How to Flee the Gestapo

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 »

Sometimes when I’m humming along in my research, thinking that I’m looking for innocuous facts like date of birth, I suddenly fall into a bog of accusations and counter-accusations, of activities that look very bad from one point of view but reasonable enough from another. It’s not unusual; the Second World War was custom made for such confusions. It was entirely possible for an authentic resister to have dealings with the enemy in order to shield his or her resistance work. To most of the world he or she looked like a collaborator rather than the courageous resister he or she really was.

I came across such a case in the Belgian archives while trying to determine how long a particular Dutch businessman had been living in Brussels. We’ll call him Joseph (b. 1907). It seems that Joseph moved to Belgium in 1942 in connection with a family business that supplied lumber to the German navy in Antwerp. The Belgians didn’t consider him necessary to the Belgian economy and asked the Germans to give him a pass back to the Netherlands, but the Germans declined.

The difficulty lies in Read the rest of this entry »

This is the story of how a young Jewish man joined Dutch-Paris. We’ll call him Joe. He was born in Berlin in 1921 but moved to Amsterdam with his family in 1928. The Nazis revoked his German citizenship while he was learning the textile trade. He didn’t belong to a Resistance group in the Netherlands but he found ways of getting false papers and false work documents to people in need because of his position at a textile firm in Appeldoorn.

In June 1943 he crossed the Belgian border on his own and found himself a room in a small pension in Brussels which didn’t require him to register. The Dutch pastor in Brussels introduced him to another member of the Comité which was the Belgian branch of Dutch-Paris. At that same meeting, Joe met a Dutch Engelandvaarder who was looking for a place to stay. Joe offered him hospitality and in return the Engelandvaarder introduced him to a couple of passeurs on the Dutch/Belgian border near Maastricht. Joe did some liaison work for the Comité.

On 2 August 1943, Joe received a letter from his sister saying that she and her parents were in danger and Read the rest of this entry »

Convoys of evaders walking over the Pyrenees to Spain worked on the same principle as convoys of ships crossing the Atlantic: it was safer to take one large group than many smaller groups. So Dutch, French, Belgian and Polish men wanting to join the Allied armies and downed aviators crossed in large groups of up to 30 made up of men of many nationalities who arrived in the foothills courtesy of different evasion lines including Dutch-Paris.

All these men would meet up in some clearing or hotel and walk on from there. Many of them started off from a certain “Hotel des Pyrénées.”  That hotel had a long career in the resistance, but the Germans eventually found out and surrounded it with heavy arms at 11:20 pm on 8 November 1943. Thirty evaders, including Engelandvaarders and downed aviators, a couple of mountain guides and the hotel owners were inside preparing for a convoy’s departure.

A lot of the Europeans and both guides managed to escape out the back windows. The sixty year-old landlady, however, was arrested and put into a German car parked in front of the hotel.  She took advantage of the dark and the fact that most of the Germans were busy pillaging her hotel to exit out the far side of the car, jump the wall and run through the neighbor’s garden to escape. She hid in the hills for a month until friends took her to the train in their car. She spent the rest of the war hiding in Paris. But, as she put it after the liberation, so many emotions gave her an attack, and she was paralyzed on one side.

Her husband died in a concentration camp in April 1945.

The Hotel des Pyrénées was out of business, but the guides moved their meeting place elsewhere and the evasions to Spain continued.

Sixty-nine years ago, on 5 November 1943, an American B-17 bomber crashed in the Netherlands not far from the North Sea. The plane had gone down so quickly that the crew didn’t have time to bail out. A couple were killed on impact; others seriously injured. Dutch civilians including a doctor arrived at the scene a few minutes before eight Germans pedaled up to take the Americans prisoner.

The Dutch police arrived about the same time and began a long argument with the Germans to the effect that because the Americans had crashed on Dutch soil they should be prisoners of the Dutch police. The Germans won that argument; shot over the heads of the crowd to disburse it, and marched the aviators to the village.  The doctor took the two seriously injured airmen to hospital under guard.

The Germans tried to interrogate their prisoners but got only name, rank and serial number in reply. So they put them in a third floor room without food or washing facilities and kept a close eye on them. One of the crew, the bombardier, who had been an enlisted man before the war, took charge of planning their escape. Fortunately for all of them, Read the rest of this entry »

The leader of Dutch-Paris, John Henry Weidner, was born 100 years ago today on 22 October 1912, in the Belgian city of Gent.  As the son and grandson of ministers, Weidner was raised to know right from wrong.  When they lived in Switzerland in the 1920’s, for example, Papa Weidner didn’t want his four children to attend school on Saturdays, the day on which Seventh-day Adventists observe the Sabbath. The Swiss authorities gave him the choice of either sending his children to school or himself to prison on Saturdays. Papa Weidner chose jail for himself.

After the family moved across the border to Collonges-sous-Salève, France, so that Papa Weidner could teach ancient languages at the Seventh-day Adventist seminary there, young John spent all the time he could in the mountains.  He spent many summers as a young man traveling throughout Belgium and France selling religious literature.  When the Germans invaded the Netherlands, John Weidner and a friend got as far as boarding a ship to England before the captain made them get off. They set up a textile shop in Lyon instead.

Because of its location in the Vichy zone close to Switzerland, Lyon acted as a great catchment center for refugees of all sorts during the war. Weidner and other devout Christians there resisted Nazism in various ways, some by printing clandestine newspapers, others by helping fugitives. Circumstances and one thing leading to another meant that John Weidner began to specialize in helping Dutch fugitives.  He began by helping the Dutch consuls in Vichy to aid the many Dutch refugees coming into southern France by sending food and clothing to Dutch Jews caught in Vichy’s notorious internment camps and writing endless official letters to get them out.

In 1942 business acquaintances who had fled the Netherlands asked him to Read the rest of this entry »

Most airmen got rid of their flying boots after their aircraft crashed on occupied territory. They were much better quality than any foot gear available on the Continent by 1943 and so would have immediately given away an evading airman to an even minimally observant policeman. But very few (short) Belgian or French farmers had a spare pair of shoes lying about that would fit a (tall) American.

So the aviators squeezed their feet into the best that could be found. But the best usually wasn’t good enough to walk over the Pyrenees into Spain, especially in the winter. So shoes had to be found at a time when shoes were rationed, and not usually available even with the coveted ration tickets.

Dutch-Paris solved the problem by Read the rest of this entry »

One hundred and twelve Allied airmen made it to Spain and on to England courtesy of Dutch-Paris, but they didn’t all join the escape line at the same point or even travel with their own crews. If, say, a B-24 Liberator bomber were attacked somewhere over Germany while on a bombing run, the pilot may have been able to make a run for England through the cloud cover. If the plane couldn’t make it that far, it could crash in the Netherlands, Belgium, France or the Atlantic ocean. Hopefully the crew would be able to bail out first. But some might not make it out of the airplane. Some might be captured when they landed. Those who made it safely to the ground would be scattered over some distance and might be picked up by friendly local people who had no connections to each other. It’s entirely likely that at least one member of the crew would be badly injured with, say, a broken ankle or severe burns.

The safest thing for the patriots who found a downed airman to do was send him along his way to Spain as quickly as possible. The Germans executed people for helping aviators. So if the airman was Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we’ve got the Eurozone and you don’t even have to exchange money let alone show your passport when moving from one western European country to another, it’s easy to forget that the German Occupation didn’t introduce fortified borders in Europe. Certainly they created a few new ones such as the Demarcation Line in France, but for the most part they intensified the security along already existing borders by adding their own douaniers [customs agents] and troops to the local border authorities.

And if, for centuries, there had been guards and customs agents protecting those frontiers, there had also been people who had found ways to get past those guards and, especially, those customs agents.

There were, for instance, smugglers. Indeed whole families lived off the proceeds of smuggling for generations. Shortages meant that many amateurs joined the professional smugglers during the Second World War. Most, of course, were simply trying to feed their own families. But there were also men who had had to go underground and turned to smuggling as a way to support themselves and their families. Both sorts of smugglers tended to be “politically reliable”, meaning against the Occupation authorities.

There was also a wholly legitimate and legal category of individuals who crossed the border without the usual formalities: farmers who lived on the border and owned fields on both sides of it. The local border authorities knew these people on sight and really didn’t care if they strayed beyond their fields to attend services or have a beer in the “other” country.

The usefulness of both categories of experienced border-crossers didn’t escape resisters or fugitives. If smugglers could carry salt or cigarettes over the frontier without getting caught, then they could show people how to get over the frontier without being caught. Farmers who regularly crossed the border to tend their crops or go to church made ideal couriers to take messages, documents, money or mail to and fro.

So the Germans intensified the security along European frontiers; they made it more difficult and more dangerous to cross from one country to its neighbor. But they didn’t stop either the legal or illegal traffic across international borders. They made crossing borders more difficult and more dangerous, but they also made people more desperate and determined to do it.

In fact, there was probably far more illegal traffic across borders during the Occupation under the noses of the German douaniers and Feldgendarmerie [military police] than there had been before the war under the far more easy-going local border authorities.

Despite the impression you may have gotten from the movies, the Resistance involved a lot of mundane tasks that were far from exciting except for the ever present possibility of arrest, torture and deportation to the concentration camps.

Take, for instance, the problem of housing downed Allied aviators who were trying to get to Spain to get back to their bases in England. Although some brave families took the risk of hosting these men who rarely blended into the crowd and didn’t like to be quiet or cooped up, it wasn’t always possible to find enough homes to house them. This was especially a problem in Toulouse where the aviators gathered until there were 12 or more of them to make up a convoy over the Pyrenees. For a while in early 1944, Dutch-Paris rented a house for their aviator “clients”, as did a French evasion line with which Dutch-Paris worked called Françoise.

The Françoise network, which was based in Toulouse, rented several houses for aviators. But there was a problem with heating these houses, especially as the Americans didn’t fully appreciate how very difficult and expensive it was to heat any building during the war. But Françoise found a way around that. They recruited the director of the gas company in Toulouse.

This businessman had coal delivered illegally (without ration coupons) to a couple of homes used by Françoise for aviators. He also installed gas lines to a couple of other homes despite the regulations and then suppressed the readings from those gas meters for the duration of the war. That way the Americans could turn up the heat as much as they wanted.

The director also drove a couple of Americans in his personal car from Toulouse to Foix (90 km) on two occasions.

It’s not flashy. No one would make a movie about the director of the gas company. But it’s the sort of everyday circumvention that the Resistance relied on.