How to Flee the Gestapo

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.

Most of the men and women who rescued others as part of Dutch-Paris were either unmarried or old enough that their children had already left home. But there were men and women who had the courage to join even though they had young children.

Sometimes it turned out alright. For example, a Jewish couple walked out of Amsterdam in 1943, pushing their baby in a stroller. They took refuge in Brussels and worked full time supporting other Jewish people in hiding as part of the Comite. But first they found a good foster home for their baby, now a toddler. They did not want the Germans to find him if they were arrested. Nor did they want their son to grow up in a world run by Nazis.

Also in Brussels, the father of seven children at home joined the Comite. He was extremely active in finding creative ways to fund the rescue efforts and even allowed fugitives to stay at the family home. In this case, his wife clearly shared in his commitment to resistance, although she does not figure in the lists of network members.

Both of those families made it through the war without anyone being arrested. But other families in the line were not so lucky.

On the French side of the Swiss border, a customs agent and his wife actively assisted Dutch-Paris with smuggling documents and people over the border. They opened their home to fugitives on more than one occasion. But the father was shot and arrested by plainclothes police in the spring of 1944. To this day no one has been able to identify exactly who these agents were or what unit they belonged to. He never returned. The mother was arrested in March 1944 when delivering illegal documents. She was liberated from a German prison in August 1944 but was rumored to have suffered from a nervous breakdown.

In Paris an entire family – mother, father, 16 year old twins and 9 year old daughter – spent two nights in a French prison. The family was released, except for the father. He was turned over to the Germans and died in a concentration camp in February 1945. The mother died during a bombing raid in April 1944.

The parents of another family in Paris were both arrested and deported to the concentration camps. The father died there although the mother returned in the summer of 1945.

And, of course, there was the father who was arrested with his 14 year old son in Paris.  The mother, who was pregnant, and young daughter of the family escaped arrest because they were staying at a different hiding place than the father and son.

These parent resisters knew the sort of risks that they were taking for themselves and for their children.  But for them it was much worse to allow the Nazis to implement the hate-filled society of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.

War does not spare children. They are injured, maimed and killed by bullets, missiles and shrapnel. They spend anxious nights in underground shelters while their homes are bombed. They go hungry. They are orphaned. During the Second World War the Nazis deliberately murdered children alongside their parents as part of their crazed plans of social engineering.

War also asks parents to make impossible choices. The most extreme example from the Second World War is the Jewish parents who had to decide whether they should take their children with them for “relocation to the east” – which turned out to be mass murder in the extermination camps – or leave their children with strangers.

Many parents faced less extreme but still difficult ethical choices. How far can you go to get food for your children? Is illegal trading on the black market justifiable if the food is for your children? Is it ok to date an enemy soldier if your husband’s been in a POW camp for three years and you can’t make enough money to buy enough food for your child? What about collaborating with the enemy if it protects your children?

On the other side of the same coin, is it ok to join the resistance if it will endanger your children? Because the Nazis used children to make their resister parents talk. In fact, Dutch-Paris smuggled the children of two resistance families into Switzerland so that the children could not be used as hostages.

And in February 1944 the Germans arrested a 14 year old boy along with his father, a local leader of Dutch-Paris. The Germans tortured the father in front of the boy. But the father had expected that something like that would happen and had told his son not to talk no matter what. The father survived the war and wrote in his report that “like a hero” his son did not buckle under that psychological pressure. But the son did not survive the war.

Every parent of children still young enough to live at home who joined Dutch-Paris did so at the peril of those children. That took extraordinary courage.

Good news for all of you who are researching Engelandvaarders*. In conjunction with the Engelandvaardersmuseum and the Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen, the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag is working on a project to digitize their documents about Engelandvaarders and create an online map of the routes that Engelandvaarders used. The goal is to make it possible to reconstruct any particular Engelandvaarder’s journey with a few clicks of the mouse. It should be up and running by the end of next year. For more information and who to contact, check out the project’s page https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/de-engelandvaarders-in-kaart-brengen.

Any foreign national who arrived in the United Kingdom during the war was interned at the Royal Patriotic School and interrogated by the British about who they were and how they got out of Occupied Europe. The British were, of course, looking for German spies trying to pass themselves off as Dutch or French or Czech or anything else. They did find a few, and executed them.

Not surprisingly, the Dutch authorities in London also Read the rest of this entry »