How to Flee the Gestapo

Here’s another example of why historians use footnotes. A few of the people Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland were family members of prominent French resisters. They were in danger under the German and Vichy policy of family responsibility, meaning that family members could be held as hostages or punished because of a resister’s actions. Two […]

When Jean Weidner left Switzerland to link up with like-minded resisters in Brussels on October 13, 1943 (see the last post), he left Switzerland with the unofficial blessing of the Dutch embassy in Switzerland and the Swiss intelligence services.  The immediate and most important implication of this unofficial sanction was that Weidner had enough money […]

A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half […]

Going back to the earlier post about the differences between archival and oral history, there’s another danger in both sources that I didn’t mention before. Sometimes people lie. In the case of the Second World War, there might have been honorable reasons for falsehoods. There were plenty of occasions during the war when respectable people […]

As I mentioned before, I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary. It was a pleasure because I always enjoy discussing the dilemmas of civilians during the Second World War. The director asked some intriguing questions, one of which I’ll share with you today. She asked me about the difference between archival […]

I am happy to report that the Dutch translation of my book on Dutch-Paris has arrived from the printers. Many thanks to Maarten Eliasar, Hélène Lesger and the rest of the production team for the terrific job they did with the translation, the copy editing, the illustrations and all the details that have made it […]

A curious thing happened during the liberation of European cities 71 years ago. Among the massacres, the vengeance and the rejoicing, citizens rushed to save documents from burning buildings. There’s footage of it in the British newsreel of the liberation of Belgium posted on the website of the city of Brussels [http://www.brussels.be/artdet.cfm/5562]. Whenever the German […]

In the last post I mentioned the escape and evasion reports of Allied aviators who crashed in occupied territory, evaded arrest and made their way back to England. Such men did not just hitch a ride back to their base and report for duty. First they answered a whole lot of questions about what happened […]

If your father or grandfather crossed the Pyrenees illegally during the war, could you recreate his route? You could probably figure out the general path from the documents, but unless he himself made the effort to figure out where he’d been in the dark and wrote it down, you are unlikely to be able to […]

No matter how obsessive an historian is about her research, no matter how many archives she visits or how many thousands of documents she reads, some details will be lost or confused. That’s an obvious thing to say about something that happened in, say, the 1700’s, but it is also true for events that happened […]