How to Flee the Gestapo

About Dutch-Paris

The Dutch-Paris Escape Line ran from the Netherlands through Belgium and France and into both Switzerland and Spain.  It rescued approximately one thousand people, about 800 of whom were civilians, the majority of whom were Jewish families.  Dutch-Paris hid and supported some of those people in Belgium and France and took others across the border into neutral Switzerland.  The rest were allied airmen, Engelandvaarders or people required by the Dutch government-in-exile in London, who walked over the Pyrenees Mountains and through Spain to reach England.

Dutch-Paris also acted as a messenger service for the Dutch government-in-exile in London by smuggling microfilms hidden in fountain pens and such like along the same route.  The micro-films held copies of the illegal press and various reports regarding the situation in the Netherlands going in one direction and instructions and orders from the government-in-exile going in the other.  Such were the times that that was the easiest way for the government-in-exile to know what was going on in its own country. That information line is known as the Zwitserse Weg, or the Swiss Way.

Dutch-Paris’s acknowledged leader, at least in France and Belgium, was John Henry Weidner, a Dutch citizen who preferred to speak French and, in 1940, owned a textile store in Lyon, France.  The Gestapo arrested around a hundred Dutch-Paris agents in February 1944 but the line kept functioning until the liberation of Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands in September 1944.  Some of those arrested returned from slavery in Nazi Germany in 1945.