A baker from Winterthur shared anti-Semitic videos online. The district court acquitted him because the 62-year-old may not have been aware of the anti-Semitic content. Now the higher court has to decide (symbolic image).
Keystone
A Winterthur baker shared anti-Semitic videos. Today, Friday, he has to answer for this before the Zurich High Court. The Winterthur district court had acquitted him of the charge of discrimination.
Between 2020 and 2022, the 62-year-old uploaded a total of 18 videos to a website that were full of conspiracy theories and prejudices about Jews.
According to these videos, World War II and the Holocaust were a plot by the Jews. The provably fake “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were presented as real and Adolf Hitler was part of the Rothschild family.
The baker did not create the videos himself. But because he uploaded and made them available, he should be punished for discrimination by spreading ideologies. The public prosecutor’s office demanded a conditional fine of 120 daily rates of 60 francs.
As “Schwurbelbeck” in the headlines
The first instance, the Winterthur district court, also found that the videos were anti-Semitic. But the judge had “significant doubts” that the accused was aware of this.
Anti-Semitism is not openly depicted in the videos. It is not “the Jews” who are named as responsible, but rather the Khazars, a former nomadic people from Russia. In the videos, the Khazars are portrayed as the ancestors of European Jews. The members of the Rothschild family are presented as their most prominent representatives.
As emerged from the first trial in June 2023, the 62-year-old has now had to sell his bakeries. However, this was not because of the anti-Semitism accusation, but because he made the headlines as “Schwurbelbeck” and customers stayed away.
During the corona pandemic, he positioned himself as an opponent of the measures and created a mood against the corona vaccination and the mask requirement in his shop windows.
paja, sda
