How to Flee the Gestapo

By the time the Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945, most of the urban trees in parks and along streets had been cut down – often illegally – for firewood. The war years were cold. Every year of rationing made civilians more malnourished and more shabbily dressed. Every winter fuel rations decreased […]

In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of false resisters making claims to having been in the resistance during the uncertain period of the Liberation.  It happened. Not often, but often enough that if you come across someone making claims that no one else in the resistance network verifies, you should treat those claims […]

Here’s another story that turns on luck, sent to me by the son of an Engelandvaarder. This is a Dutch-Paris story in a very roundabout way. The Engelandvaarder, whom we’ll call Jack, made it to Spain with the help of Dutch-Paris. He then trained with the Dutch Bureau Inlichtingen (Information Bureau) and ended up working […]

One of the Comet escape line’s teenage couriers recently passed away at the age of 95. Like Dutch-Paris, Comet was also created by civilians. Unlike Dutch-Paris, Comet emphasized helping Allied servicemen to evade the Nazis by either taking them from Belgium to Spain or hiding them in Belgium. Both escape lines relied on the dedication […]

The Return of political prisoners, prisoners of war and forced laborers from Germany to France, Belgium and the Netherlands had slowed to a trickle by August 1945.   If someone had not yet come home or at least gotten a message to his or her family by then, it was unlikely that they ever would. And […]

Another effect of The Return of prisoners and forced laborers to France in the summer of 1945 that we’ve been talking about for the last few posts was a resurgence of what’s sometimes called the “extra-legal purge.” During the occupation, civilians who collaborated with the Germans had increased access to power, influence and material goods […]

There is no doubt that every former prisoner was happy to return home from the Third Reich in 1945. But those returns often held their own traumas. To begin with, it’s fair to assume that every displaced person who returned from Germany was in poor health. Some of them were so desperately ill that they […]

When they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, horrified British soldiers buried the dead and tried to save the living. They also required that the German adults who lived near the camp come into the camp to see what had happened there. And they filmed what they saw. That film was made […]

The collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War 75 years ago was met with general rejoicing, but it also represented a threat of a global pandemic. The Nazis had forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes across Europe and brought them into central Europe as prisoners and/or laborers […]

Seventy five years ago the Western Allies were moving into the Third Reich from the west while the Soviet Red Army steamrollered toward Berlin from the east. The armies had a very clear military objective: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. But they also had a vast and sprawling civilian affairs problem. The Americans […]