How to Flee the Gestapo

Our last post talked about the rescue of women political prisoners from the Ravensbrück concentration camp by the Swedish Red Cross, working in conjunction with Danish humanitarians. Several Dutch-Paris women benefited from that rescue mission.

But not all the women who had been arrested as part of Dutch-Paris and deported to concentration camps were in the main camp at Ravensbrück when the Red Cross arrived. They had been transferred to sub-camps. What happened to them? As we discussed in February, one of them was liberated by the Soviets in February 1945 but died a few days later from illness and the extreme weakness and malnutrition that all the concentration camp prisoners suffered from.

Another young woman had been transferred to a different sub-camp and was rounded up at gun point by the SS and told to march west. Apparently the SS thought that they were just making a strategic retreat before winning the war and that they would therefore need their slave labor to keep making their materiel.

One of the young Frenchwomen who had served Dutch-Paris as a guide and courier, let’s call her Marie, found herself on one of these notorious Death Marches. Many prisoners did not survive them. It’s actually surprising that any of them did considering how malnourished they were to begin with and that they were walking through a severe winter without even adequate boots or coats.
Marie survived by leaving the column, which was risky in itself. The SS shot anyone who strayed or fell behind. She had the good fortune to meet up with French POWs, who smuggled her into their camp. That gave her a roof to sleep under and something to eat, although the French POWs were in desperate straits themselves and didn’t have much to spare.

When the Germans evacuated the POWs’ camp, Marie decided not to join that forced march. Instead, she found some American GIs to turn herself over to. In that place at that time – Germany in late April, early May 1945 – the very most that anyone could hope for was to turn himself or herself over to Americans or Brits. As a victim of the Nazis, Marie was given medical care, food and shelter. Within a couple of weeks she was also given transportation back home to France.

Seventy-five years ago, in the late winter and early spring of 1945, most of western Europe had been liberated from Nazi occupation. But the war was far from over. The Western Allies and the Red Army were driving towards Berlin and the USAAF and RAF were bombing Germany around the clock.

The Nazis, however, were not willing to give up, nor were they willing to leave their human captives behind when they retreated. There were millions of non-Germans trapped in the Third Reich as political prisoners, racial prisoners. POWs, and forced laborers of various statuses. Rather than leave prisoners in concentration camps when they retreated, the SS either killed inmates or set them on the notorious Death Marches towards the German heartland.

In an exception to this standard operating procedure, the Swedish Red Cross was able to bargain for the release of Scandinavian prisoners if they came to transport the prisoners through the battle zone themselves. They did so in the famous white buses, so called because they were painted white in hopes that the combatants would leave them alone.

A convoy of white buses arrived at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück the day before it was to be evacuated. The humanitarians expected Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy five years ago the Western Allies were moving into the Third Reich from the west while the Soviet Red Army steamrollered toward Berlin from the east. The armies had a very clear military objective: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. But they also had a vast and sprawling civilian affairs problem.

The Americans and British were not able to drive the German army out of a town, arrest the Nazi town council and reopen the schools. There were literally millions of non-German political prisoners, POWs, forced laborers and slave laborers in the Third Reich. As soon as the Allies showed up these hungry people naturally considered themselves as liberated and on the side of the victors. They did not necessarily want to remain in their prison camps or prison clothes and they certainly did not want to keep eating the slop that they’d been allowed as prisoners or slaves. Most of them wanted to go home (unless their home was being occupied by the Red Army).

From the American and British perspective, these millions of people were a potential source of chaos and disease (no fault of their own that they were captive in conditions that fostered typhus etc). On the other hand, they were also clearly victims of the Nazis and the reason for the battles.

The solution was to encourage these people to put themselves in camps where they would be well fed, given better clothing and eventually given a ride home. They could also be vetted for the sort of diseases that might cause epidemics. This suited some people fine, but there were plenty of others who had absolutely no intention to putting themselves back into any sort of camp. And so you have odd incidences at the end of the war, like reports of Cossacks stealing food and laundry in French villages.

There were people who grouped themselves together by nationality and walked home, without much caring about the property rights of German civilians. The majority of French, Belgian and Dutch, however, were happy to accept a plane ride or a truck ride home in the spring of 1945.Millions of prisoners and forced laborers came home to the West in 1945 in planes and trucks in a mass population movement remembered as the Return or le Retour. It was an emotionally fraught period that defines the end of WWII as much as any battle or military campaign.  No one who saw those convoys of displaced persons returning from the Third Reich has forgotten them.

The men and women of Dutch-Paris were resisters, meaning that they were among the tiny minority of civilians in Occupied Europe who actively opposed the Nazis. What about everyone else?
Speaking very broadly, there were two choices. If you didn’t resist, you could collaborate or you could accommodate.

Collaborators were the minority on the other end of the spectrum who actively supported the Nazis. There’s actually a range in here and some of the examples get very murky indeed. There were people who were not German but fully agreed with and supported Nazism – straight out collabos. Then there were people who thought that they could best serve their occupied country by cooperating with the Nazis. That attitude led a number of civil servants into collaboration because it Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the death of the woman who ran the boarding house that Dutch-Paris rented as a safe house on the escape line in Brussels. The 55 year-old political prisoner was gassed at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück in January 1945.

Lydia’s story offers a good example of the haphazard and incomplete nature of archives and of why you should never rely on only a single source if you’re trying to figure out what happened in the past.

Because Lydia played a supporting role, she was unknown to most of the other members of the Comite in Brussels and, of course, she was unable to tell her own story after the war. But she makes brief appearances in different sources, which give different pictures of the woman.

In 1946 the Comité made reports on as many people who worked with them as they could. Lydia’s was brief because Read the rest of this entry »

There were many ways to die in the concentration camps built in Hitler’s Third Reich to punish political prisoners of all sorts. Just as not every Jew deported to an extermination camp died from poison gas, not every political prisoner died of malnutrition and exposure, although that grim end awaited them all.

Only a tiny handful of the millions of prisoners under Nazi control had anything to do with Dutch-Paris. But they died in various ways.

In November 1944 a 42 year-old man who was arrested under a false name died when the Allies bombed the factory Read the rest of this entry »

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the young women who worked with Dutch-Paris, we’ll call her Marthe.

Marthe served the line as a postbox in Paris, meaning that she accepted and forwarded messages on behalf of her colleagues. Such messages ranged for the details of an escape being planned for Jewish refugees to microfilms in transit from a courier coming from Spain to a courier heading towards the Netherlands.

Along with most of the rest of the line in Paris, Marthe was arrested at the end of February 1944. Unusually, the Germans don’t seem to have figured out Read the rest of this entry »

January 28th marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the minor players in the story of Dutch-Paris. She was a 55 year-old spinster who supported herself by running a boarding house in one of the newer neighborhoods of Brussels. We’ll call her Lydia.

The archives do not have much to share about Lydia. The Comité rented her entire boarding house in December 1943 to serve as Brussels HQ for the Dutch-Paris escape line. She was arrested along with everyone else in that house early in the morning of February 28, 1944. There were 10 Allied aviators sleeping in the house that morning, damning everyone there with the capital crime of aiding the Occupiers’ enemy. It is not known if Lydia was tortured Read the rest of this entry »

Just like Dutch-Paris was not the only escape line running through western Europe during WWII, I am hardly the only historian who has been researching escape lines. One of the most dedicated and most helpful of my fellow researchers is Bruce Bollinger. If you’ve done any research on the subject at all, you’ve probably come across his extensive and extremely helpful website: https://wwii-netherlands-escape-lines.com/

Bruce’s interest in escape lines began decades ago when he visited an uncle in Belgium who told him about hiding an American aviator during the war. Unfortunately the uncle died the next year, but Bruce found the American aviator and began tracking down every detail of his evasion to Spain and everyone who Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago, during the Christmas season of 1944, the people of western Europe had both reason for hope and reason for fear.

They had reason to hope because the Allies had landed in Normandy more than six months earlier and already liberated most of France, Belgium and southern Holland. Anyone who saw the well-fed and well-equipped Allied armies had every reason to expect that the war would finally be over before the end of 1945.

At that time, during the Liberation era, there was also cause to hope that the peace would be accompanied with new levels of social and economic justice.

But the war still raged and even those who had been freed from occupation months earlier had reasons to fear. Most of the Netherlands was still under occupation and was already well into the catastrophe of the Hunger Winter, a man-made famine imposed by the German occupation authorities on the Dutch population north of the rivers as punishment for their support of the resistance and the Allies. It would be many months before the Red Cross and the Allies were allowed to bring food to the Dutch.

On a smaller scale, there were still Read the rest of this entry »