How to Flee the Gestapo

There are lots of heart-warming stories about soldiers making their own bit of Christmas during WWII by doing things like dressing up as St. Nick and having parties for the local children.

My favorite is a family story. It didn’t happen exactly on Christmas, but it did happen during the fall and winter of 1944/45.

My father was a toddler when the Germans occupied his hometown of Maastricht. He was seven when the Americans Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of this discussion about finding Engelandvaarders in the archives, I mentioned that it’s important to get more than one version of any particular event. Obviously that’s true in almost all situations. But let’s think about why it’s important when reading through the documents on resistance.

Keep in mind that most of the documents about resistance were written or recorded in the immediate postwar period. The leader of Dutch-Paris was able to write reports during the war because he went in and out of Switzerland and kept the records in Switzerland. Most resisters would have been taking a terrible risk to write anything down.

Immediately after the liberation of a country, even before the prisoners returned from the Third Reich, resisters started writing down what they had done. More importantly, bureaucracies Read the rest of this entry »

Last time we talked about the arrest of a local Dutch-Paris leader under a false name in Brussels. A very similar thing happened to another Dutch-Paris leader in Paris.

This man, who we’ll call Smit, had been an important leader of Dutch-Paris and other rescue groups in Brussels until the Gestapo got too close. He left Belgium for Paris and set about trying to re-build Dutch-Paris there after the big round-up in February 1944. One of Smit’s contacts in Paris was a Dutch military attaché who was up to his neck in resistance, and not just with Dutch-Paris.

Smit went to visit the military attaché at his home to discuss Dutch-Paris on the same day that Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an example of why you cannot assume that an individual will appear in the wartime documents under only one name. To my knowledge, this same thing happened to two members of Dutch-Paris.

When German security personnel raided an apartment or a business with the intention of arresting a particular resister, they tended to arrest everyone on the premises. Sometimes these “extra” people managed to talk their way out; sometimes they didn’t, especially if they were Jewish.

In two instances, once in Brussels and once in Paris, local leaders of Dutch-Paris happened to be in the apartment of other resisters when the Germans showed up to arrest those other resisters. They arrested our Dutch-Paris men while they were at it. They did not figure out that these two men were actually important resisters in their own right, although they did figure out that they were Jews.

Both men were imprisoned under the names on the Read the rest of this entry »

Names can be tricky in World War II archives. I’ve found people who worked for Dutch-Paris under 10 or 12 different names in different archives, and even under different names in the same archive. There are basically two reasons for that.

First, resisters and fugitives all had a legal name and perhaps a nickname, say Cornelis and Kees. But they also had pseudonyms, noms de guerre and schuilnamen. Most of them had more than one alias. A resister named, say, Fred, might have carried false papers with the name of John but introduced himself to Engelandvaarders and aviators as William and to civilian fugitives as Richard.  Fred, John, William and Richard were all the same person even though if you read the documents without keeping that in mind you might think they were four different people.

How do you know that those names all refer to the same person instead of several people? Some postwar reports will very conveniently Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned these archives before, but people keep asking me where to look for documents about an uncle or grandfather who was an Engelandvaarder. So here are the first places to look.

But first, if you find any documents, make sure to note down all the names you come across. And then use those names to see if you can find more documents. Just in general, the more versions you can get of a story, the more you will know. Practically, if you found reports about three Engelandvaarders who traveled together, one of those files will have a lot more detail than the other two. You won’t know which one until you’ve read all three.

If your Engelandvaarder made it all the way to England, he or she was interviewed by the London Dutch. Look at the Nationaal Archief (Den Haag) in the files of the Archieven van het Ministerie van Defensie/Oorlog Londen (2.13.71 2571). Most debriefing reports are quite Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our discussion of the shapes of resisters’ daily lives. Today, going underground vs. working from home.

Going underground meant breaking all contact with your family, neighborhood and place of business to devote yourself to full-time resistance work. This was a drastic step because you had to live like an outlaw in your own country. You would most probably have to move around quite a bit. You would have to live under one or several false identities. And you could no longer hold a job to support yourself.

Many young men ended up underground to escape from the draft for forced labor in Germany. Others went underground because the Gestapo was on their heels because of past resistance work.
And others went underground because their illegal work required it. Joining a maquisard camp, for instance, meant leaving your home and family and essentially going underground. There were other resistance jobs, particularly those involving a lot of travel like the leaders and couriers in Dutch-Paris, also required resisters to go underground.

For the most part, however, going underground was a drastic and lonely step that people took only after they “were burned” and needed to leave home to avoid arrest. Staying at home was better because it was familiar and you could revert to your legal identity and legal ration cards. It was far less dangerous, less difficult and less scary.

In fact, there were some jobs that resisters could do only if they remained in their regular lives. For example, town clerks who made false documents for resisters would only have access to the proper forms and information if they continued in their Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s dive deeper into the factors that shaped the practical realities of a resister’s daily life. We’ll start with what sort of illegal work an individual was doing. Broadly speaking you can break down resistance work into four large categories: armed resistance (sabotage, partisan battles); intelligence work (gathering information); welfare (hiding people, supporting the needy such as the children of deported Jews or resisters, escape lines); intellectual (political, spiritual, the clandestine press).

All resisters faced some of the same problems. For example, what they were doing was illegal and carried severe penalties if they were caught. They all needed false identification documents. They all had to be careful about who saw what they were doing and they all carried an extra burden of anxiety and fear.

But there were differences. Members of the armed resistance carried weapons, which put them in a different category in the eyes of the occupation forces. They often lived in remote places such as camps in the forest or mountains which would make getting supplies difficult and the winter’s cold and wet. They were also cut off from their families.

Individuals who worked for the clandestine press in all its forms tended to live in cities and for the most part they could live at home. The most dangerous jobs were running the presses, which were loud and therefore easily tracked, and delivering Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all seen movies and read books with gripping tales of high derring-do by the Resistance. Some of them are based on true events because there were, indeed, moments of intense tension and danger for resisters. But for most resisters the majority of their illegal work was much less glamorous.

Let’s take a look at the practical realities of the daily lives of resisters in western Europe. It goes without saying that every resister had a unique experience. Even if we generalize (which we will) we still need to recognize that certain circumstances made a big difference to a resister’s life.

For one thing, life in the countryside was very different than life in a city. There were quantitatively more soldiers and police present on the streets of Paris than in a farming village in southern France. But it was easier to slip through anonymously in Paris than in the village. So a resister might be more noticeable and more likely to be betrayed in the small village. Unless the entire village was compromised in whatever the resister was doing, which did happen in a few places, mostly villages that sheltered the persecuted.

Also, food was easier to find in the countryside. It’s a toss-up whether it was easier to Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue our discussion of how private citizens have influenced the public memory of the Second World War. We began with Memorial naming the victims of the Soviet regime in the USSR. Last time we mentioned how an association in France added the name of a Dutch-Paris resister to the war monument in his home town in 2023, 78 years after his death in a concentration camp.

Dutch-Paris has also been remembered in at least two “Stolpersteine” or “stumbling stones.” These are 10cm square brass plaques placed in the cobblestone pavement outside of the last known, freely chosen residence of a victim of the Nazis before they were killed or escaped persecution through emigration or suicide. Of course many honor Jews, but the stumbling stones honor all victims of the Nazis including resisters who were killed in custody. Each one is handmade and reads: “here lived” followed by the victim’s name, date of birth and what happened to him or her.

The two Dutch-Paris stumbling stones that I know of honor a Jewish father and son who escaped from the Netherlands with help from Dutch-Paris. The father’s includes the year he was arrested in France, the date he was deported from Drancy and the date he was vermoord (murdered) in Auschwitz. The son’s says “gearresteerd 1942 Frankrijk ontsnapt gevlucht Juli 1943 Zwitserland” (“arrested 1942 France escaped fled July 1943 Switzerland).

The stumbling stones began as the private project of Read the rest of this entry »