How to Flee the Gestapo

Last time we talked about the arrest of a local Dutch-Paris leader under a false name in Brussels. A very similar thing happened to another Dutch-Paris leader in Paris. This man, who we’ll call Smit, had been an important leader of Dutch-Paris and other rescue groups in Brussels until the Gestapo got too close. He […]

Here’s an example of why you cannot assume that an individual will appear in the wartime documents under only one name. To my knowledge, this same thing happened to two members of Dutch-Paris. When German security personnel raided an apartment or a business with the intention of arresting a particular resister, they tended to arrest […]

Names can be tricky in World War II archives. I’ve found people who worked for Dutch-Paris under 10 or 12 different names in different archives, and even under different names in the same archive. There are basically two reasons for that. First, resisters and fugitives all had a legal name and perhaps a nickname, say […]

As we’ve discussed in the last two posts, it wasn’t all that hard to forge an identity card in France or Belgium. Pastors and university students did it. But it was actually much more complicated than just creating a document that would pass casual inspection. The biggest problem with forged documents was that the police […]

In our last blog we were talking about who forged the false documents for resisters and other fugitives. From the admittedly small sample of Dutch-Paris, it appears that resisters did it themselves as one of the tasks required to resist. Any of you who are thinking about your own government-issued identity card in 2023 are […]

Let’s continue with questions from the comments on the side of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV on youtube. Someone asked, very sensibly, how many good forgers were available to make false documents for the resistance and other fugitives. That’s a question no one will ever be able to answer with any certainty because forgers […]

Our last post started talking about a Dutch expatriate named Bernard as an exemplar of the confusion of the Occupation. Bernard was one of those Dutch expatriates who responded to a request for help from a refugee by creating an entire rescue network and helping just about anyone who asked for help. He was in […]

To continue with our armchair travels and plans for next year, here are four museums in Belgium and the Netherlands to put on the itinerary. Let’s start in the small town of Leopoldsburg in Belgium close to the Dutch border, within easy reach of Brussels and Maastricht. A new museum about the Liberation of Belgium […]

I’ve finally figured out why the map on the first version of the cover for The Escape Line was wrong. I couldn’t understand why the designer had included towns that were not part of Dutch-Paris’s routes. But I had made the mistake of assuming that the designer had based the cover on the photos and […]

Just about 75 years ago, on October 13, 1943, Jean Weidner left Switzerland illegally but with the assistance of a Swiss officer, to create the Dutch-Paris escape line. Up until this point, he and his colleagues had been running an escape line between Lyon (France) and Geneva (Switzerland). Weidner himself had not been to northern […]