How to Flee the Gestapo

It’s hard to know what balance to strike between anecdotal history (as remembered by participants) and documented history (as written at the time) when writing about something as hidden as the Resistance. On the one hand, no one ever thought to write down certain details that can only be uncovered through talking to a participant. How else will you find out that one resister knew and trusted another because their mothers had gone to grammar school together? Or that the customs agents on the trams near the Belgian/Dutch border didn’t bother young men dressed like gentlemen because they were too busy inspecting the belongings of those who looked like farmers or workers?

On the other hand, the resisters themselves had a very limited knowledge of what was going on outside their own activities for the simple reason that Read the rest of this entry »

Very few resisters were professional spies or criminals, so they had to figure out how to forge papers, evade the police, and smuggle people and goods as they went along. Sometimes they did this by diving down into the underworld and finding a criminal to mentor them. Sometimes they found a professional spy to give them some tips. But mostly they had to figure it out on their own.

Here’s an example. Until November 1943, Dutch-Paris in Brussels was mostly concerned with hiding Dutch fugitives in Belgium or getting them to Switzerland. If an Allied airman ended up in their care, they passed him on to one of the Belgian evasion services. But at the end of November 1943, one of their men announced that his contacts in the Ardennes and Maastricht had a whole lot of aviators that they wanted to move south. And so Dutch-Paris added an aviator evasion line to its activities.

They rented a boarding house and set it up to lodge and supply both aviators and Engelandvaarders. They would move the men into Brussels and equip them for the journey with workmen’s clothing, false IDs and advice on how to behave. First they had to take away all the airmen’s possessions except their dog tags because they had a dangerous habit Read the rest of this entry »

During the war, the Occupation authorities rearranged the social and political units of western Europe into individual boxes then threw up barbed wire barricades and a wall of regulations and police authorities to keep people and information from going from one box to another. It wasn’t impossible to get out of, say, the Netherlands and into, say, Belgium. But it wasn’t easy and it was even harder to get news to or from your family in another of the boxes. The situation gave rise to resistance networks like Dutch-Paris. It also presented opportunities to criminals.

Take the case of a certain young Dutchman we’ll call V who made a wartime career for himself of preying on the goodwill and/or fears of other Dutch men and women in France.  He appears to have been collecting money from his countrymen and from the Gestapo, who paid a bounty for resisters.  Here’s just one of his exploits.

At the end of 1943, V and a friend were trying their luck on the Riviera by posing as Dutch workers who needed money to go to Spain to join the Allied armies. They gathered quite a number of “loans.” But while they were talking to a Dutch consul, his colleague called the Dutch consul in the next town, who warned him that V was working with the German police. They got him out of the office as soon as they could.

But V and his friend used their Gestapo travel passes to go to the Netherlands. There they went to visit the two men’s sisters, with special greetings Read the rest of this entry »

Although we tend to think of Resistance as intense flashes of danger like we see in the movies, it’s important to remember that the Occupation ground on for years. In between the exciting parts, the heroes and heroines still needed to get their shoes fixed and take care of their families.  They all had great courage when it came to opposing the Germans, but they didn’t necessarily live blameless lives in all other regards.

Take the story of a man we’ll call Louis, who was a passeur, or mountain guide, in the Pyrenees. Louis took dozens of Dutch, Belgian, French and Allied fugitives over the mountains into Spain for several different Resistance networks. He charged Dutch-Paris 3,000 francs per man, which was around the going rate.

In mid-December 1943, the French police arrested Louis at a restaurant in Toulouse. Rumor had it that the restaurateur betrayed him because Louis was having an affair with his wife. The police couldn’t find anything to charge him with other than possession of a false identity card in the name of Paul Blanchard. A police officer who worked for the Resistance “legalized” the false card, and Louis walked out of prison as Paul Blanchard.

A month later in late January 1944, the Gestapo arrested Louis in the same restaurant. Public opinion blamed the restaurateur for denouncing him. It couldn’t be proved, but everyone thought it was highly suspicious that the restaurant owners disappeared at the liberation, presumably for fear of being tried (or lynched) for denunciation.

Louis, however, escaped from the train deporting him to Germany, made his way back to the Pyrenees and, with the help of his 20 year-old nephew, recommenced passing fugitives over the Spanish border. The Germans, however, traced him to a mountain village and demolished, stone by stone, the house that he and his nephew had just left. They didn’t capture Louis, but they did kill his 22 year-old niece. His nephew decided that things were a little too dangerous in France, took himself, two Dutchmen, a Belgian and a British aviator to Spain, and joined de Gaulle’s Free French in North Africa. Apparently he felt he’d be safer in the army in wartime than with his uncle.

Incorrigibly, Louis continued guiding fugitives until July 1944, when French Milice (paramilitary collaborators) kidnapped him by pretending to be maquisards (partisans). His body was found soon after with a bullet in the head.

Meanwhile, Louis’ wife was arrested by the Germans in early January 1944 for harboring fugitives. At the time, it was assumed that she was arrested as a hostage for her husband. But by 1947 it was thought that she was arrested for her own resistance activities because the Germans knew the passeur as Paul Blanchard rather than by the name he shared with his wife.

She returned from Ravensbruck in 1945 to take up her job as a hair dresser and care for their 6 year old daughter. It must have been somewhat bitter news to her that while she was in the hands of the Gestapo, her husband was caught, not because he was leading resisters through the forbidden zone or taking their child to safety, but because he was philandering. It’s hard to say how she or his niece’s parents would have felt about his posthumous Medal of Freedom.

There was an evasion service (service d’évasion) that took convoys of 10 to 15 Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen and Allied aviators from Toulouse to Spain every week from November 1942 to December 1943. They smuggled 400 people over the Pyrenees to Spain without mishap until it all ended because of one jumpy Belgian.

On the 19th of December, 1943, a 55 year old woman whom we’ll call Mme Arnaud escorted a group of 11 on the train from Toulouse to the small mountain town of Loures-Barousse as she had done with dozens of other groups. This one consisted of a Yugoslavian, a British aviator, four Dutch persons who had been in Switzerland, and five young Belgians. She passed the group on to the station master and a 14 year old boy.

Very unusually, an agent at the station two stops down the line asked to see the tickets of a Dutch doctor and his wife who were part of the convoy. They showed him their false papers. Two of the young Belgians, however, turned on their flashlight, which drew the attention of some Germans, who demanded their papers. Instead of Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch-Paris helped all sorts of people to escape from the Germans during the war. Some of them were much more obvious candidates for evasion than others. The trained military personnel who had bailed out of Allied aircraft had, one presumes, the field skills, discipline and health for the task. The young Dutch Engelandvaarders also had youth on their side, along with an innate understanding of the European situation. The older resisters who were called to London might not have had youth, but they had already proven their moral courage and resilience. Generally speaking, however, the Jewish families who fled with their elderly relatives and young children had nothing particular in their favor but desperation. Obviously some of them were young resisters in their own right, but as a group, the Jewish fugitives had neither chosen nor been trained for the arduous task of fleeing across Occupied Europe.

Here’s a story that illustrates how Jews and other fugitives had to rely on the kindness of many strangers. It comes from a young Dutch woman who fled with her middle-class parents during the mass deportations of Jews from the Netherlands. Unfortunately she doesn’t explain Read the rest of this entry »

In February 1943 a Dutch man of Jewish descent showed up at a farm in the Jura Mountains of France that was owned by a Dutch couple. The man had probably been on the run for months and probably had no relation with the farmer other than a shared ability to speak Dutch. The farmer gave him a place to sleep, food and clothing, as he had already given several other Jewish fugitives.

This man distinguished himself from the other refugees at the farm, however, because he had been separated from his wife in their flight from the Netherlands. We can presume that he was worried, if not downright distraught, over this. Given that he must have stumbled onto the farm, perhaps even being sent there by a sympathetic French police officer who was well-known to the farmer, how would his wife ever find him?

It probably worried the farmer too. But being a man who knew Read the rest of this entry »

I received a message from a gentleman in Collonges-sur-Salève, who was kind enough to drive me around the Franco-Swiss border last year. Apparently he’s been reading Flee the Captor, which is a biography of John Weidner’s wartime activities written in the 1960s. My correspondent brought an historical inaccuracy in the book to my attention.
Apparently the book claims that Weidner took Charles de Gaulle’s brother Xavier and his family from France to Switzerland. But it is well-known in Collonges, where all this happened, that it was the local Catholic priest who took the de Gaulles to Switzerland. Mme de Gaulle even attended the ceremony in which the priest was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations, which tells us that the de Gaulles thought it was the priest who helped them to safety.
Looking back in my notes, I find a report filed in the Dutch archives in The Hague in which John Weidner describes the priest as an active resister who harbored many resisters and fugitives. That tells us that the priest was not part of Dutch-Paris but that he and Weidner were in contact during the war.
In the French defense archives, there’s a mention of Xavier de Gaulle as Dutch-Paris’s link with the Free French in Algiers, which suggests Read the rest of this entry »

Very few people are cut out for the dangerous life of those Resistance heroes who dedicated themselves wholly to the cause – changing their appearance and identity regularly, always on the move, deliberately cut off from family in hopes of protecting them. But there were ways to continue with one’s usual life while helping out the Resistance. One could, for instance, keep one’s job at the town hall while putting legitimate stamps on false documents or warning people about impending police actions

Of course staying above ground while working for the Resistance carried its own share of dangers and anxieties. And they didn’t end with the war because to be effective such people had to appear blameless to the Germans. Which meant that they sometimes gained a reputation as a collaborator among the mass of people who were not resisters. Collaborators, or those commonly thought to be collaborators, had to answer to popular tribunals at the liberation.  It was not always easy to prove that one was not a collaborator.

Take the case of a certain Dutch entrepreneur who gained valuable contracts building airbases for the Germans in southern France. Because he was working for them and they trusted him – which implies a certain amount of schmoozing the enemy on his part – our man was able to issue travel warrants to Dutchmen that authorized them to travel from the Netherlands to southern France. Our man used those warrants to camouflage Read the rest of this entry »

It took a certain psychic fortitude and flexible attitude to survive as a rescuer.  Take just one story from a Dutch businessman who had been living outside Lyon since 1938 whom we’ll call Bernard.  He and some of his French friends in his village opened their homes to Dutch refugees, giving them shelter, buying them food on the black market, washing and mending their clothes.  They arranged for false documents through the local French resistance group and for safe passage into Switzerland through Dutch-Paris (see previous post of 10 November 2011 for more details).

In early 1944 John Weidner asked Bernard if he would shelter a young Dutch family with a 10 month old baby for a few days on their way to Switzerland.  He said he would be happy to do so and opened the door one day to find a woman with a large basket that turned out to have the baby in it.  The widow who lived in the same building and did the washing and mending for the refugees was overjoyed to have a baby in the house even though other people at the time considered babies to be a noisy security risk.

It just so happened that Bernard had already made an appointment to go to Clermont-Ferrand to fetch another young couple on their way to Switzerland at the same time that the 10 month-old was at his home.  According to the doctor, the wife was due three weeks later, but Read the rest of this entry »