The Bern Trial of 1934–1935 was the first judicial proceeding in which the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was examined as a direct legal question. Brought as a criminal complaint by the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and the Jewish community of Bern, acting as private prosecutors under the canton of Bern's Schundliteratur statute, against the National Front figures distributing the text of the Protocols, the trial produced sworn testimony from witnesses with direct or indirect knowledge of the Paris Okhrana's operations, constituting the most concentrated primary-source record of the attribution question in any single archival location.
This dossier documents the trial record: witnesses who testified, what each documented under oath, the expert testimony, Judge Meyer's 1935 verdict finding the Protocols to be a plagiarism of Maurice Joly's 1864 Dialogue, as established by the court-appointed experts, and the 1937 appellate reversal, which turned on the scope of the Schundliteratur statute (it reached offenses against sexual morality, not political defamation) and set the Protocols' authenticity aside as legally unnecessary. It corrects the persistent mischaracterization of the reversal as a finding of authenticity.
Threshold Press Dossier No. 5. By L.L. Featheringill.
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