Grüningers Fall

According to the Swiss documentary filmmaker Richard Dindo (1944), the media want to make us believe that Swiss non-alignment during World War II was only a thin veneer around Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic feelings. This stirred his interest in the story of Paul Grüninger, a Swiss policeman who in the late thirties provided false travel documents to hundreds of Jews who had fled from Austria. He was convicted for this as early as 1940, as a result of which he was unable to practise his old profession any longer. Grüninger died in 1972 at the age of eighty. It would take until 1996 before he was officially rehabilitated. By reconstructing Paul Grüninger‘s life on the basis of witness accounts by people who were saved by him, Dindo wants to pay tribute to this former policeman, a man who ‘followed the voice of his conscience‘. Dindo based his film on the book with the same title by investigative journalist Stefan Keller. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)