How to Flee the Gestapo

When he was still 20 years old, R.F. Anderson took off in a B-17 named “Martha” to bomb Brunswick, Germany. The German air defenses disabled the plane but the pilot and Anderson, as the navigator, managed to nurse it far enough westward that they could bail out over the Netherlands, jumping 500 feet into a […]

It wasn’t just their children whom resisters had to worry about: their entire families were in danger of German retribution. But the calculus of risk is different when it involves adults. Some chose to protect their parents by excluding them; others to involve them. For instance, one young Dutchman went so far as to sign […]

Although it would most probably be a serious misfortune to get involved with a corrupt police agent or civil servant today, it could have been a saving stroke of good luck during the second world war. On occasion, the corruption could be leveraged into escape. For instance, there was a young teacher who lived in […]

In July 1941 a young man we’ll call Frits (born 1918) left for England with a friend we’ll call Henk. They ran out of money in Valenciennes, France, and turned back to the Netherlands. In order to support himself and his widowed mother, Frits took a job with the CCD in The Hague as a […]

Although Dutch-Paris was mostly in the business of rescuing people, the line did also convey information. For the most part, the information was gathered by other people skulking about the peripheries of German military installations, plying officers with wine or simply and boringly counting the number of trucks that drove by. The information, whether it […]

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you can piece together a portrait out of bits from different archives. Take the example of Dr. Dreyfus. I first came across the name in the […]

I was sitting in the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag reading through the telegrams exchanged between the Dutch Legation in Bern and the Dutch government-in-exile in London when the ever-helpful archivist sat down next to me.  He told me that a mutual acquaintance had called him to say that a certain LF had died. “Oh?”  […]

There were all sorts of ways to join the Resistance. For some, it was just another, more dynamic, way of hiding. Threatened with deportation to “the east” (i.e. the extermination camps) in 1942 like all other Jewish persons in the Netherlands, the “van Caneghem” family found a hiding place in July 1942. The parents, their daughter […]

At the risk of sounding prematurely crotchety I have to wonder if this isn’t too much to ask of a 24 year-old (my apologies to all recent college grads currently improving the world). I’ll tell you as much of the story as is in the file, which is regrettably sparse on background information. A certain […]

Let me tell you a story of kindness in a time of war, about a man whom we’ll call Colonel N. because all I know is that he was an officer in the Belgian Army, a veteran of the Great War of 1914-1918. After the Germans released him from the POW stalag where he’d been […]