How to Flee the Gestapo

Although, as an historian, I remain astounded by the vast amount of documentation about Dutch-Paris now available in various archives, a lay person could be forgiven for thinking that rather a lot of the details have been lost. For example, the details of how, exactly, the pastor recruited a café owner to act as a […]

Because there’s no written history of Dutch-Paris, or even a complete list of names of its members, I’ve been reconstructing the line following the trail of names in the archives. That trail was first laid in 1944-1945 when various authorities asked the survivors to give them the names of other people involved. The Dutch Red […]

I’ve had many occasions over the last two weeks to remember what my friend at the Dutch Red Cross Archives pointed out: an archive preserves the idiosyncratic organization created by the person or institution that wrote the documents in it.  An archive is not a library, where the books are arranged according to universally recognized […]

It’s not enough just to find an archive with relevant documents; you also have to find those documents within the archive. Unfortunately, every archive is organized differently, and none of them are organized for the convenience of historians. They’re arranged according to the inner logic of the organization that created them, whether that be a […]

There’s a lot of dull reading involved in historical research, and at the beginning of a project it’s difficult to tell if the letter of complaint about delayed trams is worth noting down or not. After all, it tells you how the trams were functioning, but is that going to be important? It will be […]

I’ve been looking through the handful of cartons of documents originating from the German police at the Archives nationales in Paris. These are the papers of the SIPO-SD, meaning all the various German policing authorities, both Nazi Party and military, that persecuted Jews, Communists and resisters; passed out travel permits, and kept an eye on […]

One of the more unexpected difficulties I’ve encountered in researching Dutch-Paris has to do with people’s names. I knew, of course, that it would be difficult to uncover the names of all the members of the line in the first place. Resisters hid their identities; so well that some of them still count as missing […]

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you can piece together a portrait out of bits from different archives. Take the example of Dr. Dreyfus. I first came across the name in the […]

Historical research is a little like hunting. You need to know what kinds of tracks your quarry leaves; it always helps to have a local guide, and timing makes all the difference. For the most part historians follow paper trails, so we have to think about who would have written about our subjects and why. […]

Two weeks ago I had never heard of the archives of the Dutch Red Cross. But then in two days a Belgian archivist, a Dutch editor and a footnote all suggested that I needed to go there. They were right. Like its counterparts everywhere, the Dutch Red Cross acted as a missing persons bureau during […]