How to Flee the Gestapo

I thought I’d say a little more about why it’s so appropriately symbolic that The Escape Line was officially released on May 5, the anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands. It would have been even more appropriate if the book had been released on May 4 because that’s the day that the Dutch commemorate their losses during the war. Dutch-Paris, of course, was part of the Dutch (and French and Belgian) resistance to the German occupation and so belongs in any victory celebration. But Dutch-Paris would not have existed if the Dutch (and Belgians and French) did not suffer the losses that are commemorated on May 4.

The list of victims of the war in the Netherlands is tragically long and varied. Dutch-Paris had a hand in trying to rescue people from almost every category. They began by helping Jews who were fleeing the deportations to Auschwitz. Then they helped young men who were trying to avoid forced labor in the Third Reich. And they helped many resisters, some of whom were being chased by the Gestapo. They did not help civilian casualties of battle or bombing in the Netherlands, but they did help downed Allied aviators and Allied soldiers who escaped from POW camps and were part of those battles.

So every inspirational story of the ordinary men and women in Dutch-Paris rescuing a Jew or a resister or an aviator comes out of a dark shadow of the terrible situation in the Netherlands. The Jews would not have needed help if they were not being hunted to death. The resisters would not have run afoul of the law if the occupation laws had not been so foul. The aviators would not be evading capture if the war had not been raging over the heads of civilians throughout Europe.

The only part of the catastrophe that the Dutch people suffered during the Second World War that Dutch-Paris does not reflect is the famine that the German occupation authorities imposed on the northern part of the country during the Hunger Winter of 1944/45.

Seventy five years ago this month, in May 1943, a Dutch Jew who we’ll call Nestor made a clandestine journey from Brussels to Switzerland. Nestor owned a factory in Brussels but spent most of his time helping other Jews escape the Nazis, particularly Jewish children who had been effectively orphaned when their parents were deported “to the east.”

Nestor worked with more than one resistance group, including the Comité of Dutch expats who were hiding Jews in Brussels and later joined Dutch-Paris. He was also the treasurer of the CDJ (Committee for the Defense of Jews), which was also hiding Jews in Brussels. Because they were running out of money in May 1943, his colleagues in the CDJ sent Nestor to Switzerland to ask for support from the international Jewish organizations there, such as the American Joint Distribution Committee.

The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t easy to get into Switzerland and, indeed, Nestor was caught and sent back over the border into France on his first attempt. He had, however, heard rumors about a Mr Meunier in Lyon who helped Dutchmen get to Switzerland. Mr Meunier happened to be John Weidner, whose second in command, who we’ll call Moen, was a Belgian Jew who had worked for the CDJ in Antwerp before fleeing to France. It’s probable that Moen and Nestor knew each other by reputation if not personally.

So Nestor went to Lyon and Weidner got him into Switzerland. This time the Swiss authorities did not realize he was there until after he had left again. Nestor was successful in getting pledges of financial support, but had no way of exchanging Swiss francs into Belgian francs or of transporting the cash to Belgium. He stopped by Lyon on his way back to talk the matter over with Weidner and Moen.

Moen volunteered to make the clandestine journey between the Swiss border and Brussels every two weeks in order to deliver cash to Belgium and bring back dangerous documents such as the lists of the true names and hiding places of Jewish children. He did it for the rest of the war.

When Weidner himself went to Brussels in October 1943 to expand his escape line into what became Dutch-Paris, the first person he talked to was Nestor. He didn’t have to look any further because the Comité of Dutch expats was eager to join forces to rescue the persecuted.

Today, May 5, is the anniversary of the Liberation of the entirety of the Netherlands in 1945.  Last night, May 4, communities across the country commemorated the terrible losses that the Dutch people suffered during the Second World War.  It’s symbolically appropriate that Oxford University Press will release my book on Dutch-Paris in the US today.   The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe will be available in the UK in early June. This is the same book that was translated into Dutch as Gewone Helden, except for a new conclusion and a few more anecdotes about the aviator escape line. It also has a few more photos (thank you to the families who provided them).

The Escape Line begins in 1942 when individuals started working together in Lyon, Brussels and Paris to rescue Jews from the Nazis. As the occupation continued and the Nazis expanded their persecution, these original groups helped more and more people. They found ways to make false documents, hide men, women and children, and escort fugitives across national borders. In 1943 these groups linked together into Dutch-Paris to provide an escape line that stretched from the Netherlands through Belgium and France to both Switzerland and Spain. Beginning by relaying microfilms for the Dutch government in exile, Dutch-Paris soon became a clandestine courier service for resistance groups across western Europe. They helped Jews, young men avoiding the forced labor draft, resisters with the Gestapo on their trails, and civilians trying to join the Allies. Their decision to also take downed Allied airmen to Spain attracted the attention of the German military secret police, the Abwehr, which led to a massive round up of Dutch-Paris resisters in February 1944. Despite the destruction of the aviator escape line, Dutch-Paris continued to support civilians in hiding, take civilians to Switzerland and Spain, and deliver illegal documents until the Liberation.

I’ll be participating in a week-long online interview about the book with Nonfiction Fans, Illuminating Fabulous Nonfiction  click this link

You can get The Escape Line wherever you buy your books.  If you prefer to order online, consider  Brilliant Books, an independent bookseller in northern Michigan that offers free shipping in the US – click this link – or direct from Oxford University Press with this link.

The son of an Engelandvaarder who crossed the Pyrenees with Dutch-Paris sent me a link to a documentary he participated in last year. Unfortunately the documentary, Chased and Saved, is not available online, but if it comes near you I highly recommend it. It’s part of an historical project sponsored by the provincial authority in Lleida, Spain, that remembers the refugees who crossed the mountains into Spain during WWII.

Dutch-Paris took only young men in good health, and possibly one or two women in excellent health and with a dire need, across the mountains into Spain. But Dutch-Paris was an unusually large and well organized network. They had the luxury of being able to take older people, women, and children to safety along the physically less demanding route to Switzerland and, when necessary, arranging for certain Engelandvaarders to traverse the Pyrenees in a train (albeit at staggering cost).

This documentary reminds us that tens of thousands of fugitives crossed the Pyrenees into Spain during the Second World War. Many of them were young men wanting to join the Allies or Allied soldiers and aviators wanting to get back to their bases. But many of them were civilians, mostly Jews, who were not likely candidates for climbing mountains in the dark wearing city clothes. But they did it because their choice was that or capture by the Nazis. Some of them were small children, including a woman in the documentary who took the path it films when she was five years old.

The others in the documentary are the children or nieces and nephews of other wartime refugees who trekked into Spain. They stop along the way to talk about what the experience was like for their relatives and what it means to them as Jews today. My friend, the son of the Engelandvaarder, says something important in one of those conversations that’s worth pausing to consider.
The conversation comes around to the observation that remembering the WWII border crossers is important because the same sort of thing is happening today. Someone comments that these things are cyclical. Our Engelandvaarder’s son says that this is true, but no one is obliged to accept the weight of history.

No one is obliged to accept the weight of history. It sounds banal but is actually explosive. Certainly none of the resisters in Dutch-Paris accepted the weight of history as it showed up in their day as the Third Reich or the Etat Français or internment camps or deportation trains. If they and other resisters like them had accepted it, who knows how or when the war might have ended.

As I explained in the last post, Jean Weidner asked the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland for money to support needy Dutchmen in southern France on March 23, 1943. The ambassador was sympathetic but couldn’t give him any money at that time. A friend, however, had an idea. This friend was a Jewish refugee whom Weidner had visited in a French prison and then smuggled into Switzerland. He had just started a job packing care packages to be sent to POWs in Germany by the World Council of Churches in Formation (WCC).

The WCC was a Christian ecumenical organization based in Geneva and was run by a Dutchman, Pastor Willem Visser ‘t Hooft. The friend introduced him to Weidner and his wife the next morning. Like the ambassador, the pastor was sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch refugees and retirees in southern France. Unlike the ambassador, he did not need permission to act. That very day Visser ‘t Hooft gave Weidner a letter to one of his associates in Lyon authorizing that French pastor to give Weidner Read the rest of this entry »

Seventy-five years ago this week, on March 23, 1943, Jean Weidner went to visit the Dutch ambassador in Bern, Switzerland. By this time Weidner and a few colleagues had already been running an escape line between Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, for eight months. On this occasion, however, he wasn’t in Switzerland because of the escape line. On this trip he was traveling on behalf of a group of Dutch expatriate businessmen in Lyon.

Four months earlier, in November 1942, the Germans had occupied southern France, including the city of Lyon, while the Italians had occupied the French departments bordering the Italian and Swiss borders. This had caused a bit of a panic among refugees in southern France and those trying to help them. It had also caused the Dutch government-in-exile to stop sending money to Vichy to support Dutch citizens in southern France because they did not want it to fall into enemy hands. Some of the people who had been relying on the Dutch money were refugees but others were retirees who could not access their bank accounts in the Netherlands because of German occupation policies. Starting in November 1942 the retirees couldn’t Read the rest of this entry »

As well as taking civilians to Switzerland, carrying secret documents across occupied Europe and hiding people from the Nazis and their collaborators in Belgium and France, the men and women of Dutch-Paris took over 100 Allied aviators and soldiers to Spain. A few of them escaped from POW camps in the Third Reich or Mussolini’s Italy and made their way to Switzerland. The American or British military attaches there arranged for them to travel across France and into Spain via Dutch-Paris. Most of the aviators, however, came down in the Netherlands, Belgium or France and were passed to Dutch-Paris by other resisters.

I’m looking for family members of the Allied military men helped by Dutch-Paris, mostly so I can invite them to Dutch-Paris talks. But I would certainly like to have more photos of aviators, if the families are willing to share.

Here’s the verified list of Allied military men helped by Dutch-Paris. There are more, but these are the ones who are documented. If you find a father, grandfather or uncle on the list, please let me know at megan at dutchparis.com. Thank you.

Anderson, Robert F., USAAF
Arp, Elwood, USAAF
Bachman, Carl E., USAAF
Bailey, Harold, RAF
Boyce, Harold, USAAF
Breed, Mervyn, RNZAF
Brenden, Arden, USAAF
Brigman, Campell C Jr, USAAF
Brown, Cecil,
Brown, Philip H, RAF
Buckner, John R., USAAF
Cassady, Leonard, USAAF
Cohen, Simon, USAAF
Davenport, RCAF
David, Clayton C., USAAF
Downe, Charles O., USAAF
Dutka, John A, USAAF
Elkin, Norman, USAAF
Elllis, Robert O., RAF
Ferrari, Victor, USAAF
Flores, Leopold, USAAF
Gallo, Russel, USAAF
Grubb, Ernest, USAAF
Hargest, General
Harris, RAF
Hicks, Chauncey, USAAF
Horton, Jack O, USAAF
Hussong, James, USAAF
Koenig, William, USAAF
Kolc, Eric, USAAF
Kratz, Harry, USAAF
Krengle, Robert, USAAF
Lock, William B, USAAF
Mackie, NM, RAF
Mandell, Nicholas, USAAF
Martin, Loral, USAAF
McDonald, William H. USAAF
McGlinchy, Frank, USAAF
McLaughlin, John G, RAAF
Mellen, Clyde, USAAF
Miles, Brigadier General
Miller, Karl D, USAAF
Miller, William J, USAAF
Morley, Henry, RAF
Morgan, Herman, USAAF
Morphen, Jeffrey, RAF
Mullins, Charlie, USAAF
Newton, James USAAF
O’Welch, Paul, USAAF
Page, Fred, RAAF
Roberts, Omar, USAAF
Shaffer, Edward R., USAAF
Schuman, Donald C, USAAF
Settle, James, USAAF
Shaver, Kenneth, USAAF
Sherman, Howard, USAAF
Smith, Sydney, RAF
Snyder, Walter, USAAF
Steel, Henry, USAAF
Stern, Albert, USAAF
Stock, Ernest, USAAF
Van der Stok, Bram, RAF
Tank, Frank A. Jr, USAAF
Tracy, James E, USAAF
Trinder, Wallace, USAAF
Trnobransky, Jan, RAF
Vass, John, RAF
Wallinga, Jacob, USAAF
Wardle, Hank, RAF
Watlington, RAF
Watts, George, RAF

Here’s the story of Dutch-Paris’s encounter with the legendary partisan leader Colonel Romans-Petit. He and his 4,800 partisans in the French Forces of the Interior rose up to wreak havoc in the German rear when the Allies landed at Normandy. From June 6 to July 12, 1944, they controlled a 2,000 square kilometer region in the Jura Mountains in eastern France, which they called the République de Montagne (Republic of the Mountains).

It just so happened that one of Dutch-Paris’s couriers, whom we’ll call Vermeer, was in Brussels on D-Day. The railway system fell apart almost immediately because of sabotage by resisters and requisitions by Germans, but Vermeer managed to make his way as far south as Lyon. From there, however, he had no hope of catching a train to Switzerland, so he started to walk. When maquisards (partisans) in the FFI stopped him, Vermeer asked to see their commander. They said he could, but it wouldn’t be easy and he’d have to wait in a hotel. A fire fight between the FFI and German troops delayed his departure. Finally he was taken in a car to an undisclosed location. They changed cars several times because of bomb craters in the road and other wartime inconveniences. The partisans delivered him to the gendarmes in the town of Nantua. By this time the local gendarmes had all declared their loyalty to the FFI. They put him up in a hotel for the night.

Vermeer was struck by the atmosphere in the region. He noted that there were no Germans to be seen, that the BBC Radio from London could be heard in the streets (it was a crime to listen to the BBC in occupied France); that young men in trucks were heading to the front singing patriotic French songs, and that official bulletins with news from the battle hung everywhere.
The next morning, his hosts blindfolded Vermeer and took him to talk to their commander, known then as Romans. He managed to convince them that he was not a spy but a bona fide resister on important business. While at the HQ Vermeer met an American liaison officer, to whom he gave the names and serial numbers of a group of American aviators who had been shot down near Arras and whom Dutch-Paris had just taken to Spain.

Vermeer was given safe passage and an escort out of maquis-held territory. Back in German-held territory, Vermeer got a lift from a journalist. He spent the entire time spinning a story about how pro-German he was. It worked well enough to get him to the Swiss border.

It wasn’t until after the war that Vermeer realized he’d been questioned by the famous Col. Romans-Petit himself.  In 1979 he visited Col. and Mrs Romans-Petit, who took him high up into the mountains to show him the site of the FFI HQ where he had been taken blindfolded 35 years earlier.

Considering that the Second World War went on for six years and it was the duty of every British officer to attempt to escape capture, it’s not surprising that POWs spent quite a bit of time devising escapes. Officers, at least, didn’t have much else to do.

But it wasn’t easy to get out of a POW camp. A man had to get through locked doors, barbed wire and guards who were not easily amused. Some POW camps, like Colditz, had additional challenges in the form of stone walls and moats. It was possible for a man to bluff his way out in a basket of laundry or some such, but a planned escape involved a number of men. A tunnel, for instance, had to be dug without adequate tools. And they had to hide the dirt they took out of the tunnel and shore up the tunnel as they dug. The men working on the tunnel needed sentries to warn them when guards approached.

Once a POW got to the other side of the walls, he was in enemy territory. He needed Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the Allied servicemen whom Dutch-Paris smuggled out of occupied territory via the Pyrenees and Spain were aviators who had bailed out of their airplanes or crash landed them in the Netherlands, Belgium or France. That was certainly the case with the men who were arrested – or not- at the Porte de Pantin in Paris in December 1943.

But some were aviators or soldiers who escaped from POW camps in the Third Reich or Italy and made their own way to Switzerland. Once there, they came under the protection of their respective embassies. It just so happened that the Dutch military attaché in Bern had connections to Dutch-Paris and was on good terms with the British and American military attachés in Switzerland. The Dutch military attaché arranged for a number of escaped POWs to travel from Switzerland to Spain with Dutch-Paris. His American and British counterparts paid for the men’s expenses such as train tickets, black market food, false documents for the border zone in the Pyrenees and a guide, or passeur, over the Pyrenees.

One of these men, F/Lt Hank Wardle, was a Canadian book keeper who had volunteered with the RAF before the war began. He had the dubious honor of piloting the first British bomber to be shot down over Germany at night in April 1940. He escaped from a POW camp in August 1940 but was captured the next day when he Read the rest of this entry »