How to Flee the Gestapo

The last post talked about cracks in the Nazi machinery of extermination as seen on the micro level of Dutch-Paris families. In Brussels, for example, German labor officials rounded young men off the streets without once asking about racial or political affiliation. They focused entirely on getting bodies to the factories. That sort of prioritization […]

Let’s continue the discussion of who was the enemy of the resistance during WWII. The simple answer is the Nazis and all the Germans who obeyed the Nazi government, particularly the Wehrmacht and police agencies. But reality is never that simple. The enemy of the resistance was both Nazis (people) and Nazism (worldview). We’ll start […]

Sometimes all it takes to save a life is for another person to act forcefully on their behalf. Here’s a Dutch-Paris story that I only recently learned from the grandchild of the man concerned.  The man’s great-grandchild was doing a little family research and asked me a question, which led to me asking them quite […]

I am equally pleased to let you know of the publication of another book involving Dutch-Paris: Luck through Adversity: The Memoir of a Dutchman’s Flight to Freedom through the Dutch-Paris Escape Line of World War II by Pieter Rudolph Zeeman. Any of you familiar with the story of Dutch-Paris will remember Rudy Zeeman as the […]

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 […]

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the young women who worked with Dutch-Paris, we’ll call her Marthe. Marthe served the line as a postbox in Paris, meaning that she accepted and forwarded messages on behalf of her colleagues. Such messages ranged for the details of an escape being planned […]

Continuing on with our discussion of the use of the railways by escape lines, we should recognize the railway men who belonged to Dutch-Paris. There were two that I know of. The first was a Dutch railway official who worked at the Gare du Nord, the station where all the trains to and from the […]

Here’s another worry that Weidner and his lieutenants faced as they tried to figure out the extent of the German roll-up of Dutch-Paris in late February 1944. Would the Germans carry out their published threat of punishing the extended families of resisters who helped Allied aviators? After all, they arrested the 14 year-old son of […]

Two posts ago, on November 18, I wrote about the arrest of a young Dutchman named Paul.  Although he was in charge of daily operations for the Comite and knew the names of other resisters and the hiding places of many Jews, the Germans thought he was caught by accident and of little account. His […]

A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half […]