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2024

Controversial Swiss war traitor gets a revamp 

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A new film about Ernst Schrämli, a Swiss soldier executed for treason during the Second World War, illustrates the shifting public consensus about Switzerland’s fraught wartime politics. On January 31, 1976, the Solothurn Film Festival played host to the world premiere of Richard Dindo and Niklaus Meienberg’s documentary The Execution of the Traitor to the Homeland Ernst S. (Die Erschiessung des Landesverräters Ernst S.). A key work of the then-flourishing Young Swiss Film movement – Switzerland’s answer to the Nouvelle Vague – Ernst S. put forward a provocative thesis. Based on the case of Ernst Schrämli, the first of 16 Swiss citizens executed for treason during the Second World War, Dindo, an activist filmmaker, and Meienberg, a leftist journalist and historian, sought to expose the hypocrisy at the heart of Switzerland’s wartime policies. To them, Schrämli, a young soldier found guilty of passing on military equipment and imprecise intel to a German agent, was emblematic of the ...