Georges Brunschvig

Georges Brunschvig (21 February 1908 – 14 October 1973) was a Swiss lawyer and president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG). Internationally, he is best known for representing the plaintiff in the 1934–35 "Berne Trial".

Born in Berne to a family of Jewish horse traders, Brunschvig studied law at the University of Berne and passed the bar exam in 1933. In 1934, he founded a law firm on the Marktgasse in Berne and married his childhood friend Odette Wyler, with whom he had two daughters.

At the age of 25, in one of his first cases as an attorney, he and his colleague Emil Raas took up a criminal case by the SIG against the Nationale Front, a movement of Swiss Nazi sympathizers. At the time, Frontists had taken to distributing antisemitic pamphlets on the streets, including . Brunschvig won the case, later known by historians as the "Berne Trial", by a thorough debunking of the Protocols. The defendants were convicted by the Bernese district court of violating a Bernese statute prohibiting the distribution of "immoral, obscene or brutalizing" texts. Even though they were acquitted on appeal – the Cantonal Supreme Court held that the Protocols, while false, did not violate the statute because they were used as a means of political propaganda – Brunschvig had achieved the SIG's principal goal: a court holding debunking the Protocols.

During World War II, Brunschvig served as a captain with the military court of Berne. As president of the Bernese Jewish community and a board member of the SIG, Brunschvig was among the first in Switzerland to receive word of the deportation of German Jews to extermination camps. However, his and the SIG's efforts to stop the expulsion of Jewish refugees to Germany by Swiss authorities were largely fruitless.

In August 1942, a Belgian Jewish couple were arrested by police in the Jewish Cemetery in Berne after having fled from Brussels through France to Switzerland on bicycles. Despite Brunschvig's intercession with the authorities, the couple was expelled from Switzerland the day after their arrest; after the war, Brunschvig found out that they had been killed in Auschwitz. This incident caused Brunschvig to abandon the restraint he had previously imposed upon himself so as not to lose what influence he had with the authorities. Through the journalist Hermann Böschenstein, he had the incident made public in the Basler Nationalzeitung. The resulting public outcry caused Swiss border controls to be loosened temporarily.

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