Wilhelm Gustloff (30 January 1895 – 4 February 1936) was the founder of the Swiss NSDAP/AO (the Nazi Party organisation for German citizens living outside Germany) at Davos. He remained its leader from 1932 until he was assassinated in 1936. Life and assassination Gustloff (a son of merchant Herrmann Gustloff), who worked for the Swiss government as a meteorologist, joined the NSDAP in 1927. He assisted in the distribution of the antisemitic propaganda book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the point that members of the Swiss Jewish community sued the book's distributor, the Swiss NSDAP/AO, for libel. Gustloff was shot and killed in Davos in 1936 by David Frankfurter, a Yugoslav Jewish student from what is now Croatia, incensed by the growth of the NSDAP. Frankfurter surrendered immediately to the Swiss police, confessing "I fired the shots because I am a Jew". He was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment and spent the war in a Swiss prison. On May 17, 1945 — shortly after V-E Day — Frankfurter was pardoned by a Swiss court. Aftermath Gustloff was given a state funeral in his birthplace of Schwerin in Mecklenburg, with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and Joachim von Ribbentrop in attendance. Thousands of Hitler Youth members lined the route. His coffin, transported on a special train from Davos to Schwerin, made stops in Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg and Wittenberg. Gustloff's widow, mother and brother attended the funeral and received personal condolences from Hitler. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was the first at Gustloff's funeral to recite a few lines in his honour. Gustloff was proclaimed a Blutzeuge of the Nazi cause and his murder became part of the propaganda that served as pretext for the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. His wife Hedwig, who had been Hitler's secretary, received from Hitler personally a monthly "honorary pay" of , the equivalent of some US$13,000 today. Unlike the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan in Paris in 1938, Gustloff's death was not immediately politicized to incite Kristallnacht. Hitler did not want to risk any domestic bouts of antisemitism to cause Germany to lose the recently awarded right to host the 1936 Summer Olympics, since his antisemitic policies had already led to calls to relocate the games. Namesakes The German cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was named for Gustloff by the Nazi regime. The