Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund Berner Prozess um die "Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion"

Copyright Holder: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich. Archiv für Zeitgeschichte - Archivleitung Contains records of various provenances relating to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion trial held in Bern, Switzerland. In 1933, the Alliance of Swiss Jewish Communities (Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund - SIG) and the Jewish Community Bern (JGB), as part of its initiative to combat antisemitism, brought a court case against the “National Front” (“Nationale Front”) for distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The case was based on paragraph 14 of the law governing motion pictures and measures against trashy literature (“Gesetz über das Lichtspielwesen und die Massnahmen gegen die Schundliteratur") and its aim was to prohibit the distribution of the Protocols by proving that it was a forgery. The collection also includes records relating to the Basel trail. At the same time as the trial in Bern, the lawyer Oskar Meyer brought a civil libel case before the court in Basel on behalf of his clients, Jules Dreyfus-Brodsky, Dr. Marcus Cohn and Dr. Markus Ehrenpreis, against the publisher and distributor of the Protocols, Alfred Zander et al. The Basel trial was viewed as an unwanted distraction by the team of lawyers conducting the trial in Bern and was marked by interference on their part. In the end, Oskar Meyer had to agree to a settlement and the Basel trial mostly was forgotten. The files pertaining to the trial in Basel were compiled by lawyer Oskar Meyer. It is not clear how the Basel records ended up as part of the SIG holdings. Additional files pertaining to the trials in Bern and Basel can be found at the AfZ in the Philippe Schwed papers and the Georges Brunschvig papers as well as in the Wiener Collection at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel, and in the Wiener Library in London, England.