In May, a commemorative plaque was erected in Neuchâtel to commemorate the life of young Catholic Maurice Bavaud, guillotined in Germany in 1941 for having planned to assassinate Hitler. Switzerland made no attempt to save its native son.
What should you do against a dictatorship? A commemorative plaque erected in Neuchâtel in May in honour of Maurice Bavaud, who at the age of 22 attempted to assassinate Hitler, raises this question. “We might wish for more people like him in the world, to kill these monsters,” retired doctor Jean-François Burkhalter, 81, who was responsible for the initiative, said during the ceremony. Maurice Bavaud, who came from a humble Catholic family, decided to act. “He sees the Führer as a threat to Switzerland’s independence, to humanity and to Catholicism,” according to the record of his trial in 1939, which no Swiss diplomat attended.
In 1938, after returning from a seminary in Brittany where he had trained to become a missionary, the young man took the train for Germany, whose leaders were seeking dialogue with Switzerland and making barely any effort to prevent Swiss citizens visiting the Reich, recalls historian Marc Perrenoud. Maurice Bavaud managed to get close to Hitler during a parade in Munich on 9 November. The number of arms raised to hail the dictator prevented him from firing. He was subsequently arrested for travelling without a ticket. The Swiss embassy in Berlin, run by a certain Hans Frölicher, “did not want to exhaust Germany’s goodwill towards Switzerland for this person”, the Neuchâtel historian comments. The Office of the Public Prosecutor, when approached by the German authorities, carried out an investigation into the young man, and sent the Nazis a message describing him as a homo-sexual.
Maurice’s father suggested that Germans imprisoned in Switzerland be released in exchange for his son’s life. The Swiss administration ignored this proposal. During the trial, his duty counsel stressed (in vain) that Bavaud had not fired a single shot. His family received a final letter from the prison in Plötzensee. “I embrace you all very tightly, as this will be the last time.” Maurice was guillotined on 14 May 1941. There was no burial. During the 1950s, the Bavaud family received 40,000 Swiss francs in compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany as a settlement. In 1979, German writer Rolf Hochhuth depicted Bavaud as a modern William Tell. In 1980, journalist Nicolas Meienberg published a work devoted to him.
Could Switzerland have saved Bavaud? Marc Perrenoud cites the case of another Neuchâtel native, pastor Roland de Pury, who was arrested in a Protestant church in Lyon in 1943. He was close to the French Resistance and his life was saved after an exchange with German spies. De Pury and his family had relatives and contacts that the Bavaud family did not. In 1989 and 2008 respectively, federal councillors René Felber and Pascal Couchepin acknowledged that Swiss diplomacy did not do enough to save Bavaud.
The commemorative plaque devoted to the Catholic features a bas-relief portrait of him. It was placed on a house located between the house of his birth and the house he left to go to Germany. A memorial stele stands on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel and another plaque (erected in 1998) can be found on the house where he was born. “Here, though, you can see his face,” the former doctor says. The doctor’s plan is to have a monument to Bavaud erected outside Plötzensee.
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