Some of the people who watched me talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV when it was first broadcast asked some interesting questions in the side comments. I couldn’t address them during the show, but I thought I’d answer a few of them here and in the next few posts.  [link for the ww2tv show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vWmwfHMb7o]

Let’s start with a couple of questions about how Dutch-Paris smuggled refugees into Switzerland.

Was the Swiss border fence electrified? Not in the Genevois where Dutch-Paris operated. On the border between the canton of Geneva and the French department of Haute-Savoie the Swiss put up an 8’ high barbed wire fence. After a while they noticed that it was easy to crawl under it, so in some places they put up wooden obstacles along the bottom of the fence.

Why were the Swiss so anxious to stop people at the border? That’s a much discussed issue. I can’t give you a definitive answer because the why didn’t matter so much to Dutch-Paris as the how. But part of the answer has to be that Switzerland is a landlocked country with very little agricultural land and no easy way to import food. Like everyone else, the Swiss did not know how long the war would last or who would win it. The more people they let in, the more difficult it would be to feed everyone.

Without going into policy specifics – which seem to have changed constantly – or numbers, I can say that the Swiss did not throw open their borders to all comers during the war. That actually would have been an unheard of thing to do anywhere in the 1930s and 1940s. They did turn back some refugees who showed up without getting approval to enter the country first. Some of these refugees did end up in the hands of the Nazis. But others, including some people helped by Dutch-Paris, did not. However, the Swiss did accept refugees during the war and ended up supporting some of them for the duration.

Dutch-Paris approached the ever changing mystery that was Swiss refugee policy by making sure that everyone they took illegally over the border had a perfectly legitimate and absolutely legal permit to stay in Switzerland as a refugee before they arrived in Geneva. Most of them were Jews; some were not. It helped that they were mostly Dutch because the Dutch embassy in Bern took financial responsibility for Dutch refugees in Switzerland.