If you’re thinking about the Second World War and especially about the resistance, you have to keep in mind how immensely complicated life got when the Nazis occupied an area. In particular, civilians were unmoored from many of the structures of daily life that organized their pre-war world. In particular, it was always best to assume that police of all varieties could not be trusted. Also, rumor ran rampant.

We can see this in the story of a man we’ll call Bernard. Bernard was a retired Dutch executive who was living in a village outside of Lyon in 1940. Being a businessman with a lifetime of international experience and the observant sort, Bernard could tell that Dutch refugees would be drawn to Lyon because of its proximity to Switzerland. So he took himself to the Dutch consulate in Lyon and offered his services as a translator. At that time, the consul was a Frenchman who spoke no Dutch. Nevertheless the consul showed Bernard the door, which offended him to such a degree that he had nothing more to do with the consulate even though that consul died (of natural causes) early in the war.

Why did that meeting turn out so badly? Bernard doesn’t specify in his report and the consul didn’t live long enough to give one. The man who took over as Dutch consul said he didn’t know what happened. But other documents have a rumor about it. They claim that the first consul shunned Bernard because he talked to a Frenchman who had been nominated to the position of representative of the Dutch Red Cross by the collaborationist French in Vichy. This is either petty or there’s a lot more to the story than made it into the documents. Simply talking to a Vichy official should not be enough to brand a person as a collaborator. After all, maybe he was a “good” Vichy official who wanted to use his position to help Dutch refugees. Maybe Bernard thought he could use this Frenchman to get food or papers for refugees. We don’t know.

Bernard turned his back forever on the Dutch consulate in Lyon, but he most certainly did not turn his back on Dutch refugees in need. In fact he ended up helping about a hundred of them, some Engelandvaarders, some Jews, and almost all at his own expense. He took some of them into his own home. That act led to finding other people to help with things like black market food, false documents and a route into Switzerland. In effect, Bernard created his own rescue network. His most dedicated helpers were a family who shared his villa and a neighboring family.
Bernard was not part of Dutch-Paris because he preferred to be an independent. But he was in frequent contact with the leaders of Dutch-Paris, taking in their refugees and giving his to them to take to Switzerland. He even acted as a safe house in extremis for them.

Despite the ample evidence of the generous assistance that Bernard gave to many Dutch refugees during the war, he was investigated for collaboration in October 1945. Why? The very early rumor that he was a collaborator because he talked to the French Red Cross official had made its way to London and then to The Hague. It was nonsense, of course, but a bitter pill for Bernard to swallow that after emptying his own bank account on behalf of refugees and spending months in hiding from the Gestapo he had to defend himself from such ugly accusations. At the time, however, in the aftermath of the war before central governments had re-established themselves, rumor was all anyone had to go on about anything.