In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of false resisters making claims to having been in the resistance during the uncertain period of the Liberation.  It happened. Not often, but often enough that if you come across someone making claims that no one else in the resistance network verifies, you should treat those claims with caution.

There is, however, another, most honest, reason that a resister’s reports or testimony could be incorrect. Resistance was a highly dangerous, nerve wracking and secretive endeavor. The fewer people who knew something like an address and the fewer people in the network who each person knew, the safer it was for everybody. So resisters were operating on limited information.

But when a network was rounded up, the Gestapo and their colleagues tended to bring all their suspects to the same place to interrogate. They told their victims whatever they thought would break them, which was sometimes lies about the other resisters in the network. And the arrested resisters saw things in the Gestapo torture houses, perhaps staged by the interrogators, perhaps not. They were tortured. They were imprisoned. They were shoved into cattle cars and dumped in the hell of the concentration camps. And all the while, they may have been trying to figure out what went wrong. How did the Germans find them? Were they betrayed?

People need to explain the catastrophes happening to them. In at least one case, the resister – a local leader of Dutch-Paris – came to an incorrect conclusion. He took all the facts that he knew or thought he knew and decided that the network had been betrayed by another member of the line who he’d never much liked. We’ll call our arrested and deported leader Felix.

When Felix returned to Paris he told everyone his theory but treated it as fact. At that time, the top leaders of the network were running the “Netherlands Security Service” in Paris, which put them in a position to thoroughly investigate Felix’s claims. They concluded, based on a lot of interviews and documents that Felix did not have access to, that Felix was wrong. Dutch-Paris had not been betrayed by the man Felix accused.

But Felix wouldn’t let it go. He was, perhaps, a tad unhinged by his experiences in the torture chambers and concentration camps and by a family tragedy that followed his arrest. His accusations drove the innocent resister out of the country. Finally, government officials had to require Felix to cease and desist.

If you were sitting in the archives and all you read about the accused was what Felix said, you would think the worst of the falsely accused. But if you read the entire dossier, not just what Felix said but what the accused said and the Netherlands Security Service reported and what other members of Dutch-Paris said, you would see the situation for what it was. A tragedy. A brave resister who struggled to survive the atrocities committed on him. And another brave resister damaged in both his reputation and his self by his colleague’s efforts to make sense of his world.