Names can be tricky in World War II archives. I’ve found people who worked for Dutch-Paris under 10 or 12 different names in different archives, and even under different names in the same archive. There are basically two reasons for that.

First, resisters and fugitives all had a legal name and perhaps a nickname, say Cornelis and Kees. But they also had pseudonyms, noms de guerre and schuilnamen. Most of them had more than one alias. A resister named, say, Fred, might have carried false papers with the name of John but introduced himself to Engelandvaarders and aviators as William and to civilian fugitives as Richard.  Fred, John, William and Richard were all the same person even though if you read the documents without keeping that in mind you might think they were four different people.

How do you know that those names all refer to the same person instead of several people? Some postwar reports will very conveniently ask the individual to list all of his or her aliases. Otherwise, you just have to read the documents carefully.

The second reason that the same person appears in different documents under different names is spelling. Resisters and fugitives tried hard not to write things down. No one handed over a calling card with his or her name cleared spelled out during clandestine meetings. Instead each person remembered the name he or she was told and then, probably after the war, tried to spell it out as best they could. So what you get is French speakers spelling out Dutch names phonetically and vice versa. Unless it was something very common such as Maria, there are going to be spelling errors. So be a little loose with spelling when you’re looking up names in archives.

Here’s a spelling problem I only came across once and is unlikely to have happened many times. After the war, the family changed the spelling of the family name. It was a big enough change that, in my opinion, they changed the name. It made no difference to me because I learned about this man in the documents, all of which used the name that the family used during the war. But several Belgian researchers were amazed to hear that I had found out anything about this man because they had been looking under the different, postwar name. So stick to wartime spellings for wartime documents, especially in Dutch (because Dutch orthography was modernized after the war).