Wilhelm Gustloff

Wilhelm Gustloff (January 30, 1895 - February 4, 1936) was the German leader of the NSDAP (Nazi) party in Switzerland; he founded the Swiss branch of the party at Davos in 1932, which organized German citizens living in Switzerland.

Gustloff, who worked as a Swiss government meteorologist, joined the NSDAP in 1929 and put much effort in the distribution of the antisemitic 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 branch of the German Nazi Party, for libel. Gustloff's wife Hedwig had been Hitler's secretary. Gustloff was shot and killed in 1936 by David Frankfurter, a Jewish student incensed by Gustloff's antisemitic activism.

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 Hitlerjugend members lined the route. His coffin, which was transported on a special train from Davos to Schwerin, made stops in Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg and Wittenberg. His widow, mother and brother were present at the funeral and received personal condolences from Hitler. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was the first at Gustloff's funeral to recite a few lines in honour of the deceased. Gustloff was made a Blutzeuge of the Nazi cause and his murder later became part of the propaganda serving as pretext for the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. His wife received from Hitler personally a monthly "honorary pay" (Ehrensold) of 400 Reichsmark.

The German cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was named after Gustloff by the Nazi regime; the ship was sunk in 1945 with the loss of over 9,000 lives. Also, the Wilhelm Gustloff Foundation or Wilhelm-Gustloff-Stiftung was named after him. The small arms factory Berlin Suhler Waffen und Fahrzeugwerke was renamed Wilhelm Gustloff Werke in Gustloff's honor in 1939.

His assassination is an element of the novel Crabwalk by the German writer Günter Grass with the plot based on the fate of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff.