Swiss Green Party MP Jonas Fricker said during a debate over animal protections in the National Council legislative body on Thursday that Jews deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp had a better chance of surviving than pigs sent to industrial livestock farming.
Fricker’s alleged belittling of the Holocaust triggered outrage in Switzerland, causing him to resign on Saturday.
He said on Thursday that “the people who were deported there [Nazi extermination camps] had a chance to survive. The pigs go to a certain death.”
“You know the photographs, the documentary films from Europe that show the unspeakable industry livestock farming – they are transported to a certain death,” Fricker continued, adding that the last time he recalled seeing a documentary about the transport of pigs, photographs of the mass deportation from Schindler’s List came to mind.
The Swiss National Council debate covered the Fair-Food-Initiative and the standards in the industrial farming sector. The Swiss media was blanketed with coverage of Fricker’s comparison between pigs and Jews during the Holocaust.
