National Front (Switzerland)

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Newspaper article in the NZZ (1934)

The Nationale Front (NF) was a fascist party in Switzerland in the 1930s and 1940s and part of the front movement .

development

The National Front was the most influential party of the so-called front movement, which challenged the political system of Switzerland with a new national ideology in the early 1930s . Influenced by fascist ideas that had already come to power in neighboring Italy in 1922 and that flourished throughout Europe during this period, two university groups also organized themselves in Switzerland from 1930 onwards at the University of Zurich . The intellectually superior head of the front movement was Paul Lang . From 1931 he developed the state-political theories of frontism. The more academic and elitist New Front with Robert Tobler and the proletarian- völkisch National Front with Rolf Henne came together in April 1933 to form the Kampfbund Neue und Nationale Front , from which the National Front party emerged in May.

In the months that followed, it experienced a significant increase in votes and influence, which went down in Swiss history as a spring on the front lines . This upswing is closely linked to Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in the German Reich a few weeks earlier .

The National Front received its greatest influx in autumn 1933, when it clearly made the leap into the Swiss National Council in the national elections in Zurich and also made big profits in Schaffhausen . These border areas were also the strongholds of the party. In other regions, especially French-speaking and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the National Front was never really able to gain a foothold.

Ideologically, the National Front leaned more and more clearly on the National Socialist model of the NSDAP . While the party initially emphasized a special path for Switzerland, from 1936 onwards it openly admitted to the (German-) National Socialist worldview. This met with resistance from most Swiss and initiated the party's creeping decline. While moderate forces turned their backs on the party, the National Front developed more and more into a radical splinter group of National Socialist Swiss.

By the mid-1930s at the latest, the party had formed secret paramilitary units in which it went into open combat against the system. It carried out various smaller attacks in Zurich and Bern and organized an unregistered march on Bern in the summer of 1937 , during which party members occupied the parliamentary square for a few hours and had violent clashes with the police.

Since 1938 the National Front has been increasingly monitored by police authorities. This led to the arrest of the party leader Robert Tobler in the spring of 1940 and to the self-dissolution of the party, which did not, however, mean the end of the movement, only its relabeling: Almost all of the old members continued their activities under the new name of the Federal Collection .

Outward appearance

Outwardly, the National Front was based on the one hand on elements of the medieval Swiss Confederation , on the other hand on fascist and National Socialist models such as the NSDAP .

The emblem of the National Front was the old Swiss flag with a cross drawn right through to the edge (a symbol that is now used again by the PNOS in a slightly different form ). The official greeting of the frontists was the old Swiss Harus with his right arm raised. Until the legal prohibition of uniforms, the party's “Schutzstaffel”, organized in so-called Harsten , appeared in gray uniforms.

Membership numbers

The National Front had no open membership books, so membership numbers are difficult to estimate. Science is based on the following projections:

  • 1933: 4000
  • 1934: 5000
  • 1935: 9000
  • 1939: 2300

Party leader

Prominent members

See also

literature

  • Beat Glaus: The National Front. A Swiss fascist movement 1930–1940 . Benziger, Zurich / Einsiedeln / Cologne 1969 (also dissertation at the University of Basel ).
  • Matthias Wipf: Frontism in a border town - Schaffhausen in the Second World War 1933–1945 . Univ. Bern, Hist. Institute, manuscript (90 pages), Bern 1998 (location: Schaffhausen City Archives).
  • Walter Wolf: Fascism in Switzerland. The history of the front movements in German-speaking Switzerland 1930–1945 . Flamberg / Zurich 1969 (also dissertation at the University of Zurich ).
  • Hans Stutz: Frontists and National Socialists in Lucerne 1933–1945. Raeber, Lucerne 1997, ISBN 3-7239-0094-1 (= Lucerne through the ages. New series, no. 9).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Wolf: Paul Lang. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  2. ^ David Lee Preston: Hitler's Swiss Connection. In: The Philadelphia Inquirer . January 5, 1997, accessed June 4, 2011.