One last comment from my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV. I was discussing the arrests of most of the men and women in Dutch-Paris’ aviator escape line that led, in most cases, to torture and deportation to the concentration camps. One of the viewers wrote that “soldiers shouldn’t ask civilians for help.”

There were people in the Allied air forces that agreed with that. But, realistically, what were the airmen who were shot down over western Europe supposed to do? They landed in a country where they didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs or the lay of the land, and didn’t have any experience living with the enemy. But they were under orders to evade capture and try to return to base.

There was a pair of Americans who later ended up with Dutch-Paris who made their own way across most of the Netherlands without civilian help. Unless you count the food and clothing that they stole from farms as help. But even those two amazingly skillful and self-reliant aviators eventually had to ask for help because they didn’t have false IDs; didn’t know where to cross the border illegally, and didn’t have any local money.

The officers of the American MIS-X and the British MI-9 tried to reduce the risk to civilians by creating “escape aids” and training aviators on how to evade capture. Every airman was supposed to carry an escape kit with a silk map, forged currency, fake documents that were never usable, food and a compass. They were also told to make a point of not knowing much about any civilians who helped them so that they could not betray their helpers if interrogated. And they were told to do what any civilian helper told them to do. Some aviators followed these instructions better than others.

Was any of that enough? No, and the Americans and British knew it. MIS-X and MI-9 spent a lot of time and money after the war to find and assist civilians who helped aviators during the war. They appreciated the risks such helpers took and the price that many of them paid.

But it’s important to remember that the helpers took on those risks voluntarily. Far from everyone who was approached by a downed airman offered help. Some of them even reported the men to the authorities. While reporting aviators was unnecessarily pro-Nazi, refusing to help was simply common sense. The men and women who did agree to help knew they were resisting the Nazis by doing so. In case they missed that, the German occupation authorities put up plenty of posters announcing that the penalty for helping aviators was execution of every male in an extended family and deportation for every female.

The aviators knew it too. Maybe they didn’t know the exact details, but they knew that their helpers were risking a lot to help them. That’s why many said over and over that the real heroes of the war were the civilians who fed them and sheltered them.