How to Flee the Gestapo

World War II ended in demographic chaos, with between 11 and 20 million displaced persons outside of their home countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people trying to cross frontiers, many of them suffering from malnutrition, maltreatment and trauma. Some of them had been wandering, or held against their will, since the very beginning of the war.

The people who were uprooted in 1939 and 1940 were often either refugees who fled the battles or military personnel on the losing side. In 1940, of course, it was the Poles, British, Dutch, Belgians, French and their Allies who had lost the most recent battles. An Allied soldier left behind in occupied Europe after Dunkirk had the choice of turning himself in as a POW or going underground. Some of them found their way back to the Allies via escape lines. Some hunkered down under false identities. And some joined the resistance out of either inclination or necessity.

The most well-known of such servicemen-turned-resisters may well be a Scot named Ian Garrow who started Read the rest of this entry »

If you followed the footnotes in The Escape Line or looked at the appendices, you’ll know that I went to 31 archives in seven countries to reconstruct the history of Dutch-Paris. I would have gone to a few more if I had had the time and money. If you’ve read the last three posts, you’ll have an appreciation for the range of archives that hold documents about resisters.
All of that is to say that the documents about resisters are as hidden and disbursed as their subject matter. Just like you couldn’t go up to a Resistance Recruiting center to sign up during the war, you can’t go to a single Resistance archive anywhere to find out what happened. Resisters had to be creative and flexible to lead their double lives under occupation. You have to also be creative and flexible to find what traces they left behind.

In the 1980’s it seemed self-evident that there were no documents about resistance because it would have been suicidal for resisters to write anything down. So the only histories of resistance were either oral histories or, essentially, memoirs. But that self-evident truth was wrong. There were Read the rest of this entry »

One last post about the different kinds of archives you might need to consult during a WWII research project. We’ve discussed governmental archives and the archives of institutes and museums dedicated to studying the war. There are other types of archives that may or may not have what you’re looking for.

Being bureaucracies, universities have their own archives which often have “special collections.” These concern alumni or professors rather than the school itself. They get there because someone was left with a whole bunch of papers that seemed important but they didn’t really know what to do with them. I found a cassette tape of an interview of the leader of Dutch-Paris in the special collections of the University of Michigan because a former professor interviewed him for a book she wrote in the early 1980s. Similarly, a university in Brussels has the papers of a leader of Dutch-Paris in the city that had been given to a professor by the man’s widow. The archivist told me they had been lost, which I consider to be open to interpretation. If a person in whom you’re Read the rest of this entry »

In our last post, we started talking about the importance of understanding the history and mission of an archive. Some archives, like the governmental archives, were simply gathered to store an organization’s history. In that case, you have to know what the organization did.

The Dutch Red Cross, for example, undertook the herculean task of interviewing everyone who returned from the Third Reich and cross filing all that information. They also set up a missing persons bureau, which meant they made index cards for every missing Dutch Jew. After they had figured out what happened to the Dutch population during the war, they put all the index cards, reports, lists and files in their archive, making it a treasure trove of information.

Given the cataclysmic upheaval of the war, it’s not surprising that Read the rest of this entry »

A number of people have asked me where to look for information about people or groups associated with the resistance during WWII. How do you figure out which of the many archives has what you want? Years ago Raymund Schütz, who is now at the Haags Gemeentearchief, gave me a f piece of advice that will help anyone researching the still-shadowy world of WWII Resistance.
To find what you’re looking for, you need to understand why and how an archive was created.

Every archive has its own unique mission, which determines what documents it gathers, catalogs and makes available.

A national archive, such as the Nationaal Archief (the Netherlands), the Archives nationales (France) or the National Archives and Records Administration (USA), acts as the depository for official government records, mostly generated by bureaucracies, and perhaps a few outlying collections that have been donated. They are public records offices, as the National Archives of the UK, used to be called. The availability of their records is subject to Read the rest of this entry »

To continue with our armchair travels and plans for next year, here are four museums in Belgium and the Netherlands to put on the itinerary.

Let’s start in the small town of Leopoldsburg in Belgium close to the Dutch border, within easy reach of Brussels and Maastricht. A new museum about the Liberation of Belgium called Liberation Garden / Bevrijdingsmuseum Leopoldsburg will open in 2022. Obviously I have not visited it yet, but I do know that the director, Peter Schrijvers, is an excellent historian of the personal experience of the war. And there’s a connection with Dutch-Paris. The young resisters who were arrested at the line’s safe house in Brussels in February 1944 were transferred to a German prison in the town shortly before the Liberation of Brussels. Luckily they were not among the prisoners executed at the camp and survived the war. https://liberationgarden.be/

Heading north we reach Amsterdam, where two museums will have new exhibits relevant to Dutch-Paris.

The excellent Verzetsmuseum (Resistance Museum) is expanding into its basement to bring us an exhibit about 100 Dutch resisters. Dutch-Paris will be represented by its leader, Jean Weidner, and objects belonging to a few of the line’s other members. https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/en/expositions-and-activities

There’s a new addition coming to the top notch world of Dutch museums: what is being called the Nationaal Holocaust Museum in Oprichting / National Holocaust Museum in Development https://jck.nl/nl/nhm . It is part of the Joods Cultureel Kwartier (Jewish Cultural Quarter) which includes the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where the Nazis imprisoned Jews during round-ups in Amsterdam. Several Dutch-Paris resisters helped rescue children from it before they joined the line. The new museum will have an exhibit specifically on Dutch-Paris through the story of a particular family involved with it.  The museum will open in late 2022 or early 2023.

If we travel west to a WWII bunker overlooking the North Sea, we come to the Museum Engelandvaarders in Noordwijk aan Zee https://www.museumengelandvaarders.nl/ The museum has an interesting exhibit on Dutch-Paris, as you would expect considering how many Engelandvaarders Dutch-Paris helped to reach Spain. But it covers all the different routes taken by Engelandvaarders, who were a creative as well as courageous bunch. It’s fascinating to compare the Dutch-Paris route to these others. I know of at least one Dutch-Paris Engelandvaarder who has donated his false documents from his journey to Spain to this museum.

It’s the time of year when we’re thinking of the liberation of France, Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands. But 2021, sadly, is not the year to go tour the beaches of Normandy or see any of the sites of Liberation. But we can dream, and to help you plan your next tour of WWII sites in western Europe, I’d like to suggest the following sites that commemorate Dutch-Paris.
We’ll begin with memorial treks for those of you with strong legs and a desire to see for yourself what it really must have been like to cross the Pyrenees on foot. And if that’s your goal, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to start training now.

The Maison de la Chemin de la Liberté in Saint-Girons, Ariège, France, houses a fine museum of the escape lines that ran through the Ariège. Although it’s a little to the east of most of Dutch-Paris’s routes, they do have a nice exhibit about the line. And they offer memorial treks. If you click on Read the rest of this entry »

The last post talked about cracks in the Nazi machinery of extermination as seen on the micro level of Dutch-Paris families. In Brussels, for example, German labor officials rounded young men off the streets without once asking about racial or political affiliation. They focused entirely on getting bodies to the factories.

That sort of prioritization of other considerations above race can also be seen in the arrests of several Dutch-Paris resisters.  For example, Luftwaffe police arrested a young Jewish man who was pretty much running Dutch-Paris’s daily operations in Brussels and knew the hiding places of hundreds of Jews. Luckily, they arrested him at the apartment of a woman belonging to a different escape line and assumed that he was there to ask for help. No one set them straight. The Germans in the Luftwaffe police and court knew he was Jewish, but at the trial Read the rest of this entry »

To continue with the last post’s descriptions of Dutch-Paris’s entanglement in the Holocaust, I noticed something unexpected in my research. If you look at the Holocaust on a macro level – millions of people murdered, industrialization of death in the extermination camps, rates of deportations, process of disenfranchisement, the Nazi machinery of death appears to be invincibly solid. But if you look on the micro level of the stories of individuals involved in Dutch-Paris, there are cracks.

There is, of course, the story of the two young Jewish men who jumped out of the deportation train in eastern Belgium and spent the rest of the war as part of Dutch-Paris. That’s a story of extraordinary courage and initiative and surely a bit of luck.

But there are also stories that show cracks in the German machinery. For example, I can think of three times when Read the rest of this entry »

I was honored to be invited to a zoom talk given by the daughter and niece of Dutch-Paris resisters about her mother’s adventurous escape from the Nazis during the war and her postwar work to help the children of victims of the Holocaust.  I can highly recommend her book about it, Motherland by Rita Goldberg.

It’s worth remembering that Dutch-Paris began as illegal opposition to the Holocaust.  The men and women of Dutch-Paris did not show their disgust with Nazi racism or their support of their Jewish neighbors by marching in the streets or signing petitions.  That would have been foolhardy in the extreme given that they were living under German occupation.  The situation had also gone far beyond the stage where political actions were helpful or even possible.  No, they took a quieter, clandestine, but no less dangerous route to resist Nazi racism by helping its victims to survive.

The component groups of Dutch-Paris in Brussels, Paris and Lyon all began in 1942 in order to Read the rest of this entry »