How to Flee the Gestapo

Seventy-five years ago the fate of the Netherlands hung in the balance as the Allies and the Wehrmacht battled for control of the Dutch bridges over the Rhine in Operation Market Garden. The Allies lost that battle, leading to the catastrophic Hunger Winter, or man-made famine, in the northern two-thirds of the country.

By that time, however, the southern portion of the country had already been liberated and was put under the control of a Dutch Military Government under Prince Bernhard (married to Princess Juliana, heir to the Dutch throne). The city of Maastricht, through which many of the aviators who were helped by Dutch-Paris had traveled on their way to Spain, had already been liberated by American troops on September 14.

In the days leading up to the 14th, there were plenty of signs to give the people of Maastricht reason to hope that their liberation was near. Brussels, which wasn’t all that far away, had been liberated on the 3rd. They could hear artillery firing, although that only meant that battle was heading their way. More tellingly, the Germans were burning their files and documents. There was no reason to do that unless they were planning to leave. Furthermore, and somewhat shockingly, there were German soldiers moving through town who looked worn and ragged. The people of Maastricht were used to seeing the occupation forces strutting around with highly polished boots and sharp creases. These soldiers looked like they might be losing.

My father, who was six years old, had his own sign. His older brother who had been underground with the resistance for some time had come back home. His mother made him leave his gun at the back door when he came in the house, but the point was that he was back home.

On the morning of the 14th the people in his neighborhood were anxious that the sound of artillery fire might be bringing the fight onto their doorsteps, but hopeful that they would soon see the last of the occupation forces. Children were told to stay inside. Most people stayed inside. Then a tank rolled down the street and stopped in the intersection.

The people of the neighborhood did not recognize the tank, but that did not mean it was an Allied tank. It could have been a new model German tank. But when a soldier popped out of the top and lit a cigarette, they knew it could not possibly be a German. They were liberated!

Brussels was a dangerous place for civilians 75 years ago, during the summer of 1944, especially for men of military age.  The German occupation authorities had absolutely no tolerance for anything that could interfere with their military operations and heightened their surveillance of the civilian population.   They also rounded men up off the street to ship off to the Third Reich as forced labor.   If Dutch-Paris needed to deliver money or ration coupons to any of the 400 people they were hiding in and around the city or to visit them for any reason during those last months of the war, it was a woman who ventured into the streets to do it.

Dutch-Paris was able to avoid further arrests during that summer, at times very narrowly, but they did already have people in prison.   There was an elderly woman and a young man who were arrested in November 1943 during a raid on another resistance network.   They had been tried and sentenced to deportation but had not been deported along with their co-defendants.  The only explanation for that is bribery, but there’s no proof of it.   The two of them, however, were included in the last trainload of political prisoners slated to leave Brussels for the Third Reich, known as the “phantom train.”   Belgian resisters managed to misplace the train long enough that it never left Belgium and the political prisoners were liberated with the rest of their compatriots.

Other members of Dutch-Paris had been arrested at the safe house on rue Franklin on February 28, 1944.  Their landlady was deported and killed at Ravensbruck, but they did not leave the prison of St Gilles until being transferred to a prison camp at Beverloo when the Allies were already on the horizon.   The guards there did execute some prisoners, but none of the Dutch-Paris resisters.   Instead, they were liberated on September 4, 1944, the day after Brussels was liberated.

Unlike their Dutch-Paris counterparts in France, the men and women of Dutch-Paris in Brussels could celebrate their liberation without the shadow of anxiety for resistance colleagues who had been deported to the concentration camps at the last minute.

Seventy-five years ago, on August 25, 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered after five days of street fighting. There were parties in the streets, a huge parade, a Te Deum at Notre Dame cathedral. The German occupation authorities had not followed Hitler’s order to destroy the city, but they had not been as merciful to their prisoners.

During the month of August 1944, while the Allies were battling towards Paris from their landing sites in Normandy and Provence, the Germans were deporting as many political prisoners as possible from prisons across France. This included a number of men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris. Some of those arrested in the major raids on Dutch-Paris addresses at the end of February 1944 were deported to concentration camps within a few weeks of their arrests. Apparently the Germans did not think that these prisoners were particularly Read the rest of this entry »

August 15th marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied Landings in southern France on the beaches of Provence, known as Operation Dragoon. These are not as well remembered as the Allied Landings in Normandy a couple months earlier. But the people who lived there and the German troops and their collaborators who were still in control of southern France certainly noticed the event.

The maquis (military Resistance) sprang into action and the Pyrenees were mostly liberated in the next seven days. Dutch-Paris was still operating in the area, working to get men into Spain. A few of those fugitives chose to stay in France, joined the Secret Army and helped liberate the Pyrenees.

In Toulouse, a mob of citizens stormed the prison of St Michel on August 19 and released all the political prisoners being held there. This was good news for a Dutch-Paris courier who lived in Toulouse and had been arrested there because of her connection with Dutch-Paris on June 22. The Gestapo had interrogated her about Dutch-Paris seven times and had stripped her apartment of most valuables, but she had not yet been deported. Toulouse was liberated the next day, August 20.

Over in the French Alps, Annecy was liberated on the same day as the political prisoners in Toulouse, August 19. The entire region along the Swiss border convulsed with fighting between resisters and the Germans and their collaborators that often took the form of atrocities perpetrated on civilians in an attempt to discourage the maquis. Once the American Army showed up, however, the Germans began to retreat. Lyon was liberated on August 24.  For many civilians in the region, however, the joy of liberation was bittersweet.  It was only after the Germans retreated that they could begin to count their losses.

I’ve finally figured out why the map on the first version of the cover for The Escape Line was wrong. I couldn’t understand why the designer had included towns that were not part of Dutch-Paris’s routes. But I had made the mistake of assuming that the designer had based the cover on the photos and maps in the book or even read the book.

Then I saw the small promotional piece that a local librarian posted for a talk I gave in January. There was that same incorrect map. And this time I recognized it because the map was part of a commemorative stamp cover released in the 1980s. I’d seen it before in the Weidner archives and read quite a bit of correspondence about it. The commemorative stamps were part of a gambit of men who had not been part of Dutch-Paris to claim that they were actually the leaders of Dutch-Paris. A scandal ensued in the world of Dutch resisters, leading to the disgrace of the pretenders.

Where on earth, I wondered, Read the rest of this entry »

Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, the French national holiday celebrating freedom and democracy. It shouldn’t be any surprise that during WWII the Vichy regime banned the celebration of Bastille Day. This created a bit of a conundrum in 1944. In those parts of France that were definitively liberated by July 14, people celebrated publicly and with a lot of verve. In those places where the Germans were still in control, such as Paris, celebrations had to be a lot more circumspect. But what about those parts of the country that had never had much of a German presence or could consider themselves under Resistance control?

Two Dutch-Paris couriers found out just how confused the situation could be. Both men in their early 30s, they had left Switzerland a week earlier to try to find out what was happening with their Dutch-Paris colleagues in Paris and Brussels. They made it to Paris, although they couldn’t find most of the people they were looking for. They gave up trying to Read the rest of this entry »

Knowing as you do that the Normandy Landings on June 6, 1944, turned out to be a huge success and that the Allies won the Second World War, you would think that the Germans focused all their resources and all their attention on pushing back the Allied advance. This was a lot more true for the German army, the Wehrmacht, than it was for the other German units and authorities occupying France and Belgium.

Eight days after D-Day and 15 weeks after the first round-up of the Dutch-Paris aviator escape line in Paris, German police arrested a young French courier and her mother at their home in a suburb of Paris. Three days later they arrested another Dutch-Paris courier at her apartment in the city. Five days after that Read the rest of this entry »

Escaping to Spain meant trekking over the Pyrenees for at least two days, often at night, often in the snow and always with border guards on your heels. Not surprisingly, Dutch-Paris relied on local men who ran their own escape lines over the mountains to take Dutchmen and aviators the final miles into Spain.

One of these guides, or passeurs, was an escaped French POW known as Charbonnier. He belonged to the local Secret Army and had, in fact, been given the job of regulating clandestine passages over the mountains in that region. He and his network helped very large groups of evaders including both Allied aviators and civilians. Unlike other passeurs, Charbonnier provided an armed escort for his convoys to Spain, at least in certain sections at certain times.

The Germans finally caught him a few days after the Normandy Landings. On June 13, 1944, Charbonnier did not show up at the high mountain huts where a number of fugitives, including Allied aviators and Dutch resisters travelling with Dutch-Paris, were expecting him. He and two of his colleagues were driving up to the huts when the Germans ambushed them on a stone bridge over a narrow but powerful mountain stream. Reports differ about whether they were killed by machine gun or flame thrower, but they most definitely did not survive.

Charbonnier’s network was well enough organized and firmly enough rooted in the local populace that his death caused only a slight delay in the evasion of the fugitives waiting in the huts. They set out two days later and arrived in Spain on 18 June 1944. One of them was a Dutch RAF pilot who had tunneled out of the POW camp at Sagan on 24 March 1944 as part of the “Great Escape” and was only now completing his escape from occupied territory.

Here’s another example of why historians use footnotes. A few of the people Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland were family members of prominent French resisters. They were in danger under the German and Vichy policy of family responsibility, meaning that family members could be held as hostages or punished because of a resister’s actions. Two such fugitives were the 9 and 11 year-old children of the leader of a very large French intelligence network. Dutch-Paris gave them the code name “les enfants de Marie,” or “Marie’s children.”

A fellow historian recently pointed out that in her memoir about her resistance network published in 1968, Marie said that Dutch-Paris gave the children to peasants. These peasants pointed the two children in the direction of the barbed wire fence several miles away on the Swiss border and told them Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 20 May 1944, Jean Weidner and three other members of Dutch-Paris were arrested outside of a restaurant in Toulouse by French paramilitary collaborators in the Milice. Ironically, it was a case of mistaken identity. Weidner had a price on his head, but they thought they were arresting a French Communist who they wanted in connection to the deaths of several Miliciens.

One of the Dutch-Paris men, the one who lived in Toulouse, fumbled his documents and ran away down the street. The other three were taken to the Milice prison, which was not very far at all from the café that Dutch-Paris used as a headquarters in the city. Two nights later one of them jumped out of Read the rest of this entry »