How to Flee the Gestapo

Now that we’ve talked about where to find documents about resisters during WWII, you have to know how to evaluate the documents you find.

Just because someone wrote something down a few generations ago does not mean it’s true. People were confused during the war. Some people even outright lied during the war, particularly if they thought it would keep them from getting into trouble themselves. So if you read something shocking about your aunt, make sure you find supporting evidence for it. Your aunt may have done whatever it is, but she might also have been the victim of false rumors and unfounded accusations.

And make sure you write down the name of the archive and the catalog number of any documents you read in your notes. Because if you accuse your aunt of that shocking thing, you had better believe that people – and not just family – are going to demand to know where you got your information. You had better be Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing on from the last two posts about archives, let’s run through a strategy to do some archival research.

Here are the two most important things to remember:

Ask the archivists for help. In my experience, archivists are friendly professionals who know a heck of a lot about where information might be hiding.

Take a lot of notes, especially any names you find while reading a document. Then use those names to expand your search. And keep careful track of the catalog number of each document.

Let’s say you have an aunt who you know was a courier for a resistance network in Lyon, France, during the war. She was arrested, but not deported. That is enough to get started. I’d start in Lyon itself in the official regional archives. They happen to have an impressive database of resisters from the region that was constructed in response to the Klaus Barbie trial. If your aunt was arrested in the Rhone region, she’s in that database. Of course, she might be in it under a pseudonym, but that’s a different problem.

So you go to Lyon, look up your aunt’s dossier and take a lot of notes. It’s important to make a list of all the other names that come up in your aunt’s file. These may be resistance colleagues of hers. Make a list of all the names you find including any alternate spellings and any pseudonyms. It’s helpful to write down birthdates and other facts about these other people as well. You want to look up their files as well because not all archival files are created equal. Some have a lot more information in them than others.

What do you do if your aunt did her illegal work in a region where no one did anything particular to gather up or organize resistance files? Start on the national level. Follow the trails of the other names you read in the files you find and keep expanding your search.

Archival research is a slow process that is unlikely to follow the path you expect. You will not find everything there is to know about your aunt in any one archive. Some archives will have more information. Some archives might have nothing at all.

Be open minded and flexible. And don’t forget to ask the archivists for help.

Next time: Footnotes!

Let’s keep talking about how to find documents about WWII in archives.
First thing you need to do is make a list of all the details you already know. It will help a lot of if you know the following:
Person’s birthdate
Person’s name
Any aliases, pseudonyms, schuilnamen, noms de guerre or odd spelling of the name
Names of anyone who helped that person or worked with him or her in the resistance
Name of any resistance group to which the person belonged
Where did he or she do his or her illegal work? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve talked about how to find an individual in the WWII archives before, but new people keep asking me questions so let’s talk about it again.
The first thing that you, as a researcher, need to understand is that every archive has its own system for filing and cataloging documents. That system depends entirely on the individual history and mission of the archive.

Official government archives are meant to store government documents. They receive documents from every department of the government on a regular basis, store them, catalog them by ministry or department and by the date, and, usually, allow researchers to look at them. So they are pretty straight forward. You look for things according to the government department involved and the years involved.

Say the person you are interested in was arrested in France in 1943. The French had a ministry for war victims that Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s review from the last couple of posts. Acts of resistance, and especially acts of violent resistance, did not happen in a vacuum in the Second World War. Occupation and resistance were a political and community struggle. Anything resisters did could have a negative impact on the community because of the occupation policy of holding the community responsible for all members, specifically any resisters.

Resisters, therefore, had to think not only of the blow they wanted to make against the German occupier but of how the occupier would retaliate against the community. In the starkest terms, they had to decide if killing a certain officer would make a big enough impact to justify the predictable execution of 50 local men in reprisal.

Of course, most resistance was non-violent and for the most part it was the resisters themselves who paid the price. Dutch-Paris, for example, did not cause Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I wrote about how resisters in their own small community had to consider the current and future needs of that community. But there were, of course, examples of resistance actions in larger places where resisters acted without as much thought for the local residents.

In France, for example, there were times when outsiders decided to make a big statement by assassinating a German officer. They did it in a city then got away. But, predictably, the Germans inflicted reprisals on the local community for the assassination. So local men, usually men of high standing such as the mayor, the doctor, the banker, were executed as punishment for the assassination. And the occupation authorities never considered executing just one person for the life of a single German. The standard reprisal was 50 local people executed in reprisal for the death of one German.

The occupation authorities executed so many hostages, of course, as part of a policy of governing by terror. The idea was Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re thinking about resistance during the Second World War, you have to remember that most of it happened within communities where people lived and expected to continue living. In those cases, things got very “delicate” as the French say, because the people involved had to weigh the immediate German reaction to something against their community dynamics in the present and future.

For example, in November 1943, the Armée Secrète* around a market town in the Pyrenees rescued a sick colleague from a hospital. They spirited the man away in the middle of the night but left 100 Francs and a note on the night stand. The note said: “thanks for taking care of him. Don’t tell until 7:30 or 8:00 am.”

There are two interesting things here. First, the AS paid their hospital bills. Obviously, they didn’t want to discourage the hospital from helping one of their people in the future. They also understood that the hospital had Read the rest of this entry »

The reports and images of Ukrainian women fleeing with their children, leaving their menfolk behind to fight are shocking and heartbreaking. But they should not be surprising. War is an enemy to families. It breaks them apart even if no one dies.

The Second World War forced all sorts of parents to send their children away into the unknown in order to protect them from a known danger.

In London, elementary school children evacuated to rural parts of the country with their teachers but without their parents. Those parents could only hope that the local adults who took them in would treat them kindly. Some parents were so afraid of the bombing that they sent their children to Read the rest of this entry »

If you read the last few posts about families in Dutch-Paris, you may have wondered why there is hardly anything in the documents about the children left behind to fend for themselves when their parents were arrested for resistance. After all, that would not go unnoticed or undiscussed today.

I suspect that there are two main parts to the reason. In the first place, the Second World War traumatized the entire continent. When it ended, millions were dead. Millions were displaced and living in refugee camps. There were entire refugee camps of orphaned children. There wasn’t enough food, or fuel, or clothing. Entire cities had been laid waste. So a few kids who were living on their own in their family homes in a part of Europe that was still standing were hardly the biggest problem or the greatest tragedy around. It was a tragedy for them, but, comparatively speaking, they were doing pretty well.

The people who noticed these kids on their own were connected to them in some way as neighbors, relatives or other members of Dutch-Paris. They just Read the rest of this entry »

In the past couple of posts we’ve talked about the families involved in Dutch-Paris. Some made it through the war without arrests but others were not so lucky. What happened to the children while the parents were prisoners?

The documents do not go into detail about how the children navigated the last 15 months of the war after their parents were arrested, but they do give some hints.

The nine and eleven year old daughters of the French customs official on the Swiss border who was arrested by mysterious police were taken in by a neighbor after their mother was arrested in March 1944. They returned to their mother’s care after she was liberated from prison in August 1944.

Three Dutch-Paris families were disrupted by arrests in Paris. In one family both parents were arrested and then deported to the concentration camps. The oldest child, a daughter, was old enough to work. She had one or two younger brothers. Their parents’ employer allowed them to stay in their apartment while their parents were gone and gave them money.

Everyone in the second family in Paris, including the nine year old daughter, spent two nights in a French jail. The French police turned the father over to the Germans but let the others go. They returned to their apartment, under surveillance. Two months later, the mother died of a heart attack during a bombing raid. That left the 16 year old twins and their sister alone in Paris for the last year of the war. It is not clear how they managed to survive, although leaders of Dutch-Paris who evaded arrest did take cash to them. They also helped the three orphans to resettle after the war.

In the third family, the father and teenage son were arrested, but the mother and young daughter were not. Dutch-Paris offered to take the mother and girl to Switzerland, but the mother felt that she was too pregnant to make the journey. Dutch-Paris made sure she had cash. Dutch-Paris also hired a lawyer to get the boy out of prison. The lawyer succeeded in making a deal because he was under 16. The Germans agreed to let him go as long as he returned to family in the Netherlands. He did so, but disappeared in the spring of 1945. The father returned from the concentration camps that summer to be reunited with his wife and two daughters. They continued to look for their missing son into the 1960s.

Those are the bare facts as related by the documents. Surely, there is much more to each story. But they all boil down to one thing. The children of resisters had to rely on the kindness of others. Just as the people Dutch-Paris rescued had to rely on the kindness of strangers for their own survival.