How to Flee the Gestapo

I’ve come to Paris to try to figure out how it came about that over one hundred members of Dutch-Paris were arrested in February and March of 1944, many of them later dying in the concentration camps. John Henry Weidner was more than a little interested in the question himself, and, as a Captain [...]

In France, I’ve been looking through the regional and departmental archives for the Rhone (Lyon) and Haute-Savoie (Annecy) for records regarding Dutch-Paris. Given that I have the names of several people, including civil servants and police agents, who worked for the line in those cities and even the dates that a few of them [...]

Twenty years ago I wanted to write my dissertation on the Resistance but everyone from professors to archivists told me it could only be done as an oral history. My French couldn’t stand up to that, so I found another topic (the Liberation). I think everyone was right at the time, but it wasn’t that [...]

Sitting in the archives of CEGES/SOMA in Brussels, I opened up a folder piled high with official forms all neatly filled out by hand or typewriter in bureaucratic German. They were the files of the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK), literally translated as the Currency Protection Unit*. It sounds innocuous enough, like a band of accountants searching out [...]

Just in case anyone thinks that the life of a researcher is glamorously exciting or satisfyingly contemplative, let me tell you about the day I had.
I started out from my hotel in Brussels at 7:30 am with the idea of photographing some of the places used by Dutch-Paris, known here as the Comité.  Back in [...]

It’s hard enough to read someone else’s handwriting in your native language, let alone in one you learned in graduate school. But to my immense relief, most of the documents I’ve come across so far are typed. In some cases that’s because somebody’s secretary typed up copies of handwritten reports (thank you!). But in other [...]

The herculean task of organizing the Weidner Archives is being ably undertaken by Stan Tozeski, a retired archivist from NARA. He tells me that when he started in on a heap of moving boxes filled with manila folders and papers in various states of deterioration, in other words, the contents of John Henry Weidner’s office [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand corrected.  It turns out that resisters did write a lot down.  It’s just that they wrote it down after the danger had passed.  For France that happened with the Liberation in the summer of 1944.  Belgium was liberated in September 1944, as was a southern swathe of the Netherlands.  To [...]

One of the best things about this project so far is the community of people who are actively interested in escape lines.  For instance, the Escape Line Memorial Society (ELMS;  http://www.escapelines.com) based in the UK raises funds to assist helpers who are now in financial need.   They also run freedom treks across western Europe in [...]

As soon as I start to tell a story, I run into the problem of names. The documents usually give the full names of the members of Dutch-Paris, with the exception of those who never told their colleagues their true name before their arrests and then deaths in deportation. But would it be right to [...]