Israel Bought Engine Secrets From the Man Sent to Burn Them

The bundles went into the furnace under Alfred Frauenknecht’s supervision. The engine documents they supposedly contained had been diverted for Israel. A 1971 Swiss judgment describes an engineer who turned the destruction of an industrial archive into a delivery system for foreign agents.

Frauenknecht headed the jet-engine department at Sulzer. His employer built the French-designed ATAR 09C under licence for Switzerland’s Mirage III S fighters. Once paper records had been transferred to microfilm, they were supposed to be destroyed. His cousin collected the loads in a Fiat van, then substituted lookalike packages in a Winterthur garage. Obsolete drawings concealed the fake contents.

The judgment records seven loads burned between September 1968 and September 1969. Genuine documents travelled through a separate chain into Germany and onward to Israel. Frauenknecht estimated that roughly 200,000 plans and descriptions had been supplied. The material concerned how to build the engine, including tools and manufacturing instructions.

When the trial opened in April 1971, he admitted the transaction while disputing its criminality. JTA’s contemporary account describes a defendant who accepted the facts and rejected the legal conclusion. His lawyer, Manfred Kuhn, argued that he had helped a friend in danger: Israel, which France had denied delivery of 50 Mirage jets after imposing its arms embargo.

The $200,000 payment was part of the admitted facts. Kuhn pressed for acquittal on grounds of sympathy for Israel. Prosecutor Jacob Muller sought seven years at hard labour and argued that the sale had damaged Switzerland’s interests abroad.

The court convicted him. JTA reported a sentence of four-and-a-half years at hard labour and a two-year loss of civil rights. The court also recommended his expulsion from the Swiss Army, according to the contemporary bulletin. His cousin was acquitted.

After the verdict, Kuhn appealed for help for Frauenknecht and his wife, telling JTA that the money had been confiscated. Israel’s officials had declined comment when the allegations first became public in 1969.