How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

Escaping to Spain meant trekking over the Pyrenees for at least two days, often at night, often in the snow and always with border guards on your heels. Not surprisingly, Dutch-Paris relied on local men who ran their own escape lines over the mountains to take Dutchmen and aviators the final miles into Spain. One […]

Continuing our discussion of the fall-out of the wave of arrests in Dutch-Paris in late February 1944, we come to the question of what the survivors should do. The sensible thing would have been to call it a day and scatter into false identities and new hiding places far from Paris, Brussels or Lyon. But […]

Blog – 75 years col du portet d’aspet Seventy-five years ago next week, on February 5, 1944, 30 men – 10 downed American aviators, three British aviators, an Australian, one Belgium civilians and 11 Dutch Engelandvaarders rendezvoused in a meadow outside of a hamlet high in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their two French guides […]

I’m happy to report that The Escape Line has been recorded as an audiobook and is now available to borrow or purchase.   So you can listen to the story of Dutch-Paris on your commute or long drive, although you’d miss out on the photos and maps in the book. Or you could join a walking […]

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on December 31, 1943, Gestapo agents and other German police officials raided a somewhat seedy inn on the outskirts of Toulouse called the Panier Fleuri. They arrested two Dutchmen, one Belgian and one Irishman with connections to Dutch-Paris.  They also arrested the landlord, but released him shortly.  In fact, the Germans […]

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 […]

The son of an Engelandvaarder who crossed the Pyrenees with Dutch-Paris sent me a link to a documentary he participated in last year. Unfortunately the documentary, Chased and Saved, is not available online, but if it comes near you I highly recommend it. It’s part of an historical project sponsored by the provincial authority in […]

Most of the Allied servicemen whom Dutch-Paris smuggled out of occupied territory via the Pyrenees and Spain were aviators who had bailed out of their airplanes or crash landed them in the Netherlands, Belgium or France. That was certainly the case with the men who were arrested – or not- at the Porte de Pantin […]

I made the perhaps rash prediction in my last blog that no one will have questions about the title of the American edition of my book, The Escape Line (coming out with Oxford in June 2018). There may not be questions but someone will surely object that Dutch-Paris was not the only escape line and […]