How to Flee the Gestapo

Let’s keep talking about how to find documents about WWII in archives. First thing you need to do is make a list of all the details you already know. It will help a lot of if you know the following: Person’s birthdate Person’s name Any aliases, pseudonyms, schuilnamen, noms de guerre or odd spelling of […]

I’ve talked about how to find an individual in the WWII archives before, but new people keep asking me questions so let’s talk about it again. The first thing that you, as a researcher, need to understand is that every archive has its own system for filing and cataloging documents. That system depends entirely on […]

If you read the last few posts about families in Dutch-Paris, you may have wondered why there is hardly anything in the documents about the children left behind to fend for themselves when their parents were arrested for resistance. After all, that would not go unnoticed or undiscussed today. I suspect that there are two […]

Good news for all of you who are researching Engelandvaarders*. In conjunction with the Engelandvaardersmuseum and the Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen, the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag is working on a project to digitize their documents about Engelandvaarders and create an online map of the routes that Engelandvaarders used. The goal is to make it possible to […]

The most difficult information to determine when researching Dutch-Paris was not figuring out what happened in a clandestine network that reached across five countries or the names of the people involved – although that required research in over 30 archives in five languages – but how much things cost during the Second World War. There […]

If you followed the footnotes in The Escape Line or looked at the appendices, you’ll know that I went to 31 archives in seven countries to reconstruct the history of Dutch-Paris. I would have gone to a few more if I had had the time and money. If you’ve read the last three posts, you’ll […]

One last post about the different kinds of archives you might need to consult during a WWII research project. We’ve discussed governmental archives and the archives of institutes and museums dedicated to studying the war. There are other types of archives that may or may not have what you’re looking for. Being bureaucracies, universities have […]

In our last post, we started talking about the importance of understanding the history and mission of an archive. Some archives, like the governmental archives, were simply gathered to store an organization’s history. In that case, you have to know what the organization did. The Dutch Red Cross, for example, undertook the herculean task of […]

A number of people have asked me where to look for information about people or groups associated with the resistance during WWII. How do you figure out which of the many archives has what you want? Years ago Raymund Schütz, who is now at the Haags Gemeentearchief, gave me a f piece of advice that […]

In my last post I mentioned the legendary Comet Escape Line. It’s legendary because the men and women of Comet achieved the remarkable feat of rescuing hundreds of Allied servicemen from the Nazis. But it is also more literarily legendary as a story. It’s a legend in itself because it is the best known of […]