How to Flee the Gestapo

Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, […]

Following the last post about the difficulties of determining wartime exchange rates for currency, some of you are probably wondering why historians don’t just compare bread basket prices. It’s a good idea except that once again you run into the huge divide between the official story and daily life in the fractured markets of occupied […]

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 […]

Seventy five years ago this month, in May 1943, a Dutch Jew who we’ll call Nestor made a clandestine journey from Brussels to Switzerland. Nestor owned a factory in Brussels but spent most of his time helping other Jews escape the Nazis, particularly Jewish children who had been effectively orphaned when their parents were deported […]

As I explained in the last post, Jean Weidner asked the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland for money to support needy Dutchmen in southern France on March 23, 1943. The ambassador was sympathetic but couldn’t give him any money at that time. A friend, however, had an idea. This friend was a Jewish refugee whom Weidner […]

Seventy-five years ago this week, on March 23, 1943, Jean Weidner went to visit the Dutch ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. By this time Weidner and a few colleagues had already been running an escape line between Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, for eight months. On this occasion, however, he wasn’t in Switzerland because of the […]

It didn’t take long for the businessmen in Dutch-Paris to figure out that all their careful vigilance in getting the best possible exchange rates and diligence in raising donations from themselves and others could not pay for hiding people indefinitely or escorting other fugitives out of occupied territory. The black market food, rents, clandestine health […]

The question of getting money across borders during the occupation that Weidner solved with postage stamps in the last blog post bedeviled other Dutch-Paris resisters and, indeed, the whole line. They came up with a number of arrangements that added up to a private, clandestine banking system that stretched from the Netherlands through Belgium and […]

The restrictions and shortages of living under German occupation during the Second World War brought out an impressive creativity among otherwise ordinary and law-abiding citizens. In fact, the whole story of how Dutch-Paris operated an escape line and rescued so many people could be seen as an exercise in creativity, but here’s a smaller, more […]

In the previous post I talked about how cigarettes were used to buy things on the black market and bribes during the war. Although it looks like some Dutch-Paris couriers may have used cigarettes for petty bribery, for the most part Dutch-Paris relied on cash for both the black market and bribes. Dutch-Paris, of course, […]