How to Flee the Gestapo

Although Dutch-Paris had dependable routes between Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Geneva, Weidner and his top lieutenants did not travel on them. Instead they had their own ways of getting from one place to another. Weidner travelled on the false papers of a businessman, allowing him to take the fastest trains between one city and […]

In the last post I described how a teacher at the Seventh-day Adventist seminary in Collonges-sous-Salève used to ride his bicycle across the Franco-Swiss border to attend graduate class in Geneva. He often carried messages and documents across the border with him, usually without any trouble at all. There was one day, though, that he […]

The greatest number of Dutch-Paris agents to be arrested were arrested because the Abwehr, a Wehrmacht counter-espionage unit, was very successful at eliminating escape lines. They got their hands on a Dutch-Paris courier because collaborationist French police suspected her of black marketeering. They tortured a long list of names and addresses out of the courier […]

In the spring of 1944, not too many weeks before the Allies landed in Normandy, a Dutch secret agent and a Dutch priest left the Netherlands. The priest played a leading role in the Dutch social resistance that supported people hiding from the occupation authorities. The secret agent had parachuted into the country on a […]

Every arrest of a Dutch-Paris resister or a person whom they helped posed a threat to the entire line. Everyone knew that the Gestapo and their colleagues tortured arrested resisters. No one expected anyone to hold out forever. So it was vitally important for Dutch-Paris to know exactly why someone had been arrested. If the […]

On the night of 5 November 1943, maquisards of the Armée Secrète (Secret Army) rescued a sick companion from the hospital in St-Gaudens, France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. They left 100 francs wrapped around a note saying “thanks for taking care of him. Don’t tell until 7:30 or 8:00am.” The director of the […]

Every Resistance organization had worries about security. They were particularly acute for groups like Dutch-Paris that simply could not be kept among friends. Dutch-Paris was too big and covered too much territory. Sometimes contact had to be made between strangers, although both strangers would come recommended and vouched for by mutually known third parties. One […]

In 1939 a Catholic family from the Tilburg region left the Netherlands to buy a farm about 24 km outside of Paris. In 1940 they met a Dutch monk living in a monastery in Paris who had walked the 4 km from the nearest metro station to see if he could find some food for […]

Every time a resistance courier escorted a fugitive to a new place, the courier put his or her life at the risk of the fugitive’s ability to follow directions, act discretely and avoid being caught. How did they do that? We get a glimpse of it from a eulogy that a former Engelandvaarder, whom we’ll […]

For those of you who don’t like to carry your driver’s license around on the odd chance that you’ll get in a car accident, consider this. If one of the various German police surrounded the street you were walking down in Occupied Europe and caught you without your identity documents, or didn’t trust those documents, […]