How to Flee the Gestapo

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 »

Continuing on with our discussion of the use of the railways by escape lines, we should recognize the railway men who belonged to Dutch-Paris. There were two that I know of.

The first was a Dutch railway official who worked at the Gare du Nord, the station where all the trains to and from the north, including Belgium and the Netherlands, stopped in Paris. Our man in the station was a source of invaluable information and of less travelled ways in and out of the station. He also opened his family home to the organization for meetings and sent his teenage sons out with messages. The entire family was arrested and kept in jail by the French for two nights. After that, the French police turned our man over to the Germans but let the family go. Our man died in the concentration camps.

Our second railway man was a supervisor for the French railways in the Pyrenees. Or at least he way until he was ordered to arrange the loading of forced laborers onto a train bound for the Third Reich. His refusal to do so made him a criminal. He spent the rest of the war underground, working as a passeur or guide for downed Allied aviators and other fugitives over the Pyrenees into Spain.

There were undoubtedly other railway employees who helped Dutch-Paris out in one way or another without committing to outright resistance as part of the line. It’s likely, for example, that the men and women working for the line in Paris knew which trains to Toulouse were not patrolled by document inspectors because someone in the railways told them.

Just as Dutch-Paris could not have escorted fugitives across occupied Europe to safety in neutral Switzerland or Spain without using the train, they could not have done it without help from the railway workers.

Here’s an interesting question that someone asked at one of my talks about Dutch-Paris. If downed Allied aviators and resisters were escaping the Nazis on the trains, why didn’t the Gestapo just take over all the trains?

If there are any grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic, that would be a good one because the history of the railways during Nazi occupation is deeply complex. You could, actually, write a dissertation on very specific railway topics such as the catastrophic Dutch railway strike begun in September 1944 or the use of the railways to transfer prisoners in the spring of 1945 when it would have been far more rational for the Third Reich to use what lines and stock still functioned for military purposes.

But let’s limit ourselves to the use of the railways by Dutch-Paris and the specific question of why the Gestapo didn’t take over the trains to stop escape lines.

To a certain extent, the answer is that the Gestapo, or at least the German occupation authorities, did take over the trains. The Gestapo did not send its own agents to drive locomotives. But they did patrol passenger trains and railway stations, reserving the right to detain anyone at any time. And if it wasn’t the Gestapo checking passengers’ documents, it could have been Read the rest of this entry »

With all the dramatic stories of resistance in movies and novels, we tend to forget that resisters were civilians living under an occupation that lasted for four or five years. Like all other civilians they had to get by on short rations and worn out shoes. They lived in cold houses and drank ersatz coffee made out of roasted chickory like everyone else. Maybe they had more than their fair share of fear and anxiety, knowing that the authorities were after them as they did. And resisters who traveled as couriers or guides had much more than their fair share of the inconveniences of trying to get around as a civilian in Occupied Europe.

Travel was difficult for every civilian, of course. Because of the gasoline ration, the only option for long distance travel was the trains. Civilian passenger trains did not get top priority during the Occupation and could easily be delayed or cancelled because the Occupation authorities declared that either the train or the track was needed for military purposes. The only way to know for sure when and if a train was running, was to go to the station to inquire.

If a train was running, there was a good chance that it would be delayed. In addition to the usual, peacetime reasons that a train might be delayed, there were a few reasons specific to the occupation. In an air raid, trains stopped wherever they were so that the passengers could evacuate it to seek shelter. If they happened to be in a rural area, passengers could find themselves lying in a ditch until the all clear sounded. If the pilots damaged the train, the passengers could be there for a long time or would need to walk to the nearest town. Sabotage attempts had similar consequences although they were possibly more dangerous.

A Dutch-Paris courier reported in late 1943 that he was late getting to Paris because someone, presumably resisters, had blown up the track underneath a couple of carriages while his train went over it. The courier had helped to rescue the wounded. Other passengers helped to push the damaged carriages off the track. They had hooked up the remaining carriages and continued on.
Even without attacks, the trains of the time were cold, unlit and very crowded. They were ideal places for police to check people’s documents because very few people are willing to jump off a moving train. Train stations were also subject to heavy surveillance. International couriers and guides also had to go through several layers of document and customs inspections at every border.
There wasn’t anything very glamorous about train travel during the Occupation, even if the traveler was a courier or guide in heightened danger of arrest during the journey.

Every once in a while I pass a car with a bumper sticker urging me to practice “random acts of kindness.” It sounds like a warm, fuzzy way to make the world nicer. But if you look at the story of Dutch-Paris, you’ll see that random acts of kindness can have profound consequences.

For example, in late 1943 a Dutch-Paris courier was on his way to a rendezvous at an apartment building in Brussels. He knocked on the wrong door. The lady who answered the door told him that the Gestapo was in the apartment he was looking for. It goes without saying that he left the building immediately. He was free to play an instrumental role in linking up the line and escorting hundreds of people to safety.

That neighbor lady did not have to answer her door at all. She put herself at risk by warning the stranger about the Gestapo. No one would put it past them to arrest her for doing that. In that situation, her act was not only kind but courageous.

Here’s another example that I’ve mentioned before. In December 1943 an Engelandvaarder was arrested in Paris by Wehrmacht officers. He opened the back door of their vehicle, rolled out and ran off through the blacked out streets of Paris. At one point, after the alarm had been sounded and the police were in pursuit, an old lady took the young man by the arm and told him to escort her to the Metro. The police paid him no attention because he was escorting an old woman. Her kindness, and her courage, certainly saved him.

The complete story of Dutch-Paris has to be full of such spontaneous acts of kindness. Not all of them would have been so courageous. Just giving food to a fugitive would have made a big difference to people on the run. Looking the other way, making a gesture to indicate that police were ahead, giving a foreigner directions, all those things would have made a difference to fugitives and the resisters helping them. It’s impossible to even begin to count the random acts of kindness that supported Dutch-Paris. Only the most dramatic, like the lady taking the Engelandvaarder’s arm on the streets of Paris, made it into the archives. Others may have been remembered only in the family stories of the beneficiaries. Others may not even have been noticed by anyone but the person who did them. But there is no doubt whatsoever that random acts of kindness played an important role in the resistance to the Nazis.

Although the most common image of the Liberation of Europeans from Nazi Occupation 75 years ago is one of joyous celebration, we should not forget that tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians paid for that liberation with their lives. The Dutch certainly haven’t.

Within weeks of the liberation of my father and his neighbors in Maastricht, the US Army began burying its dead in a cemetery outside the village of Margraten. Known today as the Netherlands American Cemetery, it now houses the graves of 8,291 military dead and lists the names of 1,722 of the missing. Like all Allied war cemeteries in western Europe, Margraten’s beautiful park shelters seemingly endless rows of white crosses and stars of David (link to site).

What distinguishes Margraten from other war cemeteries is the way that the Dutch people have cared for it. Right in 1944, when the first bodies were buried there, before the war was even won, local people adopted the graves of American soldiers. Volunteers were given one or more graves to tend with only the most basic information about the deceased: name, rank, home state and, if possible, day of death. They knew almost nothing about the person buried there except that he, or in some cases she, had died in the fight to save them all from the Nazis. That was enough for these Dutch men and women to continue to bring flowers to the grave for the rest of their lives. When the original volunteer died, someone else in the family took over the obligation to tend the grave.

If you look at Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue with the story of my father’s liberation from the Nazis 75 years ago in Maastricht. He was 6 years old, so his memories are the impression of a child.

He remembers that American Army trucks and equipment rolled past his home day and night for days. The Dutch, who had been on short rations for years, were amazed at that wealth and at the organization of the American First Army. Why, the Americans even brought their own bridge to replace the centuries old St Servaas bridge that the Germans had blown when they retreated! Nonetheless, an American officer apologized to some local dignitaries that it took his engineers more than 12 hours to lay that Bailey Bridge across the River Maas. They were usually much quicker, he said, but they hadn’t slept in days.

The local Dutch found all this wealth and efficiency reassuring enough to definitively celebrate their Liberation with Read the rest of this entry »