– Neuchâtel resident Maurice Bavaud was beheaded by the Nazis
Abandoned by official Switzerland, the seminarian who wanted to kill Hitler suffered the death penalty in a Berlin prison.
Posted today at 10:31 a.m.
Munich, November 9, 1938
The Bavarian capital is paraded on the occasion of the March of Remembrance commemorating the failed Nazi putsch of 1923. In the crowd – many in brown shirts and well-shined black boots – who await the parade in which Adolf Hitler and the elite of the national-socialist regime, a well-dressed young man is on hot coals: the Neuchâtelois Maurice Bavaud. Tall 22-year-old blond, carefully combed back, he goes unnoticed. But his heart is pounding. This convinced Catholic, who had left a French seminary training missionaries shortly before, wanted to kill the Führer, the man whom the people gathered around him adored.