How to Flee the Gestapo

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Dutch-Paris played small roles in three iconic WWII stories: the Engelandspiel (Operation North Pole); The Great Escape and the escape from the POW prison at Colditz. In all three, Dutch-Paris escorted escapees on the last leg of their journey to neutral Spain.

In case you haven’t seen the 1963 classic movie The Great Escape, it’s the story of 76 Allied POWs who escaped from Stalag Luft III near Sagan-Breslau through a tunnel that they dug without anything near the proper equipment. The Nazis recaptured all but three of the escapees. One of the three was a Dutchman named Bram van der Stok who flew with the RAF. As a Dutchman Van der Stok obviously had a huge advantage in blending into the civilian population, especially once he reached the Netherlands.

Van der Stok escaped from the POW camp on 24 March 1944. He arrived in the Spanish village of Canejan in the Pyrenees on 18 June 1944 and he filed a report with the London Dutch authorities on 27 July 1944. In that report, he says Read the rest of this entry »

An extraordinary woman of incredible courage passed away on 11 December 2022. At only 19 and 20 years old, Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) Folmer guided hundreds of fugitives including downed Allied aviators from the north of the Netherlands to the Belgian border. They usually rode bicycles. She passed a few of the aviators to Dutch-Paris because she knew one of the young men in the group from high school.

After her resistance network was betrayed, she was sentenced to death and deported to the concentration camps. Luckily, her paperwork got lost during transport so the sentence was not carried out. She was liberated by the Russians and made a harrowing journey back home to the Netherlands with other Dutch resisters.

Folmer was awarded the Bronzen Leeuw, the Read the rest of this entry »

All of you who’ve told me you wish you could come to one of my talks about Dutch-Paris, here’s your chance. You can watch me talk about Dutch-Paris on the internet on the ww2tv channel on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vWmwfHMb7o (or search ww2tv youtube and look for the episode called The Dutch-Paris Escape Line from 8 December 2022).

If you’re not familiar with it, ww2tv brings experts from all sorts of backgrounds to talk about their particular expertise. A lot of the episodes are military history, but not all of them. I’ve already learned a lot from watching the show.

Many thanks to all the Dutch-Paris families who’ve shared photographs and stories with me and allowed me to use them for this and other talks.

Within the titanic clash of World War II, the Resistance was actually a rather small world. Only a fraction of the European population was willing to risk their necks to oppose the Nazis, or had the opportunity to do so. And most of those who did operated within local groups in a local area. Granted, that “local” might be on both sides of a border, but it was still circumscribed.
Dutch-Paris was different from most resistance groups because it was neither local nor specific to any one, army, nation, political party or church. It was not only international in its scope but also transnational in its attitude and personnel.

As a result, Dutch-Paris got involved in three of the most famous incidents of the war: the Engelandspiel (aka Operation North Pole); the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III (the one from the 1963 movie); and the escape of POWs from the maximum security POW prison at Colditz. Their involvement was minor, although critical. They smuggled men who had escaped in all three events to Spain. Why Dutch-Paris? The Allied officers in charge of such things in Switzerland considered Dutch-Paris to be the safest and most secure route to Spain. Not that there were many other options.

Let’s start with the Engelandspiel. This was a German intelligence coup in which they caught Dutch secret agents as they parachuted into the country without the British catching on. Finally, two Dutchmen escaped from a prison in Haaren (NL), made it back to England and put a stop to the charade. There is plenty to read on the Engelandspiel if you want details. In this post we’ll just talk about Dutch-Paris’s part in the story.

It starts in the French city of Annecy close to the Swiss border in November 1943.  The two escaped Dutch agents – Piet Dourlein and Benny Ubbink – were hiding in the upstairs bedroom of a local man who lived in one of the small streets in the town. The local man was guarding the door with a hatchet because the town was full of angry French Miliciens, come by the truckload to wreck vengeance for the resistance killing of a collaborator. The assassination had nothing to do with Dutch-Paris. It was just bad timing.

One of the leaders of Dutch-Paris had also arrived in Dutch-Paris that day with seven fugitives including a couple of Czechs and an Englishman and an order to get the two Dutchmen to England as soon as possible. A second leader of Dutch-Paris also arrived in town that day from points north. They rendezvoused in the local man’s home. One of them went out to do some shopping for the fugitives and came back with cheese, bread, apples and a small piece of butter. He divided it all up as provisions for the fugitives for the train journey to Toulouse.

Because the Milice bent on vengeance in the streets of the city made the situation considerably more dangerous than usual, the resisters decided to ask the fugitives if they wanted to leave that night or risk hiding another night in Annecy. The Czechs argued that the Milice were sure to be watching the train station, but in the end they all slunk through the darkened streets and onto the night train to Lyon. There they transferred to a train to Toulouse.

In Toulouse, Dutch-Paris put Ubbink and Dourlein in a convoy of 29 men, including Turks, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Canadians, Americans and Englishmen. They most probably took a combination of local trains and busses to a hamlet in the foothills of the Pyrenees before walking on foot over a few mountains to the Spanish village of Canejan. According to one of the Dutchmen on that convoy, they departed Toulouse on 26 November 1943 and arrived in Spain on 1 December 1943. They lost two men during the trek over the Pyrenees. Three others were shot as spies in Gibraltar or England. The Dutch agents who put an end to the Engelandspiel, however, were safely delivered back to London.

We think of war as a state of emergency and a crisis. And it absolutely is for anyone in a war zone with active military operations. A bombing raid (or, today, missile raid) is most definitely an immediate crisis. Being in a village where soldiers are shooting at each other is clearly a state of emergency.

But when you’re thinking about World War II, it’s important to remember that for the majority of people in Europe most of the six years of war were not an ongoing crisis. Certain groups – such as anyone in a concentration camp – could be said to have endured years of crisis, of course. But for most, there were flashes of crisis during military operations or repressive actions by the occupier. In between those, civilians got used to the mundane facts of occupation – to having to prove their identity at any moment, to having to use crowded and unreliable public transportation, to having to queue for food, to having family members gone away as soldiers or laborers.

But civilians found ways to accommodate to the new reality of occupation. They carried their identity papers. They put wooden wheels on their bicycles and made arrangements with suppliers outside of the official rationing system, meaning the grey or black markets. They missed the person kept away by the war, but they found ways to manage without him or her.
Resistance was a way of accommodating materially without accommodating morally. Resisters also carried identity papers. It’s just that sometimes those papers were false. They were probably more aware of transportation difficulties than most because resistance required movement, often times with something contraband like clandestine newssheets or downright illegal like fugitives.  They had to stand in line for the same rations as everyone else, unless they didn’t get any rations at all.  And their actions were quite likely to make them the missing person, executed or deported to a concentration camp.

What resisters didn’t do was accept the occupation as an inevitable status quo.

So resisters lived in the same material normality as everyone else. But they acted against it by resisting the occupier. Obviously resistance was dangerous by its very nature. That constant danger and the fear and anxiety that it carried with it, made the life of a resister a constant crisis for months and even years.  So while the experience of WWII was not a constant state of emergency for most civilians, it was one long alarm bell for resisters.

I recently had a wonderful conversation with a Dutch woman and her mother. They’re trying to piece together the story of their father/grandfather. He was arrested on the Franco-Swiss border in 1942 and executed shortly thereafter.

The family has some letters that the Engelandvaarder wrote from prison. They also have some information from the man’s brother-in-law, who was also arrested on the Swiss border but was not executed because he was only 17 years old. And they have the name of a third underage Engelandvaarder who was part of the group. They believe they have a name (probably an alias) of a man who betrayed them on the border.

That’s actually quite a lot to start with, as long as you keep in mind that the memories of a 17-year-old from his time in prison are going to be restricted to what he alone experienced. But they have names, dates and locations. From there they can look up bureaucratic records and post-war reports. It’s enough to build on.
So far my new friends have come across two things that I’d like to share with you.

First, they got a name of a passeur from a French website. It’s a good and trustworthy website. Nevertheless, if you read the one page article on the father/grandfather on that website carefully, you’ll notice that the author made an assumption that doesn’t hold up. The author assumed that if French passeur X helped a few Englishmen in 1942 he must have also helped these Dutchmen in 1942. I have no doubt that the French passeur helped Englishmen and was executed at the military prison in Dijon. But I have no reason to think that he also helped the Dutchman who was also executed at the military prison in Dijon. The Wehrmacht was meticulous in their record keeping, but they had a long list of people to execute. They didn’t waste a spot on the firing range just to make sure they didn’t execute strangers at the same time. Also, passeurs weren’t running tour groups. There’s no reason to think that a Dutchman had access to the same clandestine network as an Englishman.

My point here is that you need to read anything on the internet carefully and with a certain amount of skepticism. You should take the same attitude toward books, but at least books have footnotes to back up their claims. And if it’s a book published by an academic press, it’s been reviewed by at least one other scholar in the field.

Second, my friends drove down to France to visit the village where their father/grandfather was arrested and then went to Dijon to try to see the prison. The prison was not opened to visitors. But just by chance they saw a poster for an exhibit about resistance in Dijon. It turned out to be just up the street at the local archives and it had a mock up of the sort of prison cell that their father/grandfather would have been in. Plus, the archivist was very enthusiastic and promised to look for documents for them. The moral of this story is: do not ignore the local archives and libraries. And do not hesitate to tell the archivists and librarians what you are looking for.

Footnotes. Who needs them? You do, for two reasons.

First, footnotes are like a trail of breadcrumbs that a previous researcher left for you. If you’re lucky enough to find a scholarly book about the subject you’re researching, it will have footnotes. Those footnotes will be full of extremely helpful information such as: names of archives and catalog numbers of relevant documents. So while reading this secondary source, make a note of the archives that scholar consulted. You might also want to read some of the other books in the bibliography. If you don’t know where to start, or where to go next, follow the trail of footnotes.

Second, footnotes keep everybody honest. The whole point of footnotes is so that scholars can check up on each other. Don’t think they won’t. One of my professors in grad school became a bit of a celebrity because he traveled from California to Germany to find a document that another historian had used to “prove” his argument. Turned out that other guy had Read the rest of this entry »

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 »