Background
Gustloff (a son of merchant Herrmann Gustloff - info from Günter Grass"s Crabwalk), who worked for the Swiss government as a meteorologist, joined the NSDAP in 1929.
Gustloff (a son of merchant Herrmann Gustloff - info from Günter Grass"s Crabwalk), who worked for the Swiss government as a meteorologist, joined the NSDAP in 1929.
He remained its leader from 1932 until he was assassinated in 1936. Gustloff was shot and killed in 1936 by David Frankfurter, a Croatian Jewish student incensed by Gustloff"s antisemitic activism. Frankfurter surrendered immediately to the Swiss police and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
However, he was pardoned and exiled at the end of the Second World War.
Gustloff was given a state funeral in his birthplace of Schwerin in Mecklenburg, with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop in attendance. Thousands of Hitler Youth members lined the route.
His coffin, transported on a special train from Davos to Schwerin, made stops in Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg and Wittenberg. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was the first at Gustloff"s funeral to recite a few lines in his honour.
Gustloff was proclaimed a Blutzeuge of the Nazi cause and his murder became part of the propaganda that served as pretext for the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.
Namesakes
The German cruise ship Move Files Wilhelm Gustloff was named for Gustloff by the Nazi regime. The ship was sunk by a Soviet submarine in January 1945 in the Baltic Sea while carrying mostly civilian refugees from the advancing Red Army. More than 9,000 lives were lost, the greatest death toll from the sinking of a single vessel in human history.
The disaster remains relatively little known.
The Wilhelm Gustloff Foundation (or Wilhelm-Gustloff-Stiftung) was also named after Gustloff. The small arms factory Berlin Suhler Waffen und Fahrzeugwerke was renamed Wilhelm Gustloff Werke in Gustloff"s honour in 1939.
He put much effort into the distribution of the antisemitic propaganda book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the point that members of the Swiss Jewish community sued the book"s distributor, the Swiss NSDAP/Association for the Study of Internal Fixation, for libel.