Despite the common term “the Resistance” and the claims of politicians like Charles de Gaulle, the civilian resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War was not monolithic. It wasn’t even the work of a few large, well-known national networks. For the most part resistance was the highly fragmented and localized work of discrete groups of people who saw a need and acted on it.

This is especially true for rescue work and escape lines. In fact, there were many rescuers of Jews who worked entirely independently without ever belonging to an organized group of any sort. You could do that if you were hiding someone. But you could not act entirely alone if you wanted to move that someone to a place of greater safety. That required cooperation among a few people but not necessarily very many people.

A lot of rescue groups/escape lines operated in very specific areas, most often on a border. There were, for example, small groups that smuggled fugitives from the Netherlands to Belgium or France to Switzerland using their own property on the border and their own local knowledge of places and people on both sides of the border. There were also more entrepreneurial types of locals who didn’t care about resistance but were willing to take people over the border illegally for a price. Such passeurs could be found on both the Swiss and Spanish borders.

There were indeed some fugitives with impressive savoir-faire and personal resources who made their way out of occupied Europe on their own by devising their own routes and either finding local resisters to help them across borders or paying local non-resistance passeurs to lead them. In fact, a couple of young men who joined Dutch-Paris initially found their own way to Switzerland and were recruited by Dutch-Paris in Switzerland.

All this is to say that you cannot assume that just because someone made it to Switzerland during the war, or even made it part way to Switzerland or Spain, that person was involved with Dutch-Paris. He or she could have been acting on their own initiative. Or they could have been helped by another resistance group or even several other resistance groups.

Of course that person might have been helped by Dutch-Paris, but it’s very unlikely unless he or she went through Brussels or Paris or Lyon or Toulouse or, better yet, three out of those four. Dutch-Paris had a particular route even if that route frayed a bit going over the Swiss and Spanish borders and it operated during a specific time frame (not before 1942).  And Dutch-Paris has 320+ known helpers. If the individual in question interacted with any of those helpers, then that’s another good indication of an intersection with Dutch-Paris.