How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

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 […]

Seventy-five years ago Jean Weidner and his lieutenants were still trying to figure out just what happened in Paris, Brussels and Lyon at the end of February 1944. With the bird’s eye view of hindsight, we know that German police coordinated raids on several Dutch-Paris addresses on the same morning in Paris and then in […]

Luck played a role in the escape or capture of every Allied aviator, but it wasn’t possible to predict whether the luck would be good or bad. Take the story of an American gunner whose B-17 crashed in the Netherlands in November 1943. We’ll call him Ken. It was 13 days before his 22nd birthday […]

German counter-espionage officers stationed in occupied Holland, Belgium and France were highly professional and effective.  They did not, for example, hare right off to raid every address that they tortured out of a Dutch-Paris courier in mid-February 1944.   They knew that the courier’s colleagues would be hiding and they could wait for those colleagues to […]

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 11 February 1944, several men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris met for lunch in Paris at a Chinese restaurant that was probably on the rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. It wasn’t a happy meeting. Paris wasn’t a happy place in early 1944. Food […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Seventy-five years ago today, on November 18, 1943, the young man in charge of daily operations for the Comité in Brussels was arrested. This was not the first time that this particular young Dutchman, we’ll call him Paul, had been arrested. He and his entire family had been captured as they fled from their home […]