How to Flee the Gestapo

Few people today appreciate the chaotic disaster of Germany in 1945 or of the millions of non-German Displaced Persons liberated there by the Allies. It would take a number of books to understand it. But I can give you one example of the confusion that also explains the richness of the archives of the Dutch Red Cross Information Bureau.

A Dutch Jewish businessman (b. 1906) whom we’ll call Nestor acted as a founding member of both the Dutch-Paris related Comité in Brussels and the treasurer of the Committee for the Defense of Jews there. In March 1944 Nestor knocked on the door of an apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris that belonged to another Dutchman loosely affiliated with Dutch-Paris. The Gestapo answered the door.

In the fall of 1944 Nestor sent two postcards from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to a cousin in Switzerland. Read the rest of this entry »

1940-1945

The Netherlands celebrates Liberation Day with an official holiday on the Fifth of May every fifth year. But the Dutch remember the war every year with two minutes of silence at 8 pm on the Fourth of May, known as Dodenherdenkening (Remembrance of the Dead). People gather at monuments across the country, with the biggest and most official taking place on the Dam in Amsterdam.

But I rode my bike to the Waalsdorpervlakte Memorial in the dunes in Scheveningen, The Hague. I arrived a few minutes early to find that there were hundreds if not thousands of people already quietly lined up waiting for the ceremony to begin at 7:25. Many of them carried flowers.

During the war the Germans incarcerated resisters in the nearby Scheveningen prison, which came to be known as the Oranje Hotel*. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago I had never heard of the archives of the Dutch Red Cross. But then in two days a Belgian archivist, a Dutch editor and a footnote all suggested that I needed to go there. They were right.

Like its counterparts everywhere, the Dutch Red Cross acted as a missing persons bureau during and after the second world war. In fact, as soon as the way was cleared into Germany, they sent teams in to gather up as much documentation about missing Dutch nationals as they could find. (They weren’t the only ones, “capturing” German documents was a bit of a sport at the time). They also asked all repatriates to fill out a form specifying with whom they had been arrested, which prisons and/or camps they had been in, who they had seen die where, and who they had seen be transferred to which prison or camp. But a quirk of Dutch law Read the rest of this entry »

On 19 February 1944 a black automobile running on gasoline drove into the border town of St-Julien (Haute-Savoie, France) and stopped at the home of Police Inspector C. (born 1906). Four men in civilian clothes got out. After they arrested the inspector, two of the men took his wife to the Hotel Cheval Blanc where they demanded a Madame A (born 1889). By this time they were impatient and threatened to burn the hotel if Mme A was not found within 10 minutes. Fortunately for everyone else, she was in the laundry room.

The unknown men carted away two suitcases and box of clothing and other scarce items when they drove away from the inspector’s home with their two prisoners. Inspector C. and Madame A were taken by car to Lyon and put on a train to Fresnes prison in Paris that same evening. Madame A returned to Haute-Savoie in January 1945, where she died at the hospital of Annemasse three months later. The Inspector was never seen again.

Having heard about the arrests through “the public rumor” as soon as they happened, the local French gendarmes investigated. Read the rest of this entry »

Around the same time that the French started to open up their WWII archives (the 1990’s), they also started to collect the testimonies of Resistants. As part of this effort, the Center for the History and Documentation of the Resistance in Lyon videotaped a woman who had been an important courier for Dutch-Paris. We’ll call her Raymonde.

In the 100 minute interview, Raymonde reads from a sheaf of papers in front of her, answering the interviewer’s occasional questions with anecdotes. She is dressed conservatively and remains composed throughout. This is the story she tells.

Born in 1923, she had three older brothers who were killed in the First World War. Her mother died in October 1940. When she tried to tell the news to her fourth brother, she discovered that he had been killed in the Second World War. Soon after that, she met Jean Henri Weidner at church. He asked her to work as his secretary in his newly opened textile business in Lyon.

In December 1940 Weidner asked the young Raymonde if she would type some small Resistance tracts. Read the rest of this entry »

In France, I’ve been looking through the regional and departmental archives for the Rhone (Lyon) and Haute-Savoie (Annecy) for records regarding Dutch-Paris. Given that I have the names of several people, including civil servants and police agents, who worked for the line in those cities and even the dates that a few of them were arrested by the Germans for doing so, I thought I’d find some official traces of it.

But there are very few. This telegram, loosely translated, explains why. Keep in mind that it was sent in the very last days of 1943 or first days of 1944, half a year before the Allies landed in Normandy.

“Today German police proceeded with an operation in Bernex (Haute-Savoie) during the course of which 4 evaders of forced labor [réfractaires] were killed, 5 persons were executed [fusillés], 9 chalets and 2 houses burned – stop – Mayor and baker arrested – stop – Reason given: peasants have not delivered quotas set by food authorities [Ravitaillement Général] and the presence of a bust of the Republic at the town hall – End.”*

There are other reports about partisans requisitioning food and kidnapping presumed collaborators from buses. The Alps were boiling with guerrilla warfare. The French authorities had more pressing concerns than a few unarmed Samaritans smuggling foreigners out of the country. Besides, the Germans were taking care of it.

*Archives départementales du Rhone, 182 W 269, regional prefect in Lyon to Ministry of the Interior, Police at Vichy, no date.

Twenty years ago I wanted to write my dissertation on the Resistance but everyone from professors to archivists told me it could only be done as an oral history. My French couldn’t stand up to that, so I found another topic (the Liberation). I think everyone was right at the time, but it wasn’t that the documents for the Resistance didn’t, in theory, exist; it was that you couldn’t get at them if they did.

Back then, any document having to do with the period 1940-1945 in any French archive could only be consulted by permission of the prefecture of the department, the ministry of culture and the police. You had to request such permission for each individual dossier by its inventory number. The inventories, such as they were, were kept under lock and key in the archivists’ offices. You had to gather your credentials, preferably affixed with a large seal, and beg. One departmental archivist told me that I couldn’t see the inventories because there was already a book about the war in the department. Apparently she didn’t think there was any need of another. I said thank you and moved on to the neighboring department where the (younger) archivist let me see the inventories, but warned that the topic was “un peu délicat” (a tad delicate). In the course of time, Read the rest of this entry »

Sitting in the archives of CEGES/SOMA in Brussels, I opened up a folder piled high with official forms all neatly filled out by hand or typewriter in bureaucratic German. They were the files of the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK), literally translated as the Currency Protection Unit*. It sounds innocuous enough, like a band of accountants searching out money laundering schemes by studying account books. Indeed, they answered to the German customs authorities. But they were far from innocuous. They were hunting for loot and although some of their victims were “Aryans”, most were Jewish.

One random report states that in Brussels on 23 October 1942 the officer arrested a Jewish couple making an illegal journey from Holland to Switzerland. He confiscated the following:

258 Dutch guilders in notes

140 US dollars in notes

20 Swiss francs in notes

23 Swiss francs in silver

The DSK also arrested Jews who lived in Brussels while plundering their homes. Lists of confiscated valuables make up the bulk of the reports. And then, almost as an after thought, comes the sentence: the Jews in question were turned over to the SS or SD. Which meant deportation, which was as good as writing out a death warrant.

What’s so chilling about these documents is the orderly greed of it. The point was the theft of the money and other valuables. The murders were secondary, almost a way of closing the book on the account, making sure that the balance stayed on the Reich’s side.

*CEGES AA 558/110 a-c. For more on the nefarious activities of the DSK in Belgium, see the work of Insa Meinen (in French and German).

Just in case anyone thinks that the life of a researcher is glamorously exciting or satisfyingly contemplative, let me tell you about the day I had.

I started out from my hotel in Brussels at 7:30 am with the idea of photographing some of the places used by Dutch-Paris, known here as the Comité.  Back in the Netherlands I had the idea of renting a bike to photograph all of them, but then I saw how people drive here.

55 Boulevard de Waterloo

The first place was the Café du Tunnel, 55 Boulevard de Waterloo.  A woman who found hiding places for at least a hundred Dutch Jews during the war would meet one of the Comité and her latest “clients” here to take them to their hiding place.   It’s now a high-end clothing shop.

6 Place Louise

Nearby at 6, Place Louise, was another café used as a rendez-vous that is now a high-end clothing shop.  So much for breakfasting at the scene of clandestine meetings.

6 Heldenplein

So I kept walking to 6 Heldenplein, home of the Comité’s pastor.  I can only assume that the neighborhood was in better repair in the 1940’s.  At least the name “heroes’ square” remains appropriate.

From there I walked over to Belgian’s Second World War archives and research institute, CEGES/SOMA.  I could not have been more warmly welcomed there, but that’s no guarantee of satisfying research.  I started out with some German documents that sounded better in the catalog description than they turned out to be, as is all too often the case in any archive.  Then I looked at some superbly rich documents which were nevertheless disturbing in that they were essentially the preamble to the death warrants of innocent people.  They cast a pall on the day, and they only went up to 1943 whereas I need them for 1944.

So I requested three more dossiers.  The woman whose turn it was to fetch documents came to apologize to me in both Dutch and French that she couldn’t get any of them.  One had disappeared (no great loss: they’re photocopies of reports in the archives of the foreign ministry).  One was in the office of a researcher who wasn’t in today.  And the third was a massive collection of an enormous Belgian Resistance network.  The archivist in charge of them only began to catalog them a couple of weeks ago.  It’s impossible to request files without a catalog number.   She offered to go fetch the archivist, but I elected to send him an email on the subject.

I then came across a reference to the trial of Geheime Feldpolizei 530, the German secret police unit that arrested at least two and possibly more members of the Comité.  I set off an alarm when I went to ask someone about where to find those records, but Madame, le président du salle, called yet another researcher about it.  It turns out that I need to apply to the Ministry of Justice to see the trial records and the Ministry of Social Welfare to see the other reports regarding the prisons.

I need to write the Ministry of Social Welfare anyway to see their files on the 47 members of Dutch-Paris who were arrested by the Germans in Belgium.   And I need to apply to the Sureté d’Etat (security services) to see the files they have about a dozen or so members of Dutch-Paris.

By this time it was noon, when the archive closes for an hour, and I’d reached an impasse.  I decided to walk over to the Museum and Archives of the Flemish [Dutch-speaking] Community in Brussels.  My mistake was to rely on the map.  I did indeed find a buzzer labeled with the name of the museum, but the person who answered it spoke French.  During the course of our second conversation over the intercom he explained in no uncertain terms that there was no archive in the building and that everyone there was French-speaking.  I admit that it did seem like an unlikely building for a museum.

19 rue Franklin

Being close to what I had thought was the address of the Dutch church in Brussels during the war, I tried to find that.  And failed.  So I took the metro to 19 rue Franklin, site of a German raid on 28 February 1944 (see previous blog entry on remembrance day).  It’s now in the shadow of the European Union building, which of course wasn’t there in 1944.   In fact, in 1944, European union was a rather unpopular idea of Hitler’s.

73 rue du Trone

Having plotted all this out on Google maps, I caught a bus that would take me to the rue du Trone.  Except that the bus went one stop; the driver shouted “Terminus!”, and everyone got out.   I discovered that that bus takes a three-hour break on Wednesday afternoons.  Fortunately I was back at the metro and managed to take it close enough to 73, rue du Trone, which was the Comité’s headquarters for “social work” ie hiding people.  It wasn’t chosen for its beauty but it may have been chosen because it goes through to the Place du Londres on the back side instead of to the usual dead-end courtyard.

The back of 73 rue du Trone

Then I took a very long, crowded and winding bus ride to the prison of St. Gilles where at least a dozen members of the Comité spent some time.   Despite appearances, it was built in the late nineteenth century and looks the same today as it would have in 1944.   I don’t know whether the Germans kept guards outside the gates or not.

The Prison de St. Gilles

From there I was able to take the metro and my feet, arriving back at the hotel at 5:30 pm.  Was it a successful day?  In terms of gathering citable information, no.  But I’m now on the way to seeing what promise to be extremely useful documents.  And I have a good sense of the distances that members of the Comité traveled by foot or public transport and a solid appreciation for the hills of Brussels.

In March 1951 a man (b. 1890) who had sheltered fugitives for Dutch-Paris in Brussels wrote a letter to John Henry Weidner about the group’s recent commemoration of “onze gedenkdag” on 28 February. Literally that means “our anniversary” but in this case it would be better translated as “our remembrance day.”

On the 28^th of February 1944 German security services raided the pension at rue Franklin, 19, Brussels. What they found was the headquarters of the Belgian section of the Dutch-Paris pilot escape line, complete with ten American airmen, a fully-equipped atelier dedicated to producing false documents, and Dutch-Paris’s records and account books. They confiscated all the papers, presumably sent the Americans to POW camps, and arrested everyone in the building, including:

Mademoiselle O., the Belgian owner of the pension who did not survive deportation to a concentration camp.

“Jo Staal” – A Jewish man born in Berlin in 1921 but rendered stateless by the Nazis. He had brought pilots from Maastricht (Netherlands) through Brussels to Paris. After the liberation of Brussels freed him from the prison of St. Gilles, he fought with the British until being captured as a POW. He survived the war.

“Chris” – a young Dutch man who escorted people over the Dutch-Belgian border. The Allies liberated him from the prison camp at Beverloo in September 1944.

“Monsieur Hans” – A Jewish man born in Amsterdam in 1923. He had distributed false documents to people in hiding and escorted pilots to Paris. He was tortured five times before being transferred to the camp at Beverloo, where the Allies liberated him.

“Rob” – Born in 1923 in Alblasserdam (Netherlands) and a geology student, he had made fifteen trips to Paris with airmen between being recruited into Dutch-Paris in January 1944 and his arrest at the end of February. He was imprisoned in St. Gilles until August 1944, then transferred to the camp at Beverloo. After being freed, he joined the Dutch military intelligence services as a 1^st lieutenant.

“Jan” – A law student at the faculty of law at Utrecht (Netherlands), where he was born in 1917. He made the false documents for Dutch-Paris. The Germans tortured him before he was transferred to the camp at Beverloo, where he was liberated in September 1944.

“Vermaas” – The youngest Dutchman to receive a law degree, he had been involved in a student organization to rescue Jewish children in Utrecht. He had come to Belgium to study economy and been in charge of daily operations for Dutch-Paris since November 1943. He threw himself over the staircase at the prison of St. Gilles on 10 March 1944 in order to take all the blame onto himself and so spare his colleagues. He died shortly thereafter at a military hospital. Monsieur Hans was not tortured again after Vermaas’s suicide.

This raid was only one incident in the “roll-up” of the line that is thought to have begun with the arrest of a courier in Paris on 11 February 1944. According to one list found among John Henry Weidner’s papers, Dutch-Paris suffered 33 arrests between 18 February and 18 March 1944 and a further 12 between 20 March and 7 April 1944. There were certainly more arrests, more deportations, more deaths.

But Dutch-Paris kept going. Others stepped up to deliver money and false documents to people in hiding, others escorted fugitives and gave them shelter. It was harder with all those losses, but the “goede zaak” (the good job) got done.

The 28^th of February seems like a good day for all of us to remember those who fought the Nazi evil by showing mercy to its victims rather than by wielding weapons.