How to Flee the Gestapo

In the past few posts we’ve talked about collaborators who supported and joined the Nazis because they believed in Nazism; economic collaborators who were essentially looking out for themselves and didn’t mind what happened to the everyone else with the Nazis in control; and collabos who supported the Nazis because they focused on only a […]

In the last posts we talked about single issue collaborators willing to damn everything else for the sake of one idea and  collaborators who agreed with Nazism and had the integrity to declare their allegiance. There were also opportunist collaborators who saw that the wind was blowing on the side of the Nazis during the […]

The most insidious collabos were those who threw in their lot with the Nazis – and the futures of their entire countries – for the sake of a single issue. Rather than looking at the whole picture and considering what the consequences of the entire Nazi package would be, they focused on one issue. The […]

An old friend of mine said something profound this summer. The lock down had been lifted here in Michigan, so it was possible to move about, although many public gathering spaces were still closed, including theaters, gyms, bowling alleys and banquet halls. Restaurants and cafes were allowed to be open with tables spread far apart, […]

I’m tremendously pleased to let you know about the recent publication of The Weidners in Wartime: Letters of Daily Survival and Heroism under Nazi Rule by Janet Holmes Carper. Janet and I have become friends through our overlapping research and she has been more than generous with her help. In fact, it’s possible that it […]

I had a surprising conversation with my 14 year-old son about the book he’s reading for school: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The most interesting part went like this: My son : “Romeo was the bad guy.” Me : “What?” My son : “He murdered two people and then he killed himself, so….” (shrug). All the […]

The men and women of Dutch-Paris were resisters, meaning that they were among the tiny minority of civilians in Occupied Europe who actively opposed the Nazis. What about everyone else? Speaking very broadly, there were two choices. If you didn’t resist, you could collaborate or you could accommodate. Collaborators were the minority on the other […]

Seventy-five years ago, during the Christmas season of 1944, the people of western Europe had both reason for hope and reason for fear. They had reason to hope because the Allies had landed in Normandy more than six months earlier and already liberated most of France, Belgium and southern Holland. Anyone who saw the well-fed […]

Here’s an interesting question that someone asked at one of my talks about Dutch-Paris. If downed Allied aviators and resisters were escaping the Nazis on the trains, why didn’t the Gestapo just take over all the trains? If there are any grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic, that would be a good […]

With all the dramatic stories of resistance in movies and novels, we tend to forget that resisters were civilians living under an occupation that lasted for four or five years. Like all other civilians they had to get by on short rations and worn out shoes. They lived in cold houses and drank ersatz coffee […]