Jewish books and forbidding Jews and Aryans from mixing romantically. Jews were ousted from businesses and schools. David was most distressed when Adoph Hitler came into power in 1933, and the first concentration camps were established, his son said.
But everywhere David looked, people turned a blind eye. Even Jews kept quiet at first, not anxious to call attention to themselves. So David moved to Switzerland, where the Nazi Party had not yet begun to take hold.
More and more, it appeared that would change. David paid close attention to politics, Moshe said, even attending a Nazi rally and hearing talk of eradicating all Jews. Wilhelm Gustloff, a leading Nazi official, began making inroads in the country with efforts such as the distribution of the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the elders of Zion.”
David Frankfurter wanted a high-profile way to alert the world. Initially, he planned to assassinate another high-ranking Nazi but aborted it when he thought he was discovered. Then he planned to assassinate Hitler, but he abandoned it when he feared retribution against the Jews. Eventually, he chose Gustloff, who was at home on the telephone when Frankfurter knocked on his door and asked Mrs. Gustloff if he could speak to her husband.
David fired four times. Three hit the target. Then he used the telephone in a neighbouring apartment to call police, telling them to come arrest him because he’d shot Wilhelm Gustloff. The police laughed him off, Moshe said, so his father walked down the station and asked to be arrested. The police didn’t believe him until he produced a pistol from his pocket.
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. He served nine, being released in 1945, the year the Second World War ended. With it ended the Holocaust, which had seen an estimated six million Jews killed in death marches and concentration camps, including David Frankfurter’s father and three other family members. David died in 1982.
Moshe, 54, is often asked how he reconciles his father being an assassin. The subject was not discussed at home, even as two books and a 1974 movie, Konfrontation, chronicled his father’s actions, he said. But the Jerusalem resident said he proudly gives lectures such as the one in St. Catharines this week.
“It kept the Nazis out of Switzerland, and the lives of 20,000 Jews who lived in Switzerland were safe,” he said. “From a historical point of view, was the assassination justified? My answer is very clear.”
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08-11-2007, 11:41 PM
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