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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 harrowing German concept that Donald Trump has not yet managed to achieve
Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has been following a despot’s playbook. Trump himself has all but acknowledged this, by gleefully sharing with New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their new book a “historian’s” assessment that Trump has more power than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Never mind that it wasn’t a historian at all who came to this conclusion, but a longtime friend and caddy of golfer Gary Player. The anecdote shows what’s going on in Trump’s head: the fantasies of an 80-year-old would-be despot who’s more fixated on his place in history than on the concerns of even the MAGA faithful.
What Trump has been up to amounts to nothing less than trying to capture and radicalize the American soul — persecuting immigrants of color, gays, lesbians and other minorities; coarsening Americans into Trump’s own brand of vulgarity; lobbing figurative Molotov cocktails at the rule of law; perverting America’s history; and sowing divisions that echo the raw spite that once split North from South. It’s an attempted American variant of what Germans call Gleichschaltung, the Nazis’ 1933 rapid re-engineering of every facet of German life — business, culture, sports, education, and all else — to conform to the doctrines of Adolf Hitler.
With America’s 250th birthday now behind us, it’s worth asking how far Trump has already taken the country down the path of an American Gleichschaltung.
As Hitler was rising to power, Germany was in a perpetual state of political, economic and social upheaval. During the 15 years between Germany’s World War I defeat and Hitler’s rise to power, roughly a dozen serious attempts were made to overthrow the government — from communist revolutions to right-wing putsches. The best known is Hitler’s own failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.
On the evening of Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler and a contingent of Brown Shirts stormed Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller during a gathering of Bavarian government and community leaders. Climbing onto a chair, Hitler bellowed “The German revolution has begun!” The next day the Nazi leader led 2,000 followers on a march through the city, hoping to incite a nationwide uprising. Bavarian state police were waiting. About a dozen of Hitler’s followers were killed in a fusillade of gunfire. Hitler escaped but was tracked down and arrested. He was given a five-year prison sentence but a Nazi-friendly court granted him parole after only 10 months.
Hitler focused on rebuilding the party. When the Great Depression struck Germany, putting millions out of work, Hitler’s radical and antisemitic pronouncements found resonance among the populace, resulting in increased political power for the Nazi party. As successive coalition governments fell in the face of political and economic turmoil and street violence, the Nazi leader was made chancellor in January 1933 through backroom political dealings.
After fire destroyed the Reichstag on Feb. 27, 1933, there was little stopping the German chancellor on his march to one-man rule. The very next day key civil liberties — including freedom of expression, of the press, and of assembly, as well as protections against house searches and property confiscation — were abruptly suspended by a decree whose title claimed it was “For The Protection of People and State.” Amid mass arrests and terror by Hitler’s Storm Troopers, and with much of the populace already backing the Nazi leader, Gleichschaltung was carried out within two months.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
The Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol echoes the Beer Hall Putsch in one essential respect: a leader inciting followers to march in an attempted coup d’état.
“After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol,” Trump told the MAGA mob at a rally. “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Trump lied; he didn’t accompany them on the march. Back at the White House, he let the violence happen as America watched in horror.
Neither Trump nor Hitler had to stay long in the wilderness. During Hitler’s brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison, Nazi comrades like Rudolf Hess made pilgrimages to visit the boss. For Trump, after retreating to Mar-a-Lago, it became a parade of sycophants — among them the late Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — each making the journey to pay homage.
Trump’s intent to rule like an authoritarian began manifesting itself on the very first day of his return to the White House.
There was the flurry of Executive Orders on inauguration day, signed with Trump’s Sharpie in carefully choreographed photo-ops. It was all spectacle, as Trump basked in the role of a ruler issuing edicts that were intended to recast the land in his image. “Could you imagine Biden doing this,?” Trump boasted while holding up a freshly signed order. The most outrageous edict was Trump’s pardon of about 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists, akin to Third Reich pardons for Nazis who had been convicted of crimes before Hitler ascended to power.
Trump’s unleashing of ICE and other federal agents to terrorize immigrants showed how far he was willing to go — masked agents making arrests at Home Depot parking lots and inside immigration courts, brutally yanking people out of their vehicles, and in Chicago, a raid that included agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and using flashbang grenades, automatic weapons, and breaching tools as they burst into apartments.
Trump insists that he is above the law. His most radical acolyte — Stephen Miller — argued that Trump’s absolutist power extends to relations with other countries, an argument for taking Greenland.
And so here we are, a year-and-a-half after Trump’s second inauguration. The republic is battered, bruised and wobbly, but it still stands. To a significant degree this is because of federal courts that have blocked dozens of Trump’s assaults against democracy — often with excoriating words, like these from U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee: “The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.”
Hitler never faced this kind of judicial opposition. And he was never confronted with the magnitude and fearlessness of citizen resistance that has swept across the US — like the Minneapolis protests triggered by the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted because of his war in Iran and soaring consumer prices, some Republicans are finally daring to resist him, the MAGA movement is fraying, Jeffrey Epstein still dogs him, and a snowballing number of Americans are infuriated over Trump’s abuse of his presidential powers to enrich himself and his family — raking in at least $2.2 billion in 2025.
With the midterm elections four months away, our democracy may be facing greater peril than at any time since the Civil War. Like a mortally wounded beast, Trump may resort to desperate measures for survival. He’s already working to poison the midterms — dismantling federal election oversight, suing states to imply their elections are insecure, and stoking daily mistrust about any contest where Democrats might topple Republicans. Each move lays the groundwork for claiming fraud, contesting results, or deploying more extreme measures under the guise of “protecting” the vote.
We needn’t look too far back in history for despots who chose a scorched-earth exit as they faced the loss of power.
The post The harrowing German concept that Donald Trump has not yet managed to achieve appeared first on The Forward.
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The real reason Clavicular is in Israel
Clavicular is partying in Tel Aviv this week.
If you don’t know who that is, first of all, I’m happy for you. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer, part of an online male subculture that subscribes to the idea that becoming as hot as possible is the main, perhaps the only, meaningful thing to do with one’s life, and the only road to success. To achieve peak hotness — “ascend,” in looksmaxxing lingo — followers of the doctrine engage in such activities as hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to supposedly sharpen their jaw line (“bone-smashing”), or taking steroids and meth to improve their physique.
The last time Clav — as people call him, though his real name is Braden Peters — went viral, it was for getting turned down repeatedly by French women during Paris fashion week. The time before that was for dancing with a bunch of far-right influencers, including noted antisemite Nick Fuentes and manosphere titan Andrew Tate, to Kanye West’s Führer-sampling song “Heil Hitler” and singing along to the offensive lyrics.
Which is why Clavicular’s sudden appearance in Israel was such a surprise — and a controversial one. In one video, the bouncer at a Tel Aviv club kicks him out, saying no one who hates Israel is welcome inside. Several Israeli feminist influencers have also decried his visit, pointing to his bad behavior with women. And, of course, countless users online have accused him of normalizing genocide, including mega-popular streamer Hasan Piker. But others are excited by his presence; a female IDF soldier is also appearing in his videos (she’s now facing disciplinary action for the collab), as is Chabad influencer, Yossi Farro and he’s drawn excited crowds in Tel Aviv.
Farro was perhaps the first Jewish influencer to court Clavicular after the “Heil Hitler” incident; his usual schtick is wrapping tefillin with celebrities. But he made a video last month feeding the looksmaxxer the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat stew cholent — Clav said it was good — and it went viral in the Jewish world, where people decried the effort at rehabilitation. But the clip also went viral with antisemites: Fuentes said he wanted to hang a mezuzah and get in with Jews, too.
The first announcement that Clavicular was in Tel Aviv also came with a post from Farro, crossposted by several large Jewish social media accounts. In the video, Farro gifts Clav a memento that could not be more of our times: a necklace featuring an OpenAI logo with a Star of David in the middle. Later, he posted a video of a conversation with Clavicular calling the biblical Joseph the first looksmaxxer. It felt surreal.
That’s the whole point. Clavicular is just as obsessive about his fame as he is about his looks. Clicks boost accounts no matter whether they’re from haters or followers; monetized social media pays the same amount for adoring comments as it does for ones calling Clavicular evil and praying to spit on his grave. Engagement is engagement. (Farro, who didn’t reply to a request for comment, seems to be operating by the same philosophy.)
The simple answer as to why he was in Israel was because it would be controversial — which it was — and controversy earns him money and eyes. Clavicular said that he noticed everyone was talking about the nation, but almost no influencers were going. He figured he would go viral if he bucked the trend. It’s not by accident that Clav’s one-time publicist, Mitchell Jackson, specializes in cancelled figures of all political persuasions, including Candace Owens, Caroline Calloway and an OnlyFans model named Adam22. The point is attention, not adulation.
In an interview with The Free Press, Clavicular said he did not see his visit as political; he came to party. And he criticized the idea that a young influencer should have any political take, or that the outlet should even ask about his views. He doesn’t know about anything but looksmaxxing, he wrote in a post, and believes it’s irresponsible for him to talk about anything else. While one could say advising teens to take steroids and meth is also irresponsible, he’s not wrong about his ignorance of geopolitics.
But many Israelis and Jews are happy to have him, despite his “Heil Hitler” singalong. Israel has been short on positive PR, and Clav has called the country beautiful and fun. Never mind that Clavicular is followed by at least as many haters, watching out of Schadenfreude, as he is fans, and hardly brings uncomplicated good vibes to Israel with him. At least someone popular among the youth, who are increasingly critical of Israel, said something good about the nation. Many Israelis seem desperate enough for global goodwill that they’re willing to overlook Clav’s antisemitism. People are even claiming he’s Jewish now. (And maybe he is; he hasn’t confirmed or denied, but he’s certainly never mentioned it before.)
And, of course, Clavicular does have adherents who believe anything he does is cool, that he’s always “mogging” (dominating via his powerful aura, more or less). So even if he proclaims he has no political opinion, everything is politics and his presence serves to cast Israel in a more positive light, even if it’s the nihilistic glow of an amoral influencer who cares about looking good above all else. He may be cringe, but he’s popular. Maybe that’s enough for some, but it highlights how low the bar is for Israel’s public image in this moment.
For Clavicular, though, it’s all a game. He doesn’t care about Israel’s image or the war in Gaza or settlers or Palestinians. His only side is his own, and even then he doesn’t need to be popular; he only needs to be seen. He said he plans to stream in Russia next.
The post The real reason Clavicular is in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza
(JTA) — Graham Platner concluded his Senate bid on a pro-Palestinian note on Friday, in the last lines of a letter to Maine’s secretary of state formally withdrawing his candidacy.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts,” Platner wrote before signing off with the valediction, “Solidarity forever.”
The secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, is among the candidates seeking to replace Platner on the ballot, and she soon adopted his stance on Israel. Before becoming secretary of state, Bellows was the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
Asked about Platner’s letter on CNN’s “The Source” on Friday, Bellows said she agreed with Platner’s claim that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. “Yes. Israel — the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza right now,” Bellows said. “And we should not be sending any taxpayer funds to be conducting that harm.”
Bellows did not immediately respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment on Monday.
Platner, a Democrat, posted the letter nearly two days after announcing that he would leave the race, following sexual assault allegations that caused even his most devoted allies to drop their support. It was a remarkable fall for an oyster fisherman and populist who emerged out of political obscurity to command such a lead that Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, suspended her own campaign in April.
In both the speech his announcing his withdrawal and the letter, Platner has painted his exit as the result of a conspiracy against him and the progressive movement, rather than a consequence of accruing controversies that undercut his ability to win in November.
“All we were asking for was healthcare, was to end the genocide, to use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas,” Platner said in a Facebook address announcing his exit, two days before sending the formal letter.
Platner’s successor will be selected during a nominating convention on July 25. Since his exit, candidates vying to replace him have staked out their own stances on Israel, with others besides Bellows saying publicly for the first time that they believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Israel and its supporters reject the claim, which a recent poll found that half of Democrats believe.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
