How to Flee the Gestapo

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, especially in America, we tend to forget how important the railways were during the Second World War. We remember them in the horrific image of cattle cars rolling toward Auschwitz or as targets for bombing runs. But we forget that everyone relied on them every day.

By the end of the war only the Germans, the police, doctors and collaborators had legal access to gasoline. If you’re remembering films of resisters hanging off the sides of vehicles waving sub-machine guns, that was at the Liberation. During the Occupation, ordinary people either walked, got on a bicycle, hitched a horse up to a cart, found a bus running on a wood conversion engine, or took a train or a tram.

There were a lot more trains and trams running in western Europe in the early 1940’s than there are now, and many of them ran on steam, belching out grey smoke and scattering smut as they went. Belgian had an enviably dense network of public transportation. The Pyrenees had regular service on lines that have since been overgrown and even turned into roads for automobiles.

The slower a train went and the more local stops it made, the less likely it was to be controlled by anyone, let alone Germans. Or the inspectors might be looking for free-loaders riding without a ticket or for smugglers. That meant that resisters and other fugitives riding with a paid ticket and without any illegal butter in their pockets could pass inspection without any worries. The authorities did, however, control the main lines that ran between, say, Brussels and Paris or Geneva and Toulouse. But not every day and not every train. If you weren’t sure whether a particular train would be controlled, it was best to get on a crowded train in the middle because inspectors started at the ends. Obviously, the more people on the train, the more slowly the inspectors moved through it, giving the people in the middle time to hear about the controllers and take evasive action.

Dutch-Paris and other Resistance lines relied on these trains and trams just as much as everyone else. In fact, Dutch-Paris’ couriers and leaders purchased railway subscriptions that entitled them to discounts on their train tickets. After trips in France and Belgium, John Weidner reported on the state of the lines (increasingly broken due to sabotage and bombing) and morale among passengers (declining among Germans) to the Dutch military attaché in Switzerland.

Dutch-Paris used trams or local trains in Belgium to get fugitives from the Dutch border to Brussels. Then they found it simpler and safer to use the main line night train from Brussels to Paris. They used the main line night train again to move fugitives between Paris and Toulouse or the Alps and Toulouse. From Toulouse to the Pyrenees, they used local trains. The Gestapo tended to be regrettably zealous on the main line running east to west at the base of the Pyrenees, so it was best to take the slow train there.
More on trains in the next post….

Although, as an historian, I remain astounded by the vast amount of documentation about Dutch-Paris now available in various archives, a lay person could be forgiven for thinking that rather a lot of the details have been lost. For example, the details of how, exactly, the pastor recruited a café owner to act as a “post box” for the line, or even when, are missing from the existing documents. There are a number of reasons for such lapses.

1. The information was forgotten at the time because it was considered either too insignificant or too dangerous to remember, especially in written form. The pastor, for instance, never wrote down the café owner’s name for fear it would lead to an arrest. Then, under the weight of years of clandestine activity, he simply forgot how it happened in the first place.

2. The information was written down during the war, but the papers were either destroyed or captured. This happened with most lists of people helped by Dutch-Paris. For instance, when Klaus Barbie arrested the Dutch consul in Lyon, the consul’s secretary very understandably burned any compromising papers she could find. In Brussels, the German security services captured not only 10 aviators and 6 Dutch resisters but also all those resisters’ forgery supplies and what they always called their “archives.”

3. Immediately after the war, the people who knew the information didn’t write it down. For instance, in the mid-1940’s, the Americans and British did quite a bit of investigating in order to reward people who helped aviators during the war. Such people submitted reports to the British and Americans that described how they helped airmen. But no one asked them for reports about how they helped Jews, so they never wrote that down. Or if they did, the reports didn’t end up in an archive.

4. Some of the documents that were written during the war have been lost. The Gestapo, for instance, deliberately burned their own files. The personal papers of a Dutch-Paris leader in Brussels appear to have been misfiled by the archive to which they were confided and are effectively lost. Obviously, it’s impossible to say how much detail is in such “lost” archives, but there is undoubtedly some.

5. The people who knew the information did not survive the war in order to record it. Every member of Dutch-Paris who perished in the concentration camps took his or her resistance secrets to the grave. No one knew everything about the line, not even John Weidner. No one wanted to know more than necessary for fear of betraying others under torture.

There’s nothing surprising in the fact that many of the details of a complicated Resistance line such as Dutch-Paris have been lost. What is amazing is that so many can be reconstructed out of the archives. Perhaps we will never know how the pastor recruited the café owner, but we don’t really need to know that. It’s enough, and impressive enough, to know that that particular café owner did that particular job until she was arrested on such and such a date at such and such a place under such and such charges but that another café owner replaced her as the Dutch-Paris “post box” until the liberation.

Here’s one of the more dramatic stories of how an Engelandvaarder came into contact with Dutch-Paris. It concerns a Dutch man, whom we’ll call Bruno, who was already married with small children when the war started. Fairly early on, in 1941, he got a message that the Gestapo was on his trail for his Resistance activities.

Bruno decided to leave the Netherlands in order to join the Dutch army in England. But first he faked his own drowning so that the Germans wouldn’t harass his wife and so that she would receive a pension from the widows’ and orphans’ fund. He did this with the help of a fisherman and a few trustworthy bureaucrats.

Before he left he had heard that any Dutchman arrested in France would be treated as a spy on Radio Oranje (the Dutch service of the BBC, listening to which was harshly punished by the Germans). So when he was arrested in southern France, Bruno pretended to be playing without a full deck.

He did it to hide the fact that he intended to join the Allied armies, but it led him to 14 months imprisonment. All those long months he feared that he might really go insane. He must have been only adequately convincing as a madman, though, because the French kept him at the Fortress of Montluc in Lyon for three months under suspicion of being an English or German [!] spy. They finally put him in an internment camp for politically unreliable foreigners. The Dutch consul in Lyon found him there and put him in contact with John Weidner. Bruno kept up his crazy masquerade because he was afraid that if the Germans ever found out he wanted to join the Allied military they would take reprisals against his family.

Again, he wasn’t wholly convincing although he lied enough that he felt he owed Weidner an apology for it after the war was over. Weidner got him to Spain with the help of the Dutch consuls in Perpignan and Toulouse before that route closed at the end of 1942.

The Dutch government-in-exile, however, decided that Bruno was much more useful to the Allied war effort in Curacao, where he could organize shipping in the West Indies, than as a soldier. He didn’t see his wife and children again until late 1945 when he was finally able to arrange berths for them on a ship coming from the Netherlands to Curacao.

There was a shortage of accurate information during the war, especially among resisters who by necessity used layers of false names and subterfuge to protect themselves. Rumors abounded in the Resistance, nowhere more so, I suspect, than in the prisons and concentration camps where resisters tried to figure out what went wrong.

In the case of Dutch-Paris, there was a young Dutchman living in Paris during the war whom we’ll call Tony. Tony acted as a liaison of sorts between Dutch-Paris and another Dutch escape line and was one of those charmed resisters who had a knack for just missing being arrested. That happened again in February 1944 when so many members of Dutch-Paris did not escape arrest.

After the survivors returned from the concentration camps, a small group insisted that Tony had betrayed them even after another individual confessed to having given everyone’s names under torture.

Why did these survivors insist that Tony had betrayed them? Was it just that they didn’t believe in the coincidence of Tony not being arrested when they were? Was it because the most influential member of that group had never liked Tony in the first place? It might have been partly for these reasons, but it was undoubtedly also because of what happened a few nights before the big round-up.

Around 10:30pm, which was very late in blacked-out, curfew-restricted Paris, a tall Dutch looking man calling himself Tony rang the doorbell of a woman we’ll call Micheline, who fed and lodged fugitives for Dutch-Paris. He asked for another member of the group by name, and when Micheline acted surprised, the stranger rattled off a few more names of Dutch-Paris members.

Upset by this encounter, Micheline told one of the people “Tony” had asked for about it the next day. She replied that, because he was tall, sounded Dutch, and knew people’s names, it must have been the Tony who worked with Dutch-Paris. After they had all been arrested (except Tony and some others) a few days later, Micheline saw the stranger from walking freely around Gestapo headquarters. From this she deduced that Tony had betrayed them. It’s unlikely that she kept her suspicions to herself during the long months in Fresnes prison and Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Micheline survived to return to an empty apartment in the summer of 1945. She told John Weidner her suspicions. Weidner was one of the people who escaped the round-up in February 1944 and had taken command of the Netherlands Security Service in France and Belgium in November 1944. He had made it his business to find out why his people had been arrested and was convinced that Tony was innocent. He introduced Tony to Micheline, who admitted that she had never seen him before. The stranger at her door was some other Tony, who undoubtedly knew the address and names because the courier had already given them under torture by that date.

The damage to Tony’s reputation was done, though. He was so upset at the accusations of treason that he volunteered for the Dutch military and spent the next few years in Indonesia.

It’s well known that the Germans plundered the Occupied Territories to support their war effort and their own home front. You think of occupying troops seizing the contents of an entire grain silo or shipping the entire production of a factory directly to Germany. And the theft of the great works of art to satisfy top Nazis is well known, as is the theft of the furnishings of Jewish homes after the arrests of the families who lived in them.

The extent and petty detail of such plundering, however, is less well known. The German security services routinely emptied out the homes of suspected resisters as soon as they arrested them, long before any potential trial or decision on their case would be made. Among the members of Dutch-Paris who survived the concentration camps, many returned to empty homes. The Germans even took the refrigerator out of one apartment in Paris. They took money and jewelry, of course, but also clothing, furniture, household linens, postage stamps and food.

When they arrested the Dutch consul in Lyon in February 1944, the Gestapo or their minions – none of the bystanders were asking too many questions at the time – confiscated 1,295 tins of sardines. The sardines had been purchased by the Dutch government in exile and sent to southern France via the Red Cross in Portugal. It had been done legally with all the requisite paperwork. Despite the barrage of official complaints, however, the German authorities in France refused to either return or pay for the sardines.

After all, those sardines meant a great deal to the Dutch families hiding in southern France who had little access to food, but they were hardly a Rembrandt or the wine cellar of a chateau. They were just a few more boxes of things meant to disappear into the “night and fog” along with the men and women who had owned them.

Allied aviators who bailed out over occupied territory and successfully returned to the UK had to answer a lot of questions when they got back to their bases. The engineers, for instance, wanted to know what had happened to their aircraft. Intelligence officers wanted to know about conditions on the ground in continental Europe. And a small unit, whose mission it was to assist POWs and evaders, wanted to know exactly how the evader had made it back home.

When asked what advice they would give to other evaders, some said to do everything your helpers told you to do out of respect for the danger the helpers were putting themselves into for your sake. Others said that helpers tended to get too fond of “their Americans” and want them to stay until the invasion (whenever that would be). These impatient aviators recommended moving on despite the helpers’ advice. They also advised against giving out the passport photos airmen sometimes carried as souvenirs because they might be needed for false documents later. (Although they might as well have given them away, most of the photos that airmen carried were the wrong size or the wrong degree of formality and therefore useless in false documents.)

Evaders also recommended traveling alone rather than in a group; avoiding travel at night when the curfew made anyone on the roads suspect, and jumping off moving trains from the right side of the train. Many of the evaders mentioned that German soldiers didn’t seem to see aviators very well. Time and again, Germans patrolled past airmen squatting behind a tree or lying behind three measly rows of beans without discovering them.

The top advice of all successful evaders, however, was not to give up your GI shoes or flying boots because you think they’re too conspicuous. Dye your boots black, they advised, because French shoes were too small and had soles made out of cardboard. French shoes were wholly inadequate to climbing the Pyrenees in any weather and made escape into Spain even more difficult than it already was. Dutch and Belgian shoes wouldn’t have been any better and may have been worse. None of the evaders put it quite this way, but to a man they all implied that it would have been better to have been caught by the Germans because you were wearing good boots than to have crossed the continent and the Pyrenees in wartime European shoes.

Of course the escape and evasion reports that I read were all written by men who had made it across the Pyrenees without their GI footwear, so their advice on the matter may have had more to do with frostbite and regret than safety.

Circumstances often played a capricious role in how an individual came to join the Resistance and where in the Resistance he or she ended up. Take, for example, the story of a young Dutchman (born 1918) whom we’ll call Bob.

Bob began the war as a student at the engineering school in Delft until the Germans closed it down in response to student protests. Bob spent that summer working in a mine then resumed his studies at the University of Amsterdam. In November 1942 he decided to leave for Spain because one of the Jewish friends he’d been helping was arrested. Unfortunately, the Feldgendarmerie (German military police) caught him at Turnhout (Belgium) and sent him to the prison in Haren (The Netherlands). After a month or so he avoided being sent to Germany as a laborer because of “outside interference.” That might mean that his father bribed someone, but the documents don’t say.

Bob returned to his studies in time for a razzia in Amsterdam during which the Grüne Polizei and NSB (German police and Dutch collaborators) arrested all the men between 18 and 30 that they could find. They found Bob Read the rest of this entry »

This is the story of a French man, born in 1898, who created an intelligence network specializing in information about German troop movements and the location of the launching sites for V1 and V2 rockets. He wasn’t involved with Dutch-Paris, although the two networks had people in common.

Our man had been wounded and gassed in the First World War and was too old to serve in the second war. Shortly after the French defeat in 1940 he started a gazogène business, demonstrating both a clear grasp of reality and excellent forethought. Gazogènes converted gasoline burning engines into wood burning engines. By the end of the war the Germans reserved what little petroleum was left in Europe for themselves. If the French wanted to travel by car, they needed a gazogène.

Naturally, our man had to travel quite a bit to build his new business. One day in 1941, when he had been caught trying to cross the demarcation line illegally, he overheard some Germans discussing military matters. Because our man spoke fluent German, he understood what they were saying. And that gave him the idea to become a spy. Read the rest of this entry »

One day in December 1943 a 21 year-old woman whom we’ll call Marie-France received a visit from her downstairs neighbor who worked at the nearby train station – the gare du nord – and whom we’ll call Dodo. He introduced her to another middle-aged man he called Felix, who was the Paris chief for Dutch-Paris.

Dodo told Marie-France that he had found a very good job for her, if she wanted it. She told him that she liked her job and had no intention of leaving it. But he persisted, saying that she would make a lot of money because it was a question of working for the Germans at the gare du nord. Marie-France shot back: “I’d rather hang myself than work for those people.” Felix laughed and said “violà, that’s what we need.” Then he told her about Dutch-Paris.

Because her fondest dream was to help the Allies, she quit her job and started working full time for Dutch-Paris. She ran a lot Read the rest of this entry »

On 21 July 1943, the Italian civil affairs officer for Haute-Savoie (France) called the head of the Swiss visa bureau in Annemasse (France) into his office to warn the 63 year-old Swiss citizen that he had been denounced by an Italian Fascist living in Geneva. We’ll call the Swiss bureaucrat Mr. S. The Italian Fascist had accused Mr S of carrying intelligence over the Franco-Swiss border for the English consul in Geneva. Being a careful man, Mr S wrote up a report of this interview for his superior and left it in his office in Geneva with instructions for his son to deliver it should anything happen to him.

Nothing did happen until 9 August 1943 when a dubious individual showed up at the visa bureau in Annemasse. This person told Mr S that Lyon was in terror because the Gestapo was making mass arrests and that a certain Mr. B had had to go into hiding. He claimed that he had been sent to tell Mr S to take this message to “the people you know” and showed him a medallion with the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of the French Resistance led by de Gaulle). Mr S. claimed he had no idea whatsoever what the man was talking about. The man left and Mr S continued with his paperwork until 1:00pm, when he went down the street to have coffee at the home of some friends.

He noticed the dubious individual lurking in the street, but continued on his way. As he was hanging up his hat at his friends’, the doorbell rang. His hostess came back saying that she’d told the men to see Mr S at his office but they’d followed her inside. The three men in civilian clothes drew their pistols and Read the rest of this entry »