How to Flee the Gestapo

Here’s another example of  social connections among members of Dutch-Paris that were established before the war. Sometimes people recruited others for their resistance network from among the people they worked with.

There was a man in eastern Belgium, for example, who worked for a government bureau that allowed him to travel from place to place in the fulfillment of his professional duties. This was true for police officers, doctors and clergy, of course. But it was also true for people who did things like inspect and repair roads and bridges. After all, the occupation lasted five years and it was in the best interests of the occupation forces to Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been discussing the practical consequences for resistance networks like Dutch-Paris of the fact that they could not openly recruit or advertise for the best candidates without being arrested and worse. One of these consequences was that everything they did went by word of mouth or gut instinct, meaning that many people came into contact with Dutch-Paris by referral.

As a researcher it’s very hard to trace the pathways made by such referrals because the documents don’t discuss them. Official reports or forms didn’t require a resister to explain how they came to be part of their network. They tended to ask about actions. Most of the interview type documents didn’t ask the question either. But there were definitely circles of connections outside of resistance among the men and women in Dutch-Paris. Some I uncovered. Some I can guess at. And I’m confident there are others I have no idea of.

Here’s an example. There were a number of Dutch Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about how resistance lines, especially escape lines, were vulnerable because they had to trust strangers and were always in need of more help and more resources. Resisters knew this. They knew that they literally put their lives in someone else’s hands when they trusted them with their identity. But in a clandestine organization their only choice was to trust their guts about the character of strangers or to rely on referrals from people they did know.

The leaders of Dutch-Paris happened to be remarkably good judges of other people’s characters. They had serious doubts about some of the men who were later revealed to be working for the Germans and refused to work with them. They created very good security measures and followed them. But they had a problem unique to rescue organizations. Dutch-Paris existed to help the persecuted. Not just the persecuted whom they personally knew but the persecuted of any nation or faith.

As a clandestine organization they had to rely on the persecuted to Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about how resistance networks’ inability to vet recruits and those they helped made them vulnerable. Their constant need for more help and more resources also made them vulnerable, if only because it might force them to trust someone they were not 100% sure about. This combination made resisters vulnerable to German agents, some of whom were local people in the pay of the occupation authorities and some of whom were officers of German police authorities.

The German military police, the Abwehr, took great interest in Allied activity in occupied areas including the whereabouts and evasion of downed Allied aviators. They knew that there were civilians helping such aviators to evade capture and were determined to stop it. That’s why the life expectancy of an escape line was measured in months, and not many of them.

One of these Abwehr officers hired locals to infiltrate resistance networks but also went into the field himself under the name of Eugene. He relied on his employees to make the first contact with resisters and then introduce him as another resister with access to radio contact to London and false documents.

This is how it worked in the case of Dutch-Paris. One of the line’s couriers went Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our discussion of the hazards of having to trust strangers for a resistance line. It was possible that the authorities might capture someone the line was helping and get information out of that person. It was also a very real possibility that a German agent might infiltrate an escape line by pretending to be a downed Allied aviator.

But the most serious danger and the one that caused the most damage was the German agents who infiltrated resistance lines by pretending to be resisters. Many of these agents were not themselves German but were French or Belgian or Dutch men or women being paid by the Germans to betray their countrymen and women.

Dutch-Paris itself did not fall victim to Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post we talked about how resisters had to rely on their gut instincts or on referrals to judge whether to trust someone. In the case of an escape line such as Dutch-Paris, they had to trust strangers to work with and to help. But it made any resistance network vulnerable.
The German occupation authorities were very aware of this vulnerability among resisters and especially in escape lines. They exploited it expertly and efficiently to infiltrate the networks.

One of the better known ploys used by German military police was to send false aviators through an escape line. The idea was that a German agent would pretend to be a downed Allied aviator all the way through the line to Spain. In Spain he would Read the rest of this entry »

Rescuing people from the Nazis and their ilk was dangerous and illegal work. Everything had to be done clandestinely, which meant that the rescuers had to either trust their gut instinct about working with or helping strangers or they had to go by referral. It’s not like they could advertise in the paper and ask for three letters of recommendation.

This fundamental fact of resistance had several consequences. The most dire was that it made resistance networks vulnerable to the enemy. As an example, the Comité was helping a Jewish man hide in Brussels. The man was able-bodied and willing to risk walking through the streets each month to collect the new ration cards and money that his family would use in hiding for the next month.

But one month he and every other pedestrian on the street walked into a trap. The occupation authorities often cordoned off Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I mentioned that the Dutch remember the last winter of the war, 1944/45, as the Hunger Winter. In September 1944 the Allies liberated the southern third of the Netherlands but failed to liberate the rest of the country where most of the populace lived. The Allied advance pushed eastward into The Third Reich, leaving most of the Dutch people under the control of angry and fanatical Nazi occupation authorities. In a vicious response to the uncooperative attitude of much of the Dutch populace, the Nazi authorities cut off food supplies to civilians. They barricaded and guarded warehouses.

Civilians made long treks out of the big cities and urban areas by foot and by bicycle to hunt down and barter for food in farming regions.  Nevertheless, tens of thousands starved to death. When the Allies arrived in early May 1945 they found most of the population on the verge of starvation.

As desperate as not having enough food or fuel during the coldest winter anyone could remember was, the Dutch people still had to navigate the dangers of Read the rest of this entry »

By the time the Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945, most of the urban trees in parks and along streets had been cut down – often illegally – for firewood.

The war years were cold. Every year of rationing made civilians more malnourished and more shabbily dressed. Every winter fuel rations decreased and supplemental sources of heating and cooking fuel, such as trees, disappeared.  Each winter was more severe than the last while the people were less able to withstand the cold. But whether they had warm boots or enough food to eat, they had to stand outside in lines for their rations.

Bitter cold marked the last winter of the war, what the Dutch remember sorrowfully as The Hunger Winter for the man-made famine imposed by the Occupier.  In liberated Belgium and France the resisters of Dutch-Paris shivered along with the rest of the general population.  Except for those of them who had been arrested before the liberation and deported to concentration camps. With scarcely enough food to cling to life and dressed in rags, the Third Reich’s political prisoners labored in the elements and stood for hours in the open, freezing air. They endured beyond the limits of endurance.

But winter does not take sides. Soldiers on both sides of the battle lines froze to death. German women and children stumbled ahead of the rampaging Red Army on frostbitten feet as the Soviets moved through Prussia towards Berlin.

It was war – the product of human machinations – that caused the suffering of millions during that harsh winter of 1944/45. Without the war civilians and soldiers alike would have had the food, clothing, shelter and fuel that humans need to survive great cold. The winter would have been just as harsh, but far less deadly.  It’s the human concept of war and the actions humans take to prosecute war that is the enemy.

In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of false resisters making claims to having been in the resistance during the uncertain period of the Liberation.  It happened. Not often, but often enough that if you come across someone making claims that no one else in the resistance network verifies, you should treat those claims with caution.

There is, however, another, most honest, reason that a resister’s reports or testimony could be incorrect. Resistance was a highly dangerous, nerve wracking and secretive endeavor. The fewer people who knew something like an address and the fewer people in the network who each person knew, the safer it was for everybody. So resisters were operating on limited information.

But when a network was rounded up, the Gestapo and their colleagues tended to Read the rest of this entry »