How to Flee the Gestapo

Sixty-six years ago this week the Danish government and the Swedish Red Cross evacuated 7,000 female prisoners from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, most likely saving their lives. The women traveled by the famous White Buses or train to ferries that took them to Sweden, where they were nursed back to sufficient health to return to their homes in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Poland after the war ended in Europe in early May 1945.

The evacuation from Ravensbrück was part of an effort to evacuate Scandinavians from the prisons and camps of the Third Reich that began in March 1945. At first the Germans would only allow neutral Swedes to come in, but by the end most of the personnel and matériel were Danish. They took the Dutch, Belgian, French and Polish women to safety because, to their surprise, Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not enough just to find an archive with relevant documents; you also have to find those documents within the archive. Unfortunately, every archive is organized differently, and none of them are organized for the convenience of historians. They’re arranged according to the inner logic of the organization that created them, whether that be a public administration, a charity or an individual who had his own way of filing the papers in his institute or home office. This is why large archives staff help desks in their catalog rooms.

There are three ways to go about searching for relevant documents. The best as far as I’m concerned is to befriend a knowledgeable archivist who’s happy to help. So I say something along the lines of: “I just read about someone named Smith who was supposed to be in Lyon in 1943.” And the archivist says, “Oh, that’s usually spelled Smythe in this archive” or “That would be over in ZBM/18/IIIc, let’s go look at the catalog” or, two weeks later, “You asked about Smith. I had this dossier on him sent over from a depot across the country.” Those are the archivists who have my eternal gratitude.

Another way to find documents is to start with someone else’s footnote. In this scenario you start out by Read the rest of this entry »

Favorable or otherwise, rumors have long lives. They usually creep along insidiously, showing up in quiet comments, in snubs at parties, in jobs inexplicably withheld, but sometimes cropping up in courts of law. Given the necessary lack of transparency in the Resistance and the brutal effects of its activities, it was and still is fertile ground for rumors.

Dutch-Paris is no exception. Not surprisingly, the rumors tend to center around the wave of arrests in February and March 1944. Because the Germans never said how they got the information that swept a hundred or so people into the concentration camps and many of those into their graves, the survivors were left to puzzle out their own explanations.

A highly placed member of the réseau who truly did suffer terribly at the hands of the Germans, returned from Buchenwald, Dora and Bergen-Belsen convinced that a certain individual whom we’ll call Max had betrayed the group to the Germans. His proof was that Max had not been arrested.

Actually Max had been arrested, but the Germans had run out of hand-cuffs at the “mousetrap” in Paris that he and another Dutchman had fallen into. When a guard was walking the two of them down the street, Max took off running in one direction, the other man in the other. The other man was recaptured; Max escaped.

After the liberation of France, John Henry Weidner was commissioned as a captain in the Dutch Army and put in charge of the Dutch Security Services in Paris. It was his job to vet all Dutch nationals in France for collaboration before issuing them passports to return to the Netherlands. He was, quite frankly, in a position to investigate anyone’s wartime activities and he took the matter of the betrayal of his Resistance group personally. He defended Max against his colleague’s accusations to the point of arranging for the colleague to publicly retract his accusations based on the signed confession of a young woman who acknowledged that she had given the names and addresses of most members of Dutch-Paris under Gestapo interrogation.

It took a few months for the dust to settle and one or two more official letters from Weidner, but Max’s name was cleared in 1947, officially at least.

Then in 1990 Weidner received a letter from a Dutch Engelandvaarder who had been arrested at 6:00 am on December 31, 1943, on his way to England in a hotel in Toulouse that was used by Dutch-Paris and other escape lines. The Dutchman, we’ll call him C, was convinced that an unknown man who had appeared at the hotel on the evening of the 30^th had betrayed them all to the Germans. He claimed that he had met that man by accident in April 1990 in the Netherlands and that the man was Max. C had written a formal complaint to the Dutch office for the prosecution of war crimes accusing Max of betraying his fellow Dutchmen. C sent a copy of it to Weidner for his approval because he claimed that Weidner accused Max of causing the arrests in Paris in February 1944.

Weidner’s response was short: you have completely inverted what I said. Max was in no way responsible for those arrests. But in January 1991, Weidner received a letter from the Dutch prosecutor for war crimes asking about the arrests in Toulouse on December 31 1943.

This time Weidner answered more fully, explaining that he had investigated the arrests in Toulouse when he was in charge of the Dutch Security Services in France and concluded that a Belgian had betrayed the three Dutchmen, two Belgians and one Irish RAF officer at the hotel that last morning of 1943. He also defended Max from any blame in Toulouse or Paris and suggested various places where the prosecutor could find the files from the 1940s.

The paper trail ends there. I don’t know whether Max was called in for questioning or whether C launched a less official campaign against him. In any case, it couldn’t have been easy to have that rumor following him for fifty years and more.

You needed a certain entrepreneurial spirit to start up and run an escape line during the war.

There’s no need to elaborate on the risks involved, far worse than bankruptcy.

And you had to believe in what you were doing. Illegal, clandestine activities under the Nazi occupation were not for the faint-hearted.

You also needed to convince other people that your idea was both good and possible, and you had to pick your team wisely. After all, you were asking people to devote themselves to a project without guaranteed success or immediate profit. And one sloppy or chatty team member could mean the death of you all, quite literally.

And you were going to run into difficulties Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting story from a German reader who is related by marriage to the chief of the Parisian section of Dutch-Paris. We’ll call him Felix.

Felix worked in the Dutch consulate in Paris. His wife, who was also Dutch, had German relatives, one of whom tried to visit them at their home in Paris. This was the uncle of our reader. He spoke French and Dutch and had the family’s address but never managed to visit them because, as the family story goes, someone obstructed his way by sending him off in the wrong direction. It’s not that surprising in hindsight; he was wearing his German uniform.

This must have happened sometime between June 1940 and November 1942 because the German uncle was sent to the Russian Front in 1942, and the German authorities closed the Dutch embassy in Paris in November 1942 and ordered all the diplomats back to the Netherlands. Felix, his wife and three children removed themselves to a hiding place outside of Paris rather than to The Hague. It’s unbelievably unlikely that the relative in the German army would have the address of the hiding place of a family neck deep in the Resistance.

But why, if he had the address, couldn’t this multilingual German soldier find it? Apparently, he didn’t have a map. Of course, the unknown person who misdirected him might have been Felix’s concierge, who had her suspicions about his activities and would have lied to anyone in uniform who came looking for him. Or it could even have been Felix himself, who didn’t know his wife’s German relative but kept his composure when an enemy soldier asked for him in a chance encounter in the street.

But most probably, it was a random passerby who didn’t have any connection whatsoever to Felix but simply gave a German the wrong directions without knowing anything about the German or his destination. Maybe that person made it a policy to send Germans in the wrong direction as a personal act of resistance without ever being part of The Resistance. If so, it was the kind of attitude that made it possible for Resisters to disappear like fish in the ocean of the Parisian population.

Of course, he could equally as well have asked a sympathizer eager to ingratiate himself with the occupying army, or a woman looking for a German boyfriend to help fill the larder. Then that person might have taken him right to Felix’s door, where he may have seen something leading to Felix’s arrest, thus depriving Dutch-Paris of an important leader and compromising the escape and survival of hundreds of people.

History is full of such chances, good and bad, but we don’t usually hear about them. It’s really only chance that we know about this one.

If you plot the known Dutch-Paris addresses for Lyon and Paris on maps, you’ll notice an interesting difference. In Lyon they’re close by each other in the same part of town, but in Paris they’re spread out across the entire city.

All but one of the Dutch-Paris addresses in Lyon lie in what is known as the Presqu’ile, or peninsula, between the Rhone and Saone rivers. A courier coming into Lyon would have arrived at the Perrache train station, walked northward to the grand Place Bellecour and then on into the shopping and residential district, going no more than a few streets further north than the Hotel de Ville. Even a Dutch refugee who’d never been to France before would have been able to find the Dutch Consulate close to Place Bellecour or the Office for Dutch Assistance in the monumental commercial building of the Bourse. It couldn’t have taken John Weidner himself more than half an hour to walk from the train station to his hotel on the rue Sainte Catherine if he was enjoying the window shopping along the way.

But Paris is another story altogether. Evading airmen hid in the basement of the physics laboratories of the Ecole normale superieur in the fifth arrondissement near the Pantheon while the woman who organized their escape lived Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of dull reading involved in historical research, and at the beginning of a project it’s difficult to tell if the letter of complaint about delayed trams is worth noting down or not. After all, it tells you how the trams were functioning, but is that going to be important? It will be if it turns out that “your” people used those trams.

As the research goes on, the outlines of the story begin to emerge and the documents start fitting together. In the case of Dutch-Paris, where the records are scattered over more than a dozen archives in four languages, the documents tend to flow along several paths, only rarely confirming each other directly.

But I had a moment of eerie congruence when I was speaking to the widow of a passeur Read the rest of this entry »

I had the great honor and privilege to meet a woman who sheltered refugees in her attic on the French side of the Swiss border. Her husband, we’ll call him Jean, smuggled papers over the border for Dutch-Paris on his daily bicycle rides to the university in Geneva. He also guided fugitives over that same border, although by a different path.

Jean’s wife and children very graciously drove me around the border to show me where he crossed the border both openly and covertly. There were two official border crossings that he used regularly until the Italians took away his pass. The photo below shows the border between Croix-de-Rozon, Switzerland, and Collonges-sous-Saleve, France.   Jean used to take the line’s mail across there to the post office in  Croix-de-Rozon.  A French customs official once saved him there by warning him that the Germans were strip-searching everyone in that cream building to the left.

There was also an unofficial crossing point. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been looking through the handful of cartons of documents originating from the German police at the Archives nationales in Paris. These are the papers of the SIPO-SD, meaning all the various German policing authorities, both Nazi Party and military, that persecuted Jews, Communists and resisters; passed out travel permits, and kept an eye on industry. It’s an incongruous collection of receipts for requisitioned cutlery, biweekly forms of numbers of arrests made, and internal Gestapo telephone books.

Intriguingly, even if you took the papers themselves out of context, pretending you didn’t know how the Second World War ended, you could tell that the people who wrote these papers both knew that their end was near and refused to believe it.

To begin with, there’s the quality of the paper. Read the rest of this entry »

There isn’t much mystery about why people went to Switzerland or Spain via Dutch-Paris. They were fleeing from the lethal Nazi persecution of the Jews. Or they had been involved in the Resistance but the Gestapo had found their trail. Or they were members of the Allied military, or wanted to fight the Germans alongside it.

The question is more difficult in the cases of people who had every reason to flee, and the connections to do so, but chose to stay behind and help others escape. Of course at some point every resister had a good reason to go underground. Many of the men and women of Dutch-Paris did so while, usually, keeping up their Resistance work. I’m thinking of people who were themselves displaced fugitives who already stood out as refugees but who nevertheless took the added risk of opposition.

Take, for example, the handful of young, Dutch, Jewish men whose families were deported “to the east”. Two of these men literally jumped off the trains that took the rest of their families to Auschwitz. They could have Read the rest of this entry »