How to Flee the Gestapo

An historian can find unexpected treasures in an archive. Usually that means a paper trail leading to an unknown event or unsuspected person. But sometimes the unexpected thing involves the actual physical document. For example, when I was looking for German reports on the arrests of Dutch-Paris agents in the French Archives nationales in Paris, […]

A word of caution to family historians and student researchers who are looking for resisters in the archives (see my posts of 23 December 2013, 18 February 2014 and 4 March 2014). Not all the documents in the archives are the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In the first place, very few individuals […]

Sierk Plantinga, a retired archivist from the Dutch Nationaal Archief, has sent me a welcome correction to my last two posts (18 February and 4 March, 2014) about finding refugees in the archives. No one knows more about the archives about Dutch people in France during WWII than he does. Sierk tells me, and I […]

In the last post we talked about the probability of finding documents about a family’s legal journey out of Occupied Europe in government archives. The chances are slim to none. But in the other and far more likely scenario that the family in question travelled from The Netherlands to Portugal illegally, the chances of finding […]

A reader wrote to me about his attempts to reconstruct his family’s flight from Occupied Europe. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s somewhat like looking for a needle that may or may not be in a haystack. Something the reader said made me think that it might be useful to return to the subject of archives, […]

A number of readers have asked me about their relatives who were involved in Dutch escape lines during the war. So in this season when we think about our families, I offer to everyone the advice I’ve given to them. First, please remember that I do not use anyone’s true name in this blog except […]

In the last post I said that two categories of government agencies started collecting the history of the Resistance immediately after the war. The first were those bureaucracies charged with distributing pensions, medical benefits and the like to resisters. Before disbursing any money, however, they first established each resister’s bona fides. Those files are a […]

Although resisters did not, as a rule, keep records during the war, various government agencies rushed to create files on them immediately after the war. These agencies fell into two groups: those interested in organizing information for the sake of dispensing money and those interested in figuring out what went on during the war. The […]

Money was as critical for Resistance as it is for almost everything else. But for the most part resisters did not keep careful accounts of it. Most resisters did not have the time or the means or a safe way to keep accounts. After all, receipts and expense sheets could be used as incriminating evidence […]

Like detectives, historians try never to rely on only one witness to an event. Everyone sees things from their own perspective, and very few people ever have all the information. So we look for as many documents as possible and piece together the story as best we can. In the case of Dutch-Paris, the documents […]