How to Flee the Gestapo

A number of readers have asked me about their relatives who were involved in Dutch escape lines during the war. So in this season when we think about our families, I offer to everyone the advice I’ve given to them.

First, please remember that I do not use anyone’s true name in this blog except John Henry Weidner’s. Every other name is a pseudonym (schuilnaam, nom de guerre). The stories in this blog are all true, but you cannot know that any one story is about your relative.

Second, it’s not easy to find traces of resisters in the archives. The good news is that 10 years ago it was well nigh impossible. Now you at least have a chance because of changes in archival laws and the establishment of new archives.

Third, the records are uneven, to say the least. There simply are no records for some people. This might be because they died during the war or because they refused to ever fill out any forms after the war. Ironically, there are almost no files on JH Weidner because he was so well known as a famous resister in 1944-1946. Some files have one sheet of paper with, say, a name and birth date. Other files have years’ of correspondence and gendarmerie reports. I once spent months getting permission to see a particular file, flew to France, took a train, rented a car, found an archive in the middle of nowhere and only then discovered Read the rest of this entry »

Although the German army did its best to lock down Occupied Europe and control the movements of the population, there was a surprising amount of room for maneuver for those with the character to find it. Take, for instance, the story of a young Dutchman we’ll call Bob.

When the Germans started rounding up Jews like himself in June 1942, the eighteen-year-old Bob left the Netherlands with a friend. The two of them made their own way across the border into Belgium, across Belgium and into France, across the Demarcation Line and to Lyon. There they looked for help at the Dutch consulate, and met John Henry Weidner. The consulate helped them with identification documents, ration coupons and the like while they waited for three more friends,.

The three friends, a couple and a bachelor who were almost old enough to be the young men’s parents, arrived in Lyon within a couple of weeks. They all negotiated clandestine passage to Switzerland with a Read the rest of this entry »

Although the German army did its best to lock down Occupied Europe and control the movements of the population, there was a surprising amount of room for maneuver for those with the character to find it. Take, for instance, the story of a young Dutchman we’ll call Bob.

When the Germans started rounding up Jews like himself in June 1942, the eighteen-year-old Bob left the Netherlands with a friend. The two of them made their own way across the border into Belgium, across Belgium and into France, across the Demarcation Line and to Lyon. There the Dutch consulate helped them with identification documents, ration coupons and the like while they waited for three more friends.

When the three friends, who were almost old enough to be their parents, arrived, they all negotiated clandestine passage to Switzerland with a professional passeur. The man charged an outrageous sum, but Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy enough to imagine the agonizing dilemma of a Jewish family or a resister who needed to find a passeur to Spain or Switzerland. Obviously, their first choice would be to go with a resistance line like Dutch-Paris, if only they could find one. Failing that, they would have to pay a passeur and hope that they had entrusted themselves to an honest businessman rather than a criminal who intended to hand them over to the Germans or abandon them on a glacier.

But what we don’t often consider is the situation of a prospective passeur. Imagine that you know a good way into Switzerland or Spain and would really like to defy the Germans by helping their enemies escape. It’s possible that if you simply stay put fugitives will find you and ask for help. But maybe not. In that case, there are two problems.

The first problem is security. You could go to a café near the big train station and see if anyone needs help. But what if the people claiming to need help are really German agents provocateurs? Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous post I shared the reflections of Frits, a Dutch university student who smuggled Jews and Engelandvaarders over the border from the Netherlands into Belgium for Dutch-Paris. As far as passeurs go, Frits was unusual. Generally speaking, you can divide up passeurs into three classes: volunteers, professionals and criminals.

Frits was a volunteer who accepted no payment for helping the persecuted to cross a border from one country to another. He was unusual among volunteers in that he did not live on the border and had not grown up on the border. On the Swiss border it was possible for a passeur to literally live on the border, with the front door in France and the garden gate in Switzerland. But most volunteer passeurs lived close to the border and possibly had perfectly legal passes to cross it. Perhaps they lived in Belgium but worked in the Dutch city of Maastricht, or they lived in France but owned fields in Switzerland or went to university in Geneva. Such men and women were unquestionably part of the Resistance.

The second class of passeurs were the professionals: men (mostly) who charged clients for showing them the way over a border. Some of these men made their living by smuggling and simply changed Read the rest of this entry »

A small handful of the men and women who risked their lives in their early 20’s as part of Dutch-Paris returned to the crusade to preserve humanitarian values in their retirement. Fortunately, Europe was not once again under occupation. But they felt that young people did not understand what had happened in World War II and, more importantly, that it could happen again. So they gave interviews to oral historians about their roles in the Resistance or they gave lectures about it, mostly to student groups.

One of them, a Dutchman whom we’ll call Frits, acted as a passeur. He smuggled many people, including Jews and Engelandvaarders (young men wanting to join the Allied military) over the border from the Netherlands to Belgium and often all the way to Brussels. He also carried documents back into the Netherlands and sometimes brought the luggage of people who could not carry their own suitcases as they sprinted through the border zone.

Fritz stressed that he and his colleagues were rank amateurs. They were university students who didn’t like what was going on and were willing to do something about it. He and his friends thought about carrying guns but Read the rest of this entry »

Although Allied governments certainly tried to organize and control “The Resistance”, especially the armed Resistance, it was a fundamentally grass-roots movement. You became a resister by taking action where you thought necessary and putting yourself at risk. That holds true for people who started resistance work because a friend or acquaintance asked them for help. As a result “The Resistance” included large scale and even international organizations such as Dutch-Paris as well as individuals working entirely on their own. The French government recognized this by granting pensions and honors to a whole category of “non-affiliated resisters” whose actions outside of any known network could be documented and verified.

In my research I have come across at least two women who spent years helping fugitives in France without belonging to any Resistance group. Once of these was a Mme K who ran a family boarding house in Paris. Her last name and her story suggest that she or her husband may have had family ties to Belgium.

Starting in 1940 a priest from an international order which had a mother house on the rue des Sèvres in Paris sent young men to Read the rest of this entry »

The last post showed photos of some of the places that Dutch-Paris used in Lyon, France. Dutch-Paris was hardly the only Resistance group operating in Lyon; they weren’t even the only Dutch resisters in the city. But the circle of people willing to risk themselves in the humanitarian resistance was small enough that the Dutch engaged in rescuing Jews and other persecuted people in Lyon knew about each other and cooperated even if they did not all belong to the same group.

Humanitarian efforts among the Dutch in Lyon centered on the Dutch consulate there, which was a natural destination for fugitives who had made their own way into Vichy France. Weidner met many of the people whom Dutch-Paris escorted to Switzerland through the consulate. But Weidner was not the only Dutch expatriate living in the Lyonnais who Read the rest of this entry »

Before Dutch-Paris existed, John Weidner started his Resistance work by helping Dutch Jews who made their own way to Lyon. Weidner and a French friend owned a textile shop there on the rue du Griffon. He himself had to abandon that shop in September 1943 when the Gestapo came calling for him there. But Dutch Jews were using it for shelter as late as February 1944. It was a small shop on a narrow street running uphill from the large plaza in front of the grand mairie (city hall). Today it looks like this and lies just around the corner from a police station.

Being a bachelor whose parents and sisters lived in different occupation zones, Weidner lived in a hotel on the rue Sainte Catherine, a short walk from his shop. Weidner traveled extensively for the import/export branch of the business, so he probably wasn’t home very often. He used both the hotel and his usual business travel to build and run Dutch-Paris. This is what the front of the hotel looks like today.

Many of the Dutch Jews whom Weidner and his colleagues helped did not know Weidner before they arrived in Lyon. Instead, they went to the Dutch consulate or its refugee assistance office in this solid building on the rue de la Bourse. The consulate offered money, legal assistance and help navigating the requirements of French law and bureaucracy. Occasionally the staff sent people to Weidner with the hint that he could get people into Switzerland, which, of course, he could.

All of these buildings and the lodgings of the most active member s of Dutch-Paris in Lyon lay in the Presqu’île neighborhood of the city between the rivers Saône and Rhône. This was mostly just coincidence, but it did make running a clandestine organization easier at a time when ordinary people used public transportation or their feet to get around and curfews made being on the streets at night dangerous. Fortunately for our resisters, many of the trains they used ran in and out of the small gare du Perrache at the tip of the Presqu’île. It’s not such a long walk from that station to any of the Dutch-Paris places, but it would have been an almost impossibly long walk from the gare du Lyon that today’s travelers use, especially after curfew.

The Presqu'ile of Lyon from across the Saone

In the last post I said that two categories of government agencies started collecting the history of the Resistance immediately after the war. The first were those bureaucracies charged with distributing pensions, medical benefits and the like to resisters. Before disbursing any money, however, they first established each resister’s bona fides. Those files are a treasure trove of information about how the Resistance functioned, but the bureaucracies kept them to themselves until very recently.

The second category of government agency that was gathering information about the Resistance was officially sponsored historical institutes dedicated to the war. Of course, they were interested in many aspects of the war in their own country, but the Resistance loomed large in their investigations, especially in the early years. In France the Comité d’Histoire du deuxième Guerre mondiale (CH2GM, Committee for the History of the Second World War) had correspondents in every department. These correspondents had privileged access to archives to answer questions posed in Paris and many of their reports remained inaccessible until recently.
In the Netherlands the Rijks Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Royal Institute for War Documentation) now the NIOD instituut voor oorlogs-, holocaust- en genocidestudies (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), sent investigators to carry out interviews and gather documents to figure out what had happened during the war. Its director, Lou de Jong, wrote a multi-volume history of the war in the Netherlands based on those investigations. It has become a national depository for non-governmental documents about the war such as diaries and family photographs.

If you add these two war-specific sources of documentation – the pension paying bureaucracies and the historical institutes – to the garden variety government archives that house Read the rest of this entry »