How to Flee the Gestapo

Some weeks ago I joined other volunteers at the Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan, for their annual bomber buffing. That’s when we all get clean cloths and little pots of aluminum polish to shine up the museum’s B-17 bomber before it makes its annual rounds of air shows.

It was thrilling to stand on the wing of a B-17 and think about the missions that that plane and thousands like it flew during WWII to defeat the Third Reich. But it was also sobering to think about the young men of a B-17 or any bomber’s crew. By today’s standards, that plane is flimsy and small. Conditions were uncomfortable and dangerous, and a good many of the crews never returned because of malfunctions or enemy fire. A few men who bailed out of or crash landed in B-17s ended up in the hands of Dutch-Paris in early 1944. Dutch-Paris took them through safe houses in Brussels, Paris and Toulouse and then by foot over the Pyrenees to Spain. Once in Spain the British and American authorities got them back to their bases in England.

It was even more sobering to think of the men, women and children who were on the ground where those bombers dropped their bombs. No one who has sat through an air raid in an air raid shelter has ever forgotten the fear and disruption. Of course many didn’t survive to remember, including at least one Dutch-Paris resister who died when his concentration camp was bombed. It goes without saying that the prisoners were not the target, but bombing was not a precision science. That’s part of what made the Second World War such an overwhelming catastrophe.

Still, if not for the B-17 and other planes and their crews, would the Allies have won the war? Would we all be speaking German and saluting with our arms outstretched now?

I’ll be giving a talk about Dutch-Paris and its help to Allied aviators at the Yankee Air Museum on September 5, 2018. Here’s the flyer:

Going back to the earlier post about the differences between archival and oral history, there’s another danger in both sources that I didn’t mention before. Sometimes people lie.

In the case of the Second World War, there might have been honorable reasons for falsehoods. There were plenty of occasions during the war when respectable people lied in order to protect someone. In fact, resisters lied all the time. We now consider it to be part of their heroic defense of freedom, but at the time it was flat out lying to the authorities. There were even occasions when the authorities in the person of police or municipal officials falsified official documents in order to hide someone or help the resistance.

There’s another type of lying about the Second World War, however, that is harder to spot and more insidious: the creation of a personal legend about what one did during the war. It’s more likely to show up in memoirs or interviews after the events than in documents created at the time. But it depends on the liar. It was entirely possible to start such a legend during the war.

The most famous of such legends belong to notorious war criminals who managed to Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned before, I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary. It was a pleasure because I always enjoy discussing the dilemmas of civilians during the Second World War. The director asked some intriguing questions, one of which I’ll share with you today.

She asked me about the difference between archival and oral sources for writing history. Put simply, archival sources are written documents that are either in an archive or could be in one. That includes every sort of bureaucratic report and paper, diaries written during the course of events, court proceedings and newspapers, flyers etc published at the time. Oral history means interviews of participants or observers made after the fact. In theory you could collect such oral history a month after something happened, but in the case of the Second World War such interviews were not collected until decades after the events in question. So the key difference between archival and oral sources for the history of WWII has to do with the date in which they were created.

Every source has its shortcomings because no one Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary about a Dutch Jew who was in southern France from 1940 to September 1942.* Like Weidner, this man, whom we’ll call Sal, was involved with the efforts of the Dutch consulate in Lyon to help Dutch Jews in 1942. The director asked me a few questions that would be interesting to think about in the blog.

For example, she asked me if I thought that Sal would have been part of Dutch-Paris if he had stayed in France after September 1942. The answer is no. Resistance was a “by invitation only” club. Resisters didn’t advertise in the help wanted section. They invited people they trusted to join and risked their own lives and maybe those of their families every time they judged someone to be trustworthy enough. If that person was careless or talked too much or straight out sold them to the enemy they would all suffer.

In the case of Sal, Weidner let him know in 1942 that he had ways to get refugees into Switzerland but did not elaborate or invite him to join his escape line. Neither he nor his colleagues at the time trusted Sal because Read the rest of this entry »

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 »