The debate on the work of the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (Bergier Commission) has been dominated by the issue of Jewish refugees turned away. According to the commission’s final report, more than 20,000 civilian refugees, many of them Jewish, were turned away during the Second World War. More than half of these refoulement took place in Ticino and in Misox.
In the latest article of the journal Saggi di Dodis, historian Adriano Bazzocco shows, on the basis of a verification and expansion of the corpus of sources, that the refoulements in Ticino and in Misox mainly concerned Italian soldiers. On the basis of cross-checks with additional statistics, he calculated a maximum number of 745 Jews who were turned back at the southern border. This means that the number of Jewish people turned back at this section of the border is much lower than previously assumed.
The article by Adriano Bazzocco is available for download at dodis.ch/saggi/4-4 in Open Access.
For more articles from the journal Saggi di Dodis: dodis.ch/saggi