How to Flee the Gestapo

Almost 70 years ago today, Dutch-Paris lost a courier through one of the common accidents of the Second World War. He was not arrested for his substantial resistance activities, or even suspected of them. But he was a young man on the streets of Brussels in the summer of 1944, which was enough to put […]

One of the items to show up on the expense reports of two of the Dutch-Paris couriers is “cigarettes.” For example, on 30 June 1944 a couriers spent 1,000 French francs on ten packets of cigarettes. On first glance, it’s hardly surprising that anyone smoked during the Second World War, let alone men traveling through […]

On 21 July 1943, the Italian civil affairs officer for Haute-Savoie (France) called the head of the Swiss visa bureau in Annemasse (France) into his office to warn the 63 year-old Swiss citizen that he had been denounced by an Italian Fascist living in Geneva. We’ll call the Swiss bureaucrat Mr. S. The Italian Fascist […]

Convoys of evaders walking over the Pyrenees to Spain worked on the same principle as convoys of ships crossing the Atlantic: it was safer to take one large group than many smaller groups. So Dutch, French, Belgian and Polish men wanting to join the Allied armies and downed aviators crossed in large groups of up […]

It’s hard for many of us to imagine the atmosphere and circumstances in which Dutch-Paris operated. It’s hard to comprehend the emotional and physical difficulties of recruiting people into a life of clandestine danger for an unknown period because so many of us take our freedoms and ease (plenty of food, heat, clothing) for granted. […]

We think of the sixth of June as D-Day, the first day of the Normandy Landings that led to the Allied victory and the end of the Second World War. And although many men lost their lives that day, on balance we think of it as a day of hope and triumph. But consider the […]

During the war, the Occupation authorities rearranged the social and political units of western Europe into individual boxes then threw up barbed wire barricades and a wall of regulations and police authorities to keep people and information from going from one box to another. It wasn’t impossible to get out of, say, the Netherlands and […]

France fell apart under the onslaught of the Normandy Landings. Communications and transportation lines were broken throughout the country as the Resistance did its best to sabotage the German response to the invasion. Although some parts of the country passed the summer of 1944 peacefully enough, the region of the Alps along the Swiss border […]

One of the realities of Occupied Europe that’s hard to appreciate from our current perspective is how hard it was to come by information. I’m not talking about reliable news, which was censored. You had to engage in the criminal activity of listening to the BBC or reading the clandestine press for that. I mean […]

In France, I’ve been looking through the regional and departmental archives for the Rhone (Lyon) and Haute-Savoie (Annecy) for records regarding Dutch-Paris. Given that I have the names of several people, including civil servants and police agents, who worked for the line in those cities and even the dates that a few of them were […]