Good news for all of you who are researching Engelandvaarders*. In conjunction with the Engelandvaardersmuseum and the Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen, the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag is working on a project to digitize their documents about Engelandvaarders and create an online map of the routes that Engelandvaarders used. The goal is to make it possible to reconstruct any particular Engelandvaarder’s journey with a few clicks of the mouse. It should be up and running by the end of next year. For more information and who to contact, check out the project’s page https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/de-engelandvaarders-in-kaart-brengen.

Any foreign national who arrived in the United Kingdom during the war was interned at the Royal Patriotic School and interrogated by the British about who they were and how they got out of Occupied Europe. The British were, of course, looking for German spies trying to pass themselves off as Dutch or French or Czech or anything else. They did find a few, and executed them.

Not surprisingly, the Dutch authorities in London also had questions for newly arrived Engelandvaarders. The government-in-exile knew very little about what was going on in the Netherlands itself. They relied in great part on talking to people who had come from there and from documents smuggled out by the resistance. Dutch-Paris played a role in that by carrying microfilms between Amsterdam and Geneva as well as collecting intelligence from people along their routes.

These wartime Dutch interviews form the basis of the upcoming digitized Engelandvaarders site. They include personal information such as age, education and profession. But the main body of each interview concerns the person’s experiences during the war, especially illegal work in the resistance, and the details of his or (rarely) her escape to the UK. A second interview concerns the people who the Engelandvaarder considered to be “trustworthy”, meaning favorable to the resistance, and who “untrustworthy”, meaning a collaborator. Or, to use the words of the time, “goed” or “fout”.

I’m looking forward to seeing the final map of all the routes that the Engelandvaarders took to get to England. Those who went with Dutch-Paris, of course, walked over the Pyrenees to the Spanish village of Canejan. But there were many other ways across the Pyrennees, and there were Engelandvaarders who paddled a canoe over the English Channel and others who escaped via Scandinavia.

*Engelandvaarder is the name for any Dutch person who escaped from the Occupied Netherlands with the intention of going to England to join the Dutch government-in-exile or the Allies.  Not all of them survived the journey.