"Veritas" [Georg Adolf Alt]

Volk in Gefahr! Wall Street (Jakob Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) [A People in Danger! Wall Street (Jacob Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb & Co.)]

Geneva: Éditions Veritas, 1932. First Edition. Rare Swiss anti-Semitic and anti-democratic conspiracy booklet published during the Depression and immediately before the rapid expansion of Switzerland’s fascist-influenced “Front” movement. Issued under the name “Veritas” and bibliographically attributed to Adolf Georg Alt, the booklet presents Wall Street, Jacob Schiff, and the Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company as the center of a supposed international financial power controlling governments, currencies, Freemasonry, political parties, and the press.

The striking cover depicts “Helvetia,” the female personification of Switzerland, carrying a shield bearing the Swiss cross, beside an enlarged five-franc coin. Its captions ask whether the Swiss cross must yield to the “Star of Judas” and claim that three hundred Jewish financiers rule the world through a “Jewish gold currency.” The imagery transforms Switzerland’s national symbols into an allegory of racial and financial siege, framing the booklet as an urgent warning to the Swiss population.

Alt draws heavily upon familiar components of interwar conspiracy literature, including Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He argues that an “international state” exists above legitimate national governments and alleges that Jewish-controlled finance deliberately engineers wars, revolutions, economic crises, and currency policy. Jacob Schiff and Kuhn, Loeb are employed less as subjects of financial history than as symbols of the imagined union of Jewish banking, Bolshevism, and American capitalism.

The argument moves from international finance to an attack upon Switzerland’s own democratic institutions. Alt portrays political parties, parliamentarianism, and international cooperation as mechanisms through which Switzerland has been subordinated to foreign interests. The concluding section, headed “Political parties are the most harmful institutions among the Swiss people,” declares the party system to be “Judas,” urges voters to abandon established parties, and calls for a unified national movement resting upon racial consciousness, “national honor,” and authoritarian solidarity.

Published in 1932, the booklet is particularly significant as evidence that the anti-Semitic conspiracism later associated with Nazi Germany already circulated through independent Swiss publishing channels before Hitler’s assumption of power. It appeared as the Depression intensified political radicalization in Switzerland and just before antisemitism acquired a more organized party-political presence through the Frontenbewegung. An unusually graphic primary document of Swiss interwar anti-Semitism, combining financial conspiracy theory, anti-Masonic rhetoric, hostility to parliamentary democracy, and the appropriation of patriotic imagery in support of an authoritarian and exclusionary conception of the Swiss nation.

Large octavo. Stapled in photographically illustrated wrappers, 80 pp., illustrated. IN GERMAN. Wrappers moderately creased and worn, corners bumped, but a very good plus copy of a scarce work. Less than a dozen copies in OCLC. Item #15207

Price: $275.00