How to Flee the Gestapo

In the last post I asked how much a map of an occupied city can really show of what it would have been like to walk from one place to another in a city hushed by gasoline rationing, darkened by air raid precautions and filled with dread. We can ask the same question about clandestine border crossings.

A standard map of the Franco-Swiss border in the Genevois with the Dutch-Paris hiding and crossing places marked on it would certainly provide a sense of distances. A really detailed version might even include the no-man’s-land that fugitives had to run across before actually reaching safety in Switzerland. And it might be able to convey the looming hulk of Mt Salève on the French side of the border and the steep climb to and from the safe house above the village of Collonges and the border. The map would indicate the bridge that resisters and their charges hid under as they waited for German motorized patrols to zoom past or looked out for French gendarmes on foot. But can a map suggest the fear or excitement? Can it adequately portray the confusion of Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking about maps of Dutch-Paris. The line covered so much territory that the story needs many maps: Dutch-Paris’s routes through the Netherlands, Belgium and France; maps of the clandestine crossing places from the Netherlands to Belgium, from France into Switzerland and from France to Spain; maps of Dutch-Paris places in the main cities along the route, Brussels, Paris, Lyon and Toulouse.

These maps would give a reader a sense of the distances that the line covered, thousands of miles across western Europe. They would illustrate that in Lyon almost all the Dutch-Paris addresses were in the same neighborhood, but in Paris and Brussels they were scattered all over. The map would show how far a resister might have had to walk from his or her apartment to a train station to meet fugitives or to another resister’s apartment for a meeting. It might even show the most obvious routes that resister might have taken.

But a map does not show how narrow the streets were or how exposed intersections might be. They give no sense of the quiet of city streets when Read the rest of this entry »

The second reason that Dutch-Paris hesitated to take Allied aviators until January 1944 was that the German authorities considered helping aviators to be a much more serious offense than helping civilians. Helping an Allied service man was, after all, aiding and abetting an enemy soldier, at least from their perspective.

In addition, everyone in the Third Reich, including the families of German servicemen stationed in western Europe, suffered greatly under the Allies’ almost constant bombardment of Germany. The Germans considered Allied aircrews to be “Luftterroristen” or “air terrorists” who killed women and children.

German military intelligence, the Abwehr, had counter-espionage units dedicated to tracking down evading airmen and their helpers. These men were highly trained, professional and very successful. The penalties for captured helpers ranged from imprisonment to deportation to the concentration camps to death and often including torture along the way. These penalties could and sometimes did fall upon the helpers’ entire families including uncles and cousins.

It is not surprising, then, that the German officers who interrogated Dutch-Paris members after their arrests in February and March 1944 questioned them about Allied airmen. The round-ups caught Read the rest of this entry »

Right around this time in 1944 Dutch-Paris started taking downed Allied airmen to Spain.  Some of the men and women in the line who worked in Brussels and Paris had been wanting to do this for some time.  The problem had not been where to find aviators on the run.  Other resistance groups in the Netherlands, Belgium and France were eager to pass on aviators whom they had gathered up after their airplanes crashed.  The problem was that helping airmen was far more dangerous than helping Jews or resisters.

There were a couple of reasons for this.  In the first place, Allied airmen were foreigners who looked and acted like foreigners.  This wasn’t as true for British fliers, but it certainly held true for Americans.  Without meaning to, they stuck out.  Here’s a story from the liberation of Maastricht that demonstrates how attuned civilians were to strangers in their midst.

In September 1944, no one could say when the Allies would arrive in Maastricht, but there were signs of their approach.  Most of the German left town, blowing the bridges over the Maas behind them.  Local boys who belonged to a Dutch partisan group that camped a few miles away in Belgium Read the rest of this entry »

In 1944-45 my father lived on the eastern side of the river in Maastricht, not far from the railway station and the Bailey bridge that the US Army slung across the Maas for heavy artillery and troops on their way to Germany. He and all the other kids in the neighborhood had a lot to watch, and plenty of time to do it before the schools reopened.

Not surprisingly, that bridge had its own anti-aircraft battery stationed right there in my father’s neighborhood. The unit cooked for itself. Sometimes they made doughnuts. These were the kind that are called cake donuts, fry cakes or sometimes cider donuts. They’re plain rings of a cake like dough of flour, baking powder, cinnamon, sugar, eggs and milk fried in oil until they’re crispy on the outside and cake-y on the inside. Every American has had them. They’re good for dunking in coffee or cider.

The Pied Piper himself could not have put out a more compelling call to the neighborhood children than the smell of frying doughnuts. Every time my father and every other kid downwind of the anti-aircraft guns came running toward the smell of doughnuts, the GI who was frying them up passed them out.

I can’t ask my grandmother, but there’s a good chance that she and the other mothers appreciated the gift of doughnuts given to their children even more than the kids who ate them did.

Happy Holidays to that American GI who shared the donuts with the local kids, and all his family, from a Dutch boy who still remembers the kindness, and all his family.

It didn’t take long for the businessmen in Dutch-Paris to figure out that all their careful vigilance in getting the best possible exchange rates and diligence in raising donations from themselves and others could not pay for hiding people indefinitely or escorting other fugitives out of occupied territory. The black market food, rents, clandestine health care, clothing and train tickets for hundreds of people simply cost too much.

They needed the kind of money that only a government could provide. The problem was not so much in convincing the Dutch government-in-exile and Queen Wilhelmina in London to support Dutch fugitives in France and Belgium as it was in getting the money to the resisters who were helping those in need in occupied territory. It had to be in cash in the local currency to be of any practical use, but the German occupation authorities had disrupted the usual banking system. You could not wire large amounts of money from London to Paris during the war.

Various members of the line came up with various schemes to circumvent the legally authorized exchange system, all of which boiled down to one idea. The resisters in France and Belgium would get a loan in local currency from some local individual in town. The government would pay the loan back after the Allies won the war. Obviously, they came up with this idea after the German army lost at Stalingrad and it began to look like the Allies might actually win the war. The more certain that became, the easier it was to raise the loans.

A few members of Dutch-Paris did indeed “loan” Read the rest of this entry »

The question of getting money across borders during the occupation that Weidner solved with postage stamps in the last blog post bedeviled other Dutch-Paris resisters and, indeed, the whole line. They came up with a number of arrangements that added up to a private, clandestine banking system that stretched from the Netherlands through Belgium and France to Switzerland.

These things started on a small scale between family members. For example, a Dutchman whom we’ll call Joseph lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium, while his father, a retired colonel, lived in Maastricht, the Netherlands. When family friends decided to leave the Netherlands illegally because they were Jews, the Colonel offered his son’s help. Because Jews were not allowed to take themselves or any currency out of the country, the Jewish family gave the Colonel a certain sum in Dutch guilders. When they arrived in Brussels, Joseph took the equivalent amount in Belgian francs out of his own bank account to give to the fugitives. Of course they made this exchange at the legal, official exchange rate, which was the most favorable one for the fugitives but was unavailable to most civilians. Joseph and his father held themselves to the highest ethical standards while breaking the law, a common enough paradox for resisters.

Being an insurance agent with seven children at home, Joseph soon Read the rest of this entry »

The restrictions and shortages of living under German occupation during the Second World War brought out an impressive creativity among otherwise ordinary and law-abiding citizens. In fact, the whole story of how Dutch-Paris operated an escape line and rescued so many people could be seen as an exercise in creativity, but here’s a smaller, more personal example.

The leader of Dutch-Paris, John Henry Weidner, was living in Paris when the war started. His parents and youngest sister were living in the Netherlands. Now, Papa Weidner was a retired Seventh-day Adventist pastor who taught and translated Greek and Latin. He had a limited income. His son, on the other hand, was doing well selling textiles, at least early in the war.

John Weidner wanted to send money to his parents and sister in the Netherlands. But how? Doing so legally involved a great deal of paperwork and considerable taxes and fees. Even getting a postcard to his parents legally took time and a certain amount of double entendre to get it past the censor.

So Weidner sent his father Read the rest of this entry »

The last post discussed why the vast majority of people who were “patriots in their hearts,” and so disposed towards the resistance, did not join it. Many surely feared the consequences if they were caught, which could reasonably be expected to include torture and deportation to the concentration camps. Others who may have been willing to risk the physical consequences nonetheless might never have had the opportunity or the skills to join.

It should be mentioned that women faced additional obstacles to joining the resistance. Many had family obligations that kept them homebound, of course. And just keeping a home going took much more time and effort during the war because of all the rationing and standing in line.

Some women also encountered straight forward chauvinism. There was one young Dutch-Paris leader in Brussels who refused to let women Read the rest of this entry »

The leader of Dutch-Paris, John Henry Weidner, wrote shortly after the war that for every 50 Dutch expatriates in France and Belgium during the war whom he knew to be patriots in their hearts, only one resisted. The other 49 did not collaborate. They probably even sympathized with the resistance and maybe turned a blind eye here and there in favor of resistance activity. But they did not commit themselves to acting against the occupying forces.

Why did so few patriots join the resistance? Most obviously, resisting meant risking your life. The 50 expatriates to whom Weidner referred were not soldiers. They were men and women of every age and station, and they had good reason to fear torture and/or execution at the hands of the Gestapo and their ilk if they were captured as resisters.

Some might have been willing to risk themselves but had responsibilities and obligations that they were not willing to risk. The decision to resist becomes much more complicated when you have young children or elderly parents relying on you, or if Read the rest of this entry »