Swiss Lawmaker Compares Pigs To Auschwitz Victims
(JTA) — A Swiss lawmaker has resigned after comparing the transportation of pigs for farming to the transportation of prisoners to Auschwitz.
“The (Nazi) deportees had only a slight chance to survive. As for the pigs, they are condemned to certain death,” Swiss Green Party lawmaker Jonas Fricker said on Thursday during debate in the National Council, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland.
During the debate Fricker, 40, apologized to the parliament and the Jewish community for his “naïve” comparison.
Swiss media was blanketed with coverage of Fricker’s comparison between pigs and Jews during the Holocaust, the Jerusalem Post reported.
On Saturday night, Fricker submitted a letter of resignation to his party.
“This comparison was hurtful and unfortunate. Resigning my mandate to parliament is the strongest signal that I can send,” Fricker wrote, the news website Swissinfo reported. He also wrote that he considers the Holocaust to be a “crime without comparison.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO