On 4 February 1936, a 26-year-old Jewish Croatian medical student named David Frankfurter murdered the head of the Foreign Section of the Nazi Party in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff. Following the murder of Gustloff, Frankfurter walked to a neighboring home, where he asked to make a phone call and then proceeded to confess to police.
While Nazi leaders were outraged at the assassination, they decided not to retaliate immediately, fearing an international boycott of the upcoming winter and summer Olympics in Berlin. In an effort to preserve their neutrality, Switzerland convicted Frankfurter of murder and sentenced him to 18 years in prison followed by expulsion.
Germany hosted a state funeral, recognizing Gustloff as a Blutzeuge, or martyr. Among the several honors posthumously bestowed onto him were an SS squadron and a huge passenger ship.
Frankfurter, a son of a rabbi, was more in Daruvar, Croatia (then-Yugoslavia). While studying in Germany he witnessed the growing injustice of the anti-Jewish measures against the Jewish community, including the implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws.
Frankfurter’s father, Moshe, is said to have taken the news particularly poorly, as his hair is said to have turned white overnight. When he visited his son in jail before the trial, he reportedly asked him, rhetorically, “Who actually needed this?”
Five years later, Moshe was captured by SS forces when the Nazis occupied the city of Vinkovci in Croatia and sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp where he would be murdered by Ustaše forces.
Frankfurter received clemency and released after nine years in prison. While he was still exiled from Switzerland, he settled in Israel, where he got married, worked for the Jewish Agency and published two memoirs.
Frankfurter passed away at the age of 72 in Ramat Gan.
