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Swiss historical drama ‘Labyrinth of Peace’ shatters the myth of Switzerland’s neutrality in WWII
It’s Switzerland in 1945 and the war has just ended. A group of deeply traumatized, ragged-looking Jewish teenagers recently liberated from Buchenwald have been sent to live in a former Swiss school building.
A young Swiss woman named Klara cares for them, while her new husband, Johann, runs her family’s textile business, whose success is dependent on the work of unrepentant Nazis living in comfort in Swiss exile. Johann’s brother, Egon, home from the war after five years working as a Swiss border guard, is wracked by guilt for having to turn away Jewish mothers and children at the frontier. His new postwar job in the attorney general’s office: hunting down ex-Nazis.
This is the premise of “Labyrinth of Peace,” an engrossing Swiss drama set in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust that is now available exclusively on ChaiFlicks, the Jewish streaming service in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Shot in Switzerland and released in the country to great acclaim in 2020, the six-episode series is fraught with drama, romance and moral struggles.
“Labyrinth of Peace” is the brainchild of award-winning Swiss-Italian screenwriter and director Petra Volpe, who wanted to tell the compelling story of a little-known chapter of postwar history while also spotlighting the morally questionable role Switzerland took during and after the war.
“Switzerland wanted to show that they were on the right side of history, since they knew they had failed the Jews by locking down the country” during the Holocaust, and therefore took in Jewish refugees after the war, Volpe said in an interview from her home in Brooklyn. “When actual refugees arrived and they weren’t cute children younger than 12, and someone asked where the little boys were, the rabbi said of the youngest ones, ‘They were all gassed.’ Switzerland wasn’t happy when teenagers showed up. They didn’t treat them as nicely as they should have.”
The Buchenwald Boys, as they were called, had lost their childhoods and most of their families during the war years. More than 60,000 Jews died in Buchenwald — including my great-grandfather, after he, my grandfather and uncle were arrested on Kristallnacht and sent to the concentration camp. But some 900 youths survived and were among those liberated by U.S. forces.
Jewish refugee agencies came to their rescue, and they were sent to various sites in France, England and Switzerland for rehabilitation. “Labyrinth of Peace” turns the story of a group sent to Switzerland into an absorbing historical drama that belies the myth of Swiss neutrality and demonstrates how guilt and moral conflicts ran through families even after combat ended.
“Labyrinth of Peace” illuminates a little-known chapter of postwar history while spotlighting the morally questionable role Switzerland took during and after World War II. (ChaiFlicks)
In the series, the recently liberated Buchenwald Boys find themselves at the heart of many more interests than anyone first realizes.
One of the teens, Herschel, falls in love with the Swiss Klara, whose father’s textile factory profited handsomely during the war. The family home is rich in sumptuous detail, from silk damask wall coverings to lush oriental carpets covering the floors to the gold-rimmed Limoges tea pot from which servants pour drinks. Nearby, the Buchenwald Boys live in empty classrooms without sufficient food or clothing, after arriving in the country wearing little but rags.
In real life, the 370 or so Buchenwald Boys who were sent to Switzerland became political pawns, Volpe says. They were promised several months of rest and rehabilitation, but their stay in Switzerland was cut short when authorities in pre-state Israel told them they were going to Palestine. Most didn’t want to go; some asked to settle in Australia and others wanted to stay in Switzerland.
“Everyone just wanted to bring them to Israel and get them out of sight,” said Volpe, who is not Jewish but is married to a Jewish man. “There’s collective guilt.”
In the series, the character of Egon is based on a real Swiss border guard whose story is known from frequent letters he wrote home to his wife. Egon is introduced to viewers as he arrives home just in time for his brother’s wedding to Klara. He is wracked with guilt and anger.
“Every day he had to drag mothers and young kids back across the border and it’s killing him,” Volpe said.
Desperate for expiation, Egon gets drawn into the U.S. authorities’ search for Nazis who moved to Switzerland and are living under cover with adopted names and identities.
Meanwhile, his brother Johann — Klara’s husband — is trying to transform his father-in-law’s textile business into a success by producing a low-cost synthetic alternative to nylon. Johann touts the achievement as a pure Swiss creation, but it turns out that it’s the work of a Nazi chemist working under an assumed name in the family lab — putting Johann in a morally dubious position and creating conflict with his wife.
Many Nazis who fled Germany after the war found new lives in Switzerland, where their pasts largely were overlooked. The same happened in America, too; the U.S. government put ex-Nazi scientists to work developing military hardware and even rockets for the country’s fledgling space program.
The setting for “Labyrinth of Peace” is a verdant Swiss school where Jewish teens recently liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp are sent to be rehabilitated. (ChaiFlicks)
“Switzerland imported the knowledge of German war criminals,” said Volpe, who grew up near Zurich, lived in Berlin for 20 years as an adult and has resided in New York for the past decade. “They tried to hire scientists from the chemical industry. Swiss economic success is based on knowledge we took from the Nazis.”
Volpe’s series shatters the notion of Switzerland’s ostensible neutrality and demonstrates how many Swiss shared in the war’s sins.
“War criminals were treated like royalty in Switzerland because they had money, and refugees were treated like criminals,” observed Volpe.
“Labyrinth of Peace” was a hit when it aired on Swiss national television, and last year won awards at several Jewish film festivals in the United States. The series is now available nationwide on ChaiFlicks, the subscription streaming service that focuses on Jewish and Israeli content.
For Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 18, the JCC of Manhattan will screen two episodes from the series followed by a Q&A with Volpe.
At the end of the series (no spoilers!), Klara and a friend are shown driving while she opens a thin book that Herschel, the eldest of the Buchenwald Boys who fell in love with her, wrote and gave her. In his introduction Herschel writes, “I have done my best to prevent what was meant to be prevented. The eradication of us and our history.”
“The main message in his diary is: ‘They didn’t erase our voice and I can still tell my story,’ Volpe said. “That’s a form of victory also, and a very important message.”
Watch “Labyrinth of Peace” here.
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The post Swiss historical drama ‘Labyrinth of Peace’ shatters the myth of Switzerland’s neutrality in WWII appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”