How to Flee the Gestapo

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 »

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.