July 3: A Suicide at the League of Nations

Stefan Lux, a Czechoslovakian Jewish journalist born in Vienna in 1888, committed suicide in the assembly room of the League of Nations in Geneva on this date in 1936 to protest the rise of Nazism and the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws in Germany. Lux was a regular in the League’s press gallery. On the morning of July 3rd, he rose during the proceedings, called to Secretary General Joseph Avenol by name, cried, “C’est le dernier coup!” (‘This is the last blow”), and shot himself. Lux was taken from the gallery alive, and was tended in the hospital by Rabbi Salomon Polikof, Geneva’s chief rabbi. “I was not a practicing Jew,” Lux told the rabbi, “but I want to die as one. My Hebrew name is Shmuel Moshe Ben Abraham . . . ” His suicide was preceded by letters he wrote to King Edward VIII of Great Britain, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, the Times of London and the Manchester Guardian. The letter to Eden amounted to a suicide note: “A man who is about to die, of his free will and after careful deliberation, has a right to be heard . . . you are dealing with a band of criminals in Germany [who] are morally and mentally depraved individuals . . . I appeal to you with my last breath, Sir Eden, to face the facts . . . It is my profound hope that this miracle will take place; that the death of a barely known writer will help to bring out the truth and to shed some light . . .” Lux left a wife and 12-year-old daughter. His suicide interrupted the League’s proceedings for ten minutes.
Lux gave his life “like a soldier in an ultimate effort to arouse the conscience of humanity.” —Rabbi Salomon Polikof