Ninety years ago, on February 4, 1936, a single gunshot echoed through the Alpine stillness of Davos, Switzerland, shattering not only the life of one man but the complacent silence of an anxious Europe. The assassin was a young Jewish student named David Frankfurter. The victim was Wilhelm Gustloff, the head of the Nazi Party’s Swiss branch and a devoted emissary of Adolf Hitler.
In the quiet of a mountain resort better known for its sanatoria and winter visitors, Frankfurter’s act reverberated far beyond the confines of Gustloff’s home. It announced, with tragic clarity, that the menace incubating in Germany could no longer be regarded as a domestic aberration, and that even neutral Switzerland was not immune to the long reach of National Socialist fanaticism.
The Europe of 1936 was a continent trembling at the threshold of catastrophe. Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany had transformed a defeated and humiliated republic into a militarized state animated by racial mythology and revolutionary fervor. Torchlight parades marched through German streets in ritualized displays of mass submission; the chant of “Führer" had become a liturgical refrain. For Germany’s Jews, the consequences were already brutal and unambiguous.
The Nuremberg Laws, enacted the previous year, had stripped them of citizenship, dignity, and legal protection. Public humiliations, boycotts of Jewish businesses, and orchestrated violence signaled that exclusion was not a prelude but a destination. The rest of the world watched with a mixture of apprehension and resignation, uncertain whether Hitler’s regime represented a transient aberration or the vanguard of a darker epoch.
It was within this climate of dread and moral paralysis that David Frankfurter’s conscience ignited. Born into a Jewish family and studying at the University of Bern, Frankfurter was no revolutionary conspirator nor a member of any clandestine militant network. He was, by most accounts, a solitary and introspective young man, grappling with the anguish of watching his people subjected to systematic degradation. The reports of Nazi atrocities in Germany, of neighbors turned informers and of ancient communities reduced to pariahs, “boiled his blood," as contemporaries would later phrase it. He felt compelled to act, not out of personal vendetta but from a visceral need to register protest in a world that seemed content to issue only diplomatic murmurs.
Wilhelm Gustloff, the man Frankfurter chose as his target, was no incidental functionary. As the founder and leader of the Nazi Party in Switzerland, Gustloff had transformed Davos into a nerve center of National Socialist propaganda beyond Germany’s borders. From this Alpine redoubt, he cultivated networks of sympathizers and informants, disseminating the ideological toxins of Nazism within a country that prided itself on neutrality and civic moderation. His mission, as perceived by Swiss authorities and Jewish observers alike, was to erode the moral and political resilience of Swiss society, preparing it-should the geopolitical moment arise-for incorporation into the greater Reich. In this sense, Gustloff was not merely a party official but an agent of ideological subversion, an emissary of a regime whose ambitions were already unmistakably expansionist.
On that February day in 1936, Frankfurter entered Gustloff’s home and fired five shots, killing him. The act was neither impulsive nor accompanied by any attempt at escape. Immediately after the assassination, Frankfurter surrendered himself to the local police. His demeanor, according to contemporary accounts, was one of grim resolve rather than exultation. He had not acted to secure personal survival or fame; he had acted to bear witness. In a Europe increasingly anesthetized to the incremental barbarities of Nazism, Frankfurter sought to puncture indifference with irrevocable action.
The trial that followed, commencing in December of that year, became an international spectacle. Swiss courts, scrupulous in their adherence to legal formalities, sentenced Frankfurter to eighteen years in prison, stripped him of civil rights, and ordered his permanent expulsion from Switzerland upon completion of his term. The verdict reflected Switzerland’s determination to uphold its sovereignty and legal order, even as it navigated the perilous waters of proximity to Nazi Germany. Yet beyond the courtroom, reactions were deeply polarized. Many Jewish organizations and sympathetic observers around the world hailed Frankfurter as a hero, an embodiment of Jewish protest at a moment when protest seemed otherwise futile. Others, wary of legitimizing political violence, recoiled from the act even as they sympathized with the anguish that had provoked it.
The geopolitical ramifications of the assassination were complex and, in retrospect, paradoxical. The killing of Gustloff occurred in close temporal proximity to the Berlin Olympics of 1936, an event Hitler’s regime was intent on using to launder its international image. The Nazi leadership, acutely sensitive to foreign perceptions during this period, refrained from retaliatory measures against Switzerland that might have jeopardized the carefully choreographed spectacle of German respectability. In this narrow sense, Frankfurter’s act may have contributed to restraining Nazi aggression toward Swiss sovereignty at a critical juncture.
The absence of collective punishment or annexation in response to Gustloff’s death stood in stark contrast to the regime’s later policies of ruthless reprisal in occupied territories. It was a fleeting moment in which diplomatic calculation overrode ideological vengeance.
For Frankfurter himself, the years that followed were marked by confinement and obscurity. Incarcerated in Switzerland, he endured isolation from the broader currents of a world descending into war and genocide. Human rights advocates who later visited him noted the stark contrast between his former life as a student and the ascetic existence imposed by imprisonment. Yet even in confinement, Frankfurter became a symbol-invoked in debates about resistance, moral agency, and the limits of lawful protest under conditions of existential threat. His personal suffering unfolded against the cataclysmic backdrop of the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were barbarically murdered in an industrialized machinery of annihilation. In that inferno, Frankfurter’s earlier act of defiance acquired retrospective significance as a prelude to a catastrophe that few had fully comprehended in 1936.
With the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s shadow, Switzerland reassessed the punitive severity of Frankfurter’s sentence. In June 1945, he received a pardon and was released from prison. The timing was emblematic: Europe was emerging from ruins, and the moral certainties that had been so elusive in the 1930s were being rearticulated in the wake of unprecedented atrocity. On Rosh Hashanah of that year, Frankfurter arrived by immigrant ship on the shores of the Land of Israel. For a man who had spent years in captivity for an act of protest against Jewish persecution, the arrival in a newly established Jewish homeland carried profound symbolic resonance. It represented not triumph but respite-a fragile sanctuary after decades defined by terror and dislocation.
In Israel, Frankfurter eschewed the trappings of heroism. He did not seek public adulation, nor did he cultivate a persona of militant legend. Instead, he entered the unglamorous but essential domains of public service. He worked as a clerk in the Absorption Department of the Jewish Agency, assisting in the integration of new immigrants into the nascent society. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, he served in the Disabled Rehabilitation Department of the Ministry of Defense, contributing to the care of those wounded in the struggle for independence. Later, he found employment in the Ministry of Agriculture, participating in the quotidian labor of building a state from the ground up. His life in Israel was characterized by modesty and diligence rather than notoriety. Yet the quiet commemoration of his name-a street in Petah Tikva, a garden in Ramat Gan-testified to the enduring recognition of his moral drama.
Frankfurter’s death in 1982 closed a chapter that had begun in the shadow of Europe’s darkest century. He left behind a memoir, titled “Revenge," in which he chronicled the trajectory that led him from student life in Bern to the irrevocable decision to confront Nazism with lethal force. The book, by all accounts, is less a manifesto than a meditation on conscience under duress. It offers insight into the psychological landscape of a young man who perceived that the conventional avenues of protest had been exhausted, and who chose to inscribe his dissent in the most extreme register available to him.
The legacy of David Frankfurter resists facile moralization. To some, he remains a heroic figure who refused to submit to the paralysis of fear at a moment when fear was ubiquitous. To others, he embodies the tragic paradox of violence committed in the name of justice, a reminder that moral clarity does not inoculate one against ethical ambiguity. What is indisputable is that his act in Davos punctured the illusion that Nazism could be quarantined within Germany’s borders, or that its emissaries abroad could be treated as benign political actors. In the stillness of a Swiss mountain town, a young Jewish student compelled the world to confront, however briefly, the urgency of resistance.
Ninety years on, the shot in Davos reverberates as a historical omen. It foreshadowed the cataclysm that would soon engulf Europe, and it illuminated the agonizing choices faced by those who perceived the gathering storm while the broader world hesitated to name it. David Frankfurter did not avert the Holocaust; no single act could have. Yet in the moral ledger of history, his deed stands as an early, solitary declaration that the machinery of hate could be confronted, even when the cost of confrontation was one’s own freedom.
Fern Sidman is Senior News Editor at Jewish Voice.