How to Flee the Gestapo

There’s no question that being active in the resistance to the Nazis and their collaborators took courage, firm principles and a quick wit. What, exactly, those looked like differed from one individual to the next.

Even courage plays out differently for each person, and not just because each person needed to draw on their courage in unique circumstances.  For example, a young Engelandvaarder associated with Dutch-Paris was arrested by German officers and put into a car heading to Gestapo HQ. He found the courage to open the car door, roll out onto the pavement and take off running.  Most probably, adrenaline and the certain knowledge that the Gestapo would not treat him gently gave him sufficient motivation.

That took guts, for sure. But it’s different from the sort of cold-blooded courage that a woman showed in opening her home to strangers for an indefinite period of time. That woman was literally putting her life in the hands of strangers without any compelling reason outside of her own moral code.  Many times, it went fine and no one was harmed, indeed someone was saved.

But not always.   Take the story of a woman we’ll call Madeleine. She was a middle aged nurse who had her own apartment in Paris. In July 1943, someone denounced her by anonymous letter, accusing her of “anti-government sentiment”.  The French police investigated but uncovered no political activity.  She was not part of Dutch-Paris at that time.

A leader of Dutch-Paris recruited her in early March 1944, asking her to find other new recruits for the line. He also asked her to lodge an Engelandvaarder for a week. The man was an officer in the Dutch air force and should have been reliable or at least discreet. He was neither.  Indeed he acted as if his clandestine trip to Spain was a holiday excursion and an opportunity to visit acquaintances and do some sight-seeing. Not surprisingly, he drew the attention of the German authorities, who banged on the door of Madeleine’s apartment very early one day in late March 1944.

Madeleine and her irresponsible guest were both arrested. She was questioned, imprisoned and deported to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in July 1944. Like other Dutch-Paris women she was extracted from Ravensbrück by the Swedish White Busses and returned to Paris in June 1945. She worked with Dutch-Paris for less than a month but spent over a year as a political prisoner of the Nazis because of the disgraceful behavior of a man she was trying to help.

Out of the approximately 3,000 fugitives whom Dutch-Paris helped, that officer was the only one who is known to have caused the arrest of those trying to help him.

It’s easy to forget how long the Nazi occupation of western Europe went on.  All Belgium and the northern part of France, for example, were occupied from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1944. Most of the continent lived under the Nazi boot for longer, but even so, four years is a long time to be living under the threats and deprivations of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Gestapo.

In most places, however, the occupation ground down on life so that the shortages and fear became “normal.”  Times were very bad, but people still died of natural causes, had children, changed jobs and even had romances and got married.  Here’s a story of a wartime romance that became extraordinary because it brushed up against Dutch-Paris.

In March 1943 a young man who worked in the postal service in The Hague – we’ll call him Bill – proposed to a young woman who was training to be a nurse – we’ll call her Beth. Her family was very happy about the engagement until, like so many young Dutch men, Bill’s name came up in the labor draft. He was legally obliged to Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some encouraging news for the new year.  Last March a Dutch woman contacted me about her uncle, who had been arrested in March 1944 and deported to the concentration camps under the harshest prisoner regime (Nacht und Nebel) as a resister.

Her uncle’s name did not appear in my own research notes, but I was able to suggest various archives that might have documents about her uncle as a Dutch resister who had been arrested and deported from France.

Just recently, she found documents in the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag about her uncle.  One of them is a letter or testimonial from a well-known member of Dutch-Paris stating that she worked with the uncle during the war.  The uncle brought food from Versailles to Paris for Engelandvaarders being helped by Dutch-Paris.  Other documents report Read the rest of this entry »

Over the fifteen years that I’ve been keeping this blog about Dutch-Paris and grassroots resistance, many people have reached out to me from across the globe asking questions and offering information. Some of these queries have turned into long and friendly email correspondences in which I’ve offered as much research help as I could and in return been offered facts and stories about Dutch-Paris that I couldn’t have found in archives.

Still today the most thrilling comment I’ve received came early in my research. It was just a simple message, not more than two sentences. But in it an old man from Iowa identified himself as one of the Allied aviators who was arrested at the Dutch-Paris safe house in Brussels in February 1944. For a historian like me, it was a thrilling honor to reach back in time to connect with a person who played a role in the events I was piecing together blindly in the archives.

What’s more, once this one man had given me his name – which none of the resisters who survived had ever known – I was able to go through the British and American archives to find the names of the other aviators arrested with him. And, with some coaxing, he himself told me about what happened to him and the others in a rogue Luftwaffe prison after their arrest. Let’s just say it didn’t conform to the regulations of the Geneva Convention.

Since then other people have contacted me about their parents, uncles, grandmothers who were in Dutch-Paris or assisted by Dutch-Paris. Many have been generous enough to share their family stories and photos with me. I’ve shared some of them in my public talks. Together we’ve expanded the history of Dutch-Paris. But more than that, we’ve been building a web of connections based on Dutch-Paris.

But it’s not limited to me. Since the beginning of this project a Dutchman who is now a very good friend has been promoting connections among the living descendants of Dutch-Paris. He’s also been looking for traces of his father and grandfather as they escaped the Nazis. He already knew most of that story, but just recently he found the family of the man with whom his grandfather was hiding in the French Alps when the Germans arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz. He’s known the man’s name for years. Now he knows the man’s niece and her whole family because they flew to Amsterdam to share their previously lost uncle’s story and visit the museum where the grandfather and the uncle are remembered.

In this season of the new year, let’s celebrate not only the courage of the men and women of Dutch-Paris during the second world war, but also the intergenerational personal connections that remembering Dutch-Paris has created in the here and now. During the war such connections – some of which veered on the random – built a network that was powerful enough to save lives from the persecution of the totalitarian monolith of the Third Reich. It was powerful enough that even now, decades later, it is still sparking connections across generations and long distances.

Following the last few posts, I have one last comment about resisters being identified with a resistance group that did not officially acknowledge them.

In most cases there are only two reasons for a resister’s resistance group of network to be misidentified.  It’s either an innocent mistake or something altogether darker.

Innocent mistakes happened because during the war resisters generally didn’t have a name for their organization beyond the generic “organisatie” or a code name that only they and their immediate colleagues used. That’s just basic security. Dutch-Paris, for example, was a name used by British military intelligence and adopted after the war because it was most likely to get assistance for resisters who’d been impoverished and needed medical help after arrest and deportation.

For example, a woman who worked for Dutch-Paris survived the war but none of the people she knew and worked with during the war did. She returned home and was asked to fill out forms to claim her resistance benefits. She honestly did not know what Read the rest of this entry »

The last post about Josette Molland brings up the interesting question of how an individual ended up belonging to a particular resistance group in the postwar documents that now constitute the documents that historians use to write the history of the war.

This is a different question than how someone joined a resistance group during the war. That was a matter of timing and opportunity. The question of how someone is categorized in the documents is more a question of codification and administration.

The answer actually varies by archive because every archive was compiled by an agency with its own mission. The Dutch Red Cross, for example, interviewed everyone who returned to the Netherlands after the war but not everyone who stayed in the country during the war. The US archives gathered information about resisters who helped downed American airmen but nothing about resisters who worked on underground newspapers in France.

The difficulty for every agency, whether it was the French army or the Red Cross, was that resistance was Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an example of the sort of confusion about who worked with what resistance group that I’ve been discussing in the last few posts.

On 8 March 2024, The New York Times ran a front page obituary about Josette Molland, a French resister who survived the concentration camps and made a point of sharing her experiences through paintings and talks. The article identifies her as “fabricating false papers and transporting them for the famed Dutch-Paris underground network…”

There is absolutely no question of Ms Molland’s illegal work. She earned every one of those Resistance medals that she is wearing in an accompanying photograph. But she was not, technically, a member of Dutch-Paris. In fact, the chef de reseau of Dutch-Paris was quite adamant in several official documents that she was not part of Dutch-Paris. She is, instead, registered in the official French records at the Service historique de la défense, Bureau Resistance, as a member of Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our discussion of why many people assume that anyone who made it from the Netherlands to Spain or Switzerland during the war did so with the help of Dutch-Paris. The simple answer is that Dutch-Paris is the most well-known civilian escape line in western Europe. I say civilian to distinguish it from lines like Comet that were supported by the Allied secret services such as the British SOE or the American OSS. Those line specialized in helping servicemen, particularly aviators, whereas Dutch-Paris helped anyone who needed it.

But it’s crucial to this story that a small percentage of the fugitives who Dutch-Paris helped were Allied aviators. Both the Americans and the British put considerable effort into recognizing the civilians who helped their servicemen during the occupation, which created a lot of very useful documentation and also a certain buzz. In addition to that the leader of Dutch-Paris, John Weidner, and some of his colleagues from the line, were commissioned into the Dutch Army after the liberation with the task of Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post we discussed the localized fragmentation of the resistance and how there were many different rescue groups that helped fugitives get away from the Nazis. So why is it that so many people assume that if someone got from the Netherlands to Switzerland or Spain during the war they must have been helped by Dutch-Paris?

Mostly, it has to do with politics and publicity or fame. Let’s look at the politics first.

At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union had essentially occupied Eastern Europe. For their part, Western European governments were worried about Communists taking over their own countries through the ballot box or by force as well as the possible intentions of the American Army to impose occupation governments. We’ll just focus on Western Europe in this post.

The Western European governments obviously wanted to Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »