Pro-Nazi Swiss banker François Genoud on stage in Paris

The room The Unjustperformed from Thursday in a Parisian theater, brings back to life the famous Vaudois anti-Semitic activist François Genoud, friend of the Nazis and Arab nationalisms.

He committed suicide in 1996 in Pully, but he comes back to life from Thursday January 23 on a Parisian stage. Vaudois François Genoud, admirer of Hitler, pro-Nazi activist and supporter of Arab nationalism, is on the bill at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. The immense French actor Jacques Weber lends him his features and his voice in a brand new play, entitled The Unjust.

The purpose, as described by its authors, is as follows:

“I fear a very controversial reception”

Interviewed on January 4 on France 2 in the show Belle EpoqueJacques Weber did not hide the fact that he feared “the very controversial reception” that he was “going to have to face” in the context of the war between Israel and Hamas, while anti-Semitic acts have seen a sharp increase in France since the massacres of October 7.

Without having been able to contact the quartet of authors of the play, we can assume that the whole interest of a character like François Genoud lies in his successive commitments, the common thread of which is anti-Semitism, from the 1920s to the present day .

He shakes Hitler’s hand

Born in Lausanne, François Genoud was 17 years old in 1932 when, somewhat by chance, he met Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party and future chancellor of the Third Reich. The young Vaudois has been living for a year and a half in Germany, in the Bonn region, where he is an apprentice to wallpaper manufacturers, his father’s trade. It was one of his German hosts who introduced him to the Führer.

“I said a few words to him, notably my great interest in National Socialism…”relates François Genoud to the French journalist Pierre Péan, who released a biography in 1996 dedicated to the man he calls the “Lucifer” of Vaud – The Extremist. François Genoud, from Hitler to Carlos (Fayard).

He joined the Swiss “Nazi” party

Back in Switzerland, the Lausanne teenager grew up. He joined the National Front, a party favorable to Nazism. He created a youth branch there, of which he became the leader. He does the punching, is briefly incarcerated. He wants to go on long trips.

In 1936, he left for the Orient, stopping on the way in Jerusalem. After shaking Hitler’s hand four years earlier, he shook that of Mufti Hadj Amine el-Husseini, who shared the Führer’s anti-Semitic ideas. At this time, “Palestine was shaken by the first clashes between Jews and Arabs”, noted in 1996 in Liberation the journalist Karl Laske, another biographer of François Genoud – The black banker. Francois Genoud (Threshold).

It was after the Second World War that François Genoud’s anti-Semitism took off. Karl Laske, in Liberation:

Hitler and Goebbels, July 27, 1944, after the failed attack on the Führer. Image: AP Pressen’s image

In the 1960s, his anti-Semitism and his opposition to the State of Israel made François Genoud the defender and promoter of Arab nationalism. With his funds filled by the copyrights he bought from descendants of famous Nazis, he finances insurrectional movements.

It offers its services to Egyptians and Algerians

His Swiss nationality helps him in his activities as a matchmaker between Nasser’s Egypt and the Algerians of the FLN, where former Nazis act as advisors – the subject of the novel by the Franco-Algerian Boualem Sansal currently detained in Algeria, The German’s village or the Journal of the Schiller brothers (Gallimard).

Karl Laske reports what François Genoud said about Israel:

The journalist of Liberation add:

The PFLP is the terrorist organization that the radical left student union CUAE at the University of Geneva mentions in its latest agenda, where there is talk, without critical perspective, of a plane hijacking, precisely.

The banker and publisher François Genoud became a fervent supporter of the international terrorist Carlos, whose real name was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan linked to the PFLP, whom France kidnapped in Sudan in 1994 during a special operation.

“I am a good Swiss”

François Genoud will entrust Pierre Péan – as we can read in the weekly L’Express in 1996:

In 1994, François Genoud said, again about Israel:

Two years later, in 1996, while Switzerland was facing the scandal of escheated Jewish funds, François Genoud, marginalized but never convicted in Switzerland for his aid to terrorist movements, killed himself in Lausanne by drinking a chemical cocktail. in front of his loved ones, wrote Karl Laske. By imagining him responding to an Israeli journalist, the piece The Unjust confronts him with his greatest enemy, as well as his choices.

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