Here’s an example of why you cannot assume that an individual will appear in the wartime documents under only one name. To my knowledge, this same thing happened to two members of Dutch-Paris.

When German security personnel raided an apartment or a business with the intention of arresting a particular resister, they tended to arrest everyone on the premises. Sometimes these “extra” people managed to talk their way out; sometimes they didn’t, especially if they were Jewish.

In two instances, once in Brussels and once in Paris, local leaders of Dutch-Paris happened to be in the apartment of other resisters when the Germans showed up to arrest those other resisters. They arrested our Dutch-Paris men while they were at it. They did not figure out that these two men were actually important resisters in their own right, although they did figure out that they were Jews.

Both men were imprisoned under the names on the false identification documents that they were carrying at the time of their arrests. Obviously, they did not volunteer any information about themselves. No one else mentioned it either, possibly because their interrogators did not ask. I suspect that the interrogators’ prejudices and arrogance also came into play here. They assumed the men were unimportant fugitives who were being helped by the resisters they were after and so dismissed them.

This becomes evident in the Luftwaffe trial of the man arrested in Brussels and in the postwar testimony of the resisters with whom he was arrested. We’ll call him Mertens. Mertens was in charge of the daily work of hiding and rescuing fugitives in Brussels for the Comité and thus for Dutch-Paris. He was arrested when he happened to be visiting the apartment of two women who belonged to a different escape line, one that specialized in Allied aviators. He was there to discuss a case on which the two lines were cooperating.

The Germans, however, were after that other line. Because it was helping enemy aviators and was in Belgium, the case went before a Luftwaffe court. Mertens was lumped in with the other defendants, but was described as a Jew of no importance had been in the apartment to ask for help. Being a Jew asking for help to escape the Nazis was a crime in occupied Belgium, but not as serious a crime as aiding and abetting enemy aviators. The resisters from the other line were all condemned to death, except for the women who were deported to concentration camps. Mertens was also supposed to be deported as a Jew but was kept in prison in Brussels until the very last minutes of the occupation and then was rescued from the deportation train. His arrest under a false name put him out of action as far as his work with Dutch-Paris was concerned, but it did not lead to interrogation, deportation or execution.

After the war, Mertens told this story himself, making it easy enough to follow the change of name in his records. Also, one of the women survived the concentration camps and told the story of her arrest. She said that she and her colleagues were very careful not to say anything that would interest the Germans in Mertens or suspect any connection between him and Dutch-Paris. She was quite proud that they had succeeded and therefore protected the many people being hidden and helped by Dutch-Paris.

More about the other arrest in the next post.