National Front (Switzerland)
The National Front ( NF) was a fascist party in the 1930s and 1940s in Switzerland and part of the front movement.
Development
The National Front was the most influential party of the so-called front movement that challenged Switzerland's political system in the early 1930s with a new nationalist ideology. Influenced by fascist ideas that had already come to power in neighboring Italy in 1923 and flourished in this period in Europe, organized also in Switzerland from 1930 two academic groups at the University of Zurich. The more academically - elitist embossed, resulting from the Young Liberals New front with Robert Tobler and the proletarian- nationalist National Front with Rolf Henne joined in April 1933 Combat League 's New and National Front together, from the then in May, the party National Front was formed.
These experienced in the following months, a significant influx of votes and influence, which is received as a front spring in the Swiss history. This recovery is closely linked with the power of Adolf Hitler a few weeks earlier in the German Reich.
Your biggest inflow received the National Front in the autumn of 1933, when they each clearly made the jump to the Swiss National Council in regional elections in Zurich and Schaffhausen. These border areas were the strongholds of the party. In other regions, especially the French-and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the National Front could never really gain a foothold.
Ideologically, the National Front leaned increasingly facing to the Nazi model of the NSDAP. While the party initially still stressed one of Switzerland exceptionalism, she owned from 1936 open to the ( German ) National Socialist ideology. This met with resistance from most Swiss and initiated the gradual decline of the party. While moderate forces of the party turned their backs, the National Front has developed more and more into a radical splinter group of Nazi Swiss.
At least since the mid-1930s, the party formed a secret paramilitary units in which they went to an open struggle against the system. She committed several minor attacks in Zurich and Bern, and held in the summer of 1937, an undeclared march to Bern, at the party members for a few hours occupied Parliament Square and delivered violent clashes with the police.
Since 1938, the National Front was reinforced monitored by police authorities. This resulted in the spring of 1940 to the arrest of the party leader Robert Tobler and self- dissolution of the party, but this is not the end of the movement meant, but only its relabelling: Almost all old members continued their activities under the name Swiss collection.
External appearance
On the outside, the National Front oriented one hand, to elements of the medieval Swiss Confederation, on the other hand, on fascist and Nazi models like the NSDAP.
Emblem of the National Front was the old Swiss flag with which continues through to the edge of the cross ( a symbol, which is now used in a slightly modified form of the PNOS again ). Official greeting of Frontists was the altschweizerische Harus with lifting the right arm. Until the legal prohibition of uniforms entered the " Schutzstaffel " of the party, which was organized in so-called Harsten on in gray uniforms.
Membership
The National Front led no open membership books, therefore membership figures are difficult to estimate. The science is based on the following projections: