How to Flee the Gestapo

It goes without saying that the stakes over public memory in Western Europe are nowhere near as high as they were when the private citizens of Memorial were challenging the Soviet Union by burying the dead lying in the forests around Stalingrad. But that does not mean that everyone in Western Europe is fully satisfied with the way the Second World War is remembered. Monuments are being installed and conferences convened all the time. As in the Soviet Union, much of it is being done by private citizens.

For example, there is an association in France called Le Souvenir Français with the goal of remembering soldiers and resisters who died for France, mostly by making sure that their names are listed on monuments and their graves and monuments are tended. It’s notable that even in France, where every village has a First World War monument at its heart, private citizens feel the need to guard and protect the memory of “morts pour la France”* including poilus of 1914-1918.

Like Memorial in the USSR, Le Souvenir Français is also on a mission to name those who have been forgotten. I can’t tell you exactly how they discover such names, but it must involve some detailed archival research.

Some gentlemen from a local chapter of Le Souvenir Français contacted me in November 2022 to say that they had discovered that a member of Dutch-Paris had died in the concentration camps but was not listed on any monument in Paris or in his home town. They were looking for Read the rest of this entry »

Memory slips and shifts depending on the person and the time. Ask any five people what happened at a particular place and time and they will all have a slightly – if not wildly – different memory of the event. Those are personal, individual memories.

Public memory, meaning the “official story” as remembered by a community, shifts just as much but it is often subject to the political powers and fashions of the day. Public memory finds shape in monuments, historical plaques, parades and legal holidays. The public memory of communities that are not in power takes shape in things like vigils, art installations, songs and graffiti.
Control over public memory is often a cause and site of contention. That’s true whether the question is access to archival documents that may or may not challenge the official story or bids for the design of a monument. Or even the subject of a monument.

The best example of the power of memory that I know of comes from the Soviet Union and an organization called Memorial. The rulers of the Soviet Union were masters of controlling public memory. They went so far as to erase individuals (their own former colleagues in power) from official photographs. They also lied about Read the rest of this entry »

One last comment from my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV. I was discussing the arrests of most of the men and women in Dutch-Paris’ aviator escape line that led, in most cases, to torture and deportation to the concentration camps. One of the viewers wrote that “soldiers shouldn’t ask civilians for help.”

There were people in the Allied air forces that agreed with that. But, realistically, what were the airmen who were shot down over western Europe supposed to do? They landed in a country where they didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs or the lay of the land, and didn’t have any experience living with the enemy. But they were under orders to evade capture and try to return to base.

There was a pair of Americans who later ended up with Dutch-Paris who made their own way across most of the Netherlands without civilian help. Unless you count the food and clothing that they stole from farms as help. But even those two amazingly skillful and Read the rest of this entry »

During my talk on WW2TV someone asked the excellent question of why the archives were closed so long. And someone else asked the more philosophical but related question of why anyone would care if someone’s grandpa was a collaborator.

To protect living individual’s privacy, many archives close documents for a standard 60 or 75 years. Normally that does not include standardized reports on the potato crop as it did in France. The French simply put a blanket closure on all and any documents from the years 1939-1945. To vastly oversimplify the matter, it was a way of sweeping the war under the rug.

That attitude had a lot to do with Charles De Gaulle’s decision to pretend that everyone was in the Resistance except a few rotten Vichyites in order to demand a place with the Americans and British at the victory table and the UN Security Council. It served the interests of Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve seen the photos of Dutch-Paris fugitives crossing the Pyrenees into Spain in my book or on the WW2TV talk, you may be wondering why on earth those young men are standing in snow up to their knees way up in the mountains without so much as a warm hat let alone a decent coat or rugged footwear.

The answer is that all of them had to travel through cities on the regular trains to get to the mountains while looking like they weren’t actually going anywhere far from their home for any length of time. Young men in hiking gear heading toward the Spanish border would have been an automatic red flag for any police officer, gendarme, Milicien or German soldier in any train, train station or village. It just wasn’t safe to dress appropriately for the mountains on the way to the mountains. Nor was it possible to Read the rest of this entry »

During my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV someone asked if Vichy patrolled the Franco-Spanish border as tightly at the Germans did. The answer is no, but possibly only because Vichy didn’t have the same resources as the Third Reich did.

The German occupation authorities posted a number of units in the forbidden zone of the Pyrenees including Gestapo agents and Austrian border guards who were used to patrolling on skiis. These and other German units in the area also enjoyed a near monopoly on the telephone system and on the roadways. They not only controlled most of the gasoline supply but they were able to set up check points and ambushes at key junctions.

Before the Germans arrived in full force, what did Vichy have? Their usual border patrols and the gendarmerie. Their enforcement is better described as “selective” than as “weak.” Selective because officers in the mountains had Read the rest of this entry »

A viewer of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV made an intriguing comment. I was talking about the difficulty of getting food for fugitives without ration cards. He or she quipped that it seems like crime syndicates would have been the go-to place for your shopping needs under the occupation. The answer to that is a very complicated sort-of.

The basic fact during the war was that food was in short supply. Governments tried to ameliorate that fact by imposing ration systems that were meant to make sure that everyone got his or her fair share of what was available at controlled prices. That attempt worked better in some countries than in others.

Let’s look at France only here. The ration system creaked along there but it did not provide sufficient calories for anyone to live on. A few sticklers tried but ended up literally starving. So the French people created their own supplemental “Système D”, meaning whatever you and your family came up with to get more food.

Système D was inherently illegal, but some parts Read the rest of this entry »

As we’ve discussed in the last two posts, it wasn’t all that hard to forge an identity card in France or Belgium. Pastors and university students did it. But it was actually much more complicated than just creating a document that would pass casual inspection.

The biggest problem with forged documents was that the police could and did call up the town hall where a suspect ID was issued to ask if so-and-so born on such-and-such a date was in their register. A clever forger made sure that the false ID was issued in a place where the records had been destroyed by fighting or were in an inaccessible occupation zone. The best IDs were “true-false” IDs, meaning that they were false but they used the name and birthdate of a true person who had died but was still on the population registry. That information was not easy to come by. Clerks at town halls had that information, and the power to neglect to strike individuals from their registries, which is why resistance groups liked to recruit them as forgers.

The other major difficulty was that a simple identity card was not Read the rest of this entry »

In our last blog we were talking about who forged the false documents for resisters and other fugitives. From the admittedly small sample of Dutch-Paris, it appears that resisters did it themselves as one of the tasks required to resist. Any of you who are thinking about your own government-issued identity card in 2023 are probably wondering how on earth ordinary people managed to do that. They could only do it because ID’s were very different during the war than they are today.

A good part of the reason that IDs were so different then lays in politics. For example, it was notoriously difficult to forge Dutch ID cards because an overeager Dutch bureaucrat created a state of the art ID card that was very hard to forge. The Dutch government wasn’t terribly interested in the idea, but it didn’t take him any time at all to sell the Nazi occupation authorities on it. So this post is not about the Netherlands.

The Belgian government, on the other hand, very deliberately created Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s continue with questions from the comments on the side of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV on youtube.

Someone asked, very sensibly, how many good forgers were available to make false documents for the resistance and other fugitives. That’s a question no one will ever be able to answer with any certainty because forgers were criminals. They didn’t belong to a guild or union. They didn’t pay taxes or identify themselves as such on census forms.

It might be possible to count up the number of convictions in trials for forgery, but even that has problems. It would only count the individuals who were arrested and tried for forgery, not the total number of people engaged in forgery. And given the way the occupation authorities rolled, there is no doubt that some people arrested for forgery never had a trial although they may well have endured punishment.

The real question to ask is: Read the rest of this entry »